John Cage Visual Art

“What I’m proposing to myself and to other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.” –John Cage, 1992

John Cage advocated paying attention to the world around us, and “to the life that we are so excellently living.” He is mainly known as a composer who affected the course of music in our time, but he also lectured, wrote commentary and poetry, and made prints, watercolors, and drawings. He died in 1992, but his work continues to affect people conscious of shaping their own lives. Cage worked at Crown Point Press, publisher of fine art prints, every year from 1978 until his death. During that period he produced 27 groups of prints, mostly etchings, totalling 667 individually composed works of art. Kathan Brown worked with Cage on these prints that make up the largest and most sustained aspect of his visual art. In this book, she speaks from her own experience about how he worked. The many illustrations make it easy to see what she is talking about, and she often uses Cage's own words to describe particular works or reflect upon the nature of his art.