.

CAGE CUNNINGHAM KAPROW

CHANCE . OBJECTIVITY

MATERIALIZATION . DOCUMENTATION

ART CONTEXT . LIFE SITUATION

BRUNO DE ALMEIDA
 “You know, you can always
begin anywhere.”

(...)

(...)

“…Cage did when he referred to his use of chance operations as an

oracle, to mean an active principle that allows us to be guided by questions
rather than answers, by an opening-out of inquiry into a suggestive
dialogue with life principles not unlike the selective intersections with
chance that are the morphology of culture as well as biology.” 1

_3_
_4_
INDEX

6. INTRODUCTION

9. WHY CAN´T WE BE CONTENT?

12. JOHN CAGE

13. 4’33’’

15. MERCE CUNNINGHAM

16. ALLAN KAPROW

17. TIME PIECES

20. ARTIST / NON-ARTIST

CHANCE, OBJECTIVITY AND THE “DE-PROFESSIONALIZATION” OF THE ARTIST

23. ART / NON-ART

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ART-DOCUMENTATION

26. ART AS LIFE

CONTEMPORARY ART AS MASS CULTURE?

28. CONCLUSION

29. ENDNOTES

32. BIBLIOGRAPHY

32. WEBSITES & IMAGE CREDITS

_5_
 The following theoretical research paper was initiated within the subject of Spazio Sonoro
(Music Space). An optional historical-humanistic course, part of the first semester’s study-program
of the second year of Master at the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio (2011/2012), University
of the Italian Switzerland. A course lectured by professor Roberto Favaro2, who accompanied the
development of the first stages of the following study.

John Cage, Merce Cunnigham and Allan Kaprow’s works, theories and methods are used as
a motto to understand how a newfound status of the artwork was instigated by their shared interests
and researches, which ran transversally trough different types of artistic practices. These artists,
have not only broadened our understanding of what an “artwork” can be, but also questioned its
existence as physical objects, that we can recognize as materializing the conceptual immediacy of
the work.
“Chance”, was a fundamental method to them, as a way of generating compositions and
pieces independent of the author’s will. Even if it might not be evident, this attitude towards art-
making had a concern for objectivity and acted as a producer of order inside their creative process.
No urge for expression of the self. It is indifferent in motive and originated in no psychology or
dramatic intentions. The final purpose was indeed, to be freed from any kind of artistry or taste.
Nevertheless, the use of chance-operations was widely considered as a negation of the artist’s
responsibility. If technical ability and artistic virtuosity were not at stake anymore, spectators started
questioning what distinguished a common person from an artist. This distinction became even more
tenuous when a shift from a traditionally “object-based-art” started to dilute itself into the “artistic-
project”, which emphasized process rather than product.

_6_
 INTRODUCTION

In order to elaborate a personal interpretation of the work, the spectator is obliged to focus
on the continuum of narrative that makes the artwork into something other than a fixed object. The
audience is no longer confronted with an artwork but with the documentation of life in the “art-
project.”
But how can “Chance” be accurately documented? The context and the specificity of
circumstances are also fundamental to the uniqueness of each performance. Plus, very often,
the works cannot be equally recreated twice, and therefore, no documentation will ever be able to
convey the precise qualities of that unrepeatable moment. One can also say that the documentation
of something is not the thing itself. Ultimately, this disparity cannot be erased, and it is a divergence
that separates the viewer from the reality of the work.
Undeniably, Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow’s practice and pieces (intentionally) raise several
questions of value and authenticity. But the essence of any experimental work is hard to perceive
because the absence of the familiar is more palpable than the odd presence of what is actually there.
New forms in fact not only seem disturbingly wrenched out of contexts that have given old forms their
meaning, but can appear to be abstracted from “content” itself.
But transgression and discomfort are soon absorbed and digested by the ever-enlarging
cultural boundaries. Today, contemporary art has an interesting, if sometimes ambiguous, relation
to its broader culture. Even though it is still hard to grasp and understand it, art has never had a less
controversial social reception than the one we can witness in our times. Art was never so strongly a
part of the mass culture that it has sought to observe and analyze from a distance.
So, can we assume that the blurring between Art and Life, which Cage, Cunningham, Kaprow
and many others, desired, finally happening, (even if in a distorted way)?

_7_
_8_
 WHY CAN´T WE BE CONTENT?

“Of all man’s burdens, art is one of the most terrible and … most necessary. Without
it, he … could not be human. But of that burden, with effort, with skill, with intelligence,
and above all, with luck, it is perhaps possible — at least for the very old — to be free.” 3

Since antiquity, the Arts have been a powerful catalyst in the development of the culture and
civilization of its time. From the inspiring aesthetics of religious art and music, to the Renaissance and
the birth of the Age of Reason, the Arts have given way to powerful knowledge, opening the doors
for social and cultural (r)evolution. It is the Arts that continually work to challenge common beliefs,
and it is no wonder that many of the greatest thinkers and scientists in history gave tremendous
weight to its power and utility.4 Art is mankind’s greatest idea, its single lasting sentence of hope
and of something that has yet to come, the goal that eternally lies ahead. Its value is not defined by
immediate reaction. Indeed, its true achievement may only be noticed much later, in retrospection.
One of the main characteristics that set some individuals apart from its contemporaries is
simply the fact that they cannot be content.5 One might think that the strive for something that will
never be achieved and the lack of immediate recognition, would be the main source of discontentment
and not its solution. But for these individuals, to live a life without the constant questioning of its
current standards would simply be meaningless.
One of the theories that may elucidate why some of us can´t be content, is a Darwinian-
based conjecture defended by author Morse Peckham in his book “Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology,
Behavior & the Arts.” 6 It was Peckham’s idea that even though human beings strive for contentment,
the species demands that there will be somebody who can deal with things when they get “atypical”.
Somebody has to confront the threats to the species. And since humans are certainly the safest
species in the world, we have developed dysfunctional and subliminal ways of doing it. This means
that the human race has developed artistic behavior to sustain the indispensable intellectual flexibility
to solve new problems. So then, art, music and literature, become a way of teaching us how to deal
with discontinuity, anxiety, ecstasy, and all of those things that fall into the “non-content” category. In
fact, reality can be so mind-boggling that it becomes easier to comprehend it by analogy. Therefore
art exposes man to the tensions and problems of a “fictionalized world” so that he may endure
exposing himself to the tribulations of the real world.
Artists have been the ones engaging in this purposeful/purposeless-play, and the next three
individuals mentioned on this work, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Allan Kaprow were not
attempting to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but their aim was
simply to create a way of dealing with the real world through a framed, intensified and enlightened
standpoint.

_9_
“On the one hand, we applauded the idea of music as a highly physical,
sensual entity – music free of narrative, and literary structures, free
to be pure sonic experience. On the other, we supported the idea
of music as a highly intellectual, spiritual experience, effectively a
place where we could exercise and test philosophical propositions
or encapsulate intriguing game-like procedures. Both these edges
had, of course, always been implicit in music, but experimental
music really focused on them – often to the exclusion of everything
that lay in between, which was at the time almost all other music.

(…)

So if this was “experimental music”, what was the experiment? Perhaps it was the continual re-
asking of the question “what also could music be?”, the attempt to discover what makes us able to
experience something as music. And from it, we concluded that music didn´t have to have rhythms,
melodies, harmonies, structures, even notes, that it didn´t have to involve instruments, musicians and
special venues. It was accepted that music was not something intrinsic to certain arrangement of
things – to certain ways of organizing sounds – but was actually a process of apprehending that we,
as listeners, could choose to conduct. It moved the site of music from “out there” to “in here”. If there
is a lasting message from experimental music, it’s this: music is something your mind does.”

Brian Eno 7

_ 10 _
“I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I’m changing
it will be done more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about
them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This
means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually
is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a
changing sonorous environment.”

John Cage 8

_ 11 _
JOHN CAGE

John Cage, born in 1912, Los Angeles, U.S.A, was the most prominent experimental composer
of the 20th century, being also a writer, artist and music theorist that led the post-war avant-garde.
He was a pupil of some of the most radical innovators in music, such as Henry Cowell and
Arnold Schoenberg. Studying with the latter one, from 1933-35. This influential experience left him
unmoved by the conventional language of music, which was traditionally ordered and expressed by
means of pitch and harmony. In the early part of the twentieth century, tonality9 gradually lost its
power as an organizing agent, giving space for other organizing methods to evolve, of which the most
important was Schoenberg’s serialism.10
But Cage expressed his skepticism about his teacher’s system since “(…) it provided no
structural means, only a method… the nonstructural character of which forces the composer and his
followers continually to make negative steps. He has always to avoid those combinations of sound that
would refer banally to harmony and tonality.” 11
Around the 30s, Cage began to experiment with percussion instruments and non-instruments
such as the “prepared-piano”12, tape recorders, record players, and radios, in his effort to step out
of the boundaries of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. As a result,
he gradually came to substitute harmony, as the foundation of his music, with rhythm as structure,
prearranging pieces according to the duration of sections.
In these early works, Cage showed that his interest lay not purely in rhythms but in rhythm as
a construction, the “division of actual time by conventional metric means, meter taken as simply the
measurement of quantity”. For Cage a rhythmic structure was “as hospitable to non-musical sounds,
noises, as it was to those of conventional scales and instruments. For nothing about the structure was
determined by the materials which were to occur in it; it was conceived in fact, so that it could be as
well expressed by the absence of these materials as by their presence.”13
In the late 40s, influenced by Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies, Cage started
approaching the activities that make up music, as a part of a single natural process. Zen establishes
discipline as a contemplative practice that opens the practitioner to knowledge. It mistrusts dogma
and encourages education, seeks enlightenment but avoids formalist logic, embraces discipline but
renounces ego-centered control.
Cage then started considering all sorts of sounds as potentially musical, and he wanted
audiences to be exposed to all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements chosen by a
composer. To this end, he fostered indeterminacy in his music by using a number of devices, such
as the I-Ching14, to ensure unpredictability. Therefore eliminating any element of personal taste from
the performer. Cage’s views progressively altered from “particular ideas as to what would be pleasing”
toward no ideas as to what would be pleasing, a position where all results were acceptable and
accepted and “an error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.”15
The relevance of Cage’s chance methods of the early 50s, are in the placing of the “material
at one remove from the composer by allowing it to be determined by a system he determined. And the
real innovation lies in the emphasis on the creation of a system.” 16

_ 12 _
4’ 33’’

“A composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for

sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his
ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that
his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.” 17

Conceived in 1952, 4’33’’ is a tripartite composition by John Cage, which became the
embodiment of his premise that every sound may constitute music.
4’33’’ wasn’t composed for an instrument, but it is rather a piece by means of any instrument
or combination of instruments.18 The score instructs the musician not to play throughout the entire
length of the piece. And although it is normally understood as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of
silence”, the piece intends to highlight the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it
is (not) performed. By reducing the performer to silence, the hierarchy between music and noise is
erased and the sounds around the spectators become preponderant.19
Even thought this piece might be perceived as a simple reflection on silence, it was the result
of a careful consideration of the influence of Zen Buddhism, and Cage’s strong desire of creating
“a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology)”
(…) “divorcing sounds from the burden of psychological intention”.20 By deliberately abandoning the
control of how and which ambient sounds the audience will hear, Cage assures that neither artist
nor composer has any influence on 4’33’’. Resulting on a composition totally purged from any social
standards or pressures, as well as, from any personal taste or criteria. The piece is left unfinished,
open-ended, only to be completed by the audience itself. As Morse Peckham stated:
“A work of art is any perceptual field which an individual uses as an occasion for performing the
role of art perceiver” a definition that correctly leaves open the question as to whether the perceptual
field was occasioned by somebody else (a performer) or by the individual himself, and whether this
field is Art context or Life situation.” 21
4’33’’ also illustrates, in a rather essential way, one of Cage’s main concerns: duration. As
mentioned before, according to Cage, duration is the only component shared by both silence and
sound. Consequently, the fundamental structure of this musical piece consists of a structured chain of
“time buckets”, which could be filled with sounds, silence or noise. Where none of these components
is absolutely indispensable for completeness.
This simple premise triggered a radical shift in the way a score and music notation are
understood. “A score may no longer “represent” sounds by means of the specialized symbols we
call music notations, symbols which are read by the performer who does his best to “reproduce” as
accurately as possible the sounds the composer initially “heard” and then stored. (…) 4’33” is one of
the first in a long line of compositions by Cage and others in which something other than a “musical
thought” (…) is imposed through notation.” 22

