There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33"
Liz Park · Comparative technology transfer and society · 2014
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK CITY OCTOBER 12, 2013--JUNE 22, 2014 At the heart of the exhibition There Will Never be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33 at the Museum of Modern Art is the earliest surviving score of the infamous composition for any instrument or combination of instruments, in which the player strikes no note for the titular duration. The original score that David Tudor performed on piano in Woodstock, New York, in 1952 no longer exists. The one on display is an elegant folio of merely three sheets, created for and gifted to the artist and psychologist Irwin Kremen for his birthday in 1953. Long vertical black lines scrawled on blank pages with three sets of numbers-30, 2'23, and 1'40 for the three movements--stood in for the groundbreaking performance that so incited and enraged the audience. How can a line on a piece of paper evoke the swirl of controversy and heated discussions of the status of art that ensued following the premier of 4'33? How to represent silence? How to talk about nothing? Cage famously began a lecture thus, have nothing to say and I am saying it. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an attempt to address such questions, the curator David Platzker establishes Marcel Duchamp as Cage's forerunner and guiding figure in his exploration of gestures of negation. Accordingly, Platzker prominently placed by the gallery entrance Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), a box containing three canvas strips and three wooden slats with varied shapes determined by how a three-meter piece of thread fell onto the corresponding canvas. Characterized by a mix of chance and intentions, free-flowing thoughts and self-imposed constraints, 3 Standard Stoppages, 4'33, and other works in the exhibition operate within a rigorous framework their authors construct. Even though the works may appear completely random and radically unfettered, there is always a constant against which to measure the variables. For Duchamp, it was the length of the thread. For Cage, the length of the composition. The exhibition overall charts Cage's trajectory, not through his works alone but with an array of paintings, sculptures, installations, film, drawings, and printed matter by dozens of artists that together convey a sense of the artistic and cultural ecologies in which Cage participated. For instance, Cage's colleagues, such as German emigres Josef and Anni Albers from Black Mountain College where he taught, are represented through a number of paintings. Notable Black Mountain alum Robert Rauschenberg, who became a lifelong friend of Cage's, has a significant presence in the exhibition. A display of notes and other ephemera from Cage's experimental composition class at the New School in New York City demonstrates his influence on George Brecht, among others. …