Introduction

The introduction to this study explores the notion of audiovisuality as it pertains to John Cage’s interaction with avant-garde filmmakers. Moving from the corporeal notion of Cage’s “everyday awareness,” audiovisuality is akin to the lived phenomenal experience. Artworks expressing such an awareness point to our understanding of the self and the lived experience. Such a framework allows for the exploration of a number of issues concerning “Cage Studies,” the flood of academic literature from the past two decades that has attempted to situate Cage’s complex aesthetic stances within 20th- and 21st-century theories of history.

Conclusion

The conclusion reviews many of the theoretical and historical issues covered in this study and ends with an analysis of Cage’s last composition, One 11, a feature-length film collaboration with filmmaker Henning Lohner that sought to capture a sense of unmediated perception in an audiovisual setting. Consisting of a series of randomized lighting cues captured through randomized shot durations and angles, and accompanied by a musical score that followed similar techniques, One 11 highlights many of the contradictory elements of Cage’s aesthetic, while highlighting the importance of the audiovisual for fully articulating the Cagean notion of audiovisuality.

“Dreams that Money Can Buy”

This chapter examines the transformation of Cage’s temporal–mathematical compositional strategies in light of the audiovisual experience of the accompanied dance and its relationship to early theories of cinematographic reality in American avant-garde cinema. This chapter moves from the interactive kinetic art of Hungarian polyartist László Moholy-Nagy, to the temporalized and detemporalized narrative space in the films of Maya Deren, and to the difference and irony in the works of Marcel Duchamp. Cage’s interaction with each of these figures informed several collaborative audiovisual works, including his radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942), his cameos in Deren’s films and close dialogue with the postwar Greenwich village community surrounding comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, and his perennial fascination with the historical avant-garde strategies of Marcel Duchamp. For the latter, Cage’s music for a Duchamp section of German filmmaker Hans Richter’s feature-length avant-garde film, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), brought together the myriad of issues surrounding his move to chance in the following decade.

The Spirit Inside Each Object

This chapter addresses the question of sound on film, that is, the optical imprint of sound in the recording mechanism within the realm of visual music studies. The conceptual critique of visual music vastly expanded in the 2010s as composers and sound artists have explored the predecessors of digital signal processing and audiovisual software, looking back to the earliest technologies that unveiled the nature of sound through the diachronic representation of soundwave structure on the optical soundtrack. This chapter begins by clarifying the historical and chronological details of one of the most cited interactions in the history of visual music studies between John Cage and German animator Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s and 1940s. Further examination of this connection reveals an important technological foundation to Cage’s call for the expansion of musical resources. New documentation on Cage’s early career in Los Angeles, including research Cage conducted for his father John Cage Sr.’s patents, explains his interest in these technologies. Concurrent with his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Cage fostered an impressive knowledge of the technological foundations of television and radio entertainment industries centered in Los Angeles. Adopting the term “organized sound” from Edgard Varèse, Cage compared many of his organizational principles for percussion music to film-editing techniques.

“Cinema Delimina”

This chapter converges on the sound-in-film/sound-on-film dichotomy, when Cage revised his aesthetic stance on multimedia sound-system assemblages in the 1960s. Framed around a conference panel in 1967 at the University of Cincinnati, Cinema Now, in which Cage discussed the current state of Underground Cinema in the United States, this chapter outlines Cage’s interaction with the “two Stans,” Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, culminating in a detailed critique of Cage’s 1965 immersive interactive multimedia work, Variations V. The chapter begins with a detailed reading of the fundamental tenets of Cage’s negative aesthetic set forth in his seminal publication, Silence (1961), exploring its implications for multimedia and intermedia theories in the 1960s. Two competing poles of interpretation of Cage’s theories surrounding chance and indeterminacy emerged from the first post-Cage generation. The first sought out a reduction of the artwork to its base materials in an act of contraction, whereas the second reached for the opposite, a total expansion of individual medium-specific artworks in a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk, epitomized by Stan VanDerBeek’s theories of expanded cinema and intermedia.

Losing the Ground

This chapter centers on the relationships between acoustic projection and cinematic space. I start with Cage’s rhetoric on the medium of magnetic tape as the second transformation of sound materiality. Building on Julia Robinson’s notion of “symbolic investiture,” I survey the divided interpretations of Cage’s platform between musicologists that decode his music according to style analysis that established a compositional logic for his move to indeterminacy and the larger debate among art historians on the split between Neo-Avant-Garde and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics. I argue that Cage’s interaction with film and filmmakers provides a meeting ground for these debates within cinematic space in two films: Cage’s score for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder and colleague Morton Feldman’s score for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Last, I examine a film collaboration I discovered with the sculptor Richard Lippold that documented his monumental wire sculpture, “The Sun,” in which Cage and Lippold applied chance procedures to the editing process. Lippold’s commission came about as a result of his split with the so-called Irascible 18 collective of New York artists, and the history of its commission and reception reflects both an ideological divide on the materiality of sculpture and larger postwar McCarthy-era politics of passivity and resistance.