_ 13 _
_ 14 _
MERCE CUNNINGHAM

Merce Cunningham, born in Centralia, Washington, U.S.A. in 1919, was an avant-garde

dancer and choreographer. After a six-year residency (1940-45) as a soloist in the Martha Graham’s
company, Cunningham formed, in 1953, his own dance company where he could freely explore new
ideas of dance and of the performing arts, namely his interest in isolated movement and “chance-
choreography.”
Since its beginning, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has regularly collaborated with
others professionals from several artistic realms such as music, theatre, the visual arts, and even the
technical sciences. Collaborating with visual artists, like Robert Rauschenberg and Bruce Nauman,
architects, designers, and musicians like David Tudor and John Cage, amongst others. In an attempt
of merging nonfigurative dance elements with musique concrète, electronic music, random sounds,
pure noise and silence.
John Cage acted as Cunningham’s chief composer and musical adviser since his first important
large creation, “The Seasons” (1947), Cage’s first piece for orchestra. And even though Cunningham
continued working with music by other experimental composers, his long-lasting collaboration with
John Cage would be the most fruitful. Together, they proposed several drastic innovations. The most
prominent of them tackled the rapport between dance and music, which they concluded may take
place in the same time and space, but ought to be created autonomously of one another. “The dance
working and the musical working of the structure were applied independently, and the results “were
brought together as pure hypothetical meaning.”23
Chance procedures, namely the I-Ching, were fundamental instruments to achieve the
sovereignty of both artistic forms, music and dance. These methods helped to abandon, not only
musical forms but storyline and other conventional elements of dance composition, such as the
binomials cause/effect and climax/anticlimax.
“Now I can’t see that crisis any longer mean climax, unless we are willing to grant that every
breath of wind has a climax (which I am), but then that obliterates climax being a surfeit of such. And
since our lives, both by nature and by the newspapers, are so full of crisis that one is no longer aware
of it, than it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and its separated
from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper headlines. Climax is for those who
are swept by New Year’s Eve.” 24
This lead to the development of what can be called “non-representative” dance, which simply
emphasizes movement. In Cunningham’s choreography, dancers do not necessarily symbolize
any historical character, emotional situation, or idea. He never used facial expressions to reach an
audience, exercising exclusively pure body movement,25 as the focus of his choreographies was
dance itself.26
Although the use of chance operations was widely considered a refusal of artistic responsibility,
Cunningham remained a serious creator who never left anything to indecision. The pieces that do not
“work” are painstakingly reworked or excluded from the repertoire.

_ 15 _
ALLAN KAPROW

“Kaprow sees most art as a convention – or a set of conventions –

by which the meanings of experience are framed, intensified and
interpreted, he attends as an artist to the meanings of experience
instead of the meanings of art (or “art experience”) because the
meaning of life interests him more than the meanings of art.” 27

Allan Kaprow, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1927, might be best described as an artist
who makes lifeworks. Embracing art as a participatory experience rather than an end in itself.
Kaprow grew from an interest in Abstract Expressionism and many-layered paintings, towards
assemblage. From 1947-48 he attended Hans Hofmann’s painting school. And through Hofmann he
began developing an expressive style of action painting, based on real landscapes and figures. He
received his Bachelor degree from N.Y.U. in 1949, where he majored in philosophy and art history.
And later, in 1952, he earned his Master’s degree in art history under Meyer Schapiro. In the mid-
1950s Kaprow started exhibiting his oeuvres, expressionist or fauvist-style paintings, at the Hansa
Gallery, an East Village cooperative which he co-founded with other young artists.
Between 1956–58, he studied music composition under John Cage at the New School for
Social Research. He was mostly fascinated by Cage’s Zen-inspired trust on chance as an (dis)
organizing ingredient. During this period, and under Cage’s influence, Kaprow’s paintings evolved
into interactive installations that he latter called Environments. Works which required the audience’s
participation as well as an integration of space, materials and time.
After his studies with John Cage, Kaprow was prepared to shift from his early environments
and assemblages, to more intricate performance events. Like his former tutor, he used chance
as a way of creating unspoken, theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic
objects, blurring the distinctions between art and everyday rituals, audience and artist, and also de-
emphasizing the role of the single artist/genius. An active participation of the audience was required
in these performances. And although they seemed to be unplanned and free-formed, they were
carefully structured simultaneously in time and space.
These special “performances”, latter called Happenings (1959) would become one of Kaprow’s
best known achievements as an artist. “The Happening is an artistic event of all-at-onceness in
which there is no story line.” 28 Its concept was strongly attached to Kaprow’s conscious refusal of the
conventional beliefs of craftsmanship and permanence in the arts.
The actual Happening lives on in Kaprow’s writings as a phenomenon located in the gap
between two verbal articulations: the scenario or projection of what the Happening might be, and
the recollection of, or commentary on, what it was. In the case of a conventional artwork, some kind

_ 16 _
of object fills this gap, something that can be preserved and staged in a museum and that gives the
illusion that it fully embodies its artistic essence.29
These Happenings were developed with the aim of a creative response from the audience,
encouraging audience members to make their own connections between ideas and events. “In
Kaprow’s eyes, the role of the viewer was concerned with creatively filling the “gaps” that arose from
the changed interrelationships of the various components.” 30 Kaprow’s first Happening was set on
the Douglass campus of Rutgers University in 1958. After that, gradually the showcase space was
abandoned for more informal and natural settings.
“The move to the outside of the gallery was part of a series of steps I had been taking since
1956. I wanted to develop an art which would depart radically from the art history and contexts we
traditionally associate with art … What was needed, I believed, was to leave the galleries, museums,
stages … for the everyday world. (Later I would include the inner “spaces” of our heads and bodies.)” 31
By 1969, Kaprow’s work had evolved so noticeably into a new stage that he left the designation
“Happening” and fostered colleague Michael Kirby’s expression, “Activity.” These Activities were
more private and involved a smaller number of participants, even sometimes excluding an audience.
In some cases, Kaprow himself was the only participant and audience, as in a 1980’s piece that
focused on his daily tooth-brushing at home.32
In 1966 Kaprow wrote that if the task of the artist had once been to make good art, it was now
“to avoid making art of any kind”.
Kaprow was above all concerned with a kind of work whose forms do not present themselves
as deliberately imposed by an aesthetic attitude. Rather, they are integral to our ordinary non-art
interactions with the world we inhabit and, as a result, seem embedded in our everyday lives. This is
in conformity with his conception of non-art that momentarily blurs the boundaries between art and
what is not art, making art come alive as something truly imbricated in the substance of our lives.33

