Jones, Caroline Ab Ex Ego

Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego
Author(s): Caroline A. Jones

Source: Critical Inquiry , Summer, 1993, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), pp. 628-665
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract
Expressionist Ego
Caroline A. Jones
Meet the (De)Composer
Buckminster Fuller once described the breakfasts he enjoyed with

John Cage and Merce Cunningham during the summer of 1948, under
the groves of yellow pine at that experiment in American education, Black
Mountain College:
We really did have a great deal of fun because I spent that summer
with them on a fun, schematic new school [I called] "the finishing
school." We would finish anything.... We would really break down
all of the conventional ways of approaching school. And the finishing
school was going to be a caravan, and we would travel from city to city,
and it would be posted outside of the city that the finishing school was
coming.'
This paper originated in a talk given at the conference and symposium organized to
celebrate John Cage's eightieth birthday and visit to Stanford University in January of
1992. I am grateful to the organizers for including me, and to Wanda Corn for first sug-
gesting that I be asked to participate. For help with the substantial revisions needed before
publishing, I want to thank Marjorie Perloff for her preliminary criticisms. For their help-
ful insights and shared scholarship, I owe deep debts to Martin Brody, Arnold Davidson,
Peter Galison, Daniel Herwitz, Amelia Jones, and Stephanie Taylor; for moral support,
inspiration, and exemplary courage I thank Norman O. Brown.
1. Quoted in Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, Mass.,
1987), p. 156.
Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993)

o 1993 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/93/1904-0005$01.00. All rights reserved.
628

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Critical Inquiry Summer 1993 629
The finishing school. School of finish, and of finishing off. This was the
summer Cage's aesthetic matured-the summer when Cage, Fuller, and
other agitating influences amused themselves by imagining what they
would finish next. After Western music (Beethoven) and Western archi-
tecture (the Greeks), they felt sure they could "finish anything" and imag-
ined hiring themselves out for the job.
It seems paradoxical to speak of Cage and "finish" in the same
breath-Cage, the champion of indeterminacy, open-endedness, and
chance. Particularly now, after his death, he will be canonized as the
staunchest leader of our heroic American avant-garde, opposed in every
way to the bourgeois notions of lefini seen to undergird academicism since
the days of Colbert and Bouguereau. And certainly Cage was opposed to
"finish" in his life and work, if by finish we mean the polishing of form to
effect a transparency of medium. It is this cosmetic and embalming finish
that he addressed in 1949 in the artist-run journal The Tiger's Eye, writing:
"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."2 But the other
side of "finishing school" is echoed in Cage's comment, in the same essay
in The Tiger's Eye, that "schools teach ... classical harmony. Outside
school, ... a different and correct structural means reappears" ("F," p.
172). This finishing school-this caravan roaming at the outskirts of town,
at the boundaries of civilization-is a more appropriate vehicle for Cage's
early aims: to finish school and emerge into a new independence from aca-
demic forms; tofinish off the dead, the ossified, or the moribund; to resur-
rect only what remained capable of life.
This essay concerns just what it was that John Cage helped finish in
the late 1940s and early 1950s and what kinds of spaces he cleared before
he became the peaceful patron saint of our avant-garde heaven.3 My
observations here allude to much larger stories that can only be told
elsewhere-stories about the ending of Europe, the death of fathers, the
making of Americans.4 Norman O. Brown quoted Cage when he wrote
2. John Cage, "Forerunners of Modern Music," in Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract
Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), p. 173; hereafter abbre-
viated "E" Cage's essay originally appeared in The Tiger's Eye 7 (Mar. 1949): 52-56.
3. Or, as Paul Griffiths would have it, "the apostle of indeterminacy" (Paul Griffiths,
Cage [Oxford, 1981], p. 1; hereafter abbreviated C).
4. "The making of Americans" is, of course, Gertrude Stein's phrase, and it was used
by the organizers of the John Cage at Stanford conference for the title of the panel in
which a version of this paper was originally presented. The linkage of Stein and Cage as
avant-garde modernists was the conscious and approved significance of this reference; my
Caroline A. Jones is assistant professor in art history at Boston Uni-

versity where she teaches recent art and theory. Her books include Mod-
ern Art at Harvard (1985), Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 (1988), and
Machine in the Studio (forthcoming).

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630 Caroline A. Jones Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego
that "we know all we need to know about Oedipus, Prometheus, Hamlet";
but, wisely, he preceded this by observing that "Cage in 1959 is not the
same as Cage in 1974."5 For my own essay (begun on the occasion of
Cage's eightieth birthday and finished shortly after his death), I want to
return to that earlier time lest we forget Oedipus, Prometheus, and Ham-
let. Americans in their making have rarely forgotten those fierce sons or
failed to emulate them in their struggles to carve a culture from within the
colonial outpost of an aging empire.
In his early compositions-verbal and musical-Cage engaged,
among other things, the problematic of the abstract expressionist ego.6
His critique was both explicit and implicit, operating by word, deed, and
negativity to address what would come to appear hegemonic in American
modernism of the 1950s: the cultural construction of the artist as a mascu-
line solitary, his artwork as a pure statement of individual genius and
autonomous will.7 Cage's critical modes, the how of his "finishing school,"
constitute the central subject of this essay. Pursuing the trajectory of his
career in its cultural context, I first view Cage's search for technology as a
way of countering, or complicating, the abstract expressionist ego in its
search for a natural sublime. Second, I examine the functions of Cagean
silence in addressing that same ego, exploring Cage's multiple equations
of silence with nothingness, death, life, the sound of Others, the with-
drawal of the body, the hiding of beauty, the absence of ego, and the birth
of unintention. Finally, I view the presence of silence in Cage's work in
relation to a potentially homosexual aesthetic, particularly as read in by
the younger visual artists attracted to his work and ideas.
Pilgrims of the Technological Sublime
From differing beginning points, towards possibly different goals,

technologists and artists ... meet by intersection ... imagining
thesis, which suggests covert linkages at the deeper level of a resistant gay/lesbian aes-
thetic, proved more problematic to the conference organizers and participants. I take this
problematic as my problematic: how an absence or negativity can function to convey mean-
ing in cultural texts.
5. Norman O. Brown, "John Cage," in John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. Richard Fleming
and William Duckworth (Lewisburg, Pa., 1989), pp. 105, 104.
6. I use the term problematic because this discursively produced and culturally main-
tained subjectivity, with its countless historical shifts, could never be firmly secured. The
abstract expressionist ego should thus be read with scare quotes throughout this essay.
7. Michael Leja has offered a nuanced reading of this dominant abstract expressionist
subjectivity in his book, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the
1940s (New Haven, Conn., 1993). I am grateful to Leja for sharing his introductory essay
and helping establish the shifting terms negotiated in constructing what I term the abstract
expressionist ego.

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brightly a common goal in the world and in the quietness within each
human being.
-CAGE, "Forerunners of Modern Music" (1949)
Cage was photographed at Black Mountain in 1948, that summer of

breakfasts for the "finishing school," sporting a spiky outgrown brushcut
(fig. 1). This distinctive haircut, determined by a wartime military culture
but located raffishly outside its disciplined parameters, later earned him
the sobriquet "Frankenstein" among an adoring Italian public.8 Was
Frankenstein Cage, manipulating tapes in a Milanese radio station, or his
"monstrous" progeny, the odd electronic music broadcast through town?
Was Frankenstein the mechanical monster, or his scientist-maker? Both, in
any case, were pilgrims of the technological sublime, that romance Leo
Marx has explicated as part and parcel of the American dream.9 The ten-
sion between the hushed, primordial wilderness and the noisy technolo-
gies we bring to "improve" it is the fueling dynamic of American culture,
and it occupied Cage from the very beginning: "'[I saw] my function ... as
an inventor and research worker rather than as an artist. I had been very
much influenced by ... the need to apply modern technology to music' "
(BB, pp. 90-91). Cage's famous production of the prepared piano in 1940
exemplifies the intervention of the mechanical into the organic. Despite
the piano's highly technological manufacture, it presents a body that con-
ceals a metallic, mechanical interior in a sheath of organic wood and ivory
(an android rather than a cyborg). Modest Victorians saw the piano's body
in such anthropomorphic terms, clothing its naked legs in decent draper-
ies.'0 Cage's determination to open the piano's cabinet and to reveal
and manipulate its steel strings with a variety of foreign objects was an
8. The full nickname "the good-looking Frankenstein" was given him by the Italian
press in 1958 when Cage was in Milan, composing experimental music on tape and compet-
ing on a televised quiz show (quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five
Masters of the Avant-Garde [New York, 1965], p. 132; hereafter abbreviated BB). Clearly
meant to be affectionate, the nickname is nonetheless revealing of European attitudes
toward postwar Americans (creators of the A-bomb), whose technophilia could assume
monstrous proportions.
9. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(Oxford, 1964). See particularly Marx's discussion of Melville's Ahab and the technologi-
cal sublime (pp. 294-95) and his argument that Melville, by using machine imagery to
relate the butchery of whaling to the violence of Western civilization, speaks to "the contra-
diction at the heart of a culture that would deify the Nature it is engaged in plundering" (p.
301). As Marx put it more recently, "'the rhetoric of the technological sublime' " is "a rhet-
oric designed to invest secular images of technology with the capacity to evoke emotions-
awe, wonder, mystery, fear-formerly reserved for images of boundless nature or for
representing a response to divinity" (Marx, "Does Pastoralism Have a Future?" in The Pasto-
ral Landscape, ed. John Dixon Hunt [Washington, D.C., 1992], p. 225).
10. For one discussion of the piano's technology, see Edwin M. Good, Giraffes, Black
Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand
(Stanford, Calif., 1982).

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FIG. 1.-John Cage at Black Mountain, Summer 1948. Photo: Hazel Larsen
Archer. Courtesy Mary Emma Harris.
aggressive, mechanistic intervention. His technical intrusion into the "nat-

urally" organic was characteristic of American culture, but it was also sug-
gestive of earlier possibilities in European and American modernism that
would be largely suppressed in the postwar hegemony of American
abstract expressionist art."I As against the expansive abstract expressionist
11. I'm thinking here of the musical experiments of Edgard Varese and the machine
concerts of the dadaists.

