John Cage: Every Day is a Good Day

Written in stone: perhaps the most exciting part of Every Day is a Good Day, the retrospective exhibition of John Cage’s visual art currently touring the UK, is the series of etchings and drawings Where R=Ryoanji, begun in 1983 at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Working in drypoint – cutting directly into the metal of the printing plates – Cage drew the outlines of 15 stones according to strict formulae, their places on the print determined by use of the I-Ching. The results, shown here for the first time in the UK, are quietly stunning: the feathery ghost-patterns of Where R=Ryoanji: R²2 yield to a field dense with grey as a micro-view of graphite, leavened by the sudden breathing space of its mark-free border. The series was provoked by Japan’s Ryoanji sand-garden, an artwork free of intent, whose value rests solely in its material being: its patterns, simplicity, presence. This was, in large part, what guided Cage’s visual art, and why it still so delights and refreshes.

Cage came relatively late to producing artworks, although he had been in contact with the art world since the late 30s – most significantly, in the 50s and 60s, when there was a strong bond between the ‘New York school’ of music and abstract expressionist painting. He later credited abstract expressionism, and the work of his great forebear Marcel Duchamp, with showing him the possibility of an uncentred work of art determined by the chance of a moment. The earliest prints exhibited here were made in 1969 in response to Duchamp’s death: the influence of Robert Rauschenberg’s late 50s screenprints is evident in the pile-up and layering of visual data, but they seem undeveloped in comparison to the later work on display. Nonetheless, they give a good indication of how Cage would redeploy the aleatory techniques he’d used for so long in composition in visual art. The purest and most fascinating manifestation of that approach is the smoke drawings, prints and paintings: Cage or his students would hold paper over a fire just long enough to leave the surface dappled with carbon, the hand of the flame leaving patterns more complex, more delicate, than any human intervention could create. To these Cage generally added very little, though what he did generally enhances the finished work; the aquatint series Stones and watercolour series River Rocks and Smoke reveal an inordinate richness in austere gestures – a brushstroke describes a stone’s contours, thin smears of colour hanging in an emptiness that, like the silence at the heart of 4’33”, is never empty but buzzes with a life distant from the Western conception, of strife and activity.

In a nice touch, the exhibition’s hanging is chance-determined each time it’s rehung; at the Baltic this resulted in some prints being too high to see clearly. The space at Kettle’s Yard, a series of bare white-washed rooms, enhances the warmth and richness of the work, which seems to breathe from the paper (about which Cage was very particular). The beautiful Fire, made with a heated iron ring Cage found in a scrapyard, is secreted in a low corner, its marks glowing from the paper as if the air itself had scribed them on it. Curator Jeremy Millar leaves little pot-plants and hand-written notes on the floor; there is a room with headphones playing his compositions, and films of his laughing, gentle, iconoclastic presence (including the notorious 1960 performance of Water Walk on a prime-time quiz-show). Cage’s art reminds us, with good humour, of our presence on the earth, our responsibility to take life as it is, in its uniqueness. It’s like breathing another kind of air.

“Open your window and count the stars.”