2 John Cage’s Chance Protocols
12Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature.
3John Cage, 1957
4Defining exactly what constituted an ‘‘experimental’’ artistic practice was a
5 consistent feature of intellectual life at Black Mountain College, and these de-
6 bates moved into an intense new phase after World War II. As the previous
7chapter set forward, one consequence of the close connection between John
8 Dewey and the College’s Bauhaus-derived (‘‘Albersian,’’ as we could describe
9 the Bauhaus influence at Black Mountain) model of art pedagogy was that ex-
10 perimentation came to be understood as a creative process, nonetheless one
11 characterized by degrees of preparation, considered intention, and technical
12 competence. Similarly, the art practices and pedagogy of Black Mountain’s ear-
13 ly Albersian-Deweyan period—from the year of its founding in 1933 to approx-
14 imately the end of the Second World War—sought to align the dehabituating,
15 ethical, and personal-growth aspects of artistic practice with other forms of
16 production in culture, particularly by associating the experimental test with
17 scientific practice, advanced technological design, and sociocultural progress.
18 In offering parameters for such a conception of artistic work, by the mid-1940s
19 the neo-Bauhaus model at the College held experimentation to be a practice
20 of changing ingrained habits of perception by testing the contingency of form
21 in controlled situations.
22 By 1948, however, several factors—including logistical ones such as the de-
23 parture or retirement of founding or early-era faculty members; the influx of
24 a pool of less malleable (or sometimes merely anti-Germanic) older students
25 and veterans on GI Bill funding who were attracted by the College’s growing
26 53
27 reputation for its summer art and music programs; and, most pressingly, the
28 arrival of first-generation abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Willem
29 de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell—had the effect of reorienting the College
30 from a broader liberal arts basis to a more focused concentration on visual,
31 musical, and literary practices and polemics. Though Josef Albers was keen to
32 invite guest faculty for the summer sessions whose work represented a wide
33 spectrum of contemporary visual and cultural production, in 1948 his facul-
34 ty picks proved to be advocates of persuasive alternative arguments for what
35 artistic experimentation could and should mean in the postwar period. These
36 alternatives would challenge the predominance of Albers’s model of art pro-
37 duction, and throw into question the primacy of his pedagogical style at the
38 College. Indeed, whether they acted intentionally or not, proponents of these
39 other visions for (and sometimes against) experimentation undermined the
40 framework (and I use the word framework pointedly: it was a work of framing
41 aesthetic experience) of the Bauhaus model of attention and careful serial vari-
42 ation erected at the College, forevermore eroding its dominance and, by the
43 1950s, jeopardizing its legitimacy as one of the reigning projects of modernist
44 art production in the United States.
45 The Black Mountain College summer session of 1948 surpassed in popu-
46 larity and scope the vaunted 1946 incarnation that had elicited an influential
47 cover profile about the College in Design magazine.2 Among a rotating group
48 of about twenty faculty in session from July through August 1948 were danc-
49 er-choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, visitors to the
50 College earlier that year who were asked back for the summer; artists Willem
51 de Kooning and Richard Lippold, both recommended by Cage; architect R.
52 Buckminster Fuller (whose version of experimentation is the topic of chapter
53 3 of this book), and Beaumont Newhall, previously in residence during the
54 summer of 1946, who returned to teach the history of photography. They were
55 joined by about seventy-five painting, sculpture, and theater students, includ-
56 ing Ruth Asawa, Joseph Fiore, Betty and Peter Jennerhahn, Ray Johnson, Hazel
57 Larsen Archer, Kenneth Noland, Arthur Penn, Kenneth Snelson, and Paul and
58 Vera Williams. The Williamses later provided key financial support to Cage
59 and Cunningham at Black Mountain—Cage’s 1952--53 chance-based audiotape
60 collage work Williams Mix was named for them—and they helped support the
61 Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded during the troupe’s 1953 sum-
62 mer-in-residence at the College.
63 The first assault on the dominant Bauhaus model was blunt. Soon after de
64 Kooning arrived to teach painting, he sowed seeds of resistance to the notion
65 that studying art was necessary at all. According to his wife, Elaine, who was
66 also on campus that summer, by the end of his time at Black Mountain
6754 chapter two
69 Figure 2.1
70Clemens Kalischer, John Cage at Black Mountain College,
71 1948. Gelatin silver print. ľ Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy
72 the artist.
73 Bill had also become deeply involved with his students. Too involved, Albers
74 thought. He said to Bill at the end of the summer, ‘‘You had ten students. Six
75 of them are leaving the College to go to New York City this September. Do
76 you know anything about it?’’ ‘‘Sure,’’ said Bill. ‘‘I told them if they wanted to
77 be artists, they should quit school and come to New York and get a studio and
78 start painting.’’ Albers seemed not to take this amiss. When he was appointed
79 chairman of the Art Department at Yale two years later, Bill was the first artist
80 to be hired to teach there.3
81 It could be expected that the example of the progressive, modernist art school,
82 embodied most famously and perhaps most effectively by the Bauhaus and by
83 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 55
84 Black Mountain College, would be challenged by de Kooning and other New
85 York school artists (despite their name). The centrality of pedagogy at both in-
86 stitutions—the transmission of ideas through teaching in formalized situations,
87 of visual testing exercises loosely overseen by a master teacher in design-based
88 artistic experiments—would no doubt grate against the libertarian, individual-
89 ist streak of US-based abstract expressionism.4 (Their allied critics, too, would
90 challenge Black Mountain’s pedagogy. Clement Greenberg, recommended to
91 the College faculty by de Kooning, taught there in 1950. Though he credited the
92 students with impressive intensity, he ultimately ‘‘felt that not much art came
93 out of Black Mountain [only some famous names].’’5) The claim that students
94 at the College did not produce ‘‘mature’’ art, or the accusation that education
95 suffocated creative practice by emphasizing technical skills acquired through
96 trial, test, and peirastic dialogue, were historically quite frequent criticisms of
97 higher education and art institutions leveled by expressionist artists.6
98 Albers, however, was prepared for assaults on the Bauhaus-derived
99 Black Mountain curriculum by expressionists such as de Kooning; after
100 all, he’d spent most of his life and work advocating creative explorations of
101 form beyond the habituated constraints of artists’ subjective or self-revela-
102 tory responses. Yet it was the wolf in sheep’s clothing—John Cage’s model
103 of experimentation—for which Albers was ill-equipped. De Kooning, like his
104 fellow expressionists, did not employ the language of experimentation in a
105 rigorously defined manner; as was discussed in this book’s introduction, in
106 several ways expressionism is antithetical to the practice of the test or to the
107 rhetoric of experimentation as a disciplined, systematic process of examining
108 variables subject to thorough controls. Cage, unlike expressionists, arrived at
109 Black Mountain in 1948 with a version of experimentation—a ‘‘marriage of
110 order and freedom,’’ as he phrased it—that he considered very much in line
111 with Albers’s.7 Yet within a few years, the normally collegial Albers would
112 end his friendship with Cage over the issue of the primacy of chance events in
113 explorations considered experimental.
114 Cage’s methodology of chance-based experimentation first emerged in the
115 scores and events he composed when he taught at Black Mountain from 1948
116 through 1953; in many ways the seismic shifts in his practice during this period
117 are tied to his close engagement with the College. In these scores and events,
118 Cage initiated a series of practices that were highly structured, yet paradoxical-
119 ly attempted to sever the performance of a work from intention, argumenta-
120 tion, or ‘‘authorial’’ control. For Cage, the coupling of organized processes with
121 aleatory (chance-generated) results made it possible to transcend predictable
122 habits of composition and recital. How can one understand Cage’s quixotic
123 formulation of experimentation as a ‘‘purpose to remove purposes,’’ so counter-
12456 chapter two intuitive to how an experiment was typically envisioned at Black Mountain?8 To
125 investigate this apparent contradiction in the careful organization of situations
126 of greater contingency, of his use of order to obtain indeterminate outcomes, I
127 propose a seemingly oxymoronic phrase: ‘‘chance protocol.’’
128 To Cage, the test was an exploration of uncertainty, not a careful examina-
129 tion of variables (à la Albers). Two watershed events staged at Black Moun-
130 tain played a decisive role in Cage’s formulation of experimentation in such a
131 manner: first, his 1948 production of composer and poet Erik Satie’s 1913 play
132 The Ruse of Medusa (Le piège de Méduse) and second, his 1952 Theater Piece
133No. 1 (sometimes referred to as Untitled Event), which was subsequently pro-
134 claimed the first ‘‘happening.’’ In Theater Piece No. 1, despite a seemingly chaotic
135 or random form, particular parameters governed the execution of the work:
136 fixed durational segments, the assignment of specific tasks to performers, and
137 an agreed-upon use of certain tools or instruments. This structure served as a
138 chance protocol, allowing ever-greater unpredictability to emerge within pre-
139 defined limitations. In the years that Cage was locked in a tight orbit with the
140 College, his chance-protocol version of experimentation increasingly focused
141 on chance-derived, durationally notated instructions as a means to create and
142 organize contingent events. Initially he used chance processes to compose dis-
143 crete and determinate scores; eventually he developed strategies that allowed a
144 performance to retain as much indeterminacy as possible, usually by producing
145 scores that were subject to alteration before and during recital, and that em-
146 ployed notation systems open to interpretation by the performers.
147 Cage’s pioneering of new forms of composition and performance developed
148 in a climate receptive to seeing experimentation as not merely a feature of visual
149 art practices but also of time-based events and interdisciplinary collaborations.
150 In fact, Black Mountain was one of the rare outposts in the United States during
151 this period for in-depth work in experimental performance—that is to say, pro-
152 ductions coming out of a background in the visual arts that emphasized impro-
153 visational workshopping or unrehearsed performances, nonnarrative methods
154 (in other words, unscripted events lacking developed characterization or dra-
155 matic arc), and a close consideration of how to demarcate or collapse the spaces
156 of performance and audience. Specifically, during the 1930s the College was
157 the key US site invested in a ‘‘Bauhaus idea’’ of theater and live performance.
158 This was due to the popularity of Bauhaus-influenced theater at the campus:
159 throughout the mid-1930s, Bauhaus theater master Oskar Schlemmer’s pupil
160 and collaborator Xanti Schawinsky had staged several original productions
161 of nonnarrative, participatory theater at the College, including Spectodrama:
162 Play, Life, Illusion in 1936 and Danse Macabre: A Sociological Study in 1938. In
163 his project of experimentation through careful observation, it is no coincidence
164 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 57
165 that Schawinsky subsequently spent several years at ‘‘Albersian’’ Black Moun-
166 tain further developing interdisciplinary theatrical models initially explored in
167 Weimar and Dessau.9
168 The first section of this chapter will explore the existing tradition of Bauhaus
169 experimental theater at Black Mountain, which would be challenged by Cage.
170 Though ten years separated Schawinsky’s departure from Cage’s first extended
171 visit, the models these men investigated and developed at the College represent
172 two of the most radical explorations of US-based experimental performance
173 taking place between the wars and after. (A third, I would argue, was Bertolt
174 Brecht’s notion of Verfremdungseffekts [‘‘distancing effects’’] and Lehrstück
175 [‘‘learning through participation’’] in his ‘‘Epic Theater,’’ which also found fer-
176 tile ground at Black Mountain: Brecht’s English translator Eric Bentley taught
177 there for several years in the mid-1940s and staged productions of Brecht, in-
178 cluding a 1944 reading with sound effects and music of The Private Life of the
179Master Race.10) Stage events at Black Mountain had also adventurously sampled
180 other European precursors beyond Bauhaus performance—for example, poet
181 M. C. Richards’s productions of works by Jean Cocteau, including Knights of
182the Round Table in 1949 and a theater-in-the-round version of Marriage on the
183Eiffel Tower in 1950 (fig. 2.2). It is in Schawinsky’s work, though, that we see
184 a model of nonnarrative performance most clearly related though opposed to
185 that which Cage came to embrace. By staging a comparison between these two
186 models, the stakes of experiments in theater and other time-based media and
187 events in the postwar period can begin to be elucidated. As we will see, the
188 approaches to experimental performance Cage developed at the College soon
189 rose to prominence (and a great deal of notoriety), overshadowing the Bauhaus
190 model, which remains largely obscured to this day.11
191 The second part of this chapter will address how the ‘‘French’’ influences
192 Cage introduced were, in actuality, a series of hybrid sources he was working
193 through in the five years he taught at Black Mountain.12 In this period, he joined
194 several seemingly incompatible threads—French modernist theater from be-
195 fore and after World War I; Zen Buddhism (his fascination with the mystic
196 Huang Po’s strain of Zen arose during his time at the College); and Dada-sur-
197 realist employments of chance composition, most centrally those of Antonin
198 Artaud and Marcel Duchamp.13 His explorations of dispersion, disorder, and
199 void-like mindlessness came to spurn purposeful communication between per-
200 former and audience, estranged the traditional, ‘‘scored’’ relationship between
201 a composition and its performance, and began to draw on aleatory systems that
202 paradoxically structured and controlled unexpected results beyond human pre-
203 diction. The importance of Cage’s practical and discursive move to the chance
204 protocol is key to understanding the epistemic shift involved in repositioning
20558 chapter two
207 Figure 2.2
208Hazel Larsen Archer, June Rice Christensen as the Photographer
209 in Jean Cocteau’s ‘‘Marriage on the Eiffel Tower,’’ Black Mountain
210 College, 1950. Courtesy of the Estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and
211 the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
212 experimentation as the production of events that were indeterminate as to their
213 performance. In this, Cage’s Black Mountain events radically altered the spec-
214 trum of possibility for art and performance: in his explorations of French-de-
215 rived avant-garde theater, first of Satie’s work and subsequently of Artaud’s and
216 Duchamp’s, he inaugurated a new experimental model that came to define not
217 only Black Mountain’s future but the trajectories of Fluxus performance, Allan
218 Kaprow--esque Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, and numerous other 1950s
219 and 1960s events.
