I appreciated much of what was said by John Cage about visual art, despite the fact that most of his life was spent strictly as a musician. I agreed that a work of art does not need to advertise itself and ask to be gazed upon, and that it has an instructive power over us to alter or enrich the way we perceive and respond to the world around us. I also liked his perspective on making art - that he saw himself as the variable, a mutable entity that needed to accept the direction in which his art proceeded. There is something about his passive attitude towards art, or, in other words, his ability to let go of controlling his work that I admire. Thus his processes I also look to for inspiration and already incorporate some chance elements within my processes.
Secondly, I found it interesting when he pointed out the common behavior of artists to be a strange, dualistic one that tries to straddle living and making art, without combining the two. Cage’s use of art as a method of being ‘present’, or aware of the living he was doing at the time of creation, I found to be rather inspiring. Perhaps it is a bit of a romantic notion that Cage puts forward when he talks this way about making art, but I am inclined to believe him with respect to the fact that much of what he did he was not controlling completely. If it had been otherwise, such as if he had deliberately set out to do some kind of specific living and art making simultaneously, I would be more skeptical considering his context. And his rigor with which he applied to his artistic practices I appreciate - any less control and I would hesitate to call it art at that point. The kind of belief he had in his own methods and devices, while I don’t consider them particularly brave, I have much respect for that sort of self-discipline. Perhaps it was the art that disciplined him?
The second essay on contemporary culture, that specifically uses sampling or ‘quoting’ to make a sort of eclectic yet unified work of art or even to speak or act, I found, to be a bit extreme. While I do recognize that we live in an information-saturated age thanks to the development and commodification of technology, i.e., the advent of the internet for massive sharing capacities, I think the substitution of the individual voice for an overly determined, history-modeled voice that endlessly “quotes” from historical sources is possible, but not definite in all cases. It also did not help that I found some of the author’s similes to be rather obscure in their meaning, such as the likening of sampling to sending a fax from the future self to the present self. In the same paragraph he also talks (briefly) about the “core essence of human life”, but does not make it clear what this “core essence” is. The author seems to indicate that it is or was a definite thing, obviously capable of change, but then urges the reader to “unravel the distortions of the present day”. Are the distortions altering the old essence, or are they separate? I can’t help but find some of what the author says to be vague and necessitating elaboration before jumping to something else.
Also, the point raised by the essay that much of our cultural values have been passed on by our ancestors, I find to be not very much alarming at all. While the notion survives that the number of things that can be said, made, expressed, etc. is finite and practically exhausted, which causes our reliance on historical referencing, I find it pertinent to have things be as such. I do not take much issue with the development of culture, even if it is “overcommodified” as the essay suggests, rather I find it interesting that things have turned out the way they have, especially when one considers the contexts referenced in the essay, such as those of Emerson and Edison. I think the present state of our culture presents a great potential for experimentation and discoveries of otherwise hidden relationships or intrinsic qualities to mankind. And, whether a strong collective consciousness seems alarming or not, it is up to us to manipulate our current modality. I don’t mean this in a “let’s make the best of it” type of cliche, but it is where we are and will be. We will probably even more so immersed in technology in the future, to the point that it will not be secondary, or even separate from us for us to manipulate. But the thought of that, to me, is exciting.
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