January 11, 2004
Here's a short writeup of the coming John Cage festival. Cage was the master of aleatoric music - music that makes specific use of random elements, sometimes via improvisation, sometimes from the performance environment. His most famous work, 4'33", made it onto this interesting list the other day. Cage always reminds me of Marcel Duchamp, the great originator of conceptual art.
When I was in college a friend of mine adapted 4'33'' for the solo cello in an abridged form. It went on the program as " 2'16.5'' " . We all thought this was unspeakably witty at the time.
Somehow I missed commenting on that 10 unique works of art post below. I haven't seen Last Year at Marienbad, although I did see Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was the other most famous movie by that director, Alain Resnais. That was a very nice movie. I've also read Gravity's Rainbow, which is probably altogether too insane to take in completely in one reading. I liked most of it, loved a bit of it, and really didn't like a few other parts. I preferred Pynchon's first novel, V, which is absolutely a masterpiece.
Haggai, are you familiar with the French writer Alain Robbe Grillet? He was also associated with Marienbad, and may have had something to do with what was unique about it (I myself haven't seen it yet... they don't exactly stock that at my local Blockbuster). If you want a taste, read Robbe Grillet's Jealousy, should just take you a couple hours.
Also, I didn't think of it at the time, but I'm surprised Duchamp's large glass wasn't one of the 10...
I would have expected Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel before Large Glass.
The bicycle wheel thing was done a zillion times, the readymade is very much copied and expanded on... the list was about unique works rather than influential ones, and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even is definitely unique, and quite powerful... from that standpoint probably his most important work.
You could argue 4'33" has been done to death too. Even John Lennon had a shortened version.
At the time of Bicycle Wheel, I don't think ordinary objects were seen as art.
I haven't had the chance to see Large Glass, but the more I read about Philadelphia's Museum of Art, the more I want to visit it.
There's no way to do 4'33" again without doing precisely the same thing; readymades aren't that way. Also as I understand it the bicycle wheel wasn't even Duchamp's first readymade - wasn't that the sculpture Fountain? I could be mistaken. But in any case, it's all very repetitive. If you want a more precise correlate in the visual arts for 4'33", maybe check out Malevich?
It was, but Bicycle Wheel was much more widely seen and discussed. Mainly, I suspect, because urinals weren't seen as appropriate for polite company.
I had never heard of Grillet. According to IMDB, he eventually directed some movies as well, none of which I'm familiar with.
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