220 The third and final section of this chapter will take up how in Theater Piece
221No. 1 Cage pushed experimental performance even further than his sources.
222 Coupled with his analyses of Po’s, Artaud’s, and Duchamp’s projects, Cage’s
223 admiration for Robert Rauschenberg’s Black Mountain College--era works,
224 particularly his 1951 White Paintings, helped Cage explore experimentation as
225 a tool to ‘‘unfocus attention’’14 (fig. 2.3). The apparent emptiness of Rauschen-
226 berg’s paintings encouraged him to ‘‘check my habits of seeing, to counter them
227 for the sake of greater freshness …to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.’’15 Ul-
228 timately, Cage felt that Rauschenberg’s work revealed that ‘‘art is the imitation
229 of nature in her manner of operation,’’ operations that Cage believed could be
230 unburdened of human desire and interference. He believed his model of stag-
231 ing inattention and dispersion exposed art’s pretentions to ordering life, better
232 reflecting nature’s own complexity, chancy-ness, and lack of single purpose.16
233 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 59
235 Figure 2.3
236 Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951. House paint
237 on canvas, 72 Œ 72, four panels. ľ Robert Rauschenberg
238 Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
239 His perspective on chance operations as a mirror to the (dis)order of nature has
240 proved a contentious point for artists and scholars, from Josef Albers to many
241 in the present. As this last section considers, Cage’s sense of the experimental
242 chance protocol as handmaiden to anarchical freedom from sociopolitical de-
243 terminants remains controversial.
244 In advocating notions of multisensory presentness and the diffusion of at-
245 tention, Cage understood his work as exceeding the Bauhaus tradition at Black
246 Mountain, replacing it instead with studies in Dadaist chance and simultaneity,
247 as well as events inspired by Po’s and Artaud’s conceptions of void-like expe-
248 riences. In his proposal of a chance protocol, Cage argued that a new dimen-
249 sion of perception could be revealed outside human faculties of organization
250 and intention, a form of dispassionate quiescence he paradoxically spent most
251 of his life actively scripting. In order to understand the stakes of the chance
252 protocol’s contravention of the Albersian model of experimentation as tests
25360 chapter two of controlled variables, we must therefore return to the origin of that tradition
254 in performance—Bauhaus theater—and the genesis of the break—Erik Satie’s
255 The Ruse of Medusa.
256 ÉpatEr lE bauhaus
257 Cage first arrived at Black Mountain College in April 1948 without a teach-
258 ing commision: he was Cunningham’s piano accompanist. But that was still
259 a position of some visibility. In addition to theater and art, Black Mountain
260 throughout the 1930s and 1940s was a notable outpost of experimental music;
261 in 1944, for instance, it hosted a well-publicized and internationally renowned
262 conference celebrating Arnold Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday.17 As early
263 as the late 1930s, when Cage was on the West Coast, he had heard rumors of
264 Black Mountain as ‘‘an advanced place,’’ and had written the school asking for
265 a job; in 1942 he propositioned that the College found an on-site Center for
266 Experimental Music.18 Neither proposal panned out. By the late 1940s, Cage
267 was facing resistance to his work as a composer, though not as a rather showy
268 performer of his prepared piano compositions, performances in which he in-
269 serted objects between piano strings and played the instrument largely for its
270 percussive qualities. He was therefore ‘‘delighted’’ when Albers offered him a
271 teaching post at the College—his first for music composition—during the up-
272 coming summer session of 1948.19
273 When Cage assumed his teaching responsibilities at the College, he further
274 shifted his compositional strategy from the systemic explorations of atonali-
275 ty, seriality, and other recent developments in musical composition that Black
276 Mountain’s Schoenberg-oriented tradition was associated with. That summer,
277 he brought with him nearly all eighteen extant musical scores by Erik Satie and
278 a copy of Satie’s only play, The Ruse of Medusa, proposing the College host an
279 ‘‘amateur festival’’ of Satie’s music. He proceeded to antagonize many of the Col-
280 lege’s German émigrés by performing Satie’s oeuvre exclusively throughout his
281 summer-long stay, rather than surveying, as he remembered it, ‘‘modern music
282 in general’’; particularly infuriating was one of Cage’s introductory speeches
283 that denounced Beethoven’s harmonic tradition in favor of Satie’s emphasis on
284 rhythm and duration.20 In contrast to the rancor his lecture stirred, Cage’s pro-
285 duction of Satie’s long-neglected The Ruse of Medusa, translated that summer by
286 Richards, was universally admired (fig. 2.4). Student Arthur Penn (later known
287 for his films The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde) directed Buckminster
288 Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Elaine de Kooning as his daughter Frisette, and
289 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 61
291 Figure 2.4 (above) Figure 2.5 (below)
293Clemens Kalischer, Cast Portrait of ‘‘The Ruse of Medusa,’’ Clemens Kalischer, Buckminster Fuller and Merce including John Cage, Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Cunningham in ‘‘The Ruse of Medusa,’’ 1948. Gelatin silver
294Fuller, and Merce Cunningham, 1948. Gelatin silver print. print. ľ Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy the artist. ľ Clemens Kalischer. Courtesy the artist.
295 Cunningham as Jonas the ‘‘costly mechanical monkey,’’ with sets and props by
296 Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and students Ruth Asawa, Ray John-
297 son, and others. The props included a velvet footstool with giant human feet, a
298 monumental thermometer capped by an oversized paper bow, and a ‘‘baron’s
299 desk’’ painted in a ‘‘guild secret’’ trompe l’oeil technique de Kooning said he had
300 learned as teenager in Holland; this was outfitted with enormous four-sided
301 triangles around its legs (a tweak on the importance of tetrahedrons in Fuller’s
302 work)21 (fig. 2.5).
303 The production set the groundwork for a renewed exploration of the Col-
304 lege’s experimental theater tradition that had remained mostly dormant since
305 Schawinsky’s departure in 1938. Satie’s play features an eccentric, doddering
306 aristocrat, his insolent and ever-defiant manservant, an obedient daughter,
307 and her terrified straight-man fiancé. Consisting largely of rapid-fire puns and
308 absurd nonsequiturs, the loosely sketched plot follows the Baron’s attempts to
309 wire one General Posthumous, a storyline designed as an excuse to frame the
310 Baron’s nonsensical pronouncements regarding the impending betrothal of his
311 daughter. Scene changes are marked by short musical interludes danced by the
312 mechanical monkey, written in a musical notation full of wisecracks and ironic
313 comments (fig. 2.6). In one section, for example, the score’s text reads at bottom,
314 ‘‘Instructions in Roman text are for the choreographer, in italic for the pianist’’;
315 these begin with the following comments: ‘‘The Monkey’s Dance, no. 1; Qua-
316drille The monkey dances, sweetly, the following figure; put yourself in the shade;
317 He goes crazy, or it looks as if he has; Do not come out of your shadow / Behave
318 yourself, please: a monkey is watching you; The dance can end here.’’22
319 Satie’s ‘‘lyrical comedy in one act’’ was rarely performed, though it was
320 considered an important successor to Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896) in a
321 tradition of absurdist theater. Satie’s emphasis on burlesque gestures and his
322 creation of characters that sputtered childlike nonsense—‘‘five plus three makes
323 eleven …take four leaves six …two plus seven makes eighteen,’’ or, a few lines
324 later, ‘‘I am going to a billiards match. What a great match! Napoleon will be
325 there. The billiards Napoleon, I mean of course! …the real one’’—made
326 the entire production seem a farcical romp.23 In an article Cage later penned
327 on Satie, he pointed to the apparent freewheeling, illogical unpredictability of
328 Satie’s work and its disregard of musical seriousness as being its most compel-
329 ling qualities. In the essay, set up as an imaginary conversation between the two
330 men sourced from Satie’s published statements, Cage quoted the composer:
331 They will tell you I am not a musician. That’s right. …Take the Fils des Etoiles
332or the Morceaux en forme de poire, En habit de cheval or the Sarabandes, it is
333 clear that no musical idea presided at the creation of these works.24
334 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 63
336 Figure 2.6
337 Erik Satie, ‘‘The Monkey’s Dance (no. 1).’’ From The Ruse
338 of Medusa, 1913.
339 The flippancy with which Satie dismissed musical intention delighted Cage. He
340 concluded his ‘‘conversation’’ with the kan that ‘‘to be interested in Satie one
341 must be disinterested to begin with,’’ a paradox of non-intentioned intention
342 Cage often returned to in defining his chance protocol.25
343 Yet earlier in the essay, Cage claimed that Satie’s investment (far from disin-
344 terestedness) in antagonizing or shocking his audience—the ‘‘power to irritate’’
345 expressed in Satie’s call to ‘‘despise art’’—inspired Cage’s staging of the play at
346 Black Mountain.26 In particular, he was compelled by Satie’s attempt to make
34764 chapter two ‘‘unpredictable’’ music that, in Satie’s words, ‘‘will be part of the noises of the
348 environment.’’27 Satie’s works demonstrated that music composition could re-
349 flect everyday events—not ‘‘musical ideas’’—by representing ambient noises
350 such as the sounds of eating or the pauses between conversations. To Satie,
351 the radical neutrality of a sound not imposing itself on its audience as ‘‘music’’
352 fundamentally leveled hierarchies of distinction and quality; to Cage, such a
353 move let ‘‘sounds be just sounds …just folk tunes, unresolved ninths, or knives
354 and forks.’’28 In studying Satie’s other scores—particularly Vexations (1893), a
355 cycle that can extend to nearly 24 hours in performance, based on 840 repeti-
356 tions of a simple, fifty-two-beat theme whose four arrangements are alternately
357 heard unaccompanied and then played with two variations of a short chord
358 sequence—Cage was enthusiastic about Satie’s concern with the durational
359 aspects of sound.29 In contrast to more complex qualities of aural information
360 (pitch, frequency, amplitude, and so on), duration was the only feature that was
361 unspecific: it could incorporate measures of both silence and the audible. The
362 grand length of a performance of Vexations—a length that exceeded nearly any
363 individual’s ability to listen attentively—satisfied Satie’s desire that his work be
364 ‘‘furniture music’’ intended as background for other events. By stressing the
365 durational aspect of sound over musical tone, in opposition to prior harmonic
366 traditions, Cage argued that Satie accepted when ‘‘a sound is a sound …[one
367 can] give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all
368 the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.’’30 Important, too, was The Ruse of
369Medusa’s occasional use of instructions to the performer in durational—not
370 musically notated—segments of simple time structures designated in cardinal
371 numbers and plain language (this feature reemerged in Cage’s own work during
372 his next visit to Black Mountain in 1952).
373 Like several College productions before it, Cage’s staging of The Ruse of
374Medusa encouraged intentionally unnaturalistic and stylized acting as well as
375 innovative set and costume design. Yet there were important differences. Cage’s
376 sourcing of Satie as a precedent for a theater of cacophonous simultaneity and
377 jest departed considerably from existing Bauhaus-oriented theater and perfor-
378 mance that found its way to the College, though these were as dedicated to
379 changing audience’s perceptions through trained visual attention and concen-
380 tration as Satie’s was to doing so with fragmentary, incommunicable meanings
381 and ambiguous gestures.
382 By the mid-1920s, an entire pedagogical and practice methodology dedicat-
383 ed to workshopping time- and motion-based compositions had been perfected
384 at the Bauhaus in its second home in Dessau. This had not always been the case:
385 early theater productions, under the direction of artist Lothar Schreyer, had
386 been expressionistic and melodramatic, with highly charged emotional con-
387 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 65
389 Figure 2.7
390 Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet, 1922, photograph 1925.
391 Courtesy Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate and Collection.
392 Photograph ľ Estate of Karl Grill. Reproduced by permission
393 of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
394 tent underscored by dramatic lighting and costumes. In contrast, when Oskar
395 Schlemmer arrived at the Bauhaus in 1921 and subsequently assumed director-
396 ship of the stage workshop in 1923, he explicitly linked theatrical performance
397 with the periodic festivals and costume parties hosted by the school. The em-
398 phasis, for Schlemmer, was not on festivity per se, but rather on the manner
399 in which the masquerade of such events disguised and transformed the human
400 body. He began staging masque-like shows in which performers’ features were
401 camouflaged by heavily padded costumes, elaborate papier-mâché masks, and
402 helmetlike headdresses. In doing so, performers’ bodies were extracted from
403 ‘‘natural’’ or everyday experiences in order to be turned into archetypes of ge-
404 ometry and movement31 (fig. 2.7).
