""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural...
more""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut
