1. American composer, thinker, writer, and artist. Although his creative activities were diverse and varied across mediums and genres, Cage is probably still best known for his 4’33”, first performed in 1952 by the respected pianist David Tudor, in which the performer makes no deliberate sounds but only indicates the three movements of the piece. Cage’s belief in nonhierarchy and nondiscipline had much to do with his studies of Eastern philosophy, as it was interpreted for Western audiences by the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy and especially of D. T. (Daisetsu Teitaro) Suzuki.

Cage studied Zen Buddhism with Suzuki when the latter was a visiting professor at Columbia University in the late 1940s. At the beginning of the 1950s Cage also began to study the I CHING. Throughout his career, the Chinese Book of Changes was used as the source of his CHANCE operations in musical and artistic compositions. Cage was an important mentor, collaborator, and catalyst for many artists of his own and subsequent generations—most prominently painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and dancer Merce Cunningham. For this reason, even though he himself did not produce a clearly distinguishable body of “works,” Cage is considered a crucial figure in the art of the second half of the twentieth century, part of a historical lineage that connects him to DUCHAMP and BEUYS.

2. Huang discusses Cage’s 4’ 33” in his essay “On the Question of Language in ‘Art’” (excerpted in translation in this volume). He understands Cage’s “silence” in relation to the CHAN Buddhist saying “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” He writes, more specifically: “Questions of art will disappear only when one gains an insight into the emptiness of art. Insight enables everything to disappear, whereas sudden enlightenment makes everything come into view again.” Written in the late 1980s, while the artist was still living in China, the essay may be thought of as Huang’s daring rejoinder to dematerialization and the critique of the institution of art—the main aims of Conceptual Art. Cage’s use of CHANCE in his work and the aesthetic and epistemological role he played in bridging Zen and its notion of nondetermination with modern art make him a mirror image of Huang, who from early on strategically questioned the cultural and historical specificity of modern art through his antichronological, anticontextual thinking.

I-Ching

Chance

Chan

Beuys, Joseph

Wheel

Large Turntable With Four Wheels

Roulette Wheel WIth Six Criteria

Duchamp, Marcel