Julia Robinson about John Cage part IV

Due to the exhibiton The Anarchy of Silence at Henie Onstad Art Centre Feb 25 - May 30. 2010, the curator Julia Robinson held a lecture at Statens Kunstakademi.

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of "experimental" composition that not only changed the course of modern music and dance but defined a new conceptual horizon for artistic practice in the late-20th century.

The exhibition illuminates the relevance of Cage's contribution to contemporary art, which is the most extensive exhibition to be devoted to the artist since his death, and the first to focus on the historicization of the composer's oeuvre and its impact. The exhibition tracks systematically the critical developments in Cage's career: from his work with percussion (1930s), to the prepared piano (1940s), to chance and indeterminacy (1950s), to new media (1960s onward), through to the political focus that ever more explicitly informed the work in the last decades of his life. Cage ushered in formal, structural, temporal, and media innovations that now form cornerstones of contemporary consciousness. In this exhibition, his changing approaches materialize as the powerful series of conceptual catalysts through which the composer altered the terms of creative practice at large. Sound recordings, films, scores, and documentary materials provide an insight into the extraordinary scope of Cage's project. Through a chronological treatment of the scores and their realizations - from unorthodox percussion instruments, or "noisemakers," to the sounds of the environment, and from grand staff (musical) notation to mere textual instructions - Cage's breaks and innovations are juxtaposed with the art generated in his midst, revealing the many conceptual openings he created. In addition to Cage's own works, the exhibition features works that he created in collaboration with other artists. With Cage as a common denominator, Marcel Duchamp is presented side by side with leading artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol and many more.

Julia Robinson (Ph.D. Princeton University, 2008) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. She is curator of the current exhibition John Cage & Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence. In 2005-6 she curated a retrospective on the Fluxus artist George Brecht for the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, which traveled to the Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona. Her forthcoming projects include the exhibition New Realisms: 1957-62 for the Reina Sofia, Madrid (opening June 2010) and an edited volume on John Cage in the October Files series. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Performance Research, Art Journal, October, and Grey Room.

The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between The Henie Onstad Art Centre and MACBA, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and has been curated by Julia Robinson.

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Education

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• John Cage
• Julia Robinson
• the anarchy of silence
• Henie Onstad Kunstsenter