Anyway, John Cage - blimey. I have to admit that I really only knew his 3'44", and that the rest of his music was seriously odd, but I didn't know he painted/printed too. He went to art college and always mixed with artists so it's not really a surprise. What is a surprise is that art created according to the I Ching - following the rules of chance - can be so powerful, and often beautiful.
There's a whole series called Where R=Ryoanji, based on a famous Zen stone garden in Japan. Cage made a bag of sixteen stones, all numbered, and used the I Ching to decide which stone should be picked, where on the paper it should be, and what should make a line round it. He used pencils, pens, paint, feathers ... The resulting pictures are not what you'd expect. In some Cage dropped the stones many many times - thousands I'd guess - and the paper is a mass of fine lines, almost a scrawl at first look. But then I saw that the lines had created something like a tunnel and in it, areas of mass that felt as though they were moving. Other pictures had only a few stone outlines, drawn in different colours and media - these were easier to look at, less disturbing, but beautiful.
My favourites were one of his River Rocks and Smoke pictures - all grey water and moving rocks - and his Mushroom Book, a lithograph map where words are forests. Though he wrote poetry and books about his work, I suspect he didn't trust words too much - in the films showing at the exhibition he's shown answering questions from people at various performances, and he weighs his words very carefully. He always made perfect sense but I was so engrossed I forgot to take notes, so you'll have to take my word for it that I came away inspired to think differently about what art might mean, and the role of the artist (/writer). God I sound posey, but it really was amazing!