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discourse of the natural sublime, with its emphasis on the awed individu-
al's relationship to primordial nature, Cage called for "the use of techno-
logical means" requiring "the close anonymous collaboration of a number
of workers," leading "not to self-knowledge ... [but] to selflessness" ("F,"
pp. 175-76).12 Cage's first mature statement, the prepared piano of 1940,
already exemplified this belief in a mechanistic antidote to ego. It was an
instrument built, in part, to speak the bold vernacular of the technological
sublime.
Cage, son of an inventor, brought this most American enterprise to
music. Several of his earliest compositions were titled "Inventions"; he
compares an early "claim" for his music to a patent specification claim.'3
But his earliest innovation, the prepared piano, suggested the creative tin-
kering celebrated as Yankee ingenuity rather than the entrepreneurial
capitalism of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the like. Others, notably
Cage's own mentor Henry Cowell, had experimented with the percussive
capabilities of the piano, but Cage concretized such whimsies, taking them
further away from improvisatory performance to embed them in the tech-
nology of the piano itself.'4 By inserting nuts, bolts, screws, and other
mechanical (Frankensteinian?) bits under the strings, Cage altered their
timbre and emphasized their percussive capabilities. He also rendered
them unsuitable as vehicles for the vocal and instrumental traditions of
Western harmony, putting listeners in mind of the Balinese gamelan.'5
The artificially normative consonance of the piano's steel strings, deter-
12. For an extended discussion of the technological sublime and its relation to the
abstract expressionists' natural sublime, see my "Machine in the Studio: Changing Con-
structions of the American Artist, 1945-1968" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1992),
and forthcoming in expanded form.
13. Cage composed "Six Short Inventions" in 1932-33. The notion of a musical
"invention" also has its source in Bach and other earlier composers celebrating authorial
creation over a mimicry of nature; Cage is playing with both senses here. "Claim," a section
of Cage's "Forerunners of Modern Music," reads: "Any sounds of any qualities and pitches
(known or unknown, definite or indefinite), any contexts of these, simple or multiple, are
natural and conceivable within a rhythmic structure which equally embraces silence. Such
a claim is remarkably like the claims to be found in patent-specifications for and articles
about technological musical means" ("F," p. 175).
14. Cage recalled seeing Cowell perform: "He used a darning egg, moving it length-
wise along the strings while trilling ... on the keyboard" (Cage, "How the Piano Came to
Be Prepared," Empty Words: Writings '73-'78 by John Cage [Middletown, Conn., 1979], p. 7).
Cowell's piece The Banshee (1925) was notable for its improvisatory use of the piano's
insides. Cowell wrote in 1952, Cage "got an idea by knowing my own things.... and he
took it up and prepared the strings, which I had never done" (quoted in David Revill, The
Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life [New York, 1992], pp. 69-71).
15. "The prepared piano ... converted the piano to a percussion instrument without
harmonies" (Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, p. 154). See also Cage's view that
contemporary music composition was moving away from Western harmonics in Cage, "The
East in the West," Modern Music 23 (Spring 1946):115. It was Virgil Thomson who com-
pared the prepared piano to the "'Balinese gamelang orchestra'" (BB, p. 90).

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mined by manufacturers and enforced by piano tuners, was irrevocably

disrupted. The sonorous piano was changed from a potentially tonal
instrument, evoking the harmonic range of a full orchestra, to a pinging,
chiming, gently clamorous sound machine. Arnold Sch6nberg, presum-
ably in reference to this feat, referred to his former student Cage not as a
composer but as "'an inventor-of genius' " (BB, p. 85).16
If the prepared piano emerged from Cage's Frankensteinian search
for the technological sublime-"imagining brightly a common goal" with
technologists-it also had other contexts. For the altered instrument was
invented specifically to provide accompaniment for the choreography of
Syvilla Fort, an African-American dancer at the Cornish School in Seattle
where Cage was working at the time. The ballet, called Bacchanale, was to
be held in March 1940, and Cage recalled it as "'rather primitive, almost
barbaric' " (BB, p. 89).17 In search of a correspondingly "primitive" effect,
he wanted to use the all-percussion orchestra he had assembled out of tin
cans, hubcaps, brake drums, and other mechanical detritus (rattletrap
American good-enough engineering versus cultured European crafts-
manship).18 But these gustatory and vehicular remnants required several
performers and more space than Fort could spare on stage. Cage's solu-
tion, the percussive prepared piano, was simple and technological. It pro-
duced the unsettling effects required, in a fixed yet portable device
capable of repetition and control. Cage's first mature act of artistic inde-
pendence from European music (represented in its rarified avant-garde
form by Schonberg's twelve-tone system) was thus achieved via
primitivism, through a lowly tinkerer's technology of nuts, bolts, and
wires. Despite Fort's mythological title for her dance, with its echoes of
the scandalous European high modernism of Nijinsky's L'Apreis-Midi d'un
faune, the "primitivism" and "technologism" of the music could be identi-
fied by the participants as authentically native to the American soil.
Primitivism has often been the avant-garde's first recourse to the
problem of cultural tradition, of course, a "primitivism" read into the art
of colonized, conquered, or merely Other cultures. But unlike the alien
exoticism that Europeans sought for their paintings-for example, those
African Grebo masks Picasso encountered in the Trocadero Museum and
16. Sch6nberg's comment was apparently made to critic Peter Yates. Cage repeated
the remark to interviewer Jeff Goldberg in 1976; see Jeff Goldberg, "John Cage Inter-
view," in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York, 1988), p. 6.
17. Tomkins dates the composition of Bacchanale to 1938, but both Griffiths and
Revill give the date of March 1940, from notations on the score. See C, p. 13 and Revill,
Roaring Silence, p. 69. Griffiths notes the composition calls for a piano prepared with "one
small bolt, one screw with nuts, and eleven pieces of fibrous weather stripping" (C, p. 13).
18. To the phrase "the use of technological means" Cage appends a footnote citing the
Swiss painter Paul Klee: "I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely
nothing about Europe." Thus, at this point, technology was identified as the absolute nega-
tion of European culture and tradition (quoted in "F," p. 175).

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painted "as a kind of exorcism" into his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-Cage

and contemporary painters such as Jackson Pollock found "barbarism" in
their own country's past.19 At this point they were not so sensitive to the
barbarism of the white invaders (although later Cage would feel this
keenly). Their works echoed instead the great percussion traditions of
African-American slave music (remanent in American jazz) and the pow-
erful geometries of native American art.20 Particularly in this early part of
his career, Cage was clearly aware of the parallels between his chosen revo-
lution in music-self-described as durational rather than harmonic-and
the rhythmic basis ofjazz.21 In 1949, he praised the work "outside scho
by Satie and Webern, arguing that their "different and correct structur
means" were based on lengths of time rather than classical harmony; in
footnote, he explains, "This [durational basis] never disappeared fr
jazz and folk-music. On the other hand, it never developed in them, f
they are not cultivated species, growing best when left wild" ("F," p. 172
3). Although Cage rarely appropriated such "wild" sources directly, hi
very efforts to shift Western music from tonality and functional harmony
to an emphasis on indeterminacy and duration suggests a sophisticated
recognition of the differences fueling American vernacular culture and
understanding of the momentum gained from harnessing such differ
ences for "high" art.22
19. On Picasso's "exorcism" via African art, see "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin, 2 vols. (New York, 1984), 1:2
With specific reference to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, see Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophi
Brothel, Part 1," Art News 71 (Sept. 1972): 20-29, and Mary Mathews Gedo, Picasso: Art
Autobiography (Chicago, 1980).
20. The issue of tribal or minority cultures as sources for "high" art is a vexatious on
which Jim Clifford addressed directly in his critique of the Museum of Modern Ar
"Primitivism" exhibition and catalogue. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Cultur
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). See also Joh
Yau, "Please Wait by the Coatroom" and other essays in Out There: Marginalization and C
temporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (New York, 1990), and The Myth
Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, ed. Susan Hiller (London, 1991). What is needed now i
nuanced reading of the cultural interplay in tribal art and a recognition of these suppose
"native" styles as sophisticated Creole systems operating between a dominant culture an
multiple source vocabularies. This reading would make room, for example, for the pres
sures of the market on tribal art, exercised from the beginning through trading betwe
tribes and, later, through Western-run trading posts. There is a reason why Navajo blank
styles are often named for the trading post with which they are associated (for examp
Ganado), and jazz emanated from cities with great immigrant populations (Chicago, N
Orleans, New York). The presence of klezmer in jazz, aniline-dyed red flannel fiber
Ganado chief blankets, or Venetian glass beads on Chippewa moccasins should complicat
any reading of "native" American or African American art forms.
21. "Of the four characteristics of sound, only duration involves both sound an
silence. Therefore, a structure based on durations... is correct, ... whereas harmonic structur
is incorrect" ("F," p. 172 n. 2; emphasis added).
22. Cage, like the cultural critics of the Frankfurt school, was not drawn to jazz in p
formance; as I note below, his interest in vernacular noise always stopped at the establish

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It was in this spirit that Pollock praised "the formal qualities" of

Navaho sand painters, and Barnett Newman celebrated the bold designs
of Northwest Coast cultures such as the Kwakiutl. However problematic it
may seem now to adapt and transform the art of dominated cultures for
the production of an avant-garde aesthetic that sought its own kind of
domination, adventurous Americans emerging from the self-perceived
provincialism of the 1930s into the globalism during and after the Second
World War thought of jazz and "American Indian" art as their own. They
turned to "the primitive" not to escape from Europe (as had Picasso) but
to discover and create (through a similar appropriation) the formal means
for a truly American art.23
That said, however, there remained the perfume of exoticism in these
works-primitivism without the quotes. Thus Cage's barbaric piano was
inspired by an African American's dance, and thus Pollock and others
sought to escape the rational and civilized through some shamanistic, ritu-
alized, bodily engaged art.24 Contemporary journals such as Life and Art
News published photographs of Pollock's rhythmic "dance" around the
canvas. His unconventional engagement with the painting's surface, his
boundaries of "high" culture. But in 1952, during this early period of his career, Cage actu-
ally composed a piece by fragmenting jazz recordings (as in, I note, the practice of 1980s
and 1990s African-American rap composers/break dancers/hip-hop musicians). The
piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 5, was his first on tape. Griffiths writes of Cage's '"jazz-
tinged piano" in compositions from the early 1940s, around the same time that Bacchanale
was written (C, p. 15). For a discussion of the ambivalent relationship between American
intellectuals and jazz, see Andrew Ross, "Hip, and the Long Front of Color," No Respect:
Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, 1989), pp. 65-101.
23. Of course, as white male artists, painters such as Stuart Davis and musicians such as
Tommy Dorsey were empowered to produce this "American" art and their black colleagues
were not. On the presence of a generalized (and generative) "blues aesthetic" in American
culture, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular
Theory (Chicago, 1984).
24. That Cage was directly responding to Syvilla Fort and her dance in his composition
should be clear. Even at the end of his life, when years of simultaneous but uncdnnected
music for Merce Cunningham's dances suggested some kind of indifference, Cage
recounted a telling anecdote about himself and Karlheinz Stockhausen: "once i was with
karlheinz we were just walking in cologne and he said if you were writing a song would you
write music or would you write for the singer i said i would write for the singer he said well
that's the difference between us i would write music" (Cage, I-VI [Cambridge, Mass., 1990],
pp. 10-11). Cage did not see himself as primitive, of course; in this respect he was quite dif-
ferent from Pollock, who flirted with a Brandoesque "caveman" image despite the
intellectualism of his supporters. See Ellen G. Landau,Jackson Pollock (New York, 1989), p.
14. Sufficiently discomfited by this tendency of Pollock's, Cage declined to write the music
for Hans Namuth's documentary on the painter, recommending Morton Feldman for the
job. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New
York, 1989), p. 663. My argument is not that the two men were similar in their use or
approach to the primitive but rather that both participated in this pervasive theme of
American modernism.