TIME PIECES

“(…) performing Time Pieces in Berlin, Kaprow noted that the work: Concerns
human feelings, that is, each participant’s personal feelings … It is a framework
of objective moves designed to tap subjective states, states which are, however
unknown at the beginning … These moves are intentionally clinical … but the
content of the moves are basic to our existence: our heart beat and our breath.
(…) Time Pieces can be viewed as a “container” which we fill with the discovery
of ourselves … And what we will be doing, of course, throughout the Activity
is watching ourselves and each other. What we don’t know, however, is the
effect upon our feelings of conscious involvement in such time segments. This
remains to be discovered and reported when we reconvene on Sunday.” 34

_ 17 _
 “Time Pieces” was an Activity realized from 14 to 16 September 1973, in Berlin. It involved
thirty people, divided into fifteen couples, to which Kaprow distributed a bilingual instruction booklet
and an audio tape recorder, after he gave them a small lecture, partly quoted above. The Activity
booklets were not a documentation of the event itself since they were produced before the actual
happening had taken place. These were more of a photographic illustration for the piece, a sort
of illustration guidebook as to how the Activity should be developed. On the other hand, the tape
recorders were to be used by the participants in order to register all their actions. Couples had two
days to enact the Activity, after which they returned to talk about their experiences.
The score for “Time Pieces” asked couples to engage in an elaborate series of more than
forty private and shared Activities that revolve around monitoring and modifying one’s own and one’s
partner’s pulse and breathing rate. (see images on page 18 and 25) Participants are asked to note
their pulse and breathing rates during states of rest and after exertion, as well as to hold both inhaled
and exhaled breaths for one minute, to breathe rapidly for one minute, and to exchange breaths
by breathing directly into each other’s mouths for one minute, or by breathing into plastic bags and
exchanging the bags.35
Kaprow’s conception of this piece was very ambiguous in the sense that, in one hand, it was
much more open than any documentation could ever express. On the other hand, the rules of the
game were painstakingly elaborated and the participants should follow them thoroughly. It is curious
to notice that the intervenients on this event were afforded the greatest possible freedom even as the
artist exercised a high degree of control over them.
But there were some things that Kaprow couldn´t control. At several points the tape recorder
gave out, or someone’s run out of breath. In fact, “there will always be a gap between the artist’s
concept, what he asks of the participants (…) and the realization of the piece. But since the realization
should not be confused with any final result, this mismatch is not really a problem.” 36
In addition to Time Pieces as an Activity, Kaprow had also to organize a gallery exhibit for
ADA: Aktionen der Avantgarde. The objects he chose imply that he was torn between displaying
the sort of anticipatory representation of the yet-to-occur event, as in the Activity booklet, and the
straightforward documentation of the performance, recorded by the participants.
The video documentation of the performance resulted in an amalgam of the dense schematics
represented in the Activity booklet and the vagaries of the individual carrying out of the piece. Kaprow
must have been unhappy with the video, and eventually decided to remake it in 1975.
Throughout these several iterations of “Time Pieces”, Kaprow modified only the means of
documentation or presentation of the work. The textual score itself remained completely unchanged,
and it seems clear that Kaprow’s struggles stemmed not from a dissatisfaction with the score, but
from his desire to create a more material and visual means of presenting a score, so that it could
function as fully communicable performance instructions while also functioning independently as an
artwork.37
It is curious to see how the use and production of documentation not only is an aspect that
directly interferes with the activity itself, because the participants have an active role in registering their
actions. But also the use of documents such as the activity booklets and the videos, communicate
an erroneous message of what the actual event might have been.

_ 18 _
- Allan Kaprow (right) performing Time Pieces, 1973 -

_ 19 _
ARTIST NON-ARTIST

CHANCE, OBJECTIVITY AND THE “DE-PROFESSIONALIZATION” OF

THE ARTIST

As mentioned before, “Chance”, was widely used by Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow, as a
method of generating oeuvres independent of the author’s will. A chance procedure can be roughly
anything from rolling a dice, to the ancient Chinese divination method, the I-Ching, and even state-
of-the-art computer programs. Chance, as a structural operation, can even be traced back to the
fifteenth century with the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical dice game), a process using dice
to arbitrarily “compose” music. It was more recently used by the Surrealists’ randomly generated
works such as the “exquisite corpse” and the automatic writing, Dada’s linguistic games and Marcel
Duchamp’s found objects.
But John Cage’s “Music of Changes” (1951) is frequently regarded as the first piece to
be conceived mainly through random procedures. It is a piece for solo piano which process of
composition was established by applying decisions made using the I Ching, in order to determine
charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempi and densities. As Earle Browns affirms: “Cage’s Music
of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with
the “given” material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts
of control.” 38
Although it is considered a fully indeterminate, “Music of Changes” is a carefully composed
piece, using quasi-mathematical rigor. Every chart is 8 by 8 cells, the structure of the piece is defined
through the technique of nested proportions and the proportion remains the same for the whole
work. Even if it might not be evident, this attitude towards art production has a concern for objectivity.
No urge of expression of the self. It is indifferent in motive, originated in no psychology or dramatic
intentions, nor in literary or pictorial purposes. The final purpose is to be freed from any kind of
artistry or taste. It means that, personal expression, drama, psychology, are simply not part of the
artist’s initial equation.39 In theory, the works of art, which are the result of chance operations, don´t
have any pre-established meaning given by the author. Therefore, the spectator’s interpretation is in
no way associated with the artist’s. One can imply several connotations to the work on the basis of
one’s own imagination. But this meaning would not be inherent in the work itself, since the method of
creating as well as the content have been chosen arbitrarily.
Consequently one can assume that music, dance or visual arts were not relying on the
arrangement of things anymore. Instead, they gave a chance to the spectator to choose the way to
conduct what and how they apprehended these oeuvres. Art was not “out there” anymore, but “in
here”, something one’s mind does.
But, exactly by allowing space for freedom of interpretation (and therefore becoming more

