[Allan Kaprow, ed]
Prepared Box For John Cage
Cincinnati, USA: Carl Solway Gallery, 1987
[83] pp., 21.5 x 20.5 cm., loose-leaves in box
Edition size unknown
Produced as a deluxe catalogue for the exhibition "Tribute to John Cage", organized by the Carl Solway Gallery at the 1987 Chicago International Art Exposition, this boxed portfolio served as a way to honour Cage on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday.
The participants are associates and admirers of Cage, primarily comprised of artists affiliated with Fluxus (Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Giuseppe Chiari, Henry Flynt, Peter Frank, Geoffrey Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Joe Jones, Shigeko Kubota, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Fredric Lieberman, Larry Miller, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, and Peter and Barbara Moore), Pop Art (Jasper Johns, Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and George Segal) or both (Robert Watts, Ray Johnson).
There are also contributions by artists associated with Happenings and Performance Art (Laurie Anderson, Allan Kaprow, Per Kirkeby, Carolee Schneemann) and the Nouveau Réalists (Jean Tinguely). Cage's lover Merce Cunningham contributed, as did curator Anne d'Harnoncourt, composer Christian Wolff and writers Dore Ashton and Allen Ginsberg. Other artists included Dorothea Rockburne, Christo, Richard Long, Tom Marioni, Robert Morris, and Louise Nevelson.
Kaprow served as the editor, initiating the project with a letter sent to 100 friends and colleagues:
"The Carl Solway Gallery is organizing an exhibition in honor of John Cage for the Chicago International Art Exposition in Nay, 1987. Many of John's friends and colleagues are assisting in the preparation of this exhibition by making new works, lending existing works, contributing statements or critical pieces for reproduction in the catalogue.
A number of us who are contributing have always had a keen interest theoretical and historical discourses among the arts of our time; and John has obviously played a key role in them. It would be of great value on this occasion to examine with care the radical shift he made possible in all the arts of the late 20th century. His influence is regularly acknowledged everywhere, but rarely in detailed or evaluatively. (For example, precisely how he has affected Fluxus, the Happenings, Sound Poetry, the New Dance, experimental film, and within what theoretical frameworks?). I'm writing to you, therefore, hoping that you'll find it intriguing to prepare for the catalogue a serious critical or speculative piece on the intellectual dimensions of John's teachings, essays and music, seen as a whole.
In my own case, I would like to look at the idea of chance, not just as a method, of chance operations, but at its philosophical implications, that of relinquishing the traditional control and ordering we normally associate with art making. I'd also like to account for the effect of John's early use of radios and other non-musical instruments, as a "permission" to go all the way toward integrating everyday life and art, to the extent that no art be apparent or necessary."
Paul Sharits' contribution is a 35 mm photographic slide of one of his filmstrip projects (pictured above). Ginsberg contributed a series of photographs from his kitchen window. Claes Oldenburg’s sketch “Colossal Monument with Mushroom and Screw” alludes to Cage’s use of nuts and bolts in his prepared piano works, as well as his interest in mycology. Other contributions include personal anecdotes ("he curved a dome of music into infinity" -Milan Knížák), images, games, poems, essays, and compositional scores.
The works are housed in a cardboard box held together with red, yellow and blue rubber bands, over an image of a street map of Chicago. This graphic relates to the felt-tip pen work by Cage from 1978, titled
A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-One Waltzes and Fifty-Six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity (see below).
To create the work, Cage assembled (through 'chance operations', naturally) a list 427 addresses and arranged them into ten groups of two, sixty-one groups of three, and fifty-six groups of four. Performers are instructed to visit the locations, listen, perform sounds or make recordings.
The reader must remove the bands to access the contents, but can also rearrange them to alter the street grid, or possibly place them on the open end of the box and pluck them like a home-made guitar.
