Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, claimed that anything and everything could be included in the domain of art. How is John Cage’s work an example of “art of inclusiveness”? View samples of his performances on YouTubeLinks to an external site. to inform your discussion.
John Cage: The Aesthetics of Chance and the Art of Inclusiveness
Ginsberg showed that anything and everything could be admitted into the domain of art. This notion also informs the music of composer John Cage (1912-92), who by the mid-1950s was proposing that it was time to “give up the desire to control sound … and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves.” Cage’s notorious 4′ 33″ (4 minutes 33 seconds) is a case in point. First performed in Woodstock, New York, by pianist David Tudor on August 29, 1952, it consists of three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totaling four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The composition was anything but silent, however, admitting into the space framed by its duration all manner of ambient sound—whispers, coughs, passing cars, the wind. Whatever sounds happened during its performance were purely a matter of chance, never predictable. Like Frank’s, Cage’s is an art of inclusiveness.
That summer, Cage organized a multimedia event at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, where he occasionally taught. One of the participants was 27-year-old artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). By the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg had begun to make what he called combine paintings, works in which all manner of materials—postcards, advertisements, tin cans, pinups —are combined to create the work. If Rauschenberg’s work does not literally depend upon matters of chance in its construction, it does incorporate such a diverse range of material that it creates the aura of representing Rauschenberg’s chance encounters with the world around him. And it does, above all, reflect Cage’s sense of all-inclusiveness. Bed literally consists of a sheet, pillow, and quilt raised to the vertical and then dripped not only with paint but also with toothpaste and fingernail polish in what amounts to a parody of Abstract Expressionist introspection (FIG. 38.17). Even as it juxtaposes highbrow art-making with the vernacular quilt, abstraction with realism, Bed is a wryly perceptive transformation of what Max Ernst in the early days of Surrealism had called “The Master’s Bedroom” (see FIG. 35.11).