405 Actors in Schlemmer’s productions employed broad, pantomimic gestures
406 and generally did not speak. For example, in Gesture Dance (1926), three per-
407 formers wearing bulbous metallic masks outfitted with identical mustaches
40866 chapter two and spectacles execute flamboyant renditions of ‘‘everyday actions’’ including
409 sneezing, laughing, and listening.32 The characters’ gesticulations are exagger-
410 ated to the point of being stilted, and the figures return to certain tropes of
411 communication: hand cupped to ear indicates listening, palm shading mouth
412 signs whispering, and boisterous rocking back and forth suggests laughter. The
413 stylized gestures, combined with the use of masks and cumbersome costumes,
414 disengaged the performing body from its habitual movements.
415 The emphasis on costume in Bauhaus theater also transfigured the human
416 body and its everyday appearance by removing distinguishing characteristics
417 and imposing an order of simple shapes and primary colors. According to
418 Schlemmer, this abstracted the body and generalized its features in order to
419 ‘‘reduce the differentiated parts …to simple, unifying forms.’’33 These unified
420 forms thereby permitted viewers to see ‘‘new totality’’ beyond previous hab-
421 it-driven and subjective understandings of form.34 In most theatrical perfor-
422 mance, and indeed in most everyday social behavior, subtle work of visual dis-
423 crimination routinely helps to organize, categorize, and ultimately hierarchize
424 relatively minor differences in human appearances; for example, assessments
425 of the size of a nose or the contour of a foot become paramount indicators of
426 beauty or grace. In stressing general forms, Schlemmer rejected the meticulous
427 morphologies of fashion, the superficial interpretations of physiognomic varia-
428 tion, or the cultural conditioning that patterned gesture and exploited arbitrary
429 differences to create regimes of infinitesimal judgment and distinction. As these
431 Figure 2.8
432 Oskar Schlemmer, drawing of Man as Dancer from
433Man and Art Figure, ca. 1921. Courtesy Oskar Schlemmer
434 Theatre Estate and Collection.
435 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 67
436 historically specific, though relatively arbitrary, characteristics became natu-
437 ralized, Schlemmer contended, they promoted fetishistic judgments regard-
438 ing minute differences of form as compared with other fundamentally similar
439 forms. In contrast, Bauhaus theater attempted to overturn this tradition of tiny
440 visual distinctions made according to socially determined, often conflicting
441 habits. It did so by heightening the artifice onstage so that rationally discerned
442 details would throw habitual patterns into sharp relief. In Schlemmer’s system,
443 this perspicuous work of visual judgment focused on the close observation of
444 the relationship of bodies—not as compared to themselves, but rather seen as
445 embedded in larger perspectival contexts and environments. Reducing theater
446 to such basic design elements as form and color represented ‘‘an undertaking
447 whose purpose, contrary to nature, is order.’’35 Denaturalizing the actors’ move-
448 ments and costumes encouraged spectators to remain self-conscious about the
449 spatial relations surrounding the bodies onstage, estranging from habit their
450 perceptions of, and judgments about, human form and gesture.
451 In contrast to Cage’s emphasis on arbitrariness, distraction, and discon-
452 nection, the keywords of Bauhaus theater were unity, totality, and order. For
453 Schlemmer, ‘‘unity’’ was an escape from the maddening simplification of life
454 into trivial and fragmentary subcategories that effaced the larger interconnect-
455 edness of bodies, spatial contexts, and habits of social behavior. With concen-
456 tration and attention, broader concerns could be assessed and judged, includ-
457 ing the fundamental features of form (light, color, movement, and so on) that
458 constituted the foundation of all perception. In the stripped-down environment
459 of the new, ‘‘total’’ stage, spectators would be able to notice how the framing of a
460 theatrical space marked conventions in everyday life to which they had become
461 oblivious and conditioned.
462 In 1936, Albers invited the Swiss émigré Xanti Schawinsky, who had studied
463 with Schlemmer from 1924 to 1928, to Black Mountain to teach painting and
464 theater.36 After fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, Schawinsky had immi-
465 grated to Italy and had spent several years working in advertising for companies
466 such as Illy Caff’e, Cinzano vermouth, and Olivetti typewriters. He was best
467 known for producing a widely circulated photomontage poster of Mussolini
468 as the head of the masses to celebrate the twelfth anniversary of the Fascist
469 revolution. (Schawinsky was an equal-opportunity designer, one could say:
470 after leaving Black Mountain, he taught at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and
471 with László Moholy-Nagy created patterns for a US Army project of equipment
472 camouflage.)37
473 When he landed at the College, Schawinsky became the United States’ sole
474 proponent and performer of Bauhaus theater, and his ideas and productions re-
475 mained very much part of the institutional memory and lore of the campus after
47668 chapter two
478 Figure 2.9
479Xanti Schawinsky, Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, 1936--37.
480 From Helen Post Black Mountain College Documentary Photo
481 Collection. Reproduced courtesy of Peter Modley.
482 his departure; later these were widely circulated in his published reminiscences
483 about his time at Black Mountain.38 Within months of his arrival, he organized
484 a production of nonnarrative theater—a theater of what he called ‘‘total expe-
485 rience’’—titled Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, with music by Kurt Schwitters
486 (his Ursonate [1922--32]) (see plates 10--12). In a series of episodes that had been
487 previously ‘‘storyboarded’’ and rehearsed through improvisational techniques,
488Spectodrama staged short scenes of selected elementary concepts of theater,
489 each falling into a specific category: ‘‘optics, form and color, acoustics, sound,
490 language, music, time, space, architecture, technology, and illusion.’’39
491 In each vignette of Spectodrama, the performer’s body, if evident at all
492 (camouflage and illusion, and their constitutive elements of high-contrast
493 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 69
494 geometric forms, were key features of the Bauhaus style), figures in a tab-
495 leau of what Schawinsky termed ‘‘archetypal’’ geometric, spatial, or social
496 situations: ‘‘play,’’ ‘‘communication,’’ ‘‘form,’’ or ‘‘space.’’ Each portion of the
497 play contains elaborate sets and costumes designed so as to either conceal or
498 set off the performer’s placement and orientation with respect to the stage
499 space and props. For example, one performer, trussed in a costume of stiff,
500 intertwined white paper rolls, might emerge chameleonlike from a tangle
501 of similarly twisted paper props and move toward the stark relief of a blank
502 background. The figure’s poses and the patterns of the props repeat through-
503 out the space to create a ‘‘laboratory for demonstration’’ of the conditions of
504 perceiving difference and similarity.40
505 Moholy-Nagy, also a key figure in Bauhaus theater, termed this research-like
506 element of rational attention the ‘‘theater of totality,’’ in which a body’s move-
507 ment transpired in a structured, architectonic space.41 Rigorously ordering
508 bodies in the theater demonstrated a kind of technical competence that, in
509 orchestrating complex spatial relations onstage, extended the project of spatial
510 organization into nontheatrical everyday life (the theater being a microcosmic
511 exploration of the larger Bauhaus project of synthesizing the ‘‘living and work-
512 ing conditions of the environment’’).42 Though spectators were seated and their
513 attention carefully organized, ‘‘dynamism’’ in performance was nonetheless a
514 frequently invoked term: kinetic sculptures and moving bodies were deployed
515 in order to show that, to Moholy-Nagy, ‘‘material is employed only as the carrier
516 of forces.’’43 These forces charged the performance space with a temporal com-
517 ponent that expressed the true ‘‘unity of life.’’44 In contrast to architecture, static
518 sculpture, or painting, theater was the arena for an examination of transient,
519 time-based events and movements intersecting environmental conditions, and
520 the body’s temporal engagement with those sociospatial circumstances.
521 The search for universal gestures ‘‘common to mankind’’ took precedence
522 over what Moholy-Nagy termed the ‘‘causal ties’’ of previous theater.45 Stage
523 design was emphasized, forcing ‘‘one to learn from the way an artist perceives’’
524 by estranging viewers’ traditional emphasis on character and narrative in order
525 to instead fabricate complicated illusions of spatial perception.46 This model
526 of integration—the performing body and space joined in an ‘‘indissoluble uni-
527 ty’’—radically simplified performance to its ‘‘fundamental’’ components: ‘‘light,
528 space, plane, movement, sound, and human being.’’47
529 Walter Gropius, too, was involved in theorizing performance strategies
530 at the Bauhaus, and he underscored how spectatorial conditions of illusion
531 and attention were influenced by the architecture of the theater itself. In the
532 mid-1920s, he proposed a ‘‘Total Theater’’ in which ‘‘new interpretations
533 of theatrical space’’ were to be explored.48 In Gropius’s model, an elliptical
53470 chapter two
536 Figure 2.10
537 Walter Gropius, Photoboard with model, isometric with three
538 diagrams showing uses of the stage in the ‘‘Total Theater,’’ 1927.
539 Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. ľ Artists Rights Society,
540 New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Reproduced by permission of
541 Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
542 arrangement of ascending seats was clustered around an embedded, cen-
543 tral circular stage flanking a second cylindrical back stage49 (fig. 2.10). The
544 inner circular stage was designed to rotate, accommodating various seating
545 arrangements that represented the major performance traditions—the pro-
546 scenium stage with a shallow performance space and fixed backdrop, the
547 deep stage in which curtains and backdrops are arranged to reveal greater
548 or lesser portions of the action and to accommodate more or fewer perform-
549 ers, and finally a theater-in-the-round setup. In the latter scenario, according
550 to Gropius, ‘‘the play unfolds itself three-dimensionally while the spectators
551 crowd around concentrically.’’50 He connected this spectatorial arrangement,
552 as Schawinsky did, to precedents in other public, collective events such as the
553 circus, the bullring, and the sports arena.
554 Gropius’s three staging possibilities in the ‘‘Total Theater’’ engendered var-
555 ious spatial effects; more important, his flexible architecture (the rotating core
556 of the structure) could transform the space during performance, surprising the
557 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 71
558 audience and impelling it to ‘‘shake off its inertia.’’51 The dynamic possibility of
559 moving the stage structure itself intensified the audience’s awareness of the con-
560 ditions of staging, and when the theater was arranged with a central platform
561 surrounded by seating, the ‘‘spectator participate[s] in the drama.’’52 In Bauhaus
562 theories of spectatorship, in other words, the implied salutary social effects of
563 heightening consciousness of the environment were part of the larger interest in
564 concentration, focus, and order as transformative elements of vision. The actor,
565 according to Schlemmer, was ‘‘space-bewitched’’—‘‘altered, transformed, or
566 entranced’’ by the use of masks, props, and costumes so that ‘‘his habitual be-
567 havior and his physical and psychic structure are either upset or put into a new
568 and altogether different balance.’’53 This change in the actor’s ingrained relation
569 to gesture and its social intelligibility would impel an ‘‘inner transformation of
570 the spectator’’ by his or her ‘‘receptivity’’ to the visual ordering of the theatrical
571 field in performance.54 Only a self-reflexive spectator could, ‘‘on the basis of the
572 rational,’’ understand the embeddedness of the actor in his or her surrounding
573 space, a space that is itself ‘‘part of the larger total complex, building (Bau).’’55
574 As the performer acted out order in such a space, the spectator could rationally
575 perceive the larger field of spatial and architectural illusions in which bodies are
576 rooted contextually in their environments.