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entry into what critics termed "the arena" of the canvas, is witnessed fur-
ther by the handprints appearing on the wall-sized canvases he was pro-
ducing around 1948 (in particular, Number One, 1948). The handprints'
link to ritual art lay in their evocation of the neolithic cave paintings
recently exposed at Lascaux and Peche Merle; art world cognoscenti knew
also of Pollock's statements praising native American sand paintings and
read of his desires to be "more a part of the painting.., literally [to] be in
the painting."25 This famous quote, in fact, is from the one and only issue
of Possibilities, the journal founded by Robert Motherwell, Cage, and oth-
ers that appeared in the winter of 1947-48.26 It is an indication of the flu-
idity and expansiveness of avant-garde aesthetics at the time that both
Cage and Pollock could occupy the same platform and seem to articulate
related sensibilities.27 Neither the fluidity nor the expansiveness would
last. Pollock would remain a central figure within the abstract expression-
ist canon, and Cage would become the mentor for a younger generation
now seen to oppose it.
Cage, "the Club," and the Abstract Expressionist Ego
That Cage was an important member of the abstract expressionist

community went unsaid in 1948, but it needs emphasizing now. "I had,"
he recalled in 1965, "in the late '40s and the early 50s, been part and par-
cel of the Artists Club."28 Described as "a loose social and aesthetic organi-
zation where artists could meet to discuss issues of common interest," the
25. Jackson Pollock, "My Painting," Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-48): 79. Cage makes
reference the following year to Pollock's "sand painting" in "Forerunners of Modern
Music," where he writes: "Just as art as sand-painting (art for the now-moment rather than
for posterity's museum-civilization) becomes a held point of view, adventurous workers in
the field of synthetic music ... find that for practical and economic reasons work with mag-
netic wires (any music so made can quickly and easily be erased, rubbed-off) is preferable to
that with film" ("F," p. 175).
26. The periodical was edited by Robert Motherwell (art), Harold Rosenberg (writ-
ing), Pierre Chareau (architecture), and John Cage (music). Despite its survival for only
one issue, Possibilities is described as "occup[ying] a pivotal position in the periodical lit-
erature of Abstract Expressionism" (Gibson, "Possibilities: 'The Thing-without Theory,'"
in Issues in Abstract Expressionism, p. 33). In addition to Possibilities, Cage's contribution to
which Motherwell found uncharacteristically disappointing (see ibid., p. 34), Cage contrib-
uted "Forerunners of Modern Music" to The Tiger's Eye and was himself the subject of Leon
A. Kochnitzky, "The Three Magi of Contemporary Music," The Tiger's Eye 1 (Oct. 1947):
77-81.
27. On the fluidity of early abstract expressionism and the problem of defini
"avant-garde," see Leja, "The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New York," in Ab
Expressionism: The Critical Developments, ed. Michael Auping (exhibition cata
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., 19 Sept.-29 Nov. 1987), pp. 13-33.
28. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, "An Interview" (1965), in Conversing
Cage, p. 21.

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club began as the "Subjects of the Artist" school, evolving into "Studio 35"
and finally "the Club." At its inception in the fall of 1949, the club had
twenty members, swelling to eighty in less than a year.29 It became the pri-
mary arbiter of what would be called abstract expressionism, its members
even reluctantly endorsing the movement's name in a series of panel dis-
cussions held in 1952.30 Cage was invited to contribute to important peri-
odicals run by club members (such as The Tiger's Eye and, of course,
Possibilities); he was twice asked to speak to club members on a subject of
his choice.
But the club, that loose affiliation of bohemians that was the closest
thing to a New York school academy, was nonetheless ambivalent in its
relation to Cage, and he to it. If the prepared piano had participated in an
aesthetics of primitivism and sublimity (albeit a technophilic sublimity)
that linked Cage to his generation of artists in New York, his subsequent
move to silence and indeterminacy proved deeply alienating to the
abstract expressionists attempting to hold onto the banner of the Ameri-
can avant-garde. In the perpetual contest to control the meaning(s) of
modernism, Cage came to occupy a radically different perspective from
his cohort, serving to open a space for younger male artists whose names
are legion (the list begins with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns but
continues to include Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris,
Walter De Maria, and countless others).31 As I shall argue further below, it
was the effigy of the Individual Ego that Cage burned in his meteoric rise
to avant-garde heaven. It was only an effigy because criticism and the art
world both work tirelessly to recuperate, protect, and construct a stable
or "real" artistic ego forever fortified against efforts to deconstruct it.
Indeed, it was the group of painters gathering at the club who struggled
perhaps the most manfully to make this subjectivity real. As Michael Leja
argues persuasively, the study of abstract expressionist subjectivities is par-
ticularly rich, given that "this art took subjectivity as its explicit subject
matter [and] offers an exceptionally clear picture of the dialectic within
which subjects, including cultural producers, are shaped by various dis-
courses and representations they encounter in their culture, which they
then go on as active agents to inflect, reshape, and (mis)represent."32 My
thesis in this essay is this: the critique of abstract expressionism by subse-
quent generations of American artists was engaged primarily with this
29. Gibson, introduction, Issues in Abstract Expressionism, p. 59 n. 1.

30. See Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expres-
sionism (New York, 1970), p. 2.
31. That these are all male artists may follow from the particular kind of space opened
by Cage; the fact is also a function of the historical period (the 1960s), since women did not
emerge with any force in the New York art world until the generalized climate of a feminist
critique (in the 1970s) empowered them to do so.
32. Leja, "Introduction: Framing Abstract Expressionism," Reframing Abstract Expres-
sionism, unpaginated galleys.

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subjectivity-a complex, discursively constructed, and ever-shifting

interpellation I term here the abstract expressionist ego. This ego was
held to be highly individualized, albeit barely the master of its id; given
prominence by the postwar power and prestige of America itself, it was
dominant and pervasive in the culture of the time. John Cage offered
some of the first tools for its critique, which first took place, I argue,
within a specific homosexual aesthetic.33
Cage came with his own perspective to the New York art scene of the
late 1940s, having already made friends and traded ideas with West Coast
avant-gardists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. Their interest in Oriental
philosophies and tribal cultures, and Tobey's all-over, calligraphic "white
writing," gave Cage a particularly sophisticated angle on the abstract
expressionist interest in a native, American primitivism (achieved via a
native American "primitivism"). Seattle, where Cage met Tobey and
Graves (as well as Cunningham, who would become his lifelong compan-
ion), is far from Europe and its anxieties about tradition; it is a misty sea
town, named for an Indian chief and full of spectacular tribal art. Graves,
like the Northwest tribal cultures he studied, believed that the spirits of
animals could be summoned by art; he retained representation in his work
long after the New York school painters had become resolutely abstract.
Although Tobey's "white writing" was more readily assimilated to the
abstract expressionist model of all-over painting, he, too, held onto repre-
sentation, burying small figures in his webs of paint as if loathe to give up
entirely the blooming, buzzing physical world. This set the Western avant-
gardists apart from the New York painters' all-but-iconoclastic rejection
of the outside world. Where West Coast painters retained their interest
in an external referent, the New York school artists were seen to have
abandoned referentiality in favor of a deeply imagined inner state
of being.
Briefly put, the subjectivity of the New York school abstract expres-
sionist was constructed in the American culture of the late 1940s and early
1950s as that of an isolated, autochthonic, angst-ridden male genius, alter-
nating between bouts of melancholic depression and volcanic creativity.
Although early modernism contained many alternative modes of produc-
tion, including collective and anarchic ones, the variant of modernism
that became canonical in the United States during the cold war period cel-
ebrated the artist as a masculine solitary whose staunchly heterosexual
libido drove his brush.34 Pollock was the quintessential hero of this power-
33. See below for my discussion of the implications of the term homosexual aesthetic and
my efforts to use it in a nonessentializing way.
34. Such constructions were always unstable. Even during the mid-1950s, when
abstract expressionism was well on its way to becoming the American national (heterosex-
ual) style, the club included figures such as Frank O'Hara, who was fairly open about his
homosexuality. But as gay theorists have established (and I am thinking here of the work of
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her books Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial

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ful mythos, but even the hyperintellectual Ad Reinhardt could be por-

trayed in such terms."5 The gestural paintings of such artists as Franz
Kline and Willem de Kooning built on this romantic scaffolding and were
understood at the time as records of a spontaneous encounter with the
canvas, existential acts summoned with great courage from the depths of
the subconscious self. As Pollock said, "Painting is self-discovery. Every
good artist paints what he is."36
Another position was occupied by the abstract expressionist field
painters, whose visual and verbal works constructed the creative ego
somewhat differently. Still emphasizing the isolation of the creative act
and the awesome, even Nietzschean power of will required to conquer the
forces of destruction, such painters as Newman and Reinhardt saw their
paintings as opening the viewer to a deepened sense of self. In Newman's
words:
The painting should give man a sense of place: that he knows he's
there, so he's aware of himself. In that sense he relates to me when I
made the painting because in that sense I was there.... I hope that
my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the
feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own
individuality.37
A few quotes from journalists and essayists, writing in both big and
little magazines of the day, further suggest the dominance of this mode of
interpellation; even hostile critics in the popular press reinforced the ide-
ology of supersaturated individualism: "Until psychology digs deeper into
the workings of the creative act the spectator can only respond, in one way
or another, to the gruff, turgid, sporadically vital reelings and writings of
Pollock's inner-directed art"; or, even less sympathetic, "In fleeing from
the machine and the terrors of the man-made world, we have plunged into
Desire [New York, 1985] and Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley, 1990]), the presence of
homosexuality within an intensely homosocial masculinist discourse should not surprise us.
On the social construction of all these categories, see Forms ofDesire: Sexual Orientation and
the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York, 1990). Without interro-
gating the sexual identities or gender aspects of the abstract expressionists, Serge Guilbaut
does an excellent job of charting the canonization and depoliticization of modernism in
postwar America in his polemical How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expres-
sionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago, 1983).
35. See my "Machine in the Studio" for this argument in its full form; see also my essay
"Andy Warhol's 'Factory': The Production Site, Its Context, and Its Impact on the Work of
Art," Science in Context 4 (Spring 1991): 101-32.
36. Pollock, interview with Selden Rodman (1956), quoted in Beryl Wright, "Chronol-
ogy," in Abstract Expressionism, p. 271.
37. Barnett Newman, interview with David Sylvester, in Sylvester, "The Ugly Duck-
ling," in Abstract Expressionism, p. 144.

