More matter with less art
This article is based on a talk I gave at the recent John Cage exhibition in the Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge. Cage is perhaps best known for his avant-garde music, particularly his silent 1952 composition 4′33″ but also for his use of randomness in aleatory music.
But Cage also used randomness in his art. The Kettles Yard exhibition featured wonderful film of assistants reading computer-generated random numbers off a list, which determined which of a row of stones were to be chosen, which brush to use, and the position of the stone on the paper; Cage finally paints around the stone, stands back and announces the results as “beautiful.” He also dictated the use of chance in the form of the exhibition, and Kettles Yard used computer-generated coordinates to determine the heights and positions of the pictures, removing and adding pieces during the exhibition using a random process.
