Extravagantly praised and vilified for his pioneering musical accomplishments, John Cage is only beginning to receive his due as a catalytic conceptual artist. Working with either sounds or images, his goal has been the transformation of life into art and his ideas have inspired a generation of musicians and visual artists. "Mr. InterArt" was the apt introduction he received recently before an audience at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cage is probably best known in the popular mind for such feats of musical derring-do as 4'33''. This 1952 performance, consisting of silence in three parts, was intended to focus attention on the ambient sounds of the auditorium and its inhabitants. It is difficult to determine whether this achievement was more crucial, say, than his invention of the "prepared" piano (he placed objects inside the instrument to alter its sounds), but it was typically framed in the most resonant of terms. "Music goes on all around us," he told one interviewer, "It is only listening that stops."¹ From there it is but a small step to the proposition that art surrounds us, although seeing stops--a step that Cage did not hesitate to take.

In 1952, he created what is widely regarded as the first happening at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and the poets Charles Olson and Mary Caroline Richards were his collaborators in a theatrical event that paid homage to simultaneity through auditory and visual overload. Such work offered a sort of antidote to the spiritual and quasi-religious orientation--some would say excesses--of the then-prevalent abstract expressionist aesthetic. It also affirmed Cage's rejection (as all his work does) of art rooted in subjectivity or self expression. The fluxus movement, with its emphasis on wit and ephemerality as seen in the work of Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and others, is inconceivable without Cage.

Operating within cosmopolitan visual art circles as frequently as within the milieu of music, Cage's first New York concert was characteristically held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Early on, he recognized that his musical ideas "seemed more related to modern painting than to anything else" and likened the silences in his compositions to negative space in sculpture.² He has written widely about Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg--visual artists with whom he has been closely connected. And it was Duchamp who emerged as one of the greatest influences on his thinking.

Duchamp, with whom he played chess regularly and, apparently, not too well, both exposed and altered the workings of art by the exhibition of his "readymades." The interest in expanded perception and the creation of art ecologically fashioned from the world dovetailed with the second great influence on Cage's thinking, Eastern philosophy.

During the forties, he attended D.T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen, which introduced the subject to Americans. When confronted with the first English translation of the I Ching, Cage was overwhelmed. "The moment I opened the book and saw the charts and the hexagrams...I saw a connection with the charts I had been using...It was immediately apparent to me that I could devise a means of composing by using those means."³ Chance operations based on the I Ching have since been his essential modus operandi.

He was also profoundly impressed with the Indian notion of the function of music as a way "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences."⁴ To implement such a goal, he turned to the Indian commentator Coomaraswamy, who wrote that "art should imitate nature in her manner of operation" (as opposed to her appearance)⁵. If there is a single direction underlying all of Cage's art, it is this one.

In 1978, Kathan Brown, the owner and director of Crown Point Press in Oakland, invited Cage to make etchings. Although he had pulled a few prints in his time (the Automobile Tire Print, 1951, in collaboration with Rauschenberg, and the Mushroom Book, 1972, a portfolio of lithographs for which he created a visual text), Cage had never done anything remotely like etchings before. He took to printmaking with the zeal of the converted. Over the last five years, he has produced no less than eight series of etchings and several miscellaneous prints.

His first series of 1978, Seven Day Diary (Not Knowing), is the visual record of a crash course in etching. Cage's own description of his unorthodox working methods suggests how chance operations were used and would be used in prints to come:

Toward the end of the first day, I Ching chance operations were used with respect to two techniques, hard ground and drypoint, determining the tool to be used and the number of marks on a copper plate to be made with it. When, through chance operations, the use of a tool previously used was indicated, that fact concluded the use of that particular technique. All marks were made without looking at the plate...On subsequent days a distinction between short, medium and long marks was made and chance determined. On each day a new technique...was added to the first, so that on the sixth day all seven were used in combination.6

Chance operations also determined the position of the tiny images on the paper and which of the techniques (soft ground, hard ground, sugar aquatint, dry-point, and photo-etching) would be utilized and which would be omitted on the seventh day.

In just a week, the condition of "not knowing" had been less eradicated than embraced. Writing about Rauschenberg, Cage noted that "Modern art has no need for technique. (We are in the glory of not knowing what we're doing).⁷" Like many artists, Cage believes that technique is solely a means to a larger end. Unlike so many, he acts in accordance with this belief.

When Cage arrived at Crown Point Press, he brought with him a musical score he considered suitable for etching. (His sometimes pictorial musical scores had been widely exhibited throughout the 1970s.) Score Without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, created concurrently with 7 Day Diary, consists of two columns of six horizontally aligned rectangular bars inscribed with images from Thoreau's journal that function as notes. Chance determined the intaglio process employed to transfer each drawing to the etching plate and the color of each image. Score is not simply beautiful but might be regarded as Cage's (speedy) coming of age as a printmaker. It represents both the acquisition of skills and the beginning and end of his attempts to transpose musical forms into visual, etched ones. (Lately the etchings have begun to influence the musical compositions, enabling Cage to treat a score as a field--rather than a figure and ground configuration--to be entirely covered with sound.) It also marks the introduction into his etchings of thematic material he feels passionately about, Thoreau's journal.

Cage was introduced to the journal by poet Wendell Berry in 1967. He is drawn to Thoreau both by his love of nature (and natural process) and by his anarchic streak. Cage invoked both in this anecdote: "Thoreau once said that people are like fruit and the government is like a tree. Fruit ripens and falls away from the tree."⁸

One also senses a similar interest in the literal and concrete rather than the symbolic or metaphorical by both Cage and Thoreau. Cage concluded his long essay on Rauschenberg with the admonition, "Not ideas, but facts."⁹ Thoreau died, according to Cage, with an astonishingly specific sounding and uncompleted tome on the taste of wild apples. He illustrated his voluminous journal with thumbnail-size sketches of natural phenomena--ice cracks, bird tracks, feathers, even the effects of fungus on birch bark.