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the dimly lit corridors of man's own psyche. ... Every least gesture of the
brush becomes a revelation, and our pessimism regarding the psyche is
such that, the cruder the gesture, the greater the revelation.""38 Even more
sophisticated authors, such as Clement Greenberg, who sought to distance
themselves from psychological analyses of the new art, reinforced the pre-
vailing image of the lonely, marginalized artist. Here is Greenberg, writ-
ing for British readers in 1947:
The fate of American art is being decided ... by young people, few of
them over forty, who live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to
mouth.... [They] have no reputations that extend beyond a small
circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are as isolated in the United
States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe. ... What we have
... is the ferocious struggle to be a genius.... Alas, the future of
American art depends on them. That it should is fitting but sad. Their
isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning.39
Harold Rosenberg, whose commitment to existentialism led him,

famously, to declare that the abstract expressionist painting was "not a pic-
ture but an event," extended the metaphor of isolation to include the art
as well as the artist: "The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation
from Value-political, esthetic, moral.... The lone artist did not want the
world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world."40 The painter
William Baziotes had earlier articulated such a position, writing in 1949:
"when the demagogues of art call on you to make the social art, the intelli-
gible art, the good art-spit down on them, and go back to your dreams:
the world-and your mirror.'"41
To round out this sketch of the subjectivities identified here as the
abstract expressionist ego, I turn to Robert Motherwell, historian and
intellectual of the New York school, and Cage's collaborator on Possibili-
ties. Motherwell had also founded, with Clyfford Still, the famous Subjects
of the Artist school discussed above, the source for all subsequent discus-
sion groups of the abstract expressionist avant-garde in New York.42 The
38. Quoted in Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, unpaginated galleys.

39. Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculp-
ture," Horizon 16 (Oct. 1947): 29, 30; emphasis added.
40. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" (1952), The Tradition of the
New (New York, 1960), pp. 25, 30; emphasis added.
41. William Baziotes, "The Artist and His Mirror," quoted in New York School: The First
Generation, ed. Maurice Tuchman (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, Los Angeles, 16 July-i Aug. 1965), p. 11.
42. The school remains only vaguely documented; Motherwell does not cite Still and
includes William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, and the sculptor David Hare as founding mem-
bers. Still's participation in founding the school is documented only in the biographical
notes prepared for his 1959 retrospective; see my Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965
(Berkeley, 1989), pp. 164-65 n. 30.

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t~ 1 ~' I'
~~ q;
1L 'L~d
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FIG. 2.-Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943. Gouache and oil with
collage and cardboard. 28 in. X 35%/e in. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
small cooperative school was named, according to Motherwell, "to empha-

size that abstract art, too, has a subject," and Cage was among the artists
invited to speak on Friday evenings.43 Perhaps drawn together by their
common California roots, or their position as highly articulate intellectu-
als, Motherwell and Cage made an odd couple-Cage searching for a
technologically mediated selflessness and Motherwell for a way to paint
"what I have already discovered, what I know to be mine."44 For Motherwell,
the lone abstract expressionist genius was not only male, he was macho. In
his signature works (figs. 2 and 3), the still-vital genitals of Pancho Villa
(Mexico's romantic revolutionary outlaw) become enlarged to gigantic
scale to form the cojones of Motherwell's "Elegy to the Spanish Republic"
series.45 The subject of the artist, here, is the subjugated but latent
43. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, introduction to "Artists' Sessions at

Studio 35 (1950)," ed. Robert Goodnough, in Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism,
p. 314.
44. Motherwell, in "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)," p. 339; emphasis
added.
45. Motherwell actually referred to these forms as bull testicles, which have a privi-
leged function in the bullfighting rituals of Spain; the American Motherwell, lik

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45
FIG. 3.-Robert Motherwell, Elegy to Spanis

80 in. X 100 in. Collection: Albright-Knox
Seymour H. Knox (1957).
potency of creative (and procreative) m

fused with seminal, powerful id.
How superbly ironic, then, that Cag
to speak to the prestigious Artists Club,
Subjects of the Artists school, chos
Among the listeners were aging dadai
who would not have blinked at Cage's
abstract expressionists in the group m
bull's-eye in Cage's target. To that aud
offered subjectlessness; to men captiv
bodies' parts, a bodiless philosophy; to
the New York school, an exercise in Z
with his sometimes impish, sometimes
evening. Acting as the Zen master to t
can avant-garde, he answered all ques
Hemingway before him, never surpassed the inte

twin traditions of republican politics and bru

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prepared answers regardless of the question asked."'46 "I have nothing to

say/ and I am saying it."47 We can practically hear the cleansing fire crack-
ling through the underbrush.
But Cage's madness (his anger and his dadaist folly) had its method (as
always). To his less-than-rapt auditors-one of whom "stood up part way
through, screamed, and then said, 'John, I dearly love you, but I can't
bear another minute' "48-Cage intoned: "Arizona/ is ... almost too
interesting/,/ especially/ for a New-Yorker/ who is being interested/ in
spite of himself/ in everything" ("LN," p. 110). Here, Cage's private Ari-
zona might be an artist like Still, self-styled pioneer from the Dakota
plains, whose paintings figured the dramatic crags and escarpments of the
natural sublime, a landscape identified with the body of the artist and writ
large on the abstract expressionist canvas.49 Against such epic egotism,
Cage reminded his listeners that the subjects being obsessed about were
not trapped within the subconscious, in need of extrication, or figured in
the body of the artist; rather, they were all around, to be discovered in sim-
ple, silent wonder at the world.
The "nothing" in Cage's lecture was, preeminently, silence: "What we
re-quire / is silence" ("LN," p. 109), and silence was actively, even
maddeningly, inserted between words and phrases, breaking them out of
meaning into an ordered but nonsyntactical rhythm, a light snowfall of
phonemes falling in empty space. Without duplicating the columnar
typography that Cage used in his text to enforce visual equivalents for his
verbal silence, I suggest the space here through slashes, which should be
read as beats, gaps, and caesurae measuring the text: "But/ now/ there
are silences/ and the/ words/ make/ help make/ the/ silences" ("LN," p.
109). The function of silence is thus the central theme of the "Lecture on
Nothing"; Cage chose it to characterize his first major collection of writ-
ings in which "Lecture" is included, the eponymous Silence of 1961. "We
need not fear these/ silences,-/ we may love them" ("LN," pp. 109-10; my
emphasis).
There were other nothings beside Cage's in 1949 and gaps other than
silence that his audience might have expected to encounter that night.
Most obviously, there was the existential abyss figured by Jean-Paul
Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943)-the great absence figured by
death. Existentialism, which had "replaced Freudian andJungian dogmas
as an intellectual frame of reference" among New York school painters,
46. Cage, foreword, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Conn.,
1961), p. ix.
47. Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," Silence, p. 109; hereafter abbreviated "LN."
48. Cage, describing the reaction of Jeanne Reynal, foreword, Silence, p. ix.
49. In addition to Motherwell's phallus and testicles, I am thinking of Still's cryptic
self-portrait, 1946-L (now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) as ready examples
of the covert priapic figure in abstract expressionist paintings.

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gave meaning to nothingness, as Sartre's title suggests, precisely through a

juxtaposition with Being, a contrast between action and death (which
enforces the ultimate withdrawal of the body from action and serves as the
terminus of possibility represented by Being).50 As Lithuanian-French
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it in the discussion of existentialism
published in the New York artist-run journal Instead, "do not the catego-
ries of potency and act suffice to express this new notion of existence? ...
Because every other possibility is fulfilled and becomes act, .... death
becomes the non-reality, the non-being."51 The popular understanding of
existentialism that operated in the abstract expressionist communities on
both coasts was established by such writers as Levinas and Sartre, whose
ideas were propagated in the New York artist-run journals; they were fur-
ther popularized and given tremendous force by Rosenberg in his famous
essay on "action painting"-a call for a quintessentially embodied gesture
against the void of death's disembodiment.52 Above all, the abstract
expressionist reading of existentialism emphasized the heroic individual
artist, whose work would be a virtual instantiation of "potency and act." As
one American writer in 1958 summarized it, existentialism forced a con-
frontation with "the impotence of reason confronted with the depths of
existence; the threat of Nothingness, and the solitary and unsheltered condition
of the individual before this threat."53
50. See Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, p. 98.

