The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
One's sense of loss upon hearing of the death of John Cage reminds one, painfully and poignantly, that our age is not nearly so impoverished as some fashionable theory-mongers would have us believe. Cage was one of the great artists-an inspiration, one feels convinced- to all sensitive to his humanity, energy, integrity and joviality.
To meet Cage for the first time was to step from quiet solemnity into sudden hilarity and celebration. "And what are you doing in New York?" "I'm here for a conference on ... " "Well isn't that amazing!" Cage seemed to laugh before the punch-line, between the lines, sensing the rich absurdity of it all, enjoying the fun and surprises of existence. Another time, in Geneva, a day or so after the interview below had been recorded, and a day after I'd guided Cage to the wrong art college building for a public interview that I was to conduct with him in my version of French and his version of French, it was suddenly my turn to confront a variant of the "nightmare". None of the equipment was available: no video, no slide-projector, no overhead projector, no tape-recorder, and there I was, in a tiny cinema, ready to go, with piles of suddenly redundant tapes, cassettes, overhead transparencies and slides. "What do you suggest I do?", I asked, turning to my third-row guru, in despair. "Well", said Cage, cheerfully, "You could always improvise, you could describe the slides, read the texts, and ... " In fact, a tape-recorder was found, and with that at least and at most, I started on my way, again in my version of French. Parisian publishers grimaced, Cage smiled seraphically
Still... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline