A John Cage Centennial Tribute

@StreamingMuseum.org
February 1 – through 2012

Curated by Nina Colosi and Tanya Toft

curated for
Composers Now Festival, NYC, February 2012

Curatorial statement

This Tribute is a collection of stories and visual and sound artworks by international contemporary artists who have been inspired by John Cage. The range of his influence is immeasurable, according to architect Frank Gehry, “I think John was questioning conventions and in questioning them he was questioning our lives and our world around us. They were very profound questions and they resonated profoundly in the art world and the music world… and every body else’s world who touched it. And I think it’s had its impact on the general public… whether they know it or not. …It’s been absorbed and subsumed into the mass culture.

The work of John Cage not only inspired artists of pop art and rock music from the 1960s, like Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth and Stereolab, as well as the emergence of electronic music in the 1970s; his work also influenced the mixing and eclecticism of postmodern aesthetic, which found its early voice in the Fluxus movement inspired by Cage. Also, the “happening” or the “event performance” was formulated early on in Cage’s compositions and has become a model for entertainment in contemporary mass culture.

Artists include: ADACHI Tomomi, Steve Antosca, Kyong Mee Choi, Phil Dadson, Lesley Flanigan, Richard Garet, Loris Gréaud, Martha Mooke, Marcin Ramocki, Phillip Stearns, Marty St. James,  Susana Sulic, Stephen Vitiello, Monica Weiss.

From August 22-26, Letters from the Field – our collective exhibition produced by the residents at the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, will run at Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin. We have invited artists to respond to six contemporary topics that address histories, futures, and fictions. The form of the artists’ responses range from written content to video, painting, sculpture and performance. Functioning as a conceptual framework to the exhibition, the publication contains artists’ contributions and essays by curators in a series of eight chapters. Read the press release here.
Image: Ruth le Gear, “Weighting,” 2012, Digital video still.