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Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else

John Cage

A NOTE ON CAGE’S TEXT

A substantial part of the first conversation in MUSICAGE is devoted to John Cage’s methods in composing this lecture-poem, but I’d like to make a couple of suggestions for the reader unfamiliar with his mesostic texts. (Texts structured along a string of capital letters running down their middle.) It may be helpful to think of this piece as a kind of linguistic fugue, a canonic and recombinatory interplay of three voices—that of Jasper Johns (from whose statements this text is composed), John Cage, and, of course, chance.

The pleasure of the eye in reading Cage’s mesostics is both vertical and horizontal. The pleasure of the ear is one of resonances perhaps most clearly revealed in reading aloud. Cage had many ways of composing mesostic poetry. Here he used chance operations to locate “meso-strings” from Jasper Johns’ statements about art so that Johns’ silent voice (the strings cannot be heard when the poem is read aloud and are on the edge of invisibility on the page) is the force that fragments and reconfigures his own thoughts. For instance, Cage’s first variation on Johns’ statements is drawn together by A DEAD MAN TAKE A SKULL COVER IT WITH PAINT RUB IT AGAINST CANVAS SKULL AGAINST CANVAS. This String of letters becomes a vertical current gathering words into horizontal axes (what Cage called “wing words”) by means of the mesostic rules on pp. 57 and 61. Though the range of possible wing words is a function of chance, Cage chose their precise number, taking into account both breath and breadth—that is, both musical elements and possibilities for meaning. The result is a poem in which the interactions between chance and selection that are “Nature’s manner of operation” are formally foregrounded. Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of preconceptions about how words should relate to one another (syntax and grammar), clearing the way to notice novel semantic sense. The poem becomes more and more densely textured, more and more musical, as each section arrives in the wake and aftermath and echo of all that went before, as vertical and horizontal axes are in continual visual play, as the capitalized mesostic letters generate words within words.

Cage devised a notation for facilitating the spoken performance of his mesostic poetry: “A space followed by an apostrophe indicates a new breath. Syllables that would not normally be accented but should be are printed in bold type.” (Introduction to I-VI [Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990], p. 5) But he did not mean for this to constrain the readings of others. One can feel entirely free to play with the phrasing. The variable bonding of letters, words, and phrases adds more and more dimensions to each variation on the source text. There is a limitless proliferation of meanings. Think of Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else as a score. Think of the reading you are about to do as an exploratory, performative act that is but one of many possible realizations. Cage’s mesostics are preceded by the Johns statements on which they are based.—JR These texts come from statements by Jasper Johns, taken from Mark Rosenthal’s Jasper Johns Work Since 1974 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988), which follow. They are not about Johns’ statements and because of the way they are written, other statements are produced.

—JOHN CAGE, New York City, 1988

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

I don’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

The condition of a presence.

The condition of being there.

its own work

its own

its

it

its shape, color, weight, etc.

it is not another (?)

and shape is not a color (?)

Aspects and movable aspects.

To what degree movable?

Entities

splitting.

The idea of background

(and background music)

idea of neutrality

air and the idea of air

(In breathing—in and out)

Satie’s “Furniture Music” now

serving as background for music

as well as background for conversation.

Puns on intentions.

Take an object

Do something to it

Do something else to it

″ ″ ″ ″ ″

One thing made of another. One thing used as another.

An Arrogant Object. Something to be folded or bent or stretched, (SKIN?).

We say one thing is not another thing.

Or sometimes we say it is.

Or we say “they are the same.”

Whether to see the 2 parts as one thing or as two things.

Think of the edge of the city and the traffic there. Some clear souvenir—A photograph (A newspaper clipping caught in the frame of the mirror).

My work became a constant negation of impulses.

At times I will attempt to do something which seems quite uncalled for in the painting, so that the work won’t proceed so logically from where it is, but will go somewhere else.

My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented. In one place, certain kinds of things occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.

My thinking is perhaps dependent on real things…. I’m not willing to accept the representation of a thing as being the real thing, and I am frequently unwilling to work with the representation of the thing as … standing for the real thing. I like what I see to be real, or to be my idea of what is real. And i think i have a kind of resentment against illusion when i can recognize it. Also, a large part of my work has been involved with the painting as object, as real thing in itself. And in the face of that ‘tragedy,’ so far, my general development … has moved in the direction of using real things as painting. That is to say i find it more interesting to use a real fork as painting than it is to use painting as a real fork.

My work feeds upon itself.

Most of my thoughts involve impurities …

A Dead Man.

Take a skull.

Cover it with paint. Rub it

against canvas. Skull against

canvas.

Shake (shift) parts of some of the letters in voice (2). A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.

After the first Voice, I suppose there was something left over, some kind of anxiety, some question about the use of the word in the first painting. Perhaps its smallness in relation to the size of the painting led me to use the word in another way, to make it big, to distort it, bend it about a bit, split it up.

In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve. I think some of the changes in my work relate to that.

Try to use together

the wall

the layers

the imprint.

The question of what is a part and what is a whole is a very interesting problem, on the infantile level, yes, on the psychological level, but also in ordinary, objective space.

Entities/splitting.

An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying.

Yes, but it’s skin.

I think it is a form of play or a form of exercise and it’s in part mental and in part visual but that’s one of the things we like about the visual arts the terms in which we’re accustomed to thinking are adulterated or abused.

NOTES

John Cage’s “Anarchy” (quoted in chapter epigraph) is printed in John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. Richard Fleming and William Duckworth (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 122.

The MESOLIST program, used in all of Cage’s mesostics that employ chance operations, was developed by Jim Rosenberg. In his introduction to I–IV Cage credits Norman O. Brown with having come up with the term “mesostics” for the way Cage was writing these acrostic-like compositions with the key letters running down the middle of the text. Early on, Cage wrote his mesostic compositions directly, without the use of MESOLIST, with the capitalized meso-letters serving to gather associations to what were often strings of proper names. Later, as in “Art Is Either …,” he also began to use the more complicated chance operations described in the conversation that follows, where both meso-letters and source text serve as oracles when utilized with the assistance of the MESOLIST and IC computer programs. The IC program was written by Andrew Culver, the composer who worked for eleven years as Cage’s assistant. It simulates the coin oracle of the I Ching.