_ 20 _
democratic) these experimental avant-garde oeuvres were regarded as elitist, since their value as
transcendental/poetic pieces, was simply not understood by the wider public. This situation happened
because these works denied an object-based/ aesthetic interest, in order emphasize a philosophical/
personal quest. And it was exactly this shift that made almost impossible for the general spectator to
understand what the inherent value of such works was.
The substance of avant-garde work is often hard to perceive because the absence of the
familiar is more palpable than the strange presence of what is actually there. New forms in fact
not only seem disturbingly wrenched out of contexts that have given old forms their meaning, but
can appear to be violently abstracted from “content” itself, empty. It is not until they begin to attain
familiarity, to acquire context that they seem miraculously to fill up with their own substance.40 Its
value is not defined by immediate reaction. Indeed, art’s true achievement may only be noticed much
later, in retrospection. That is why, even today, the works from the vanguards are still unpopular
amongst the wider audience.
So, if technical ability and artistic virtuosity were not in stake anymore, spectators started
questioning what distinguished a common person from an artist. And consequently, chance procedures,
were quickly regarded as a denial of artistic responsibility, which led to an acknowledgement of a
“de-professionalization” of the artist.
But what audiences did not realize was that “chance does nothing that has not been prepared
beforehand.” 41 In order to acquire chance’s creative potential, a meticulous set of sensible steps must
be prepared beforehand (as seen in the carefully thought structure of Cage’s “Music of Changes”).
And if the established parameters are not followed, the result is pure subjectivity.
It is interesting to note that Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow used chance in order to achieve
common goals, but the way chance is incorporated into their works are noticeably dissimilar. Cage
carried the chance procedures all the way through to the process of realizing a work in performance.
As showed before, in 4’33’’, chance has its more evident role during its performance, where Cage
deliberately turns the audience’s attention towards the world of unplanned sound. Acoustic silence is
altered from being an absence of sound to being an absence of “designed sound”.
On the other hand, Cunningham didn´t use chance in the performance of his choreographies
but while they were being composed. By the time the choreography is given to the dancers,
Cunningham has largely worked it out, using fortuitous methods to decide the chain of movements,
their position is space, and the number of dancers that will perform it. His dances are not missing
structure, but the arrangement is natural rather than preconceived.
The way Kaprow elaborated “Time Pieces”, has its similarities to Cage’s 4’33’’ performance’s
openness. And also to Cunnigham’s chance-established set of decisions prior to the event. In “Time
Pieces”, even though a group of rules were carefully set to choreograph the moves of the participants,
chance entered the Activity when Kaprow abandoned control and the event took place in the intimate
space of the several couples.
As we can deduce from such examples, the use of chance methods produces order and
not chaos. Even in a chance piece, restrictions are imposed by the existence of a range of existing
“material” from which the piece must be put together, and by the choice of that material that is then
determined by chance.

_ 21 _
“Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object
whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but are more
excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating
action (…), a field delineated by certain compositional “rules”. The composer may, for instance,
present the performer with the means of making calculations to determine the nature, timing or
spacing of sounds. He may call on the performer to make split-second decisions in the moment
of performance. He may indicate the temporal areas in which a number of sounds may be placed.
Sometimes a composer will specify situations to be arranged or encountered before sounds may be
made or heard; at other times he may indicate the number and general quality of the sounds and
allow the performers to proceed through them at their own pace. (…)
Experimental composers have evolved a vast number of processes to bring about “acts the
outcome of which are unknown” (Cage). The extent to which they are unknown (and to whom) is
variable and depends on the specific process in question.”42

“Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-

knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that
must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an
exercise in freedom.”43

Thus, talent and artistry are not excluded. As with any other way of composing, what counts
is the excellence of the mind and skill that go into making the process work. And, even though, Cage
affirmed to have used the so-called “chance operations” as a way of escaping the trap of ego and
individuality. He did not succeed in eliminating his “self” from his art. All his compositions have been
unambiguously his. Ironically, the chance operations that he privileged are in some way subjugated
by his artistic persona. The assortment of materials, the arrangement of structure and the overall
musical standpoint were still shaped by his stylistic predilections. To a large extent, can have the
same speech towards Cunningham’s and Kaprow’s works.
The works produced by these three figures where more about process rather than product.
This gave rise to some extremely conceptual pieces whose enjoyment required an extra act of faith
from the casual spectator. Chance had a major role, because it helped avoiding ordinary modes of
thinking, allowing for the possibility to create something more relevant than that which the artist might
have invented under conventional circumstances.

_ 22 _
ART NON-ART

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ART-DOCUMENTATION

When the typical spectator goes to a museum, he or she is expecting from the “works of art”
a so-called “aesthetic experience”. Since Kant, we know that the aesthetic experience can be an
experience of beauty or of the sublime. But it can also be an “anti-aesthetic” experience of annoyance,
motivated by an artwork that does not possess all the qualities that “positive” aesthetics expects it
to have. As we know, aesthetic enjoyment can be equally provided by both of these apparently
contradictory experiences. But in order to experience this kind of enjoyment, the spectator must
be aesthetically educated, and this education necessarily reflects the social and cultural milieu into
which the viewer was born and in which he or she lives. Most people, simply relying on one’s own
sensibility and taste, have no need for art’s aesthetic guidance. As a matter of fact, everything can
be seen from an aesthetic perspective. All things can be a source of an aesthetic experience and
become objects of aesthetic judgment.
The art that Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow sought, was one that would allow the creation
of moments of profound vision into the working of things, an exacerbation of life, rather than artistic
tour de forces that ought to be judged from an aesthetic stance. These artists “proceeded on the
assumption that at present any avant-garde art is primarily a philosophical quest and a finding of
truths, rather than purely an aesthetic activity.” 44
The conventional art practice produces objects that can be preserved and displayed in a
museum, which fully embodies its artistic essence. “In actual fact, the object comes alive and gains
real significance for us because we are prompted to imagine the mental and psychological process
and the artistic gestures that once brought into it being and, afterward, to keep recollecting and
pondering it as something that sticks in our minds and gathers around it a host of associated thoughts
and feelings.” 45
But for Cage, Cunningham, Kaprow, their artistic processes did not necessarily imply the
production of a definable, physical object that we can recognize as materializing the conceptual
immediacy of the work. According to Kaprow, experimenters like him sought a “conversion of nonart
to art (…) In other words, he saw the extreme measure he took to break away from the closed circuit
of object-based art as the only viable basis on which he could sustain a genuinely credible and
significant art in present day circumstances.” 46
Thus, there was a progression from an object-based stance to another that is centered on
process rather than product. “Our attention is thereby shifted away from the production of a work
(including a work of art) onto life in the art project – a life that is not primarily a productive process, that
is not tailored to developing a product, that is not “result-oriented”. (…) This clearly has an effect on the

