John Cage: The Sight of Silence at the National Academy of Design

John Cage and the Mountain Lake Workshop: New River Watercolors, April 3 9, 1988.
The National Academy of Design presents John Cage: The Sight of Silence, an exhibition showcasing watercolors, drawings and prints Cage created while he was an artist-in-residence at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The exhibition also includes the artist's unusual graphic musical scores accompanied by recordings of his music, photographs, and video of Cage performing and painting.

[@MikeFuller-ok6ok]

John Cage was a true renaissance polymath. He achieved notoriety and fame as an avant-garde composer, a theorist, an artist and printmaker, a writer, and a poet. He was also an expert on mushrooms and a brilliant chess player. Whew!!

[@markbrooks7157]

According to Cage himself he was not a very good chess player.

[@MikeFuller-ok6ok]

@@markbrooks7157 Thanks for the reply, Mark. So there you go, I don't know everything. Have a nice day, or evening, or night!

[@markbrooks7157]

@@MikeFuller-ok6ok you too. Cage admitted his shortcomings while playing Marcel Duchamp who was considered quite a good chess player.

[@MikeFuller-ok6ok]

@@markbrooks7157 Thanks for the info. Going off at a tangent but mentioning polymaths, the Polish-British mathematician and polymath Jacob Bronowski was a very good chess player.

[@markbrooks7157]

@@MikeFuller-ok6ok as was Brother Theodore. Are you familiar with him?

[@karlheinzweiss1344]

Beautiful work and full of Art and Life.

[@mjmp5870]

I love this work

[@rosewa]

I loved this. I knew a musician who did something similar and he stopped doing this he died 3 years latter

[@Jsdo1980]

John Cage is actually mostly famous for using chance operations to his music as well.

[@colourheists5587]

a heavy hitter hits out of the cosmos

[@colourheists5587]

towering b brilliance

[@Wilsonminshall]

Period

[@lekoman]

The passage of time is indicated horizontally in music, not vertically. You can hold your arm at any angle you want... but you indicate the passage of time in music by moving it side to side, just as Cage does in the video, not up and down. I love this video for a bunch of reasons, but the overwrought, ill-founded profundity of that moment always bugs me.

[@barcode_artist]

Funny enough that your comment not so old as video, because I was recently saw Xenakis graphic notations book and he too have that idea about verticaly representation of music! I thought about it before, and I have assumption that people from past generation, like Cage doesnt think of time in music horizontally because that just was not in common with tools that was used at that time, and tropes too. Like, if we think of birth of cinema, they are not use time so strict to story of a movie, just an example. Also, Mika Vainio, one of those person who too say about that music representation not horizontally (nor vertically if i remember correctly). Maybe we all percive sounds differently. sorry for typos and my English lvl, I'm not native speaker.

[@patriotcam1776]

I can trace a rock and call it art.

[@U2_forever]

do it

[@piyushdas079]

seriously I agree with u..this is gimmickry

[@philipconnelly1505]

Have you done it yet? That's the difference: people say the can, but they never do.

[@badsign49]

do it

[@badsign49]

He would love to see your work.

[@howyuanlok15]

The basic in Zen is irrational, non-materialistic, and a mind void of thought. When there were so many heavy stones laying around and so much of calculation and theories, you lost the essentiality of Zen contemplation. John Cage had gone to a divergent direction of emptying the mind.