51. Emmanuel Levinas, in discussion with Jean Wahl, "An Essential Argument within
Existentialism" (1946), trans. and ed. the editors of Instead, in Gibson, Issues in Abstract
Expressionism, p. 303. This discussion originally appeared in volume 7 of Instead (ca. 1948).
L vinas goes on to answer his own question in the negative, "I do not think so," and his sub-
sequent statement about death is meant to gloss this position. As Levinas is at pains to make
clear in this late 1940s defense of Heidegger as the "one and only existentialist," being is
utterly at odds with death, since being and possibility are one, "so much so that at the
moment of [possibility's] exhaustion we have death" (ibid., pp. 301, 303). Thus potency
(as possibility) would, in Levinas's reading of Heidegger, be fully detached from the neces-
sity for act. We now read Levinas very differently, seeing him through Derridean eyes as
the rejector of Heidegger's view of death as "the ultimate test of virility and authenticity"
and the alternative to Husserl's redefinition of phenomenology as "'egology' " (Se in Hand,
introduction, The Livinas Reader, ed. Hand [Oxford, 1989], pp. 4, 2). We take instead the
post-1950s Levinas as model, his ethical philosophy summarized by the elegant statement,
"the idea of the Infinite is to be found in my responsibility for the Other" (Levinas,
"Beyond Intentionality," in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore [Cambridge,
1983], p. 113).
52. Apparently Pollock fed Rosenberg the idea of abstract expressionist painting as
existentialist gesture; he himself got it from Newman, who presumably gleaned it from his
voracious reading of the artist-run periodicals of the time. This is according to Rosenberg's
rival, Clement Greenberg, interview with the author, 9 Oct. 1987.
53. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.,
1958), p. 31; emphasis added. This passage is quoted by Sandler, The Triumph of American
Painting, p. 98; Sandler goes on to comment, "But it must also be remembered that a man,
no matter how vulnerable and anxious, who makes himself is something of a hero, even if a
pathetic one."

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But although death was certainly part of Cage's bodiless "nothing," it

was not all of it. Inactivity on the part of the artist, which amounted to
death in the thinking of the "existence philosophers" (as Livinas called
them), for Cage opened onto the untrammelled activity of the world.
Writing for a lecture at Juilliard a few years after the famous "Lecture
on Nothing," Cage presented fellow composer Morton Feldman as a
coconspirator in the new search for silence and nothingness:
The nothing/ that/ goes on/ is/ what/ Feldman/ speaks/ of/
when/ he speaks of/ being/ sub-merged/ in/ silence. / The/
acceptance/ of/ death/ is the source/ of/ all/ life./ ... Not one
sound/ fears/ the silence/ that ex-tinguishes it./ And/ no silence/
exists/ that is not/ pregnant/ with/ sound.54
To the yawning existentialist void, Cage merely yawned. The death of

action was to be confronted not with a terrified gesture of individual hero-
ism but placid restraint. Nothingness was to be met not with a scream but
with a "pregnant" silence. What gestated within that "pregnancy" and the
location of the silent but gravid body itself are complex questions whose
gender and sexual implications this essay can only begin to explore.
Noise, Silence, and the Body
"The highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty."

-JOHN CAGE, quoting W. H. Blythe's Haiku, in
"Juilliard Lecture" (1952)
The first part-on what Cage finished-is finished. The second

part-on what he began-is beginning. I turn from the prophylactic
"nothing" to the celebratory "something" that ensued.
In the 1949 "Lecture on Nothing," Cage already indicated what he
would enjoy in the early work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
He wrote (and presumably said): "I used noises/. / They had not been/
in-tellectualized;/ the ear could hear them/ directly/ and didn't have to
go through any abstraction/ a-bout them/.... Noises, too/ , / had been
dis-criminated against/; / and being American, ... I fought/ for noises"
("LN," pp. 116-17). What is the difference between music and noise? As
Cage taught us, only the intervention of culture claims the one for amuse-
54. Cage, "Juilliard Lecture" (1952), A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by
John Cage (Middletown, Conn., 1967), p. 98; emphasis added. Cage's reading of Feldman
was, of course, highly willful. Feldman led a notoriously heterosexual life and remained
much more closely identified with the abstract expressionists than Cage, culminating with
his musical homage to Rothko, composed for the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Hous-
ton, which was completed in 1979.

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ment and decries the other as annoying. Silence gives form to them both
and room for the sounds and activities of others. This was Cage's revela-
tion, and the work of these two younger painters struck, as it were, sympa-
thetic chords.
As against the natural, heroic sublime of the abstract expressionist
painters, Johns and Rauschenberg moved toward the quotidian. They
substituted found objects and found images, bracketed and made
strange to convey the violence of the everyday. In Rauschenberg's devas-
tated, unmade Bed (fig. 4), and the strange casts of body parts in Johns's
Target with Plaster Casts (fig. 5), there is a potential for indeterminacy
(always subverted by the institutional structures that frame our experi-
ence of the visual arts). Couldn't that bed be made up, the covers drawn
to conceal the torrid marks of the loaded brush? Couldn't those body
parts be thoughtfully lidded over, that shooting gallery converted to a
laconic row of plain trap doors? Rauschenberg put radios in his paint-
ings; Johns wanted to have sounds emerge with the opening of each trap
door. Agency slips from the maker to the passerby; as in Cage's works
(and those of his model, the heroic antihero and sexually ambiguous
"father" of postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp), the actions of the audi-
ence become part of the piece.55
When we speak of Cage's affinity for, and significance to, younger
artists, we recognize that influences go both ways. Already by 1949, when
he barely knew Cage, Rauschenberg was limiting his palette to mono-
chrome and using numbers to generate a kind of autonomous, depersona-
lized discipline in his work (for example, White Painting with Numbers [The
Lily White], 1949). His all-black paintings of 1951-52, which preceded the
all-white ones by a few months, used a ground of "found objects"-in this
case, newspapers-for their unreadable texture, their active silences.
When Cage and Rauschenberg found each other at Black Mountain again
during the summer of 1952, their friendship deepened, and both were
ready for further departures.
Cage writes, punctiliously, in Silence: "To Whom It May Concern:
The white paintings [of Rauschenberg] came first; my silent piece came
later."56 That summer of 1952, Cage saw Rauschenberg's apparently
blank canvases, each white, each apparently identical to its neighbor.
Rauschenberg held these canvas panels to be "hypersensitive," tender
membranes registering the slightest phenomenon on their blanched white
55. On the engendering of Duchamp as a feminized "father" for postmodernism, and

on the links between Cage's silences and Duchamp's "indifference," see Amelia Jones,
Duchamp and Postmodernism (forthcoming). I have benefitted greatly from Amelia's trench-
ant comments on this paper and from our ongoing conversations about the intertwined his-
tories of modernism and postmodernism.
56. Cage, prefatory comment to "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,"
Silence, p. 98.

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?'41
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8 in. Collection: T
of Leo Castelli in

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..i
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FIG. 5.-Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. E

vas with plaster casts in wood construction. 51 in. X 4
Castelli.
skins.57 Cage described them as "airports for the lights, shadows, and par-
ticles," characteristically transposing Rauschenberg's semiotics of a
tender, almost invisible, but deeply sensate body into a technological met-
57. Quoted in Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time
(New York, 1980), p. 71.

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aphor for communication from the external world.58 Rauschenberg's

focus on the membrane's sensations and registrations gave way in Cage's
reading to a mechanically hardened body-nerve-laden integument
become inert runway, skin become concrete.59
Cage's experience of the white paintings encouraged him to proceed
with his "Silent Piece." Its title, 4' 33", referred to increments of time,
but the numbers were often read, to Cage's amusement, as measurements
of a still body in space (see BB, p. 118). The question posed by the three-
part piece was straightforward but opened onto great complexity: why not
see what happens in that place, in that space of time, unintended by the
artist? Although in one sense Cage looked outward, to other bodies, to
generate content (where Rauschenberg was interested in what registered,
internally, from the touches of photons on his paintings' membranous sur-
faces), 4' 33" can also be seen as a fundamentally disembodied piece.
Rather than Rauschenberg's white objects, which remained three-
dimensional bodies in the world, Cage offered a bracket of silence, the
only body being the unmoving one of the performer, whose stillness
inverted the customary athletics of virtuosity into a model of inert, if
attentive, quiescence. The only body acoustically present in 4' 33" is the
body of sound; the withdrawal of the performer's body from action para-
doxically authorizes our recognition of ambient noise.
The famous "Happening"-Theater Piece #1 (1952)-was another
development of Cage's interest in a neutral bracket for varied and unpre-
dictable experiences. Staged at Black Mountain by Cage with Rauschen-
berg, Cunningham, and others during the summer Cage found such
inspiration in Rauschenberg's work, the event has been recalled with
Rashomon intensity and incommensurability: performers, audience,
dogs, weather, and white paintings all participating in an uncoordinated
accretion of events.60
The aesthetics of accretion and accumulation further linked Cage
with the younger painters, who gave each thing its autonomy within their
ultimately mysterious bricolages. They also shared with Cage the aesthet-
ics of the handyman, the tinkerer, the practical engineer. Cage had
admonished in the "Lecture on Nothing": "But beware of/ that which is/
breathtakingly/ beautiful, /for at any moment/ the telephone /may
ring/ or the airplane/ come down in a/ vacant lot" ("LN," p. 111). This
58. Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work," p. 102.
59. Martin Brody has suggested that "airports" may also be "air ports," or openings in
the air. In my reading the technological side of Cage dominates the whimsical.
60. In part it included Rauschenberg's white paintings and scratchy Edith Piaf
records; Cage, M. C. Richards, and Charles Olson reading from the tops of two ladders;
Cunningham dancing with the unexpected accompaniment of a stray dog; David Tudor
playing a prepared piano and a radio; and someone projecting films and slides upside-
down. The event terminated with the serving of coffee. See Harris, The Arts at Black Moun-
tain College, pp. 226-28.

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suggests, again, the technological sublime: a directive to find pleasure in

the aesthetics of an irrevocably altered environment, to celebrate, as
Whitman had, the "great achievements of the present ... the strong light
works of engineers."6' These are paintings that come with handy direc-
tions (Rauschenberg's Coca-Cola Plan, 1958), or moving parts that allow
them to make themselves, as if automatically (Johns's Device Circle, 1959).
As in Cage's music, the viewer, the auditor, and the environment each
enter in; the piece does not exist until experienced in time by another. In
place of the artist's body figured by the abstract expressionist canvas,
these works implied activity on the part of others' bodies-activity that
shielded, deflected, or displaced references to the artists' own.
But, as my comments on the place of the body in these works sug-
gest, there are distinctions to be made. Cage was never wholly commit-
ted to the suggestions of membranes and bodies that remain palpable in
Rauschenberg's work and rhetoric; similarly, he was not partisan to
Johns's and Rauschenberg's low-life technological sublime. Cage still
held out for an authentic high culture that would be "independent/ at
least from/ Life, Time and /Coca-Cola" ("LN," p. 117). He celebrated
creation versus reproduction, believing it important to "remove the
records from Texas/ [so that] someone/ will learn to sing" ("LN,"
p. 126).62 This stood in contrast to Rauschenberg (the Texan) and his
Coca-Cola optimism, where reproductions were reinvested with aura
(amidst the fetishizing tawdriness of Odalisk or in one of his later manip-
ulations of photographic silkscreens). Rauschenberg's erotic humor is
also un-Cagean. In the "combine painting" Odalisk (1955-58), both title
and assemblage work the joke. The punning of obelisk (that perfected
monumental lingam), with odalisque (its voluptuous female repository)
is complex. The pun operates with the work's electrified empty center
and tacky cheesecake photos to produce a more "pointed" critique of
heterosexism than Cage would ever tolerate in his rigorously dispassion-
ate art.
Although I earlier suggested a relationship between Ra

Bed, Johns's Target, and Cage's vernacular noises, distinct
made here as well. These objects fascinate us, as they fascin
questions present themselves: whose bed? (Rauschenberg's, a
And what happened there? Confronted byJohns's work, we
body parts, and why fetishized, collected, shut away? This
different sort-what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms the "clo
61. Walt Whitman, "Passage to India" (1870), Complete Poetry and Col
York, 1982), 11. 2-3, p. 531.
62. Their learning to sing suggests to me that Cage is not calling here
folk culture, which, presumably, Texans could generate on their own. I
pursuing a model of the cultural elite that will tell Texans what to lear
them-part of the "finishing school" caravan, perhaps.