577 That this work of unification was enacted in the realm of time-based events
578 was important to Schawinsky as he brought these ideas to Black Mountain; to
579 him, theater explored the fundamental conditions of perception underlying all
580 specific disciplinary explorations. As he wrote of theater’s interdisciplinary na-
581 ture, ‘‘Our theater can, I believe, get its impulse from studies that go through all
582 phases of knowledge.’’56 In Schawinsky’s next major performance at the College,
583 he attempted to push notions of spatial totality further. In the 1938 production
584Danse Macabre: A Sociological Study, adapted from a Latin hymn about the
585 Last Judgment called Dies Irae, Schawinsky’s theatrical staging—while still em-
586 phasizing elaborate masks and costumes modeled on abstract shapes, and em-
587 ploying dramatic spotlights and shadows—also included repetitive movements
588 associated with funeral rites as well as highly mannered costuming (figs. 2.11
589 and 2.12). In staging a medieval morality tale, he chose the Middle Ages’ ‘‘single
590 absolute concept: death’’ in an attempt to ‘‘find the ‘absolute’ of our own time.’’57
591 He sought the limiting experience that transcended performance/animation
592 and background/stasis dichotomies—mortality—though he later distanced
593 himself from the direct reenactment of the macabre source material blamed for
594 the suicide of one of its student actors. The theater-in-the-round aspect of the
595 performance, in which spectators were outfitted with robes and masks and giv-
596 en unconventional seating assignments in concentric circles around the central
597 stage area, to him mimicked the ‘‘original plays [of the Middle Ages] which were
59872 chapter two
600Figures 2.11 (above) and 2.12 (below)
602Xanti Schawinsky, Danse Macabre: A Sociological Study, Black
603 Mountain College, 1938. Courtesy of The Xanti Schawinsky
604 Estate. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
605 usually performed on the market place in front of the cathedral.’’58 To Schawin-
606 sky, this focus on people and spaces outside traditional theater—for example,
607 individuals in public space—updated Bauhaus precedents that focused on the
608 circus and moved theater into the territory of history by studying constructions
609 of social subjectivity. As he recalled, ‘‘While work at the Bauhaus theatre aimed
610 at the modernization of theatrical means and concepts, and had a definite pro-
611 fessional and artistic scope, at Black Mountain College an educational crack at
612 the whole man seemed in order.’’59
613 What Schawinsky meant by such a ‘‘total experience’’ incorporating the
614 ‘‘whole man’’ can be understood in relation to Schlemmer’s explication of
615 Bauhaus theater as a totality: to both men, the stage was a site of spatial unity
616 that provided, according to Schawinsky, ‘‘a general study of fundamental phe-
617 nomena.’’60 He added that theater was the most appropriate location to explore
618 concepts of basic perception, because ‘‘space on the stage was a very particular
619 place …it is by nature a place of illusion.’’61 Indeed, to Schlemmer, too, move-
620 ments of bodies on the stage represented, by simplification and abstraction, the
621 wider geometries of relationships in space perceived through visual illusion,
622 and its inverse, penetrating observation. Bauhaus theater’s work with perspec-
623 tive, with embedding the body in its space through complicated geometric for-
624 mations, was often presented as a visual tableau in which the audience perceives
625 space, but does not have any direct relation to the performer’s experience of
626 space. This results in the somewhat disembodied eye that the performances ef-
627 fect—why, for example, reproductions of Bauhaus performances look remark-
628 ably like friezes and pictures, or why Schawinsky envisioned the preparatory
629 diagrams of Spectodrama as static tableaus (plates 10--12). The abstraction of
630 Bauhaus theater and its exploration of visual illusions were ‘‘unified,’’ to use
631 Schlemmer’s language, only by the audience’s visually tracking the position(s)
632 of the performer(s); Bauhaus and Bauhaus-derived theater expressly did not
633 create cohesive spaces of unity between performers and spectators, and consis-
634 tently maintained the illusion of the ‘‘fourth wall,’’ even when seating arrange-
635 ments were less frontally oriented.
636 These theatrical scenarios required spectators’ orientation to the staged
637 events to be fixed and their attention carefully focused in order to perceive
638 the precise and subtly changing visual effects on the stage. An immobilized
639 audience permitted Schlemmer and Schawinsky to apply the framing tech-
640 niques of cinema to live performances. With such focused looking, a montage
641 of visual effects could unfold, in order for each spectator to observe phenom-
642 ena with close attention to the order and sequencing of events that he or she
643 would not normally notice if watching as a casual bystander. Though a ‘‘play
644 instinct’’ was encouraged of actors in workshopping, the final productions
64574 chapter two
647 Figure 2.13
648 Oskar Schlemmer, drawing from Man and Art Figure, ca. 1921.
649 Courtesy Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate and Collection.
650 were predicated on passive spectatorship; Schlemmer wrote that the elabo-
651 rate visual fabulations encouraged a concentration that rivaled the intensity
652 of a ‘‘peep show’’62 (fig. 2.13).
653 In important ways, Schawinsky’s work can be seen as a proxy, in time-based
654 work, for what Albers’s sensibilities hoped to accomplish in two dimensions.
655 Much like Albers, Schawinsky promoted a model of experimentation that
656 stressed order, concentration, and serial repetition, and employed careful vari-
657 ations of formal elements—color, gesture, costume, set design, and lighting—
658 that could be measured, compared, and repeated. These tests of perception
659 were undertaken to dynamically reappraise the seemingly self-evident nature
660 of vision, and to question the habit-driven tendency of physical gestures to
661 be reproduced unwittingly. The experimental practices of both Schawinsky
662 and Albers can be seen as but a corner of a larger Bauhaus project demanding
663 that the experimental act of perceptual testing produce dynamic outcomes in
664 a serial practice of repeatable trials. Schawinsky’s performances were part of a
665 collective project at the Bauhaus in which all forms of perception were being
666 reconsidered, those of time, space, and theatricality, too; for these reasons, the
667 Bauhaus was the first art school to formally incorporate a performance depart-
668 ment, then called a ‘‘stage workshop,’’ into its curriculum. Just as Oskar Schlem-
669 mer envisioned his project as a ‘‘laboratory’’ exploration of space—isolating
670 constitutive elements of light, color, and movement to attend to how under-
671 lying patterns and arrangements of forms outside the theater might function,
672 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 75
674 Figure 2.14
675 Xanti Schawinsky, scene from The Circus, first performance at
676 the Bauhaus, 1924. Courtesy of The Xanti Schawinsky Estate.
677 Schawinsky pushed Albers’s ideas of laboratory production toward concerns
678 of duration, sound, and motion; toward the incorporation of bodies, theatrical
679 audience, and three-dimensional space—concerns that have always been more
680 pressing in theater than in visual art.63
681 Cage’s production of The Ruse of Medusa was also a hybrid site of theater in a
682 visual arts context, yet Erik Satie’s script, in contrast to the Bauhaus precedents
683 at the College, was dialogue-heavy and intentionally humorous, with quips ad-
684 dressed to the audience explicitly breaking down the fourth wall and engaging
685 the spectator at a supravisual level. In Bauhaus productions from the 1920s,
686 Schawinsky in particular often included comedic scenarios, particularly around
687 the figure of the clown in circus theatrics, but they were largely explorations
688 of pantomime: gesture in relation to the forms of props and the space of the
689 stage (fig. 2.14). The emphasis in the Satie play on a script to be verbalized by
690 actors characterizing fictionalized yet archly comedic roles also departed from
691 Black Mountain precedents. Satie’s 1913 script was, distinct from Bauhaus circus
692 antics and pantomime, a proto--Marx Brothers slapstick full of ribald verbal
693 repartee interspersed with burlesque-like visual gags—scene 2 ends with Baron
694 Medusa, sounding very much like Groucho twenty years later, telling Frisette’s
695 fiancé Astolfo: ‘‘Get out now! …Off like a gun! …Come back in ten minutes . . .
696 I shan’t be here.’’64
697 The provocations of The Ruse of Medusa—its silly jesting and the disrup-
698 tion of narrative continuity in the play’s sarcastic commentary (as Satie himself
699 stated, ‘‘This is a play of pure fantasy …a joke’’)—were only part of its allure
700 for Cage.65 More important, the work was part of a Dadaist repertoire char-
701 acterized by a particular style of writing and scoring. According to historian
70276 chapter two Sandra Skurvida, Cage’s fascination with the play stemmed from how ‘‘Satie
703 introduced incongruence between language (musical, visual, notational, etc.)
704 and meaning.’’66 Satie’s score and script become a fused and highly interpre-
705 table object pointing to a fundamental hybridity between aural and written
706 information—The Ruse of Medusa’s musical score contains nearly as much tex-
707 tual as sound notation, and its script includes musical interludes interrupting
708 the narrative (such as it is) with a nonverbal ‘‘Monkey’s Dance’’ that is never
709 clearly connected to the other events of the play. Performers must translate
710 both forms of information, which, due to Satie’s nonsensical asides, exceed the
711 normal prescriptions of notation, and in this gap indeterminate interpretations
712 are introduced that explore authorial misdirection or even unintended results
713 (how, for example, as a pianist, would you ‘‘put yourself in the shade,’’ as the
714 score instructs?). As historian Liz Kotz has argued, such a hybridity in a work
715 points to a ‘‘conceptual ambiguity’’ of text-based scoring that ‘‘derives from the
716 use of the text as score [as] inseparably both writing/printed object and per-
717 formance/‘realization.’ ’’67 Cage’s recovery of Satie was motivated in part by the
718 latter’s intentionally ambiguous scoring; the confusion between scripting and
719 dialogue in the play resulted in a contingent performance full of unpredictable
720 or unintended effects.
721The Ruse of Medusa ’s ambiguities—its absurd monologues and unrelated
722 musical interludes, combined with dance and physical slapstick—alerted Cage
723 to the possibility of seemingly arbitrary relationships between actions in a per-
724 formance. In the apparent randomness of its plotting, Satie’s work departed
725 from previous, more methodical theatrical events at Black Mountain. Even so,
726 the production still drew from a script and rehearsals, in addition to functioning
727 quite successfully as a comedic piece that lent levity to the provocation posed
728 by Cage’s lectures and his single-minded advocacy of Satie. (The play’s sense of
729 lightheartedness was especially pronounced as several Black Mountain faculty
730 members performed self-deprecating, jokey roles in the production.)68 An ex-
731 amination of the ordered unity of a visual field at the College was thus replaced,
732 by the late 1940s, with diametrically opposed practices: dispersion, ambiguity,
733 and inattention. Cage couched this shift in a return to Dada, by revisiting Satie’s
734 snappy and illogical explorations of the ludic and the disruptive effects of word,
735 dance, and sound play.
736 Upon his next visit, Cage extended his methods into something one could
737 more properly term experimental (in his case, the chance protocol)—his hap-
738 pening Theater Piece No. 1. For Cage, ‘‘Happenings …have this thing we’ve
739 spoken of as carelessness in them. Carelessness comes about through . . .
740 ‘non-matrixed’ activity.’’69 Just how he composed and performed nonmatrixed
741 or nonarranged activity is the crux of his chance protocol, and it pushes be-
742 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 77
743 yond Dada’s attempt to trouble if not end ‘‘art’’ by exacerbating cultural illogic.
744 It comes by way of a most quixotic pairing: Zen and early twentieth-century
745 French art.
746 cIrca 1952: somEthIng Is happEnIng hErE
747 In his first summer at Black Mountain, Cage was just beginning to make inroads
748 in the new post-‘‘German aesthetician’’ version of experimentation of which
749 the Satie play and lectures were key mileposts.70 As he recalled, in 1948 he still
750 ‘‘saw eye-to-eye with Albers at the time, and our conversations were ones char-
751 acterized by agreement.’’71 Though separated by a generation, both men were
752 equally zealous about defining and propagating their respective visions of mod-
753 ernist experimentation, and once Cage introduced chance into his practice,
754 they would forever disagree about its role in art production.
755 The eventual split between the two emerged from a fundamental and intrac-
756 table conflict between their visions for the role of the test in fostering unfore-
757 seen experiences in art. For Albers, because experimentation was the subtle
758 and penetrating work of training the eye and mind to recognize illusion, art
759 practice was therefore situated within a spectrum of design that began with
760 technical proficiency and then produced subtle and carefully organized contin-
761 gency through serial variation. For Cage, in contrast, contingency was a means
762 of unleashing unpredictable aleatory processes that were nonetheless generat-
763 ed by systematic controls. By 1952, his procedures had the effect of drastically
764 devaluing (in anarchic fashion) the role of authorial control in artistic produc-
765 tion, encouraging new types of indeterminate performances in which events
766 unforeseen by artist, performer, or audience could transpire.72 Where Albers
767 argued that ‘‘rehearsal precedes performance,’’ such a notion of rehearsal was
768 precisely what Cage attempted to remove, without substituting expressionistic
769 improvisations on the part of the performer.73
770 Occluding the Albersian conception of experimentation he characterized
771 as a ‘‘marriage of form and content,’’ Cage’s subsequent performance events
772 at the College attempted to leave both the composition and the effects of per-
773 formance actions intentionally open-ended, as much as possible.74 Albers ab-
774 horred Cage’s incitement of artworks left open to accident: as Cage explained,
775 ‘‘When, in 1952, I took the path of chance, and later indeterminacy, our friend-
776 ship was broken …he couldn’t bear the real implications which I then carried
777 out. And he felt that I was renouncing my responsibility as an artist.’’75
778 It was upon this visit, in 1952, that Cage radically disrupted previous mod-
779 els of performance at the College, including his own, by introducing over-
78078 chapter two lapping activities and inaugurating both a dispersal of attention and a radical
781 narrative fragmentation. With Theater Piece No. 1, Cage worked in the wake of
782 Black Mountain legacies such as the theater-in-the-round, circus-like events
783 previously organized at the College by the Light-Sound-Movement Work-
784 shop led by Betty and Peter Jennerjahn in the late 1940s, which were revived
785 in the summer of 1951 by M. C. Richards and choreographer Katherine Litz.
786 The Jennerjahns, for example, in collaboration with about a dozen College
787 students and faculty, had improvised short theater pieces, sometimes ‘‘limit-
788 ed to a minute, or so,’’ incorporating projected slides, improvised music, and
789 dance elements.76 Like these precursors at the College, Cage’s Theater Piece
790No. 1 eschewed extensive rehearsals and previously arranged scripting, cos-
791 tuming, music, and characterization; it emphasized simultaneously occurring
792 events and immediacy, and closely considered how to organize the perfor-
793 mance space with respect to the audience, who was often understood as a
794 community of possible participants.