_ 23 _
way art is now defined, as art no longer manifests as another, new object for contemplation produced
by the artist, but as another, heterogeneous timeframe of the art project, which is documented as
such.” 47 The audience is no longer confronted with an artwork but with the documentation of life in
the “art-project.” Therefore, in order to elaborate a personal interpretation of the work, the spectator
is obliged to focus on the continuum of narrative that makes the artwork into something other than a
fixed object or a lifeless item.
Art-documentation raises several questions of value and authenticity. Obviously, one can say
that the documentation of something is not the thing itself. This disparity cannot be erased, and it is
a divergence that separates the viewer from the reality of the work. In addition, the way an artwork
is documented, presented and archived, is subjected to questionable criteria, which are sometimes
even detached from the artist’s control.
These questions become even more complex when we deal with the fleeting works from
artists like Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow. Their unique performances simply cannot be grasped as
objects in time. Mainly because their compositions are indeterminate and context-specific, creating a
new event each time they are staged. And even though documentation is possible in practical terms,
it becomes almost unfeasible to reproduce accurately the main attributes of such works as 4’33’’.
“Cage says that a recording of such a work “has no more value than a postcard; it provides
a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something
that had not yet happened.” Cardew is concerned about the practical problems of reproducing
improvisation where documents such as tape recordings are essentially empty; they preserve chiefly
the form that something took, give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling, and cannot of course
convey any sense of time and place. (…) “What we hear on the tape or disc is indeed the same
playing but divorced from its natural context.” 48
The documentation of artworks creates yet another problem (already mentioned before on
the chapter dedicated to Kaprow’s Time Pieces) when the document itself starts being understood
not as documentation but as a self-sustaining representation of the artwork (as it usually happened
with object-based art). The documents are “judged not solely by their ability to convey the facts of an
event but also by their beauty (…). Handwritten notes and scores assessed not as thought processes
but as drawings, and more elaborate assemblages of image and text are evaluated by standards of
design and presentation that might be completely unrelated to the original nature or intellectual force
49
of the event to which they refer.” This is exactly what happened to the Activity booklets and the
video for Time Pieces. They look so complete and self-sufficient that the spectator does not feel the
need to truly experience the artwork after reading the illustrated instructions or watching the video.
This is why nowadays they tend to be considered as aestheticized memorabilia rather than as actual
documents that could be used as tools for anyone to enact the work. “For a time, it seemed that the
Activity booklets provided the solution (…) However, finding that participants often took the illustrations
in these works quite literally and tended to mimic the photographs or videos when performing the
works themselves, Kaprow abandoned the Activity booklets and ultimately forbid them to be used for
any “official” performances of his Activities.” 50
As mentioned before, chance has a crucial role in “ordering” the works of these artists. But
how can Chance be accurately documented?

_ 24 _
 The context and the current situation and circumstances are also fundamental to the
uniqueness of each performance, these cannot be equally recreated twice, and therefore, no
documentation will ever be able to convey the specific qualities of that unrepeatable moment. Even
though we only know these works because there was some type of documentation that immortalized
them. It seems that from their inception they were not intended to be documented.

Can we then assume that the only truthful way of carrying these works into the future is by our
own personal memories?

- Photographic Documentation of Allan Kaprow’s Time Pieces, 1973 -

_ 25 _
ART AS LIFE LIFE AS ART

CONTEMPORARY ART AS MASS CULTURE?

Today, contemporary art has an interesting, if sometimes ambiguous, relation to its broader
culture, comparative to the period between 1950s and the 70s. Even though it is still sometimes hard to
grasp and understand contemporary art, art has never had a less controversial social reception than
the one we can witness in our times. Is the merging between Art and Life (that Cage, Cunningham,
Kaprow and others, promoted) finally happening?
If “contemporary” is the term that stands for the death of “modern” on the public consciousness,
then it is no doubt due in part to the term’s apparent simplicity, its self-evidence. For one, it
appears to be a purely temporal marker, simply denoting the “now”, purged of critical or ideological
presupposition. It appears not to require any lengthy unraveling, of the kind that Baudelaire, for
example, felt to be required of the “modern”, whose sense of “the ephemeral, the contingent” linked
an orientation towards the future to a break with traditional values, and in particular to a break with a
cyclical conception of time.51
The boundary that delineates the contemporary is imperceptible. When there are no longer
any artistic movements, it seems that we are all working under the patronage of this singular “–ism”
that is intentionally, and factually, not one at all. This “contemporary” condition appears to be based
on the several significances of an “after”. But we also can see it as a time of reflection, hesitation and
delay. Not only because it is a consideration of the modern projects but, most of all, because “The
present has ceased to be a moment of transition from the past to the future, becoming instead a site
of the permanent rewriting of both past and future – of constant proliferations of historical narratives
beyond any individual grasp or control.” 52
Nowadays, there are different ways to assure an ever-increasing visibility and power to the
art’s world. If one considers the art biennials, and the constant commissions for art-related-buildings
from “star architects”. These serve to insert a specific urban locale into the international art-world-
circuit, which consequently, will attract, to that specific place, art members, media, tourists and
financial investment. An obvious expression of the art world’s rapid monetization is the advent of the
popular art-fairs, which are rapidly increasing in number and locations around the globe. Our whole
society is faced with an exponential amount of art-related events/venues that were once exclusive
to a small elitist group of people and now have suddenly become part of a “mass-culture”. Just as it
was envisaged by the pioneering minds of the avant-garde, as early as the 1920s, the art system is
on its way to becoming a part of the mass culture that it has sought to observe and analyze from a
distance.
In a compelling and scary form, modern capitalist society finally has an art that aligns with the

