John Cage, a pioneer of chance music, electronic music and the use of non-standard instruments. Cage’s most famous musical composition is entitled 4’33’’. It is played at the piano and is divided into three movements. All of the notes are silent. The composition takes its name from the fact that it requires four minutes and thirty-three seconds to perform. The piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.

Cage also paved the way for the Fluxus movement to take place. Arguably the most radical art movement of the sixties. It’s said, “Without Cage, Marcel Duchamp and Dada, Fluxus would not exist”
Cage did this firstly at the level of contemporary music by the notion of inter-determinateness, the other through the spirit of Zen and his will to depersonalize art.

Explore the way in which Cage’s lecture’s are layed out typographically, writing to a rhythmic structure, allowing silence to occur through the use of white space. Produce a graphical outcome based on the Fluxus manifesto. Look into what may have influenced John Cage, see the pythagoras music theory.

Fluxus
[Purge the world ofbourgeois sickness, “intellectual”, professional and commercialized culture, purge the world of the dead art, imitataion artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathmatical art, - PURGE the world of euopanism!
Promote a revolutionary flood in tide and art. Promote living art, anti - art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilittantes and professionals.
Fuse the cadresof cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action.] Maciunas manifesto.
Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief. see Maciunas, Ben Vautier.

Zen
Emphasizes dharma practice and experiential (experience) wisdom. It in turn it de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge, and favours a direct experiential realization to reach enlightenment.

New Music and Acoustic Art; Zen philosopher; early use of tape recorder or radio as sound sources in composition, also worked with random procedures, based on I-Ging, an ancient Chinese book of oracles, and integrated everyday sounds into music.

PROGRESS REVIEW 21/11/08