795 Drawing on these precedents, by 1952 Cage was developing chance-derived
796 compositional methods obtained from parameters provided by the I Ching, or
797 the Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese text of divination. In particular, his
798 score for Music of Changes (1951) had been a turning point; during its compo-
799 sition he would ‘‘ask’’ specific ‘‘questions’’ about features of the score, and then
800 make coin tosses or casts of the traditional yarrow sticks to assemble the hexa-
801 grams the I Ching requires; he then used the ‘‘answers’’ to select the duration,
802 tempo, and other dynamics of the composition.77 Cage expressly employed only
803 the structure of the I Ching’s complex randomization features, not its divinatory
804 aspects. As he contended of the innovation of chance composition, ‘‘My work
805 became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have devel-
806 oped a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making
807 my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.’’78
808 Let’s keep that phrase, ‘‘asking questions instead of making choices,’’ in
809 mind while considering Theater Piece No. 1 and the works composed around
810 it. In early August of 1952, Cage and his frequent collaborator, pianist David
811 Tudor (also at Black Mountain that summer, though he had first arrived at the
812 College in 1951 as piano accompanist to Litz), formulated ideas for a perfor-
813 mance with multiple participants who would perform discrete activities during
814 various overlapping time segments totaling forty-five minutes (see fig. 2.17).
815 Cage proposed that College Rector Charles Olson and faculty member Rich-
816 ards read their poetry, student Robert Rauschenberg display his paintings and
817 play records or project slides, and Cunningham dance. Tudor was to perform
818 on the piano, and Cage would read from a previously prepared lecture on Zen
819 and the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. To Cage, the piece represented the
820 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 79
821 possibility of events taking place without being causally related to one another;
822 as he claimed, Theater Piece No. 1 expressed ‘‘the centricity within each event
823 and its non-dependence on other events.’’79
824 Cage had in fact established strict time brackets and organized the perfor-
825 mance with particular time, content, and location parameters. His chance pro-
826 tocol, however, structured the piece’s score around instructions that had many
827 possible effects, which organized a set of open-ended possibilities. The most
828 radical break of such a scoring in Theater Piece No. 1 was the intentionally dis-
829 orienting effect of the performance, what Richards called its ‘‘sensory bombard-
830 ment’’; it decentered attention away from the visual apperception of a theatrical
831 event to the many intermittent, intermedia experiences Cage orchestrated in
832 and around the body of the spectator.80
833 When it was performed at Black Mountain in mid-August, Theater Piece
834No. 1 incorporated the last-minute addition of upside-down slides, likely
835 projected onto the tilted surfaces of a canopy of Rauschenberg’s monochromat-
836 ic White Paintings (fig. 2.3; works I will discuss later); the canopy was arranged
837 above and to one side of the central arrangement of chairs, which were orga-
838 nized as ‘‘a square composed on four triangles merging towards the center, but
839 not meeting’’81 (fig. 2.15). The seating arrangement allowed performers mobility
840 throughout the audience area, and directly followed, as will be discussed fur-
841 ther, Antonin Artaud’s pronouncement that ‘‘the spectator, placed in the mid-
842 dle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it …immerse[d] . . . in
844 Figure 2.15
845 Performance seats and stage space for John Cage’s Theater
846Piece No. 1, 1952. Published in Michael Kirby and Richard
847 Schechner, ‘‘An Interview with John Cage,’’ Tulane Drama
848Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965).
84980 chapter two
851 Figure 2.16
852 M. C. Richards’s diagram of John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1, 1952.
853 Reconstructed in 1989 for publication in James Fetterman, John
854Cage’s Theater Pieces (New York: Routledge, 1996), 74. Courtesy
855 of the Estate of M. C. Richards.
856 a constant bath of light, images, movements and noises.’’82 Olson and Richards
857 ascended a ladder at various points to read for their segments; some claim that
858 Tudor played Cage’s 1952 composition Water Music, and films were likely pro-
859 jected by student Nicholas Cernovich.83 A dog or dogs barked at Cunningham
860 throughout the piece, and hot coffee was served (as part of the performance)
861 in cups that had been set at each seat, regardless of whether they had been pre-
862 viously used as ashtrays during the event. Figure 2.16 is a retrospective map of
863 the event by Richards—no photographs of the performance exist.
864 Cage’s incorporation of multiple events of indeterminate outcome in The-
865ater Piece No. 1 provoked a mixed response at its debut. Testimonies confirm
866 that the event left some in the audience confounded and even hostile. Com-
867 poser Stefan Wolpe, previously a Bauhaus student and currently teaching at
868 the College, ‘‘bitched’’ about the chaos and left in protest; some thought it was
869 ‘‘quite boring’’ to sit through though, while others claimed it was ‘‘an interesting
870 experiment’’; still others conceded that ‘‘you weren’t supposed to understand
871 it literally.’’84 The seating arrangement discouraged a single vantage point, so
872 contradictory accounts of the evening circulated as the many simultaneous and
873 unrelated actions assailed spectators independently with several registers of
874 sonic, literary, dancerly, and visual events. Spectators were required to turn
875 their heads and move their bodies to see the actions taking place in a panorama
876 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 81
877 above and around them, and to follow competing strains of aural information
878 and coincident movement. In this sense, they were asked to become partici-
879 pants: by registering experiences in their bodies other than ones cued by visual
880 perception, and by Cage’s increasing phenomenological demands that audience
881 members engage the broader sensorium of their bodies with acoustic, tactile,
882 and even olfactory events.
883 Through its emphasis on simultaneity, the piece ostensibly revealed the
884 unmotivated, untidy flow of life that concentration stifles and conscious de-
885 sign suppresses. As Cunningham reflected on the night: ‘‘Life itself is all these
886 separate things going on at the same time. And contemporary society is so
887 extraordinarily complex that way. Not only things going on right around you,
888 but there are all the things that you hear instantly over the television, that are
889 going on someplace else …they’re happening at the same time.’’85 That life
890 involves a surfeit of difficult sensory information was its peculiar, splendid an-
891 archy, according to the logic Cage set out in Theater Piece No. 1. The simultane-
892 ity of events was the indelible and inescapable fact of the modern world, and
893 Cage’s happening created a situation that intensified its pandemonium (all the
894 while still framing the effect of randomness by a rigorously delimited score that
895 contained defined time brackets and specific instructions).
896 As Cage was incorporating ambient and overlapping noises in musical com-
897 position and performance, he was also redefining what a music score could be.
898 In his ‘‘score’’ for Theater Piece No. 1, for example, traditional musical notations
899 of staffs, bars, keys, and notes were replaced with telegraphic durational seg-
900 ments to be interpreted by the performer. An existing fragment given to one of
901 the performers (likely to Robert Rauschenberg or Nicholas Cernovich) reads,
902 in Cage’s hand (fig. 2.17):
903 Projector:
904 Begin at 16 min.
905 play freely until 23 min.
906 Begin again at 24:30
907 play freely until 35:45
908 Begin at 38:20
909 play freely until 44:2586
910 De-skilling musical language beyond its notation in bars, notes, keys, and
911 measures guaranteed that every event could be simply performed and would
912 produce unique and unpredictable results (although the exacting, time-based
913 constraints on the performer’s freedom could inversely be interpreted as fussy
914 and overbearing, not liberating). Whereas the quantity and length of the score’s
91582 chapter two
917 Figure 2.17
918 John Cage, Script for Theater Piece No. 1, 1952. 8¡ Œ 11
919 paper. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the
920 Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
921 sections were generated by Cage’s chance-derived use of the I Ching, the per-
922 formers’ interpretations of these instructional commands were ultimately un-
923 known to him. The score, however, produced no reciprocal lack of mastery on
924 the creator’s part—it was not Cage’s choices of which possibilities to put on the
925 table, so to speak, that were chance derived, merely the questions about their
926 specific details.
927 Because no photographic record or film footage of Theater Piece No. 1 exists,
928 to get a sense of its effect it is helpful to compare it to a surviving film recording
929 of Cage’s 1959 composition Water Walk, a work also based on timed segments,
930 that he performed during a television appearance in 196087 (fig. 2.18). In Water
931Walk Cage is the sole performer, amid a field of some thirty-four items: domes-
932 tic appliances and other household objects related to water or liquidity that are
933 spread over various tables and the floor—a pressure cooker releasing steam, a
934 rubber duck, a toy fish, an electric mixer, an ice cube tray filled with ice, a bottle
935 of Campari, and a bathtub filled with water—as well as some objects related to
936 music or timekeeping, including a piano, five radios, a Turkish cymbal, and
937 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 83
939 Figure 2.18
940 Still frame from performance of John Cage’s Water Walk on I’ve
941Got a Secret, January 1960. Courtesy of FremantleMedia, North
942 America.
943 a stopwatch. In the three minutes of Water Walk, Cage methodically moves
944 among these objects: filling the blender with ice, slapping the radios, turning
945 on the blender, squeaking the rubber duck, filling a glass with ice, pouring Cam-
946 pari, and later drinking from it, while periodically consulting his stopwatch.
947Water Walk’s first seconds begin with Cage slamming down the lid of the piano
948 after putting the toy fish on its soundboard, and concludes with Cage knocking
949 the radios to the ground, acts of physical and aural aggression that he manages
950 to make appear calm and unemotional—premeditated—and even a bit slap-
951 stick-y.88 The deliberation and calculation of the performance, despite its mild
952 violence and cacophony, are surprising. During Cage’s systematic movements
953 through the space, he checks his watch like an athlete clocking pace. This ele-
954 ment of precision is striking in many performances of Cage’s works: the way the
955 chance protocol—the fixed, clocked segments that produce seemingly aleatory
956 results—lends a sense of dogged focus on time and duration to the perform-
957 er’s gestures (which can read as disinterestedness or obliviousness to audience
958 members, an audience that may expect a virtuosic memorization of the score,
959 as in ‘‘classical’’ music performances).
960 The score of Water Walk itself consists of a group of objects: a list of the
961 ‘‘instruments’’; a floor plan showing the placement of the props; three pages of
962 a timeline (one minute for each page) with descriptions, pictographic diagrams,
963 and notations of occurrence of events divided into five-second increments; and
96484 chapter two a list of notes ‘‘regarding some of the actions to be made in the order of occur-
965 rence’’ (fig. 2.19). Timings in the performed work are estimations: ‘‘Start watch
966 and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score.’’
967Water Walk itself was therefore relatively fixed in its performance, but for the
968 brisk yet unspecific tempo of the actions that were to be timed ‘‘as closely as
969 possible.’’89
970Water Walk’s paper score relies on two earlier Cage works: Water Music
971 (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958). Cage used the score of Fontana Mix (which, like
972 many of his scores of the 1950s, employed the I Ching as a randomizing tool) to
973 compose Water Walk and several other compositions; the former piece consists
974 of ten transparencies containing various numbers of dots, ten sheets of paper
975 with curved lines of various thicknesses, one transparency of a two-by-ten-inch
976 grid, and another of a straight line. The Fontana Mix score was itself indetermi-
977 nate (the performer was to superimpose the sheets to find ‘‘time units in which
978 the event may take place’’).90 According to Cage, the ‘‘graph units = any time
979 units,’’ thereby allowing the performance’s duration and tempo to be conceived
980 by the operator of the score. In its title and elements of pictorial scoring, Water
981Walk clearly resembles Cage’s Water Music, which David Tudor premiered in
982 May of 1952 at the New School for Social Research in New York before returning
983 to Black Mountain—likely the work Tudor was playing during Theater Piece
985 Figure 2.19
986 John Cage, Score for Water Walk, January 1959. Copyright ľ
987 1961 by Henmar Press, Inc. Used by permission of C. F. Peters
988 Corporation. All rights reserved.
989 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 85
991 Figure 2.20
992 John Cage, Score for Water Music, May 1952. Copyright ľ
993 1960 by Henmar Press, Inc. Used by permission of C. F. Peters
994 Corporation. All rights reserved.
995No. 1.91 Like Water Walk, the earlier Water Music emphasized the hybridity of
996 the score as a visual document and aural experience. As Cage explained,
997Water Music wishes to be a piece of music, but to introduce visual elements in
998 such a way that it can be experienced as theater. …I simply put into the chart
999 things that would produce not only sounds but that would produce actions
1001 that were interesting to see.92
1002 For example, in Water Music’s score, a descending tone of a steam whistle is
1003 depicted as a linear wave, and the instruction ‘‘Pour water from one recepta-
1004 cle to another’’ bears no musical notation whatsoever but is written in Cage’s
1005 distinctive all-caps handwriting that is in essence a kind of calligraphic visual
1006 design (fig. 2.20).
1007 In the sense that Cage described Water Music as introducing ‘‘visual ele-
1008 ments’’ that could be ‘‘experienced as theater,’’ one can begin to understand the
1009 chance protocol of Theater Piece No. 1 as perhaps one part ‘‘chance’’ to several
1010 parts ‘‘protocol’’—that the protocol’s criterion of experimental innovation is
1011 a demand to ‘‘produce actions that were interesting to see.’’ The staging of the
1012 Black Mountain College dining hall as a 360-degree panorama of competing
1013 aural and visual actions, often taking place simultaneously, was obviously not a
1014 random event; though the length of the time slots the performers were desig-
1015 nated and the other questions Cage asked of the I Ching were subject to chance,
101686 chapter two they were organized by his framing of the questions. And if Cage’s Water Walk
1017 television performance is any indication, it is likely that performers of Theater
1018Piece No. 1 utilized their time slots quite seriously, attempting, for example, to
1019 play the third projector segment for the precise six minutes and five seconds
1020 the score indicated—an officiousness distant from the reputation of ‘‘indeter-
1021 minate’’ compositions as haphazard or non-intentioned.93
1022 Similarly, in Cage’s 1952 composition 433, created during his time at Black
1023 Mountain (though having percolated in his mind for several years), the piece’s
1024 three time sections were chance-determined by use of the I Ching to be thir-
1025 ty-three seconds, two minutes and forty seconds, and one minute and twenty
1026 seconds apiece.94 When Tudor first performed 433, he placed on the piano the
1027 several sheets of the handwritten score, which was notated conventionally on
1028 sheet music with blank measures (figs. 2.21, 2.22). Upon beginning each section,
1029 he closed the lid of the piano and, glancing at a stopwatch, turned the pages of
1030 the score as time passed. When each section ended, he opened the piano lid.
