John Cage

Jeremy Millar

Irving Sandler

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

This book is published to accompany the first major UK retrospective of the visual art of the pioneering American composer and artist John Cage (1912ndash;1992). The use of chance operations, in particular the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, was central to Cage's compositional method and his approach to his drawings, watercolours and prints, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. Cage's practice is explored in new interviews with key collaborators: printmaker Kathan Brown; Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust; artist Ray Kass; and Julie Lazar, curator of Cage's 1992 'composition for a museum', Rolywholyover: A Circus. Extracts from a 1966 interview between Cage and the critic Irving Sandler are also included. At the heart of the book is a 'Companion to Cage': a selection of quotations by Cage and notes on key themes and influences from 'Alphabet' to 'Zen', making it essential reading on this important figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Published to accompany the UK touring exhibition in 2010 ndash; 2011 at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.

The Visual Art of John Cage

Every Day is a Good Day

Gerhard Mack

Paula van den Bosch

Roman Signer (Contemporary Artists)

David Toop

Jem Finer

Jeremy Theophilus

Sandra Drew

Score for a Hole in the Ground is a triple award winning work. Having been the recipient of the first PRS Foundation New Music Award, it went on to receive the Rouse Kent Public Art Award and the British Composer Award for New Media. Inspired by suikinkutsu water chimes found in temple gardens of Japan, Score for a Hole in the Ground uses tuned percussive instruments, played by falling water, to create music. Finer describes his piece as 'both music and an integrated part of the landscape and the forces that operate on it and in it'. The sound element of this piece is extremely subtle. It requires time to allow the visitor to tune their ear to the level of sound and is affected by weather and ambient noise.

Score for a Hole in the Ground

Ori Gersht

The Clearing

"The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) is a thirty-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects. It is also one of the truly amazing works of art produced in the late twentieth century. The film embodies many of the qualities that make Fischli and Weiss's work among the most captivating in the world today: slapstick humor and profound insight; a forensic attention to detail; a sense of illusion and transformation; and the dynamic exchange between states of order and chaos." "As everyday objects crash, scrape, slide, or fly into one another with devastating, impossible, and persuasive effect, viewers find themselves witnessing a spectacle that seems at once prehistoric and postapocalyptic. Millar tells us why this extraordinary film speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If history is 'just one thing after another,' then The Way Things Go is truly a historic work." --Book Jacket.

The Way Things Go

Fischli and Weiss

Jeremy Millar

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