{"id":1947,"date":"2010-07-10T16:02:19","date_gmt":"2010-07-10T16:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1947"},"modified":"2010-07-10T16:02:19","modified_gmt":"2010-07-10T16:02:19","slug":"at-swim-two-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/at-swim-two-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"At Swim-two-birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBrian Dillon reviews<\/a> a British touring\u00a0exhibition of the art\u00a0of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead<\/a>.
\nTwo quibbles:\u00a0 First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33”<\/em> to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece.\u00a0 If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the outside of the gallery, then he would have made some sense.\u00a0 But Cage’s composition is not about silence, or even pure sound, for either of which a blank gallery wall might be an appropriate visual representation.\u00a0\u00a0The composition is about ambient sound, and about what sounds count as music in our culture.
\nSecond, Dillon rightly mentions that the procedures used by Cage for musical composition from 1950 onwards (and later for poetry and visual art) were based on the Taoist\u00a0I Ching<\/em>.\u00a0 But he wrongly describes these procedures as being based on “the philosophy of chance.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Although widespread, this view is nonsense, accurate neither as to what Cage was doing, nor even as to what he may have thought he was doing.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyone subscribing to the Taoist philosophy underlying\u00a0them understands the I Ching procedures as examplifying and manifesting hidden causal mechanisms, not chance.\u00a0\u00a0 The point of the underlying philosophy is that the random-looking events that result from the procedures express something unique, time-dependent, and personal to the specific person invoking the I Ching at the particular time they invoke it. So, to a Taoist, the resulting music or art is not “chance” or “random” or “aleatoric” at all, but profoundly deterministic, being the necessary consequential expression of deep, synchronistic, spiritual forces. I don’t know if Cage was himself a Taoist (I’m not sure that anyone does),\u00a0but to an adherent of Taoist philosophy Cage’s own beliefs or attitudes are irrelevant to the workings of these forces.\u00a0 I sense that Cage had sufficient understanding of Taoist and Zen ideas (Zen being the Japanese version of Taoism) to recognize this particular feature: \u00a0that to an adherent of the philosophy the beliefs of the invoker of the procedures are irrelevant.
\nIn my experience, the idea that the I Ching is a deterministic process is a hard one for many modern westerners to understand, let alone to accept, so entrenched is the prevailing western view that the material realm is all there is.\u00a0 This entrenched view is only historically recent in the west:\u00a0 Isaac Newton, for example, was a believer in the existence of\u00a0cosmic spiritual forces<\/a>, and thought he had found the laws which governed their operation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Obversely, many easterners in my experience have difficulty with notions of\u00a0uncertainty and chance; if all<\/em> events are subject to hidden causal forces, the concepts of randomness and of alternative possible futures make no sense.\u00a0 My experience here includes making presentations and leading discussions on scenario analyses with senior managers of Asian multinationals.
\nWe are two birds swimming, each circling the pond, warily, neither understanding the other, neither flying away.
\nReferences:<\/em>
\nKyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence.\u00a0 John Cage\u2019s 4′ 33”.<\/em>\u00a0 New Haven, CT, USA:\u00a0 Yale University Press.
\nJames Pritchett [1993]:\u00a0 The Music of John Cage<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge, UK:\u00a0 Cambridge University\u00a0Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Dillon reviews a British touring\u00a0exhibition of the art\u00a0of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead. Two quibbles:\u00a0 First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33” to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece.\u00a0 If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,20,56,67,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-creativity","category-music","category-prophecy","category-uncertainty","p1","y2010","m07","d10","h16"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}