1031 Though the score indicates there should be no intentional sound on the per-
1032 former’s part, as with Water Walk a great deal of theatricalization surrounds
1033 actualizing the matrices of Cage’s ‘‘non-matrixed’’ activity.
1034 Cage’s use of the I Ching was intertwined with his intensifying investigation
1035 of the revelatory possibilities of void-like events described in Zen Buddhist
1036 Figures 2.21 and 2.22
1037 David Tudor’s original version of John Cage’s 433, pages 3 and 4,
1038 1953. The John Cage Trust. Reproduced by permission of The Getty
1039 Research Institute, Los Angeles.
1041 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 87
1043 texts; he called these the ‘‘flow-through’’ of experiences that break down the
1044 ego’s barrier.95 Breaking down this barrier, for Cage, revealed the dominance
1045 of ‘‘no-mindedness,’’ or non-intention, in the world, which could be accessed
1046 via an experience of the body as a vessel for sound.96 This connection between
1047 sound and the ‘‘flow-through’’ of experiences followed his 1951 visit to an an-
1048 echoic (an echoless, insulated, and therefore soundproof ) chamber at Harvard
1049 University, during which his expectation of total acoustic withdrawal was over-
1050 turned.97 According to Cage, in the chamber he ‘‘heard two sounds, one high
1051 and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me
1052 that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in
1053 circulation.’’98 Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound,
1054 and yet sound was nevertheless present and discernible. (He claimed that it was
1055 then that the composition of 433 seemed possible; he realized that ‘‘until I die
1056 there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not
1057 fear about the future of music.’’)99 Silence was in actuality a ‘‘walking concert’’
1058 of the body; as Cage argued, ‘‘We call it ‘silence’ because it is free of our activity.
1059 It does not correspond to ideas of order or expressive feeling …[that] ‘deafen’
1060 us to the sounds themselves.’’100
1061 That the stimulation and plenitude of ‘‘no-mindedness’’ could be features
1062 of the ostensible void of an anechoic chamber Cage connected to ninth-cen-
1063 tury Buddhist sage Huang Po’s Doctrine of Universal Mind.101 In 1952, Cage be-
1064 gan studying the text at Black Mountain, partly as a result of attending Daisetz
1065 Teitaro Suzuki’s seminars on Buddhism in the mid-1940s, which Suzuki later
1066 taught at Columbia from 1952 to 1957 to great public acclaim.102 Cage credited
1067 his investigation of Po’s Doctrine as a central inspiration for the new directions
1068 his work at Black Mountain was taking, declaring,
1069 I had come through my study of Zen Buddhism with Suzuki to an appreciation
1070 of a particular text: I liked it more than the others connected with Zen Bud-
1071 dhism—it’s called The Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind. So one evening
1072 at Black Mountain …we read the entire Huang Po Doctrine with all the notes
1073 and everything …after that experience …people told me their lives had
1074 changed.103
1075 Po’s text describes various paths to spiritual enlightenment, and advocates
1076 strategies of disengagement from action and withdrawal from the preoccu-
1077 pations of conscious thought. The doctrine of ‘‘no purpose’’ described there-
1078 in suggests abandoning intentionality in order to avail the spirit to the true
1079 flux of experience. To Po, attaining enlightenment was an unpredictable and
1080 chancy process, though certain foundational steps could be undertaken in
108188 chapter two preparation. He advocated a form of non-attachment and quietism in which
1082 ‘‘you need study no doctrines whatever, but learn only how to avoid seeking
1083 for and attaching yourselves to anything.’’104 Only when the mind and body
1084 were in a condition of harmonic balance, acting in concert with each other,
1085 could the ‘‘selflessness’’ of transcendence emerge. Po claimed that enlighten-
1086 ment may then arrive as an accident, as ‘‘a sudden self-realization’’ in a mo-
1087 ment of utter dispassion.105
1088 Cage was particularly impressed by Po’s assurance that reducing the inten-
1089 tionality of conscious thought—what Po referred to as ‘‘conceptual thought’’—
1090 laid a path to transcendence by way of bodily awareness. To Po, spiritual tran-
1091 scendence was possible for those who ‘‘would only eliminate all conceptual
1092 thought in a flash.’’106 By rejecting the mind’s demands toward reason, the spir-
1093 it would recognize the transitory nature of material phenomena and physical
1094 stimuli; as Po asserted, ‘‘Every phenomenon that exists is a creation of thought;
1095 therefore I need but empty my mind to discover that all of them are void.’’107
1096 Of special interest to Cage was Po’s championing an empty, receptive
1097 mind—an emptiness or ‘‘void’’ alert to the greater flux and changeability of
1098 transitory events. The sense of the void as open possibility became the correlate
1099 to Cage’s conception of an experiment as a protocol without predictable ends.
1100 As he explained,
1101 An experimental action, generated by a mind as empty as it was before it be-
1102 came one …does not move in terms of approximations and errors, as ‘‘in-
1103 formed’’ action by its nature must, for no mental images of what would happen
1104 were set up beforehand; it sees things directly as they are: impermanently
1105 involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations.109
1106 Cage related the notion of the void as impermanence, as a play of unpredictable
1107 difference, to his study at Black Mountain of Antonin Artaud’s work. Linking Po
1108 to Artaud, Cage saw similarities in their analyses of states of void-like instability
1109 in which the transcendence of routine and habit provided passage for unex-
1110 pected events and flashes of inspiration. In this sense, Theater Piece No. 1 was
1111 indelibly shaped by Black Mountain faculty member M. C. Richards’s ongoing
1112 translation of Artaud’s key texts, later compiled in the volume The Theater and
1113Its Double, which called for forms of theatrical performance that were utterly
1114 immediate and therefore not reliant on scripting or literary interpretation.
1115 Richards had been introduced to Artaud through her then partner Tudor’s
1116 studies in contemporary French musical composers. In his attempt to puzzle
1117 through Pierre Boulez’s 1948 Second Piano Sonata (confiding to Richards that
1118 though the sonata was complicated, he was actually ‘‘not having problems with
1119 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 89
1120 the notes, but with the music’’), Tudor had read Boulez’s sources for the work:
1121 poet Stéphane Mallarmé and Artaud.109 Richards, Tudor, and Cage discussed
1122 Artaud intensely at the College throughout the summer of 1952, and carefully
1123 studied chapters of The Theatre and Its Double as a companion to the Doctrine’s
1124 claims for the void-like elimination of intention.
1125 Artaud’s work, published first in France in 1938, collected essays and man-
1126 ifestos written throughout the previous two decades. It set forth a proposal
1127 for a ‘‘theater of cruelty’’ in which the effects of certain unpredictable actions
1128 onstage would shock viewers into a ‘‘new notion of space’’ when bombarded
1129 with many simultaneously occurring events.110 This new perception of space
1130 was characterized by ‘‘overlapping images and movements’’ and the ‘‘collusion
1131 of objects, silences, shouts, and rhythms’’ which together perform an ‘‘extreme
1132 action’’ pushing the spectator’s perception beyond its limits.111 In breaking down
1133 the viewer’s perceptual apparatus with overwhelming events, Artaud hoped to
1134 extend the effects of disorientation, ‘‘cruelty,’’ and the difficulty of perception
1135 off the stage and into the world beyond theatrical performance. As he main-
1136 tained, ‘‘There will be no unoccupied point in space, [and] there will be neither
1137 respite nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility. That is, between life
1138 and the theater there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity.’’112 It
1139 was an experience of shock in which the viewer’s previous understandings of
1140 art—art as separated from life—would be overturned. These acts of disturbance
1141 returned art to the chaotic conditions of life veiled by traditional theater’s codi-
1142 fied techniques and habits of scripting, narrativity, and characterization. Those
1143 now moribund aspects of theater would thereafter be supplanted by events of
1144 the world outside theater, thus initiating a ‘‘new’’ art that looked remarkably
1145 like the flux, chaos, and cruelty of ‘‘external’’ life while prismatically allowing
1146 for a critical vision of that life. Rather than revolutionizing the observation of
1147 conditions of the world outside theater by setting up a counterpoint of illusory
1148 effects (or even altering those ‘‘external’’ conditions themselves), art for Artaud
1149 must collapse its pretensions to autonomy and separation into already existing
1150 ‘‘life’’ conditions, thus producing a radical, destructive, and shocking break in
1151 the minds and bodies of spectators accustomed to a theater of affectation and
1152 habit. In sum, only by destroying the separation between theater and life could
1153 an invigorated sense of theater as life catalyze viewers to become aware of their
1154 relationship with natural ‘‘life’’ forces.
1155 To Cage, Artaud’s description of a barrage of simultaneous events raised
1156 ‘‘the possibility of making a theatrical event in which the things that took
1157 place were not causally related to one another.’’113 Interestingly, this is a claim
1158 Artaud himself never explicitly asserted. Cage, like Artaud, wanted to col-
1159 lapse the difference between theater and life, yet to Artaud the most radical
116090 chapter two feature of theater was its ability to compound visual and auditory effects in
1161 a dreamlike condensation of experience in which the spectator would lose a
1162 sense of the rules and conventions of the conscious mind. In viewing events
1163 as an endless accretion of disconnected moments, of different possible pres-
1164 ents, Artaud felt the theater of cruelty mimicked the ‘‘internal world’’ of the
1165 spectator; the ‘‘true illusion’’ of theater was the manner in which it reflected
1166 the ‘‘truthful precipitates of dreams’’ (dreams which, after all, do have causal
1167 connections that represent the logic of the unconscious, however latent those
1168 connecting threads may be).114
1169 In Cage’s application of Artaud’s theories of spectatorship to Theater Piece
1170No. 1, theater would literally act on the audience, but not by the mediation
1171 of acting or plotting, or by employing the unifying field of vision that joined
1172 a costumed actor with the obviously constructed spaces surrounding him or
1173 her, as in Bauhaus theater. Instead, it would do so by an escape from the ‘‘ra-
1174 tionalism’’ of premeditated, written theater performance. Artaud advocated
1175 a theater of ‘‘powerful feeling [that] produces in us the idea of the void . . .
1176 the real void of nature.’’115 Effects of void-like states, what he claimed were
1177 the ‘‘deepest states of mind beyond thought,’’ could be attained in a multi-
1178 sensory experience: it was ‘‘in the light of magic and sorcery that the mise
1179en scène must be considered …as the burning projection of all the objective
1180 consequences of a gesture, word, sound, music, and their combinations.’’116
1181 Only then would the ‘‘sorcery’’ of theater spiral the spectator into the doubled
1182 world of his or her own unconscious.117
1183 It is noteworthy that Oskar Schlemmer, Xanti Schawinsky, and Antonin
1184 Artaud invoked the notion of illusion as central to a new awareness and self-re-
1185 flexivity they hoped to awaken in their audiences. Yet while Schlemmer saw
1186 the theater as a space of illusion, it was an illusion constructed through focused
1187 attention, not void-like states. In contrast to his and other Bauhaus figures’ ra-
1188 tional examinations of spaces, transacted in the controlled environment of the
1189 theater, to Artaud the immediacy of the present allowed spectators particular
1190 purchase on ‘‘void’’ experiences; any attempts to translate or express the void
1191 through the temporally ‘‘dissembling’’ process of scripting (in which thoughts,
1192 ideas, and intentions from the past hijacked the free expression of ‘‘feelings
1193 and passions’’ in the present) corrupted the truth of immediacy.118 The chaos of
1194 the many simultaneous events onstage would induce experiences of shock in
1195 the audience, and for this reason Artaud insistently opposed the preeminence
1196 of dialogue in theater; as he stated in The Theater and Its Double, ‘‘Our purely
1197 verbal theater [is] unaware of everything that makes theater, of everything that
1198 exists in the air of the stage, which is measured and circumscribed by that air
1199 and has a density in space—movements, shapes, colors, vibrations, attitudes,
1200 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 91
1201 screams.’’119 This of course echoes Schlemmer’s call for a theater exploring spa-
1202 tial arrangements in the context of bodily movement. Yet in contrast to the de-
1203 liberate and ordered experimentation in Schlemmer’s work (he often referred
1204 to his practice as ‘‘research experiment’’), Artaud stressed the mutability and
1205 contingency of the theatrical space, stating that ‘‘the theater is the only place
1206 in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way
1207 twice.’’120 In place of the Bauhaus idea of bodies oriented through calculated
1208 geometries of space, Artaud proposed a ‘‘total spectacle’’ in which ‘‘an intensive
1209 mobilization of objects, gestures, and signs’’ provided ‘‘sudden shocks to revive
1210 our understanding.’’121 These shocks could be accomplished through immediacy
1211 and accident: theater should be as violent as ‘‘natural forces’’ that are subject to
1212 ‘‘interventions of chance.’’122
1213 Cage adapted Artaud’s sense of extrahuman ‘‘natural forces’’ as accidental
1214 and arbitrary; theater was a means to succumb to the greater chaos of those
1215 unintended, uncontrollable consequences. Such forces appear cruel or ‘‘tyr-
1216 annous,’’ in Cage’s understanding of Artaud, only because attempts by human
1217 agents to organize and control them create friction between people and their
1218 environments. For Cage, the rational pseudo-order of the mind was to be abol-
1219 ished in favor of the real order of chance. He often invoked earlier Dadaist em-
1220 ployments of chance to supplement his employment of Artaud’s arguments.
1221 Marcel Duchamp’s work in particular was a touchstone for Cage’s notion of
1222 experimentation as the acceptance of accident and the elimination of conscious
1223 interference—those features of Cage’s turn to chance that had so offended Al-
1224 bers. Cage advocated reconsidering Duchamp’s uses of chance not only as a
1225 means to compose, but also as a tool to attain random or indeterminate re-
1226 sults in experimental acts, boldly declaring, ‘‘One way to write music: study
1227 Duchamp.’’123 In particular, he credited Duchamp with opening up a space of
1228 expanded, nonjudgmental awareness: his bottle racks and bicycle wheels un-
1229 derscored the dialogical experience of the art object, its recognition as art based
1230 on a community of understanding rather than any innate quality of the work.
1231 To Duchamp, the unsubjective or ‘‘casual’’ selection of a readymade was key;
1232 the work should be as randomly chosen and therefore as affectless as possible.
1233 As he wrote,
1234 It is necessary to arrive at selecting an object with the idea of not being im-
1235 pressed by this object on the basis of enjoyment of any order. However, it
1236 is difficult to select an object that absolutely does not interest you, not only
1237 on the day on which you select it, and which does not have any chance of
1238 becoming attractive or beautiful and which is neither pleasant to look at nor
1239 particularly ugly.124
124092 chapter two To Duchamp, an artist’s nominative act—the declaration itself regardless of
1241 the object—was itself the art. He could choose anything indifferent to, or even
1242 in spite of, its aesthetic merits. Thus began a conceptual leap of faith that con-
1243 tinued to define the condition of art’s intelligibility for Cage. Coupled with
1244 the disinterestedness of the selection of readymade, Duchamp’s approach to
1245 chance also employed a paradox of intentional non-intention in its experimen-
1246 tal method.
1247 One would think that Duchamp’s 1913 musical score Erratum Musique
1248 (which can be translated as ‘‘musical misprint’’), in which twenty-five notes
1249 from F below middle C to high F were drawn from a hat by Duchamp and his
1250 two sisters, would have been pivotal to Cage. Yet Cage stated of the work, ‘‘I
1251 wouldn’t be satisfied with that kind of chance operation in my work. …I enjoy
1252 details and like things to be more complicated.’’125 Instead, of central importance
1253 was Duchamp’s piece 3 Standard Stoppages of 1913--14, in which he dropped a
1254 one-meter length of string three times and recorded the resulting forms (Cage
1255 apparently attempted to replicate the work)126 (plate 13). In creating templates
1256 of the three trials, Duchamp transformed the ‘‘standard’’ of measure into an
1257 indexical reflection of a seemingly arbitrary event. Describing this as ‘‘canned
1258 chance,’’ he underscored how the organizational protocol of the ‘‘experiment’’
1259 resulted in repeatable, quantifiable, and measurable events, though each ‘‘find-
1260 ing’’ was ultimately unpredictable. As philosopher Ian Hacking has written,
1261 such a protocol can be said to use ‘‘chance devices to introduce a new level of
1262 control into experimentation. Control not by getting rid of chance fluxuations,
1263 but by adding some more.’’127 Like a statistical study in which randomization
1264 and stochastic variation are harnessed to eliminate bias, Duchamp’s ‘‘canned
1265 chance,’’ in a most contradictory fashion, allowed each event’s specificity to
1266 emerge by minimizing the subjective element in ‘‘human error.’’
1267 The aleatory elements that Duchamp incorporated in the creation of 3 Stan-
1268dard Stoppages stressed what he called the ‘‘chain of totally subjective reactions’’
1269 the artist undergoes in planning and realizing a creative act.128 The results of
1270 a chance operation, however, emphasized how chance in fact minimized the
1271 subjectivity of the artist:
1272 ‘‘Theory’’
1273 10 words found by opening the dictionary at random by A
1274 10 words found by opening the dictionary at random by B
1275 These 2 sets of 10 words have the same difference of ‘‘personality’’ as if the 10
1276 words had been written by A and B with an intention. Or else, it matters little,
1277 there would be cases where this ‘‘personality’’ may disappear in A and B. That is
1278 the best case and most difficult.129
1279 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 93
1280 To Duchamp, subjective ‘‘personality’’ could be effaced if chance events were
1281 not random at all—if arbitrary selections could somehow be made repeatable
1282 among a large-enough sample of chance events. The use of chance creates
1283 unique and diverse experiences that the human mind cannot predict, yet the
1284 mind is so varied and complex that after a few deliberative selections of words,
1285 a subjective and seemingly irrational range of possibilities and associations
1286 emerge that can be as difficult to causally explain as a chance event. Even sam-
1287 ples generated by choice or intention produce seemingly chancy differences; to
1288 Duchamp, the ideal scenario—‘‘the best case’’—resulted when these two situa-
1289 tions, randomness and intention, became coincident and when no distinction
1290 could be perceived between chance and design. Such a de-differentiation could
1291 null all forms of intention, though that remained only the ‘‘most difficult’’ and
1292 remote scenario.
1293 Chance processes, to Duchamp, were paradoxically determinate in their
1294 composition (the control exerted by the creator in setting up the event), while
1295 producing indeterminate outcomes: ‘‘Your chance is different than mine.’’130
1296 Yet ‘‘canned chance’’—the way in which chance generates results only as dif-
1297 ferent as two different subjectivities—inserts elements of indeterminacy and
1298 randomness to create a wider range of possible outcomes, not capricious re-
1299 sults.131 Duchamp employed chance to refute habit and bias; he understood
1300 it as a practice with predictable operations though indeterminate results—in
1301 other words, as a chance protocol. No process of manipulating results, delin-
1302 eating beginnings and endings, or structuring propositions for chance activ-
1303 ities wholly eliminates intentionality; chance protocols, as executed in Dada
1304 and later by Cage, do not reject motivated action. In fact, chance processes
1305 exemplify types of technique and control that are highly motivated and aspire
1306 to eliminate the emotional biases of both individuals and systems. As critic
1307 Ian Pepper has noted, Cage’s ‘‘aesthetics of indifference’’ was in actuality a
1308 ‘‘ ‘discipline’ governed by the liquidation of intention, habit, and agency.’’132
1309 Indeed, Cage later rephrased his ‘‘questions not choices’’ formulation thusly:
1310 ‘‘Most people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I
1311 use chance as a discipline. They think I use it—I don’t know—as a way of giv-
1312 ing up making choices.’’133 Chance in composition was a project predicated on
1313 assumptions that it produced new understandings of order. Chance is always
1314 laden with intention. In his years at and post-Black Mountain College, defin-
1315 ing just whose intention reigned became the ground for mounting critiques of
1316 Cage’s notion of the experimental act.
131794 chapter two
1319 Plate 1
1320 Color Study IV-3. From Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
1321 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963/1971).
1322 ľ Yale University Press; courtesy Yale University Press.
1324 Plate 2
1325 Josef Albers, template for a Variant study, n.d. 12 Π19.
1326 Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni
1327 Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
1329 Plate 3
1330 Josef Albers, Variant, 1947. Oil on Masonite, 12 Π18.
1331 Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni
1332 Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
1334 Plate 4
1335 Josef Albers, Variant: Southern Climate, 1948--53. Oil on Masonite, 1214
1336 Œ 22¡. Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni Albers
1337 Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
1339 Plate 5
1340 Josef Albers, Variant: Southern Climate, 1948--53, detail.
1341 Photograph by Eva Díaz ľ The Josef and Anni Albers
1342 Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
1344 Plate 6
1345 Josef Albers, Variant, 1947--55. Oil on Masonite, 26 Π2814.
1346 Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni
1347 Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
1349 Plate 7
1350 Josef Albers, Study for a Variant (III), C, 1947. Pencil and
1351 oil on paper, 9116 Π1178. Photograph by Tim Nighswander
1352 ľ The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights
1353 Society, New York.
1355 Plate 8
1356 Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1958. Oil on Masonite, 18 Œ
1357 18. Photograph ľ Judd Foundation. Courtesy Judd Foundation
1358 Archive.
1360 Plate 9
1361 Josef Albers, Lettering Set, 1926--31. Milk glass on painted wood.
1362 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society,
1363 New York. Digital Image ľ The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed
1364 by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
1366 Plate 10
1367 Xanti Schawinsky, Sound and Chord
1368 Demonstration, Spectodrama Sketch
1369#5, 1936--37. The Xanti Schawinsky
1370 Estate.
1372 Plate 11
1373 Xanti Schawinsky, Spectodrama
1374 8: Building (Tensional), 1936--37.
1375 Photocollage on paper, 16 Π21.1.
1376 The Xanti Schawinsky Estate.
1378 Plate 12
1379 Xanti Schawinsky, Spectodrama
1380 5: Form and Language, 1936--37.
1381 Photocollage and pen on paper, 16.6 Œ
1382 20.4. The Xanti Schawinsky Estate.
1384 Plate 13
1385 Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages. Paris, 1913--14. Wood
1386 box 1118 Π5078 Π9, with three threads 3938, glued to three
1387 painted canvas strips 5ij Π47ij, each mounted on a glass panel
1388 7ij Œ 4938 Œ ij, three wood slats 2¡ Œ 43 Œ 18, shaped along
1389 one edge to match the curves of the threads. ľ 2012 Artists
1390 Rights Society New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel
1391 Duchamp. Digital Image ľ The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed
1392 by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
1394 Plate 14
1395 Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, 1954/1981.
1396 29-color silkscreen on Arches 100% rag paper, 50 Π72. Edition
1397 of 85. Courtesy Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio.
1399 Plate 15
1401 Buckminster Fuller, World Energy. First published in Fortune,
1402 February 1940. Courtesy The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.
1404 Plate 16
1405 Buckminster Fuller, World Energy Map, 1953. Published in
1406 Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Courtesy The
1407 Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.
1409 Plate 17
1410 Buckminster Fuller holding model of Autonomous Dwelling
1411Machine, 1947, next to model of same, assembled and housed
1412 inside geodesic dome, ca. 1950s. Courtesy The Estate of R.
1413 Buckminster Fuller.
1415 Plates 18, 19
1416 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I and Factum II, 1957. Both: Oil,
1417 ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproduc-
1418 tions, and painted paper on canvas, 6138 Œ 35¡ each. ľ Robert
1419 Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
1422 Plate 20
1423 Ray Johnson, James Dean (Lucky Strike), 1957. Ink, collage, and
1424 paper on cardboard, 18 Œ 15.375. ľ Ray Johnson Estate. Courte-
1425 sy Richard L. Feigen & Co.
1426 chancE protocols anD thE polItIcs oF thE arbItrary
1427 One way to understand the chance-protocol experiment is as a proposition that
1428 produces indeterminate results that must be accepted rather than judged—not
1429 as the production of material evidence to be evaluated, as Albers had argued.
1430 Cage’s model of experimentation minimized purposeful communication be-
1431 tween artist and audience, positing such exchanges as the obsolete habit of
1432 imposing predictable regularity on both the audience’s interpretive freedom
1433 and on the underlying, fundamentally unknowable organization of nature. In
1434 these proposals of chance and indeterminacy, Cage argued that a new dimen-
1435 sion of perception could be revealed outside human faculties of organization,
1436 assessment, and intention: ‘‘Not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to
1437 suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very
1438 life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires
1439 out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.’’134
1440 In Cage’s turn to a chance-protocol version of experimentation, his work
1441 received degrees of public exposure and notoriety that eclipsed nearly all other
1442 practices at Black Mountain College. In contrast to Albers’s largely unpublished
1443 writings, Cage’s discussions about his influences, and his commentaries on the
1444 development of procedures he was terming ‘‘experimental’’ as early as his first
1445 public talks in 1937 at age twenty-five, were widely published. By 1961, they
1446 were compiled in Silence, his influential collection of essays and lectures.135
1447 Cage’s methodology of experimentation underwent many transformations in
1448 his long life, but what is pertinent to a study of him at Black Mountain—why he
1449 is such a vital case study of experimentation there—is the way he used his rela-
1450 tively brief time at the College to test rapidly maturing ideas about prolonging
1451 the creative process of experimentation in order to generate unpredictable com-
1452 positions, and extending this new process to a work’s reception in performance
1453 situations of unfixed outcome.