_ 26 _
audience, with the social elites that finances it, and with the academic industry that serves as its fellow
traveler. In this sense, art has become literally contemporary, thanks to its exorcism of aesthetics
alienation and the growing integration of art into culture. When, by the millions, the masses vote with
their feet to attend contemporary art museums, and when a number of cultural industries grow up
around the former citadel of negativity, fine art is replaced by something that already occupies an
intermediary region between elite entertainment and mass culture. And its signature is precisely the
frenzy of “the contemporary”.53
But the connection between Art and Life that Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow envisaged
was far away from being based on financial speculation or on the trends of the moment. Because
they understood art as not being an end on itself, but something that only memory can carry into the
future, which actively involves the audience in a deeper psychological level, rather than a shallow
involvement on a pop-up art-fair.
In any case, there is a contemporary trend that continued and revalued the premises that
arose from the minds of the 60s/70s. They are the artistic groups where participants and spectators
coincide. These groups make art collaborating between themselves and occasionally with other
groups, artists and even communities. “This type of participatory practice means that one can
become a spectator only when one has already become an artist, otherwise one simply would not be
able to gain access to the corresponding art practices.” 54 Everyday-life begins to show itself through
design and through contemporary participatory networks of communication, becoming very difficult
to differentiate the presentation of the everyday from the everyday itself. As Baudelaire once claimed:
“In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle,
55
however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it.” The artist
now shares art with the public, on the most common level of everyday experience, just as he or she
once shared it with religion or politics.
Art no longer operates in a laboratory of artists, but as intuitive and active participation in the
possibility of life. In this sense, I think our question for art shall concern what it can “become,” but
not what it “is”, and we can say that, from the beginning, the purpose of such creation will not be to
produce something that becomes a work, but that acts as a force to be integrated in many different
contexts. Such creativity shall and will continuously raise questions with regard to social life and
stimulate our consciousness of life in general, as well as our actions.56

_ 27 _
CONCLUSION

“Leaps of thought are leaps of faith, almost by definition.

For they presuppose and enact faith in the value of thinking,
the value of a particular form of thinking: one that has no
immediately realizable use value, that does not readily yield
tangible results, that does not generate capital, the kind
that you find in philosophy, art, and all forms of care.” 59

I am confident, that further into the future, our society will have an intrinsic relation to the arts
and architecture, to the point where they are inseparable from our broader culture and education.
Not because they are momentary trends or financially lucrative, but because they can enhance
the potential which lies within our own experience in the world. I believe that Cage, Cunningham
and Kaprow’s ambitions, were not simply a result of the state-of-the-art, but were indeed timeless
premises that are transversal to all societies and are important to remember.
A holistic posture and the creation of points of connection with other realms of knowledge,
might allow us to stretch our concerns to a new field of possible solutions, beyond labels and
specificities. Art is an increase of life, a competition of surprises that stimulate our perception and
keeps it from becoming somnolent. Art’s role is not to provide answers, it rather prefers to suggest
then affirm, allowing space for the viewers’ points of view.
As Gaston Bachelard suggests:
“It is better to leave the ambivalences of the archetypes wrapped in their dominant quality.
This is why a poet will always be more suggestive than a philosopher. It is precisely his right to be
suggestive. Pursuing the dynamism that belongs to suggestion, then, the reader can go farther, even
too far.” 57
As the variety of the environment magnifies in both time and space and as the structures
that were thought to describe the operation of the world become progressively more unworkable,
other concepts of organization must become current. These concepts will base themselves on the
assumption of change rather than stasis and on the assumption of probability rather than certainty. I
believe that contemporary art is giving us the feel for this outlook.58

_ 28 _
ENDNOTES

1. RETALLACK, Musicage, XV.

2. Roberto Favaro: Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Padua. Studied Musicology at the Humboldt

Universität in Berlin and Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Padua. Professor of History of Music and Musical Theatre

at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. Teaches Music History in the Faculty of Design at the IUAV (Venice).

The author of numerous books published in Italy and abroad, including Spazio sonoro. Musica e architettura tra analogie,

riflessi, complicità, with a preface by Mario Botta (Venice 2010). Suoni e sculture (Cagliari 2011). Collaborates with Rete

2, RSI-Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana. Since 2013 Head of the Department of Design and Applied Arts at the
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. (source: http://search.usi.ch/people/fbef62fa53a2a3408103107bcd35d970/

Favaro-Roberto). (7 February 2014).

3. PECKHAM, Man’s Rage for Chaos.

4. URSPRUNG, Studio Olafur Eliasson. An Encyclopedia, 10-19.

5. adjective: satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else.

6. PECKHAM, Man’s Rage for Chaos.

7. ENO, Brian, cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, XI.

8. CAGE (1952) cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 50.

9. Tonality is a musical system in which hierarchical pitch relationships are based around a tonic triad, and on

hierarchical relationships between that central triad and the seven others in a key. Tonality was the predominant musical

system in the European tradition of classical music from the late 1500s until early in the 20th century, and in modern times

has been globalized as the central vehicle for popular music. (source: Wikipedia “Tonality” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Tonality) (17 February 2014)

10. “Sounds come into its own.” What does that mean? For one thing: it means that noises are as useful to new music

as the so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that

one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor with consonance or dissonance, but

rather with Edgar Varèse who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music. But it is clear that ways must be discovered

that allow noises and tones to be just noises and tones, not exponents subservient to Varèse’s imagination.” CAGE,

Silence, 68.

11. NYMAN, Experimental Music, 31.

12. A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sound (timbre) altered by placing external objects (preparations)

between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers. Cage first prepared a piano when he was commissioned to write

music for “Bacchanale”, a dance by Syvilla Fort in 1938. For some time previously, Cage had been writing exclusively for

a percussion ensemble, but the hall where Fort’s dance was to be staged had no room for a percussion group. The only

instrument available was a single grand piano. After some consideration, Cage said that he realized it was possible “to

_ 29 _
place in the hands of a single pianist the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra ... With just one musician, you can

really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard”.

(source: Wikipedia “Prepared Piano” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano (17 February 2014) Quoting Cage, John,

and Daniel Charles (1981). For The Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Marion Boyers London.)

13. Ibid, 32.

14. The I Ching also known as the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. It contains a

divination structure similar to Western geomancy.

15. CAGE, John, cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 62.

16. HIGGINS, Dick, cited in NYMAN, Ibid, 6.

17. CARDEW, Cornelius (1663), cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 3.

18. For further information see: NYMAN, Experimental Music, 11.

19. “The third component of Cage’s compositional “trinity”, listening implies the presence of someone involved in

seeing and hearing. But need this be “the audience” as we have come to consider it? For experimental music emphasizes

an unprecedented fluidity of composer/performer/listener roles, as it breaks away from the standard sender/carrier/receiver

information structure of other forms of Western music. (…) For Cage at least experimental music is not concerned with
“communication” as other music is considered to be. He once said: “We are naïve enough to believe that words are the

most efficient form of communication.” On another occasion he is reported to have said: “Distinguish between that “old”

music you speak of which has to do with conceptions and their communication, and this new music, which has to do with

perception and the arousing of it in us. You don´t have to fear from this new music that something is bad about your liking

your own music.” NYMAN, Experimental Music, 22.

