September 13 - November 17, 2001

John Cage

Etchings and Monotypes

Margarete Roeder Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition John Cage, Etchings and Monotypes from September 13 through November 17, 2001; the opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 13 from 5-7PM. The exhibition will consist of a selection of Cage's graphic works from 1978 to 1992. Cage, (b. 1912, Los Angeles; d. 1992, New York), one of the foremost and singular figures of twentieth century culture, is best known for his music composition. However Cage also had a profound interest in, association with, and influence upon the visual arts. Initially trained as a painter before devoting himself to music and studying composition under Schoenberg, Cage continued his involvement in the visual arts through his work at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company where he collaborated with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. Cage's own visual work was largely concentrated in the last fifteen years of his life from the late 1970s onwards. Cage's visual works fall broadly into three categories: graphic works, the Ryoanji drawings, and the watercolors executed at the Mountain Lake Workshop. This exhibition will focus upon the prints and monotypes, almost all produced at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, demonstrating the consistency of sensibility that Cage brought to his work, and also the broad variety of visual expression achieved. The first print in the exhibition, Score Without Parts, 1978, demonstrates Cage's working method: beginning with an established form, a score he wrote four years earlier, Cage then overdrew the grid with images sketched from Thoreau's Journals, printing colors were then decided by chance operation. Thus in this one early print we see several elements of Cage's visual practice: the relationship with his non-visual work, the incorporation of pre-existing elements, be they Thoreau's drawings or discarded plates from the print studio, and, most importantly, the role of chance. In other prints Cage operated a more complex procedure for his printmaking activities, rather than simply execute an edition of an unvaried image he began to incorporate chance elements within the print production to ensure that each print was unique. Latterly his most frequent method was to employ the action of fire on the paper. In some prints, such as 9 Stones, 1989, the printed portion of the image is consistent whereas the individual sheets are individually smoked to create a "wash" of cloud-like forms across the surface obtained by smoking the paper.            "Stones" series 1989 Nor did the artist limit himself to the production of printed works on paper. In Signals, 1978, a series of 25 monotypes, each print is accompanied not only by Cage's production notes - in effect the "score" for each print - but also the copper plate used to create the finished artwork. By incorporating the conceptual and physical elements of the print's genesis into the finished artwork Cage broadened how we understand the work of art, not as a discrete object magically emanating from the artist's hand but rather as a process, disparate and complex. In a series of color collage monotypes entitled Mesostics: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, 1985, Cage employed collaged elements, found scraps, not only from his own prints but those of other artists, printing trials, indeed the detritus that fills a print studio. These elements assembled by chance demonstrate perfectly the authority of Cage's artistic practice: an experiment that could have resulted in incoherent assemblage in fact resulted in works of great refinement and visual delicacy. To produce Fire, 1985, a set of sixteen monotypes, Cage did not "print" at all, but rather, in an extreme recasting of the printer's art, laid dampened newspaper on fine Gampi tissue; after being briefly set alight the paper was then run through the press, extinguishing the flames. In this most radical of his prints Cage almost entirely abandoned his control over the printmaking process, indeed in some exceptional examples perhaps 90% of the paper has been destroyed. With no printer to direct or consistent inks to apply Cage sought to employ that most uncontrollable "matrix"-burning paper-as his means. In observing the formal and conceptual beauty of these charred papers we can see how Cage, in "abandoning" himself to the vicissitudes of chance operation also operated the most delicate level of control. Cage himself remarked that the art lay not in determining the answer but rather in the framing of the question, "If you work with chance operations, you're basically shifting the responsibility to choose to the responsibility to ask." In his last print HV2, 1992, Cage fully explored the possibility of color. Printing from scraps of discarded copper plates Cage arranged them into a simple grid formation, with the color of each again determined by chance. The uncleaned plates, bearing fingerprints and scratches - the signs of quotidian life - were printed in delicate transparent colors, filling each sheet. Unlike the lively composition of On the Surface, 1980-82, which used a similar process, HV2 achieves a limpid calm. The orderly arrangement of the horizontal and vertical planes of color evinces the designs of neoplasticism and even a variety of abstracted landscape. Cage remarked that the intent of his art was "to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens," a quality evident in these contemplative images. "Ryoku" series 1985 Kathan Brown's new book on Cage's prints, John Cage, Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind, (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2001) will be available at the gallery, $ 45 plus postage. For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery. TOP ©2001 MARGARETE ROEDER GALLERY 545 BROADWAY FOURTH FLOOR NEW YORK CITY