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a certain type of homosexual aesthetic.63 It is clear in such works that some-

thing happened, that there are meanings to conceal behind those trap
doors and between those ravished sheets.64 The body parts in John's
assemblage are not the mysogynist surrealist synecdoches of pendulous
breast, rouged lips, or furred female parts. Instead we see one smooth
male pectoral with its trim nipple, an angular ankle, long fingers, a recum-
bent penis. As against Allen Ginsberg's contemporaneous Howl (1956),
with its exuberant homoeroticism and its savage outcry at the repression
of Otherness in America, Rauschenberg and Johns allude only tan-
gentially to their lives as gay artists in New York.65 Secrets become the
engine of their art, but that engine's autobiographical chuffing can be
heard, however faint. The younger, gay-identified artists' muting of the
self-confessional abstract expressionist ego still had its function in a
homophobic 1950s America. In that context, icons of homoerotic body
parts could never be as welcome as heterosexist ones.
My shorthand reference to Johns and Rauschenberg as "gay artists,"
and the discussion that follows of a potentially homosexual aesthetic
operating in Cage's work, should be seen as unavoidable linguistic essen-
tializations of what are instead shifting fabrics of historically determined,
socially constructed, and discursively maintained sexual differences.
These and other artists of the time did not "come out" in the post-
Stonewall sense (see Johns's statement in 1978 that, early in his career, he
preferred to "hide my personality, my psychological state, my
emotions").66 But their homosexuality was inferred and constructed none-
theless; it became sufficiently salient so that there was paranoid talk of a
"homintern" among the aggressively masculinist painters of abstract
expressionism, who feared "a network of homosexual artists, dealers, and
museum curators in league to promote the work of certain favorites at the
expense of 'straight' talents."''67 As gay theorists (such as Sedgwick, Ed
Cohen, Byrne Fone, Michael Moon, and Thomas Yingling) have
explored, the homophobia of our dominant culture must be seen not just
63. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, in particular "Proust and the Spectacle of
the Closet," p. 222.
64. When this paper had already been written, Patricia Hills drew my attention to the
work ofJonathan Katz, who has come to similar conclusions about such works by Johns and
Rauschenberg. To my knowledge, Katz's paper has yet to be published; it was delivered at
the 1991 College Art Association conference in Washington, D.C., as "Subculture Repre-
sentations in the Art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg: Identity and Community
among Postwar New York Artists." See also my chapter on Warhol for a discussion of his
homosexual aesthetic in "Machine in the Studio."
65. Even Howl was censored in its first publication, the overt homoerotic pas
altered. See my Bay Area Figurative Art, p. 135.
66. Quoted in Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Work since 1974 (exhibition catalog
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 23 Oct. 1988-8 Jan. 1989), p. 60.
67. Tomkins, Off the Wall, p. 260, speaking of "Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenb
Johns, Warhol and others."

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in political terms, as one body politic striving to deprive other collectivities

of political influence. It must also be read as a cultural text; homosexuality
then becomes the unconscious within that text, the ultimate difference
that must be repressed in order to achieve a national, literary, or visual
American tradition. Homosexuality "becomes the unconscious ... , that
which the text may not speak, for as a discourse it contradicts the very
things [it] is called into being to address." 68For such gay theorists, homo-
sexuality is not some essentialist discourse based on bodily sex acts; it is
discursively produced by "gay" and "straight" alike as a negativity within a
dominant heterosexist culture.69 It is this negativity that I want to explore
in the work of John Cage.
What is the connection, then, between Cage's famous silences (which
contain so much that they are pregnant with unheard sounds) and these
younger artists' secrets-in-view? Certainly, the connection is considerably
complicated by the position of the body in their works. The body, both
synecdochally in its parts and metonymically through its libidinal ener-
gies, was writ large in the abstract expressionist canvas; the individual
ego was celebrated in the socially constructed masculine figure of the
abstract expressionist artist. In the works of Johns and Rauschenberg, I
suggest, the body is figured by absence-the phallus shut away (in its little
"closet"), the unmade bed emptied of the body(ies) that ravished its sheets.
In Cage's work, the body is necessarily enlisted differently, for his chosen
discipline is music, not object; performance, not tableau. The overarching
thematic of silence in Cage's work, which must be linked to the secrets of
Johns's and Rauschenberg's art, can also be historicized in terms of the
shifting place of the body in his production.
Despite its technologic "hardening," the prepared piano of the late
1930s engaged the body of the performer (usually Cage) most spectacu-
larly. Leaning over the open instrument, the player plucks, strums,
68. Thomas E. Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anat-
omies (Chicago, 1990), p. 199; hereafter abbreviated HC. See also Thomas Piontek, review
of HC, Discourse 13 (Fall-Winter 1990-91):190-96. In addition to Sedgwick's and
Yingling's previously cited texts, see Byrne R. S. Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman
and the Homoerotic Text (Carbondale, Ill., 1992), and articles by Ed Cohen ("Legislating the
Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency"), Michael Moon ("Disseminating Whitman"),
and Sedgwick ("Across Gender, across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others"), in Displacing
Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Cultures, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M.
Clum, and Moon (Durham, N.C., 1989), pp. 169-206, 235-54, and 53-72.
69. Piontek refers to the conversion of Walt Whitman's homoeroticism into national-
ism: "The fact that Whitman himself contributed to this development only highlights th
enormous pressure on writers to fit into a specifically American tradition" (Piontek, revie
of HC, p. 193). See also Yingling on Crane's poem The Bridge, which he argues leaves unr
solved "the conflict homosexuality names for American culture" and, in its very contradic
tions, "inscribes [this conflict] in its negativity" (HC, p. 226). This, the final sentence in
Yingling's book, is also noted by Piontek, who concludes, "Crane's body and the body
Crane's text cannot be so easily sundered" (Piontek, review of HC, p. 196).

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strokes, taps, and slaps the strings that have been tightened by screws and
made tense with bindings and implements. By contrast, in the "silent
piece" of 1952, I argued, the body was visible, but inert-the beginning of
a "bodiless" performance. During the mid-1950s, when most engaged
with the work ofJohns and Rauschenberg, Cage had shifted his interest to
magnetic tape and other electronic sound devices; although he still
emphasized the performance of his music, it was a matter of small move-
ments: an adjustment of dials and flicking of switches. Contact micro-
phones amplified sounds made by other objects, other bodies; it was a
mechanized music in which the auditor was subjected to the daunting
extremes of an acoustical technological sublime. By the late 1960s, in
HPSCHD, the bodies of the seven harpsichord players were all but invisi-
ble, dwarfed by the fifty-one tape players, seven films, and eighty slide
projectors that performed-automatically, mechanistically, bodilessly-
for an audience of nine thousand. Even in its conjunction with
Cunningham's dances, Cage's midcareer music appears as a virtual dem-
onstration of its disembodiedness. It is asynchronous and wholly dis-
jointed from the bodies on stage, whose movements are themselves
detached from function or narrative, recombined by Cunningham into
exhilaratingly abstract morphemes drained of bodily significance.
Cage's shift toward ever more disembodied practices during these
years constituted his developing critique of the abstract expressionist
ego. His evolving rhetoric and art moved from an early participation in
the emerging goals of the abstract expressionist avant-garde-the
primitivism, the sublimity, even the individual authority implied by his
favored term invention-to his later identification with the secrets-in-
view of younger, implicitly different artists. By the pivotal "Lecture o
Nothing" of 1949, Cage had already hinted at the aesthetic of "hiding
beauty" that he would later quote in his 1952 talk at Juilliard. The kin
of beauty we might desire would be hidden in the pregnant silence
absences, and withdrawal of the body that formed the paradoxical
empty fullness of his art.
Cage taught a bodiless philosophy, claiming silence is but the absenc
of a noisy ego: "If I stop making sounds, then sounds will continue ...
silence equals unintention."70 As Gerald Bruns, Daniel Herwitz, an
Joan Retallack have each discussed, Cagean "poethics" are deeply rooted
in the anarchic ideals of certain American philosophers, notably Henry
David Thoreau.71 Cage's silence, for these scholars, opens inevitably ont
70. John Cage, speaking at the Cage symposium at Stanford, on 30 Jan. 1992.
71. See Gerald L. Bruns, "Crossroads of Ethical Theory: John Cage and Stanle
Cavell," Daniel Herwitz, "John Cage's Approach to the Global," and Joan Retallac
"Poethics of a Complex Realism," ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (forthcom
ing). This volume commemorates some of the papers given on 29 January 1992 at t
Stanford Cage symposium.