It is to these drawings that Cage turned for his second series of etchings 17 Drawings by Thoreau (1978). For this edition of photo-etchings, chance determined which images from Thoreau would be used, the amount of enlargement each received, their orientation on the plate and the density and colour of the ink. Because Cage consulted his computerized I Ching tables to select individual colours for each of the images each time it was used, every print is uniquely coloured. These are Cage's most organic looking works. The literally biomorphic nature of the imagery suggests the randomly composed effect of luxuriantly dyed biological specimens seen under the abstracting gaze of the microscope.

Cage went on to complete three additional series utilizing the Thoreau drawing--Signals (1978), Changes and Disappearances (1979-82), and Déreau (1982). Beginning with Signals, formal and geometric elements come into play. The Thoreau drawings are augmented with circles and lines made by dry-point and engraving respectively. The extremely spare works contrast sharply with the baroque multiplicity of the Changes and Disappearances series.

For the thirty-five prints in this series, an increasing number of variables intrinsic to the processes of engraving, dry-point, and photo-etching (in the case of the last, lens, f-stop, exposure time, enlarger position, and etching time) was subjected to chance operations. The most complex variable of all was the number of plates used for each of the prints. Eight plates, the exact size of the unusually shaped and coloured paper Cage had selected, were cut into sixty-six smaller plates of differing size and shape. Subject to chance, each print might have included anywhere from one to sixty-six plates containing images from Thoreau's journal or curved or straight lines etched by Cage.

Mention should also be made here of the concurrently printed series On The Surface (1980-82). Attracted to Mark Tobey's work, Cage wanted a marked, but minimal, virtually image-free effect. Recycling irregularly shaped scraps of plates, some scratched, Cage devised a complex grid system to enable chance operations to position the plates. The nearly monochromatic compositions that emerged in relief are rhythmic and the prints sensuous.

Déreau, the title hybridizes décor and Thoreau, is likely the culmination of Cage's incorporation of Thoreau's drawings within his etchings. The series both distils the visual density of Changes and Disappearances, because of fewer elements and variables, and makes use, for the first time, of unchanging elements--a horizontal line, a circle, and the curved lines derived from dropping a yard of string on the plate (a tip of the hat to Duchamp's Stoppages).

Cage's four series of Thoreau-related etchings are remarkable for their variety. Each is unmistakable. Signals's pictographic economy evokes primordial sand paintings or cave drawings; 17 Drawings by Thoreau's enlarged imagery attests to the purposes of the drawings as natural history; the multiple layers of Changes and Disappearances's complexity affirms one of its purposes as an investigation into the complexity of the etching process itself; and Déreau summarizes and clarifies all of these concerns.

This is not to suggest, however, that the works do not immediately announce themselves as Cage's. They do. They have a style that at its most fundamental might be described as abstract, flat, and all-over, adjectives that can also be applied to the work of the artists Cage most admires, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Tobey.

The use of chance operations is, for Cage, less a way of making himself anonymous than a movement toward freedom from the constraints of self. He proceeds from choices about paper or imagery; then, selecting the variable to be subjected to chance, he functions like a computer. The quality of his input, of course, determines the quality of his output. (In Kathan Brown's words, "He sets it up so it can't fail."¹⁰ ) What Cage seeks in his reliance on chance is not images without an identifiable look but images free from visual bombast, expressionism, and closure. In short, he favours art that is allusive and open-ended.

He is also devoted to beauty. Discussing Ryoanji--a series of black and white dry-points begun in January 1983 and based on the repeated tracing of rocks positioned by chance on a grid--he spoke of aesthetic failure: "At first everything failed miserably," he said, "It looked like the work of a child, an untalented child."¹¹ Through perseverance, or the reprogramming of the computer, the problem was resolved. Cage is the sort of artist who would have taken very seriously Leonardo Da Vinci's advice to seek inspiration in the mottled surfaces of aging walls.

His latest photo-etching demonstrates, in fact, just that. Weatherings (1983) is based on a photograph of a curious bit of architectural detail visible from the windows of Cage's Manhattan loft. Far above street level, several frames crafted from architectural molding punctuate the classicist façade of a former department store. The variegated wall surface behind the frames suggests an Asian landscape painting to Cage, and his lyrically coloured etchings renders the subject unrecognizable. Turned sideways, the washy purple and blue 0print is a ringer for Monet's late water-lilies.

The last of Cage's recent ventures is the series HV (for horizontal vertical), also done in January of this year. Cage's first monotypes, they were printed from foams, felts, fibres, and other sorts of packing materials, rather than plates, and were inspired by the debatable idea that Tobey had similarly inked fabrics to make monotypes. The position of the elements on a grid was determined by chance, but sometimes the press intervened to knock them off kilter. The pleasure they afforded Cage was surely akin to the naïve delight we have all felt when pressing objects or body parts against the plate of a photo-copy machine.

Ethereal and spongy looking, the HV prints emphasize colour in a new way for Cage. Pearlescent taupes and ruddy persimmons seem attuned to the current fashion palette. Horizontal elements frequently suggest landscape divisions--fissure-riddled foothills endless seas or skies--and the ease with which we make such associations is disquieting. Conceptual frameworks seem to rush in to fill a non-existent void with extraordinary speed, sealing mind and eye in the process. Cage is committed to the notion of art as the last of the intellectually unmediated experiences available to us. Or as he suggested, again in connection with Rauschenberg but equally applicable to his own art, to see such work is "to learn to use your eyes."¹²