… fortunately for all of us.

“The three stages of response to a new idea: 1. Ridicule 2. Outrage 3. Declaration that it’s obvious” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer.

[…] However, Cage himself never softened. The culture might have moved on, but he kept on his radical edge, continuing his revolution in a quiet way for those who cared not only to listen, but to act on and live by his words. Through the 1980’s, Cage’s influence was felt in the underground, influencing many of the more interesting cultural movements of that decade–the birth of indy rock, the renewal of Conceptual Art, and the rise of Language Poetry. Many of these artists studied Cage in the ’60s and ’70s and went on to synthesize newer aesthetic/cultural concerns with older Cageian ideals. While the 80’s played out in the media with Wall Street Yuppies and decadent consumerists grabbing the spotlight, many of us spent time on the edge of the culture, which in turn planted the seeds for the more politically charged times in which we now live. […] The final essay here is “Poethics of a Complex Realism” by Joan Retallack and note the word realism in the title. Retallack begins her essay with an invocation of American Pragmatist John Dewey’s “Art As Experience” and launches into a long discussion of the idea of weather as it relates to the ideas of John Cage. Cage said that he wanted his music to be like the weather–unpredictable, omnidirectional, impermanent, and always changing–complex systems that parallel the conditions of our daily life. He did several works involving the weather, modeling his ideas after nature (again, a tip of the hat to American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau), which are described here. Retallack takes the word play of weather/whether and sets up a correspondence between the physical (realized) and the theoretical (unrealized). She then posits an ethic based on the principle of weather/whether. Imagine, she says, a culture sophisticated and open enough to be able to accept difference and otherness, a culture that rejects the oversimplified media response of black/white, yes/no, a culture that embraces complexity and contradiction–a “breathable” culture. And it is here where the book brilliantly dovetails with the multicultural attitudes sweeping the country today. Cage stands in opposition to the reductive and closed ideas that multiculturalism have come to stand for. While multiculturalism plays by the media-supplied dualistic rules, Cage seems to dump the idea of rules altogether and instead celebrates the idea of difference and unpredictability as a prerequisite to understanding and accepting the difficulties inherent in a pluralistic culture. It appeals to this reader as the path of least resistance and being based in action, seems entirely workable. The multicultural debate has made many people aware of the issues, but it stands in theory only and lacks the kind of pragmatism and functionality that could lead to real change as prescribed here. […], in Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Buffalo, 1995, reviewing and revisiting “John Cage Composed In America“, Essays edited by Marjorie Perloff & Charles Junkerman 1994, 286 pages, paperback, The University of Chicago Press, USA.

Video – John Cage, appearing on a 1960 CBS gameshow called I’ve Got A Secret (from Ian Leslie + Alex Ross). Cage’s ‘secret’ is that he is an avant-garde composer. After being introduced by the presenter he performs a piece called Water Walk (… more).