20. CAGE, John, cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 60.

21. PECKHAM, Morse, cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 26.

22. NYMAN, Experimental Music, 3.

23. Ibid, 33.

24. CUNNINGHAM, Merce (1952), cited in NYMAN, Experimental Music, 29.

25. “Though some of the dances and music are easily enjoyed, others are perplexing to certain people, for they do not

unfold along conversational lines. For one thing, there is an independence of the music and dance, which, if one closely

observes, is present also in the seemingly usual works. This independence follows from Mr. Cunningham’s faith, which I

share, that the support of the dance is not to be found in the music but in the dancer himself, on his own two legs, that is,

and occasionally on a single one. Likewise the music sometimes consists of single sounds or group of sounds which are

not supported by harmonies but resound within a space of silence. From this independence of music and dance a rhythm

results which is not that of horses’ hoofs or other regular beats but which reminds us of a multiplicity of events in time and

space – stars, for instance, in the sky, or activities on earth viewed from the air. (…) I may ad there are no stories and no

psychological problems. There is simply an activity of movement, sound, and light. The costumes are all simple in order

that you may see the movement.” CAGE, Silence, 94.

26. “The movement is the movement of the body. It is here that Mr. Cunningham focuses his choreographic attention,

not on the facial muscles. In daily life people customarily observe faces and hand gestures, translating what they see

into physiological terms. Here, however, we are in the presence of a dance which utilizes the entire body, requiring for its

enjoyment the use of your faculty of kinesthetic sympathy. (…) The novelty of our work derives therefore from our having

moved away from simply private human concerns towards the world of nature and society of which all of us are a part. Our

intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake

_ 30 _
up the very life we’re living which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desire out of its way and lets it act

of its own accord.” CAGE, Silence, 95.

27. KAPROW, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, XIII.

28. MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 75.

29. POTTS, Alex, “Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart”. Cited in MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow –

Art as Life, 27.

30. MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 75.

31. KAPROW, typescript, 1982, Allan Kaprow Papers (box 31, folder 7). Cited in ROSENTHAL, Ibid, 597.

32. KAPROW, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 219. Refers to the text “Art which can´t be Art”.

33. POTTS, Alex, “Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart”. Quoted by MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow

– Art as Life, 24.

34. KAPROW, manuscript of lecture for Time Pieces, 1973, Allan Kaprow Papers (box 24, folder 3). Quoted by Glenn

Philips, “Time Pieces”. In MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 36.

35. Ibid, 36.

36. Ibid, 82.

37. PHILIPS, Glenn. In MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 39.

38. NYMAN, Experimental Music, 50.

39. Ibid, 30.

40. RETALLACK, Musicage, XXVII.

41. Statement of Alexis de Tocqueville. (http://artquotes.robertgenn.com/auth_search.php?authid=2551) (18

February 2014)

42. NYMAN, Experimental Music, 4.

43. JUNG, Carl Gustav, cited in BACHELARD, The poetics of space, XXXII.

44. KAPROW, Assemblage (note 1), 207-208 in “Assemblage, Environments & Happenings”. Cited in POTTS, Alex,

“Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart”. Cited in MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 22.
45. POTTS, Alex, “Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart”. In MEYER-HERMANN, Allan Kaprow – Art as

Life, 27.

46. Ibid, 22.

47. GROYS, Going Public, 77.

48. NYMAN, Experimental Music, 10.

49. PHILIPS, Glenn, “Time Pieces”. In Meyer-Hermann, Allan Kaprow – Art as Life, 35.

50. Ibid, 39.

51. BAUDELAIRE, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 13.

52. GROYS, “Comrades of Time”, in ARANDA, What is Contemporary Art?, 28.

53. MEDINA, Cuauhtémoc, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses”, in Ibid, 14.

54. GROYS, Going Public, 119.

55. BAUDELAIRE, Journaux intimes, loc. Cit., p.29. Cited in BACHELARD, The poetics of space, 192.

56. FANG, Hu, “New species of Spaces”, in ARANDA, What is Contemporary Art?, p.77.

57. BACHELARD, The poetics of space, 53.

58. COX, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, 233.

59. VERWOERT, Jan, “Standing on the Gates of Hell, My Services Are Found Wanting”, Ibid, 200.

_ 31 _
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__ StarPulse.com. John Cage Biography. http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Cage,_John/Biography/ (27 November

2011)

__ The Painter’s Keys. Art Quotes: The Painter’s Keys Resource of Art Quotations. Alexis de Tocqueville Art Quotes.

http://artquotes.robertgenn.com/auth_search.php?authid=2551 (18 February 2014)

__ Università della Svizzera Italiana, USI Search\ People, Roberto Favaro. http://search.usi.ch/people/

fbef62fa53a2a3408103107bcd35d970/Favaro-Roberto (7 February 2014)

__ WIkipedia: Prepared piano. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano (17 February 2014)

__ Wikipedia: Tonality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonality (17 February 2014)

__ p.2, 4, 8, 34, 35 - Photo: celine3munta (Flickr). John Cage Partition 1. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/

celine3munta/6910517153/in/photostream/ (24 September 2014)

__ p.14 - Photo: James Klosty. Merce Cunningham. Reference Code: PHO-13466. Source: Flickr: http://www.flickr.

com/photos/desingel/6031994913 / deSingel Internationale Kunstcampus: https://www.desingel.be/dadetail.orb?da_

id=20515 (24 September 2014)

__ p.19 - Allan Kaprow, Time Pieces, 1973/2012. Source: n.b.k.: http://www.nbk.org/en/ausstellungen/allan_kaprow.

html (24 September 2014)

__ p.25 - Allan Kaprow, TIME PIECES, 1975. Source: OFF Proletkult: http://ervehea.tumblr.com/post/84035399398/

allan-kaprow-time-pieces-1975 (24 September 2014)

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CAGE CUNNINGHAM KAPROW

CHANCE . OBJECTIVITY

MATERIALIZATION . DOCUMENTATION

ART CONTEXT . LIFE SITUATION

BRUNO DE ALMEIDA