1454 Moreover, in contrast to Albers’s long association with the College as a
1455 teacher and artist, Cage’s own work in this vein overshadowed his pedagogi-
1456 cal strategies, which at least during his Black Mountain years were quite un-
1457 derdeveloped. When, for example, he found students unwilling to enroll in
1458 his summer 1952 class at the College, the stated goal of which was to appren-
1459 tice helpers to do the tedious work of cutting and splicing bits of magnetic
1460 tape for his composition Williams Mix, Cage canceled all formal teaching for
1461 the term. His tenure at the College is most closely associated with his key
1462 performance events, and the way he formulated arguments about them into
1463 a new and persuasive experimental model that only later became the basis of
1464 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 95
1465 an influential pedagogy (in his Experimental Composition classes at the New
1466 School for Social Research and elsewhere).
1467 Ultimately, Cage attributed his split with Albers to the issue of chance as rat-
1468 ifying a new and uniquely American, as opposed to European, hence tradition-
1469 al, aesthetic; he declared that he ‘‘was more interested in a mediocre thing that
1470 is being made now, which is avant-garde, than …in the performance of a great
1471 masterpiece of the past.’’136 In this he distanced himself from existing European
1472 (that is, German) artistic, musical, and theatrical currents at the College; yet
1473 as we have seen, he did this by linking his work with Far Eastern, particular-
1474 ly Chinese, as well as French models. In repudiating the dominant German
1475 harmonic tradition of Beethoven through Schoenberg, Cage supplanted that
1476 canon with overlooked French composers such as Satie, Claude Debussy, and
1477 Edgard Varèse (as he bemoaned, ‘‘No Germans take French music seriously’’).137
1478 In contrast to the German precedents reverberating in the work of Albers and
1479 other émigrés at the College, he abandoned their attentive examination of the
1480 structure and serial organization of form, though he continued to pursue their
1481 familiarly modernist goal of changing audiences’ relationships to established
1482 patterns of perception. In this, Cage’s model of experimentation paradoxically
1483 attempted to script, or rather to score, what he perceived as the eternal and
1484 underlying randomness of life rarely apparent in the rules and discipline of art
1485 and other cultural systems of order.
1486 Cage sought greater indeterminacy so as to prove the fundamental useless-
1487 ness of forms of human intervention in the order of nature. He saw his work as
1488 promoting the ‘‘disappearance of power politics’’ as part of a new, holistic ‘‘total
1489 system’’ existing outside human determination.138 Freewheeling riskiness—the
1490 underlying order of the world as he perceived it—was too often impeded by
1491 the imposition of false order (political, artistic, or otherwise). One should, in
1492 Cage’s words, ‘‘experiment endlessly’’ to unfix determinations of all sorts and
1493 rid the world of all manner of social and artistic habits, including the habit to
1494 think about the world as susceptible to change.139 In this last respect, the title of
1495 Cage’s essay from which the previous quotes are drawn is quite telling: ‘‘Diary:
1496 How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).’’
1497 Threaded with his study of Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, and Zen prece-
1498 dents, Cage framed his experiments with chance and indeterminacy at Black
1499 Mountain as an expansion of performance toward the incorporation of simul-
1500 taneously occurring and happenstance events.140 In this, he linked his ideas
1501 to Robert Rauschenberg’s works. Rauschenberg was in 1951 exploring the
1502 ultimate ‘‘anti-art’’ provocation, the monochromatic canvas, and his varied
1503 and prolific output during his years at Black Mountain included his so-called
1504Black Paintings, in which he layered dirt and paint over newsprint, and his
150596 chapter two entirely White Paintings, shown during Theater Piece No. 1. These works tested
1506 the boundaries of an image’s legibility by exploring the limits of minimal de-
1507 notation, and flirted with the possibility of void-like emptiness. Cage referred
1508 to the White Paintings series as ‘‘airports for lights, shadows and particles,’’
1509 and attributed to Rauschenberg a passivity against composition and order
1510 that he himself advocated141 (fig. 2.3). Cage claimed that in the White Paintings
1511 ‘‘there is the same acceptance of what happens and no tendency towards ges-
1512 ture or arrangement.’’142
1513 Cage was intrigued with how the white canvases seemed to enhance the
1514 experience of typically overlooked events—the way, for example, the paint-
1515 ings amplified shadows, or how their color and appearance varied according
1516 to light conditions. Cage credited Rauschenberg with opening up a space of
1517 apparent emptiness and revealing it to be in fact full of diverse activity and ex-
1518 perience. Indeed, during Theater Piece No. 1, if we are to believe some accounts,
1519 Rauschenberg’s works oscillated between acting as paintings and operating as
1520 screens for slides or films—deployed as scenography within a theatrical situa-
1521 tion rather than functioning as singular artworks.
1522 In part, Cage attributed his 1952 composition of 433 to Rauschenberg’s
1523 challenge of empty openness. The score’s ‘‘silence’’ was in actuality full of
1524 ‘‘sound’’—the coughs, fidgets, and whispers of the audience, in addition to any
1525 other ambient noises. Cage argued that just as there was no emptiness in the
1526White Paintings, there was also no silence in life. He felt that the ‘‘unfocused
1527 attention’’ of the paintings, like the voids advocated by Po and Artaud, was an
1528 attack against the separation of thought and experience, intention and imme-
1529 diacy, and in particular, art and life.143 As Cage proclaimed, ‘‘Art’s obscured the
1530 difference between art and life. …Where there’s a history of organization (art),
1531 introduce disorder.’’144
1532 As historian Branden Joseph has noted, Cage equated ‘‘intentional action’’ with
1533 a defense of the category of art, a schema that posited disorder as the underly-
1534 ing process of life, and chance as a ‘‘purer perception of reality.’’146 Awakening
1535 the mind to the infinite and ultimately unknowable indeterminacy of nature
1536 was the objective, if such an interest in revealing the workings of nature can be
1537 said to have a goal at all. Herein lies the paradox at the center of Cage’s chance
1538 protocol, a paradox of which he was well aware: he exerted control in fostering
1539 situations of greater indeterminacy because he believed that the world was fun-
1540 damentally contingent and its possibilities indeterminate. As Cage proclaimed,
1541 ‘‘It’s what you might call a ‘music of contingency,’ which means that you’re
1542 necessary but not in control.’’146
1543 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 97
1544 It can be argued, however, that though indeterminate outcomes permit the
1545 appearance of freedom, they may in fact mistake the nature of the order they
1546 seek to sidestep. In a 1981 text that apostatizes the Cagean methods she had
1547 been associated with in early 1960s Judson Dance Theater, artist Yvonne Rainer
1548 contended that chance strategies were deployed ‘‘to equalize and suppress hi-
1549 erarchical differentiations of meaning.’’147 In trying to reshuffle predictable out-
1550 comes without creating intentional alternatives, Cage’s posture of dispassionate
1551 quiescence attempted to stifle the desire to influence at all—a stance that is re-
1552 markably amenable to a meek acceptance of the status quo. Challenging Cage,
1553 Rainer argued, ‘‘To have no desire—for ‘improvements on creation’—is neces-
1554 sarily co-equal to having no quarrel with God-given manifestations of reality.’’
1555 For Rainer, Cage ultimately ignored that ‘‘we are surrounded by manifestations
1556 of reality that are not God-given but all fucked up by human society and that
1557 must be contested and reordered.’’148 Attempting to transcend conditions of de-
1558 termination in the interest of greater contingency, Cage’s chance protocol may
1559 serve to rationalize the chance operator’s ‘‘questions’’ as though it were a whole
1560 new experience of a world without control that is being offered. In this space of
1561 relativism, judgments concerning interpretation are withheld, and an implicit
1562 trust is placed in ‘‘all answers answer[ing] all questions,’’ as Cage claimed.149
1563 Though Theater Piece No. 1 made the space of performance beyond the stage
1564 a part of the ‘‘event’’ in a more aggressive way, such a move may, on the one
1565 hand, imply making audience members into participants. Or, on the other, it
1566 can indicate that spectators are mere props to the action. As historian Judith
1567 Rodenbeck has pointed out, the word ‘‘happening …also implies a kind of
1568 passivity—‘it is happening to me’; in this respect it implies, too, an interesting
1569 desubjectification: the presence at an event of an objectified person.’’150 The
1570 instructional logic of Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 stimulated many future artists,
1571 particularly his students in his Experimental Composition classes at the New
1572 School, but has been criticized for the manner in which happenings’ directives
1573 could sometimes only be narrowly interpreted.151 Does one actually participate
1574 in the ‘‘non-matrixed’’ or nonarranged activity Cage described if, as in the case
1575 of Theater Piece No. 1, one follows a time-notated script or watches someone
1576 doing so? Or does one merely passively follow instructions (as a performer),
1577 or submissively let the many simultaneous events flow over oneself (as a spec-
1578 tator)?
1579 The connection of the experimental chance protocol to arguments about
1580 spectatorial empowerment in this analysis should indicate how working ‘‘ex-
1581 perimentally’’ offers models to test and to organize new forms of collective
1582 agency. For Cage, indeterminacy in musical composition mirrored his idea of
1583 a fundamentally uncontrollable and anarchical world. Conversely, in attempt-
158498 chapter two ing to break down the intentions and order of society to emulate the chaotic
1585 character of nature, he was perhaps trying to fix a target that’s always moving.
1586 The attempt by avant-gardists to conceive of a rigid social order, to set points
1587 of opposition and fixed codes to transgress (reason, order, intention, and so
1588 on), may misrecognize the intractable problem of the symbolic order: that it’s
1589 always changing, and sometimes with a perverted rationality. Perhaps Cage
1590 set up order as a straw man, as a foil for his negations, thereby mistaking the at
1591 best distorted forms of rationality that characterize modernity’s instrumental
1592 reason. Or was he exposing the contingency of practices and discourses—aes-
1593 thetic, social, political, or other—that are otherwise pledged to convention,
1594 continuity, and order?
1595 Cage perceived nature as accidental and arbitrary, and saw experimenta-
1596 tion as a window onto the greater chaos of those unintended, uncontrollable
1597 consequences. The rational control of the mind was to cede to the real order of
1598 chance; Cage’s chance-protocol experimental procedure harnessed conditions
1599 of indeterminacy as though chanciness were the order of nature. Chance is
1600 deployed, paradoxically and somewhat aporically, as a way to mimic the unin-
1601 telligible (dis)order of nature. But, as Duchamp’s ‘‘canned chance’’ questioned:
1602 Is nature that disordered; is it not also characterized by pattern, repetition,
1603 structure, and design?
1604 If Cage sought to collapse the distinction between art and life, such a
1605 project could only be accomplished by dissolving art into what he perceived
1606 as the greater chaos of life. As he declared, ‘‘Let life obscure the difference
1607 between life and art.’’152 Yet the question can and should be posed: What
1608 really is the benefit of the sensory overload that Cage evoked in the dissolve
1609 of art into life? As his chance-derived phenomenological overload aimed
1610 to unfocus attention and broaden the boundaries of perception, to many
1611 it may ever more closely resemble entertainment, diversion, and a subject
1612 immersed in a wash of confounding effects that to many is the experience of
1613 ‘‘life’’ in late-capitalist modernity.
1614 In Cage’s chance protocol, he fostered situations of greater indeterminacy
1615 because he believed that acts in the world should be detached, as much as possi-
1616 ble, from fixed or predetermined outcomes. Similar to what philosopher Louis
1617 Althusser, in a series of late essays reexamining aleatory events, once described
1618 as a ‘‘unity of a conjuncture’’ in which many planned and unplanned events
1619 coalesce into unpredictable, immediately experienced presentness, Cage’s
1620 chance protocol intended to unfocus viewers’ attentiveness and diffuse their
1621 concentration in a field of simultaneously occurring events, thereby disrupting
1622 preconceived understandings of the role of causality in maintaining social and
1623 other orders.153
1624 John Cage’s ChanCe ProtoCols 99
1625 Although it is important, as Althusser writes, to ‘‘think the openness of the
1626 world to the event, [to] the as-yet-unimaginable,’’ it may not be possible to prize
1627 Cage’s chance protocol from the quietism about the openness of the world to
1628 chance with which his work is sometimes associated.154 This is a ‘‘Zen’’ quietism
1629 with which Albers, Rainer, and many others have long struggled. In exploring
1630 greater contingency, perhaps Cage can be seen as working in Althusser’s space
1631 of the conjectural, a space of experimentation, openness to the other, and open-
1632 ness to the unknown. That is to say, though the order of the world is fraught
1633 with radical instability, there is the fact of order. But that order is provisional,
1634 and only from a medley of various contingent possibilities comes the necessity
1635 of any one particular order.
1636 Although both the Bauhaus tradition and Cage’s French- and Chinese-in-
1637 spired turn at Black Mountain willfully subordinated subjective expression,
1638 Cage instituted an experimental process based on the investigation of arbitrary
1639 structures and the exploration of extrarational experiences. In contrast, the
1640 model of theatrical experimentation proposed by the Bauhaus—with its tech-
1641 niques of reappraising the conditions of spatial perception, its attention to the
1642 organization of forms and their relations to one another, its careful investigation
1643 of the visual effects of bodily movement, and its charge to spectators that the
1644 rigor of attention in theatrical situations could bring a similar focus to circum-
1645 stances outside a performance—was superseded by the one he put forward.
1646 Between these disparate models exist a range of performance strategies, the
1647 legacies and stakes of which continue to be contested today.
1648100 chapter two