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difference and polyvocality, admitting the discourse of Others." In one

public forum, Norman O. Brown expressed reservations about the passiv-
ity of Cagean silence in the face of history but celebrated what he saw as
Cage's self-sacrificial love of the world, his agape, concluding that we
require Cage's "Dionysian madness.""73 No one imagines that this mad
silence was simple muteness; this is refuted by the intense provocation that
Cage intended, and achieved, by its means.
Silence and the Body Politic
The bodilessness of Cage's philosophy paradoxically engages the

body. It withdraws the body from vision and audition, rendering it the
noted absence in his aesthetic discourse. After Foucault, we can no longer
pretend there is no relation between bodies and the body politic. In this
sense Thoreau's Walden (his separation and his anarchism) and Cage's
silence (his bodilessness and his anarchism) are simply the attempted with-
drawal of the body from Foucault's "body politic," namely, that "set of
material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communi-
cation routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that
invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of
knowledge."74 For Foucault, the body can never be withdrawn from poli-
tics. Its incarceration in prisons, its enforced silence, and, of course, its
72. Note, for example, Cage's Apartment House 1776, the 1976 composition produced
for the American Bicentennial, almost absurdly demographic in its call for different vocal
traditions: "to be added, live or recorded, Protestant, Sephardic and American Indian
songs, and Negro calls and hollers" (C.F. Peters, publishers of the score). The decentered,
deauthored nature of these compositions is seen also in a work like Roaratorio (1979), which
uses randomly combined excerpts from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, taped sound from Joycean
places in Ireland, and live performances on folk instruments by Irish musicians. The score
for the latter is left entirely indeterminate, titled , Circus on _ ,
functioning as instructions for turning any existing book into music (the first blank being a
title, the second an adjective, and the last a text; one production by others resulted in
Realibogie-A Jacobite Circus on King James VI's Daemonologie. See Revill, The Roaring Silence,
p. 267. Martin Brody has pointed out to me the difference between such practices and
those of contemporary composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, to whom Cage is often
compared. In the case of Stockhausen's Telemusik, for example, the different sources are
appropriated from different cultures and electronically collaged by the composer, their
order and acoustical role authorially determined and fixed on tape without a clear possibil-
ity for either live performance or cultural variability.
73. Brown, discussion at Stanford Cage symposium 31 Jan. 1992, and paper given 28
Jan. 1992 at the same symposium.
74. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(1975; New York, 1979), p. 28. I am grateful to Herwitz for pointing out this link and for
our discussions on the subject of Cage, silence, and the politics of the body. My thoughts on
this have also been informed by Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of
the World (New York, 1985), which argues passionately for the need to see the torture of
individual bodies as a function of state power, not merely individual loss.

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demise under capital punishment are but signs of the state's power
expressed on the text of the body. Silence is thus always already a
response; it is, as Sedgwick argues, a "speech act" formed within a
heterosexist discourse; or, put in Yingling's terms, the male homosexual is
"empowered to speak, but unable to say" (HC, p. 26).75 Foucault expands
on his notion of silence and the body politic in The History ofSexuality:
Silence itself-the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name,

the discretion that is required between different speakers-is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated
by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the
things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strate-
gies. ... There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral
part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.76
Despite the totalizing, even hopeless aspects of such Foucauldian the-

orizing, in which negativity and resistance must always be deformed by
enclosure within a dominant patriarchy, I suggest that silence can also
constitute a kind of critique. The utopian politics of Cage's silence, at
least, should be clear; secrets and silence may be enforced by the oppres-
sor, but they can also hide the oppressed (or the liberator, or beauty, or
love) from the controlling, panoptical view.
Thus silence is both shield and protest. As Cage told a Marxist inter-
viewer in 1978, "[my] optimism that there was the possibility of changing
society-has become less... less on the surface of my feeling, and taking
its place has been a kind of silence."" Or, recalling his experience of a
deeply influential book about nineteenth-century anarchists, Men against
the State, Cage described their homosociality as embedded in silence,
which he tellingly links to love:
There was a group in Ohio, who never had any meetings and they
never talked with one another; they lived more or less in silence,
because they felt that there was so much to be done that it was foolish
to waste time talking. And I think our use of words for the most part is
to protect ourselves from other people, rather than to indicate our
75. "'Closetedness'" is "a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a

silence-not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in
relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (Sedgwick, Episte-
mology of the Closet, p. 3).
76. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), p. 27. I am indebted to Arnold Davidson for point-
ing out this specific passage and for his several helpful comments regarding the function of
silence vis-a-vis the abstract expressionist ego.
77. Cage and Geoffrey Barnard, Conversation without Feldman: A Talk between John
Cage and Geoffrey Barnard (Darlinghurst, N.S.W., 1980), p. 7. This conversation was held
28 Nov. 1978.

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love of one another. ... We need the introduction into society more
and more.... [of] the demand and the expressed desire for love, in
an anarchic world.78
Cage's opposition to the abstract expressionist ego, or what one inter-

viewer called the "egotistical sublime," was thoroughgoing. "I don't like
that idea," he commented. "Most people are blinded by themselves."79 But
his alternative was intended not merely to suppress or conceal difference
(although that may certainly have been part of its effect). It was also,
surely, to let people find themselves and their differences, without the
overbearing model of the heterosexist ego. Cage's evocation of the sounds
freed by the egoless artist suggests the utopia of anarchy itself. Praising
Feldman in his 1952 "Juilliard Lecture," he wrote: "Silence/ surrounds/
many/ of the sounds/ so that/ they/ ex-ist in space/ unimpeded/ by
one another/ and yet/ inter-penetrating/ one another/ for the reason/
that Feldman/ has done nothing/ to keep/ them/ from/ being/ them-
selves."80 Hiding beauty from the world might still reveal it to the self of
the artist and to those members of the audience who enter openly into the
space of silence and all it conceals.
Johns on Cage and the Silenced Body
In his early and more recent homages to Cage, Jasper Johns sug-
gested the fruitfulness of Cage's withdrawal of private experience from
public view, finding a dialectic between the life of Cage's embodied ego
and his call for an egoless art. A 1954 assemblage, Construction with Toy
Piano (fig. 6), is not identified as an homage, but I think it implies one. It
was produced the same year Johns met Cage, several years after Cage's
own Suite for Toy Piano (written and performed at Black Mountain in
1948), and consists of an altered or prepared piano. The delicate, aging
collage on its surface consists of papers, many of them foreign, bearing
numbers in or out of comprehensible sequence, or script that cannot be
read. At bottom left, we see, inverted, the word Nation, as if implying the
making of Americans from these polyglot scraps and texts.8' The inside of
the toy piano, the part that makes the music, is concealed. Even if the
viewer were allowed to touch the keys, the sounds would be muffled and
their source obscured by the lid and tissue overlay.
78. Ibid., p. 15.

79. Quoted in Lisa Low, "Free Association" (1985), in Conversing with Cage, p. 45.
80. Cage, "Juilliard Lecture," p. 100.
81. Nation also appears, this time on its side, below the target in Target with Plaster
Casts. Johns's love of secrets-in-view, and his early preoccupation with the United States
flag, suggest that such collage elements are not random.

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., ~" ::z'~; f oiki~
?r ?i?~d'Pt
VN ""..:
FIG. 6.-Jasper Johns, Construction with Toy Piano, 1954. Graphite and collage
with toy piano. 11 in. X 9 in. X 2 in. Collection: Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel.
The 1982 watercolor Perilous Night (fig. 7) is typical ofJohns's more

sensuous recent work, lush in its dappled, limpid pools of pigment, made
luminous by the light reflected from behind the translucent plastic sup-
port. The title refers directly to Cage's wartime composition of that same
title, written for prepared piano and published in 1943-44.82 The image
82. Johns's image was also used to illustrate a new release of Cage's composition; see
John Cage: The Perilous Night/Four Walls (1991), New Albion Records, NA037.

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ARM
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of Cage's published sheet music for the work appears at the right in
Johns's free tracing. It is significant that Johns chooses The Perilous Night
for his homage, since it was the last composition in which Cage acknowl-
edged investing his own personal emotions, before turning to chance and
silence to generate the content of his art.83
Cage speaks openly, if elliptically, of the nature of the emotions in The
Perilous Night: it was concerned with "'the loneliness and terror that
comes to one when love becomes unhappy' " (BB, p. 97). "The music tells a
story of the dangers of the erotic life and describes the misery of 'some-
thing that was together that is split apart.' "84 There was the war and the
breakup of Cage's marriage (see BB, p. 97), but equally significant for
Cage was his moving out of the Perilous Night itself, emerging from autobi-
ographic expressionism into egoless indeterminacy, turning from the
macho abstract expressionist norm toward something more tentative and
more open.85Johns focuses on this moment in creating the veiled portrait
of his longtime friend, as if Cage will always be becoming, coming ever fur-
ther out from that perilous night.
Johns's visual vocabulary in Perilous Night was familiar to him and to
those who know his works. The outstretched arm echoes, of course,
Pollock's shamanistic handprints in his paintings of the late 1940s. In
Johns's own work the truncated arm has multiple meanings. In his larger
encaustic canvas Perilous Night, executed the same year as the ink paint-
ing, there are three different arms, each a three-dimensional plaster form
clearly cast from a living body, then painted and hung on hooks that pro-
trude from the painting's surface. In the ink painting, however, where
Cage's musical composition is featured more prominently, the hand's
open palm reads differently. Inked and pressed on to the plastic support,
here it functions visually as a literal imprint of a specific gesture.86
83. "I had poured a great deal of emotion into the piece, and obviously I wasn't com-
municating this at all" (Cage, quoted in BB, p. 97).
84. Richard Francis, introduction, Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham,Johns (exhibi-
tion catalogue, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 31 Oct.-2 Dec. 1989, Tate Gallery,
Liverpool, 23 Jan.-25 Mar. 1990), p. 26.
85. When I contrast the heterosexist abstract expressionist ego to the egoless silence of
Cage, I do not mean to imply that there is a loss of ego boundaries (in the psychoanalytic
sense of an ego pathology) entailed by Cagean silence. Writers such as Klaus Theweleit
have viewed the rigidly structured and bounded homosexuality of white male fascists as a
"maintenance process" (to use Margaret Mahler's phrase), "a compulsive act of defense
against threats of devouring [ego] dissolution" represented by the female within (Klaus
Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Erica Carter, Chris Turner, and Stephen Conway, 2 vols.
[1977-78; Minneapolis, 1987, 1989], 2:318). But this peculiarly distorted form of openly
state-controlled homosexuality should be contrasted with what Guy Hocquenghem has
argued is the inherently private and revolutionary desire to desire of homosexuality in its
standard historically produced form. See Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans.
Daniella Dangoor (New York, 1980).
86. A complicating factor here is the slight turn in the imprint at elbow level, where it
awkwardly reverses the normal bend of an arm towards its thumb. The reversal (presum-

