John Cage: music for museums - modern art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Jill Johnston

John Cage, who died in 1992, aged 79, had long opposed the methods and choices practiced in museums and other established institutions, if not the very existence of such spaces. With his "Rolywholyover," an unusual exhibition which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the fall and travels this month to Houston and later to New York, Mito, Japan, and Philadelphia, Cage was given a chance to make his own imprint on such a space, something no comparable venue in music--his primary medium--ever allowed him.

Freely transposing, a MOCA press release calls "Rolywholyover" a "composition for museum." Cage applied the chance operations for which he was renowned, or notorious, in the field of music to determine results for his museum extravaganza; he used chance methods beginning in 1951 to produce music and word scores, and for the last 15 years of his life to decide the shapes and colors of his visual work, which includes etchings, watercolors and drawings. A selection of the latter takes up about one third of "Rolywholyover." At MOCA, the exhibition spanned three large galleries. Cage's visual work, in MOCA's Gallery B, already arrived at indeterminately in some respects, was further fortuited by its placement on the walls in accordance with computerized chance operations, Cage's final modification of his use of the I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes). Andrew Culver, Cage's computer programmer since 1982, was on hand at MOCA to engineer the methodically randomized wall layouts.

The result in all three exhibition spaces was the first and most obvious deviation from normal museum practices to be noticed by viewers. Julie Lazar, the MOCA curator whose idea it was to bring Cage there, approaching him about the project in '89, said Cage was "against linearity in museums, everything at eye level." In "Rolywholyover" the walls are covered by eccentrically placed pictures--as if the works had been thrown at the walls by a massive blower and made to stick wherever they landed, then straightened by hand to play perfectly conventionally, parallel to horizontal floor and ceiling lines. Cage's quarrel was with museums, not artists, or at least the artists he counted as friends; he wouldn't have dreamed of having their pictures tilt or look crooked.

The South Gallery, the largest of the three, held approximately 150 works by more than 50 artists important to Cage. These artists ranged from the obscure to the world famous, many living, many dead. Culver's most complex computerized "score" was applied to this gallery, with the pictures not only thrown, as it were, at the walls but subject to removal and reappearance during the run of the show, with changes of location as the score dictated. This gallery was rehung every day by three museum aides, working while the public was in attendance. The aides interpreted a detailed computerized printout not only for the placement of the pictures but also the positioning of movable transparent flat files containing Cage memorabilia. The file drawers can be pulled out by viewers, but the objects can't be touched. An interactive sound station was programmed with musical works by Cage along with pieces by other composers of his choice, so that visitors could create personalized sound collages.

Approximately half the total number of pictures in the South Gallery were displayed at one time, the rest stored in an archival area on movable walls. I witnessed a visitor attempting to see a Mondrian painting that was pretty much hidden from view in this archival area when a guard shooed her away. Possibly she consoled herself with another Mondrian that was on full display, although it was well above eye level. Binoculars or stilts might have helped for looking at some works. And as in all Cage compositions, there is no contextual coherence to the show, either arthistorical or individual. The context rather is Cage's own methodology, responsible for an ensemble consisting of unrelated works, unified by his own design, which viewers may know about but which they have no way to see at close range or to understand. What concerned Cage, in this outcome, as in all his outcomes since the early '50s, was the lesson he hoped to teach an unsuspecting public about the importance assigned to things and people. Chance, like natural disasters, is a great leveler of all it touches.

An idea of equality or nonhierarchy is supposed to come across where you have works by such hallowed greats as Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Morris Graves, Joseph Cornell, Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Paul Klee, Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, cheek by jowl with such lesser-known artists as William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, Alison Knowles, Lois Long, Irwin Kremen, Marsha Skinner, Ellsworth Snyder, Fanny Shoening or Jackie Matisse. Of course, most of Cage's choices are the venerated and recognized. Those who are not have very special Cage career-related reasons for being included: old supporters, admirers, collaborators (either of his or of his partner of 45 years, Merce Cunningham). Not surprisingly, most of the art works, including his own, are abstract, with a special preference for allover work, in which no center or focal point is manifest. The whole collection is a reminder that chance methods can only be practiced on chosen materials, which inevitably point to biography. This show is, finally, a portrait of Cage, of his choices in life, his image of himself through his heroes and proteges, and of his oxymoronic utopianism that embraces the unreal notion of anarchy.