A nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko:
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a recording of John Cage: Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger.de blog that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before.
NY Times review of a show at the Whitney of German artist Rudolf Stingel that sounds really great:
Mr. Stingel is also heir to the uses of chance and silence, or in his case emptiness, encouraged by the composer John Cage. This is perhaps clearest in an expanse of cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that spent six months on the floor of Mr. Stingel’s studio accumulating footprints and splatters, flecks and stains of black paint. Covering an immense wall at the Whitney, it initially resembles a huge swath of ancient parchment. When you recognize it as carpet, the thick familiar texture and the random, delicacy of the marks can create an unusual spatial push-pull. Focus on the marks, and they float in a creamy space. Focus on the carpet, and you may feel that you are doing the floating, looking down on it from above.
…The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means. Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more. It is the result of something being worked on and worked out. Beauty is the state of operating at stunning efficiency, a triumph that can’t be empty. Mr. Stingel’s work makes this perfectly clear.
“Rudolf Stingel” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 14, 2007.
Here’s a great story out of Germany:
HALBERSTADT, Germany — A relative rush of activity broke out this week in the world’s slowest and longest lasting concert as two new notes sounded in a piece of music that is taking a total 639 years to perform in its entirety.
The mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is entitled “organ2/ASLSP” or “As SLow aS Possible”. The performance began nearly three years ago on September 5, 2001, and is scheduled to last until 2639.
The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord — G-sharp, B and G-sharp — not sounding until February 2, 2003.
But things really got going yesterday as two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded.
The could be the soundtrack for The Long Now Foundation.
indieWIRE has a good story and interview with Jorgen Leth about his new film with Lars von Trier, “The Five Obstructions.” Some excerpts:
Danish directors Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier have created the ultimate exercise in sado-masochistic filmmaking. And guess who’s the sadist? In “The Five Obstructions,” Lars von Trier subjects his predecessor Leth to a series of five filmmaking trials, each based on the remaking of Leth’s 1967 short film “The Perfect Human” according to different “obstructions.” Reminiscent of von Trier’s Dogme rules, the regulations include, among others, that every shot should be 12 frames in length, that one version had to be filmed in the most miserable place in the world, and one version had to be animated.
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Leth also proves himself a worthy opponent to his young rival — always using von Trier’s mischievous limitations as springboards for creative solutions. (As von Trier whines, “The trouble is you’re so clever that whatever I say inspires you.”) In fact, all of Leth’s altered “Perfect Humans” are gems of innovative filmmaking. By the end of “The Five Obstructions,” it’s not easy to discern between obstructer and obstructed, victor and vanquished.
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iW: You’re also a poet and I was wondering how you relate your poetry to your filmmaking, because poetry doesn’t seem to have any limits. And yet you say that limitations help to create art?
Leth: For me, poetry has a strong link to my filmmaking. My films learn from my poetry. In poetry, you’re free. You start in the corner and you don’t know where it leads you. I have no message, I have nothing I want to tell, I just start and I see where it leads, and it’s a big surprise and relief if it’s good. That’s the ideal state for filmmaking. I like the idea of chance coming into filmmaking, in shooting, in editing, and I do make space in my rules of game for chance. William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and John Cage are major influences for my work. Godard is the only cineastic influence.
Read the stories John Cage tells in Indeterminacy. Go on, you’ll enjoy them. And the Smithsonian Folkways recording accompanied by David Tudor is great great great:
The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage.