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Johns had used inked body parts (his own hands and face) as early as
1962 in his homages to the dead poet Frank O'Hara-Studyfor Skin I and
Study for Skin II (1962) and Skin with O'Hara Poem (1963-65). By 1973 (in
Skin I) he used the technique again, this time pressing his genitals on the
page. The arm and open palm in particular dominate the early 1960s,
appearing in other homages by Johns to the American poet Hart Crane,
who suicided by drowning, diving with outstretched arms into death. Peri-
scope (Hart Crane) (1963) features this diving action through the imprint
of an open palm, and links it to painting: the hand slides through paint and
the arm seems to sweep a semicircle of pigment before it, moving clocklike
through time and space. The outstretched arm as a figure for art, death,
and time are themes picked up again in Johns's frankly autobiographical
series The Seasons (1985-86); here the link between Johns's heroes Crane
and Cage, Periscope and Perilous, are profound. Persistent readings by tra-
ditional literary theorists of Crane's homosexuality as a pathological
deterrent to his art, and the work of more contemporary gay theorists
who see his suicide as the ultimate speech act of one who was "empowered
to speak, but unable to say" render Johns's visual equation of Cage with
Crane still more provocative.87 Crane's extinguished periscope becomes
Cage's passage through the perilous night-a safe passage in this case,
ensured by Cage's evident survival, and signalled by the source phrase for
Cage's and Johns's title, that battle hymn that still serves as the American
national anthem: "Oh, say can you see ... through the perilous night ...
that our flag was still there?"
The ordering actions of art, and suicide, suggested by the out-
stretched arm at the right, are contrasted with the work's left-hand panel.
Here the inchoate images suggest bones, skulls, rocks, charnel. This realm
is not the aquatic but the subterranean.88 Both halves of the piece are
ably based on the cast, where we see the back, not the palm, of the hand) suggests a broken
or dismembered arm rather than a partially seen one. Compare figure 7 here, and plate 17
in Rosenthal, Jasper Johns.
87. Yingling does not interpret Crane's suicide as specifically "a speech act," seeing
Crane as one driven to suicide by society: "Crane's movement toward self-destruction can
now be understood as an episode in ideology rather than as one in character." Yingling
notes that Crane drowned himself after being beaten by some sailors he had solicited on a
boat trip from Mexico to the U.S. and views his death as proof that "homosexuality was
central to his life but was itself socially and psychically designed as an unlivable existence"
(HC, p. 79). Elsewhere, however, Yingling explores the way in which the self-hating eroti-
cism constructed as homosexual by Crane's culture manifested itself as a kind of death wish
in which, I note, suicide might be an ultimate fulfillment. As Yingling writes, "The final
orgasm [recall that orgasm itself is known in English as 'the little death'] does not merely
release but destroys desire. Sexual utopian fantasy is often figured in Crane either as death
or as ecstatic dismemberment" (HC, pp. 42-43).
88. In the encaustic painting, these forms have been drawn from a segment of Mathis
Griinewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1513-15), specifically the stunned soldiers at the foot of

132.174.254.12 on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:51:17 UTC
: .
,! ? . .? . . . . . :; ,?.. ..;;: , : . ,,. . .
FIG. 8.-John Cage, Series IV, 215 Moves (from th

1988. Watercolor on paper. 26V2 in. X 40 in. Colle
Richmond. Gift of the Mountain Lake Art Worksho
Tech Foundation.
necessary. Death is required for the life of Cage's beloved mushrooms

for his art (as he said in "Juilliard Lecture" quoted above, "acceptanc
death is the source of all life"). Johns's homage centers on The Peri
Night as the passage through which Cage, like sound, became himsel
silence. The suicide of a public emotion that allowed more private one
flourish undisturbed.
Final Gestures
Cage at eighty was not the same as Cage at thirty-six. The need for
the finishing school had abated, with its attendant anxiety about the elimi-
nation of ego. Reflecting this openness, Cage enlarged his activities to
include the making of visual art and poetry; in the last two decades of his
life he produced almost as many pictures and texts as scores. The poetry
the cross in the Resurrection panel. In the ink on plastic painting, however, this reference is
much more obscure, the only readable element being the sword of the fallen soldier, whose
haft and blade, rotated priapically upwards amidst the carnage, can be seen at the lower
left. See Rosenthal, Jasper Johns, fig. 26, for comparative details of the Griinewald.

132.174.254.12 on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:51:17 UTC
...2
" : . " ??.. Z'W .
?" ..' - :
:: ........i*:~
. , , .. . ....... ...
E?"
'i: ,, !i , ... ., :: W - ?ha
. . . .. , -
...... :)" "
?. : . ' ?i ?-; ? I ...
"'''
! ,i " " " ?1
'?,
FIG. 9.-John
smoked paper
remained a
JamesJoyce
computeriz
watercolors
gesture, th
wield the b
sionist ego."9
Inspired by the rock and sand gardens of the Zen monasteries in
Japan, Cage devised a mechanism for painting (fig. 10) comparable to the
Buddhist gardener's careful raking around a planted stone. Working with
feathers and other implements selected by the I Ching, Cage finally
adopted the brush, willing himself to ignore its loaded associations with
genius, abandoning will, and attempting, Zen-like, to "think at the end of
the brush"-to be the brush (technology/medium) rather than mind
89. In later music pieces, too, Cage opened himself to bodily gesture (and opened his
performers). The famous antipathy of organized musicians to Cage's work endured long
after he was an established composer and stemmed in part from the need for their bodily
engagement in works such as Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976). In Branches, perform-
ers are required to generate sound from amplified plant materials, such as gourds and potato
chips; in Child of Tree they are requested to eat a banana, contact microphone in place.

132.174.254.12 on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:51:17 UTC
.. . - -..
?..
.#i ';J;,
?i:
..ii.
? ::
?,':: .r : ::
":.'% .... .:
??a?F ?r ~ Irace...
,:...
i:
I:..
: "
- :..?..
..:- i: . ... . . ... . . .. . . . .. . .. . ,.
FIG. 10.-John Cage painting around a rock for a New River series watercolor
Mountain Lake workshop in Virginia, 1988. Photo: Virginia Tech Media resources
tesy Ray Kass.

132.174.254.12 on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:51:17 UTC
(message).90 Our visual association of these images with the gesture paint-
ings of his early companions in the avant-garde is unavoidable. But again,
distinctions must be made. In his continuing reliance on the I Ching and
other chance operations, Cage engaged in a dialectic with the outside
world that encouraged new developments. The ego of choice was married
to the selflessness of chance, and the authorship of the resulting gesture
could be seen as collaborative, multiple, and open to question.
Cage continued in these last works to pursue his Buddhist-inspired
goal to "'imitate nature in her manner of operations.' "91 In the series repre-
sented by 9 Stones from 1989, a fire was set on the metal printing bed, and
the smoke, ashes, and soot run through the press. Here we think of
Thoreau, that abiding interest and inspiration, and Cage's telling of
Thoreau's ambivalent relationship to fire.92 Having accidentally set the
woods near Walden Pond aflame, Thoreau watched helplessly as it spread
in the dry tinder, admitting a secret pleasure at the crackling sound of the
conflagration and the spectacle of the consuming flames. Joining the vil-
lagers who later came to put it out, Thoreau mused that fire was "nature's
broom," and "without a doubt an advantage on the whole," clearing out
the deadwood and the unproductive brush. Thoreau absolves himself of
guilt, for might not a bolt of lightning have had the same effect? In telling
the story, Cage seemed to suggest that it was not the fire that interested
him. The scale of the blaze, and who set it, were also unimportant, and
should not draw our attention. Cage wanted to point, with a delighted
smile, at the new growth that was coming up as a result.
As it happened, Cage's eightieth birthday was his last, but he was as
eager to go as to stay. When one interlocutor admonished Cage at a public
forum that "silence equals death," echoing the slogan of the AIDS activ-
ists, Cage responded, "in Zen, Life equals Death." When the questioner
continued, challenging Cage to stop his innovating and suggesting that he
was "ready for the grave," Cage smiled and said, "I couldn't be readier."
Cage was not the first American artist to celebrate silence, but he was cer-
tainly one of the most moving, entertaining, inventive, genial, productive,
and encouraging: "Everything you open yourself to is your silence."93
By forfeiting authorship he confronted authority; by giving up his claim
on sounds, they became ours. Certainly the abstract expressionist ego,
still the instantiation of the modern in American art, was never quite
the same.
90. Cage, quoted by Julia W. Boyd,John Cage: The New River Watercolors (exhibition cat-
alogue, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1988), p. iv.
91. Cage credits this phrase to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. See BB, p. 100.
92. See Cage, "The Future of Music," Empty Words, pp. 186-87. Brown's essay on Cage
first brought this fascinating passage to my attention.
93. Cage, speaking informally at the Stanford Cage symposium, 31 Jan. 1992.

132.174.254.12 on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:51:17 UTC

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Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego

Author(s): Caroline A. Jones

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343900

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Meet the (De)Composer

Buckminster Fuller once described the breakfasts he enjoyed with

Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993)

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Caroline A. Jones is assistant professor in art history at Boston Uni-

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Pilgrims of the Technological Sublime

From differing beginning points, towards possibly different goals,

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Cage was photographed at Black Mountain in 1948, that summer of

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aggressive, mechanistic intervention. His technical intrusion into the "nat-

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mined by manufacturers and enforced by piano tuners, was irrevocably

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painted "as a kind of exorcism" into his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-Cage

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It was in this spirit that Pollock praised "the formal qualities" of

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Cage, "the Club," and the Abstract Expressionist Ego

That Cage was an important member of the abstract expressionist

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29. Gibson, introduction, Issues in Abstract Expressionism, p. 59 n. 1.

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subjectivity-a complex, discursively constructed, and ever-shifting

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ful mythos, but even the hyperintellectual Ad Reinhardt could be por-

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Harold Rosenberg, whose commitment to existentialism led him,

38. Quoted in Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, unpaginated galleys.

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small cooperative school was named, according to Motherwell, "to empha-

43. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, introduction to "Artists' Sessions at

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FIG. 3.-Robert Motherwell, Elegy to Spanis

potency of creative (and procreative) m

Hemingway before him, never surpassed the inte

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prepared answers regardless of the question asked."'46 "I have nothing to

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gave meaning to nothingness, as Sartre's title suggests, precisely through a

50. See Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, p. 98.

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But although death was certainly part of Cage's bodiless "nothing," it

To the yawning existentialist void, Cage merely yawned. The death of

Noise, Silence, and the Body

"The highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty."

The first part-on what Cage finished-is finished. The second

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55. On the engendering of Duchamp as a feminized "father" for postmodernism, and

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???: .?: ...

FIG. 5.-Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. E

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aphor for communication from the external world.58 Rauschenberg's

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