The Visual Art of John Cage at CCS Center Galleries

John Cage. New River Watercolor, Series 1, #3, 1988. Watercolor on paper. (All images courtesy of the John Cage Trust at Bard College.)

Most people know John Cage (1912-1992) as one of the twentieth century's most important and original avant-garde composers and thinkers. Fewer know that he was also a visual artist, having regularly made works on paper, plexiglass, and other materials starting in the late 1960s and until his death just three weeks shy of his 80th birthday. "Nonethingtoseeness: The Visual Art of John Cage" at CCS Center Galleries presents examples of his visual art for the first time in Detroit.

Like his musical compositions, Cage's visual art typically employs aleatory techniques as part of the creative process. The series "Changes & Disappearances" (1979-1981), for example, uses the Chinese I Ching (also known as The Book of Changes) to determine the placement of small printing plates on paper whose impressions were arranged and rearranged in layers in an additive process. The individual pieces evolved over time without preconceptions as to the final images.

The series "Strings 1-62" (1979) takes its cue from Marcel Duchamp's 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) (1913-1914). Again the I Ching provided direction for dropping paint-soaked strings from a ladder onto watercolor paper to create a sequence of monotypes bearing the traces of free fall.

The trace is also central to a series of works done in the mid-1980s in which Cage used fire and smoke to register an image either directly onto the paper or indirectly off the plate. This seemingly simple (even simplistic) device results in veils of tone backgrounds reminiscent of post-painterly abstractionists such as Helen Frankenthaler and to a lesser extent Morris Louis. Later works in which hand-drawn images are overlaid on smoked paper, as in 9 Stones 2 (1989) and River Rocks and Smoke 4/13/90 (#4) (1990), are especially evocative in that regard.

Perhaps the masterworks in Cage's visual oeuvre are the many pieces he executed inspired by the famous Zen rock garden of the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. Beginning in 1983 and continuing on up to his death, Cage made hundreds of works, both unique and in multiple edition, based on the motif. In addition to the I Ching, Cage employed mathematical formulae (specifically powers of 15, the number of stones in the Royan-ji garden) to dictate the placement and quantity of images comprising individual works.

My favorite pieces are those done for the "New River Watercolor" series of the late 1980s. This series of some 50 works was begun as part of a painting workshop at Mountain Lake in Virginia. Cage gathered stones from the New River that courses through Appalachia and used them along with chance operations dictating the type of paper, colors, tools, and techniques to make watercolors, some of them quite large, of minimalist beauty. The knockout is New River Watercolor Series II, #2 (1988), a six-foot expanse of white paper simply punctuated by a broad swash of black at the top that extends to the right edge with the outline of two stones, one done in red, the other in green, suspended below.

John Cage. 9 Stones 2, 1989. Color spitbite and sugar lift aquatints on smoked paper.

In addition to the works intended to be purely visual, the show also includes a couple of pieces that doubly function as musical scores. Score Without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku (1978) is based on fragments from Henry David Thoreau's Journal. The piece has 23 elements to be assembled by the conductor. It has been performed by the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras. Fontana Mix (1981) is constructed of silkscreen on paper and plastic; it uses curved lines and random dots on transparent sheets to be superimposed on a grid and thereby indicate differences in tone, duration, and volume of sound. (The 1974-1975 composition Etudes Australes also uses the technique, based on star maps of the Australian sky, and is available on a four-disc CD issued last year by Nonesuch.)

Tying all of Cage's life work together, including the visual, is the Zen principle of non-attachment (Nekkhamma). Chance operations offered a path of "right intention" for Cage to relinquish control over his compositions, releasing their expressive possibilities into the universe and away from the narrow proprietary authority embedded in Western notions of the Artist handed down from Romanticism (and not coincidentally capitalism as well). Non-attachment underlies Cage's embrace of silence, the opening up of individual being to the common experience of environmental ambience, a way to get the ego quite literally out of the way. As Cage (decades before August Rush) once said: "Music is all around us; if only we had ears."

"Nothingtoseeness" has a very personal significance for CCS Center Galleries director Michelle Perron, who is celebrating her 15th anniversary at the venue's helm. Cage once spent the night in her childhood bedroom while she was away at college. (Her mother, the noted art patron Anne Spivak, hosted many visiting artists through the years; she also had the distinction of being the first chair of what is now the DIA Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art after the death of its founder and longtime previous head, W. Hawkins Ferry. Cage was in town for one of his many visits to speak and perform at the DIA.) Perron later worked for Cage's partner, the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham, and was at the Cunningham Dance Foundation office the day Cage died.

For this exhibition, Perron took a page from Cage's playbook and used chance operations, in her case the rolling of dice, to select and install the work. Chance operations will be used to reinstall the show on a weekly basis, the traces of which -- nail holes, wall-mounted checklist numbers, etc. -- over time will become a score of sorts for mapping the visual equivalence to silence, the "nothingtoseeness" of works no longer there. One thing that shouldn't be left to chance, however, is seeing this show, preferably more than once.

"Nothingtoseeness: The Visual Art of John Cage" is on view until October 19, at CCS Center Galleries on the Walter and Josephine Ford Campus, College for Creative Studies, Detroit. A free catalog is available. Free admission. Call 313 644 7800 for information. Also visit Artsy for current information.

Joseph Bernard: BASEDONATRUESTORY!

The Brooklyn Rail has published my review of Joseph Bernard's two-part exhibition BASEDONATRUESTORY! The exhibition took place last fall at the Art Gallery of the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts and Center Galleries at College for Creative Studies. If you're not hip the to Rail, you are really missing something. It started coming out in October 2000, not long after I moved to Brooklyn to go the New School. The list of contributors associated with the publication is quite amazing, some of the top people in American arts and letters, all of whom work for the love of ideas. When I lived in Brooklyn I always wanted to contribute, as I knew one of the film editors, but could never seem to find the occasion. Yet now that I'm in the D, I've had a couple of opportunities to play. It's cool. Also, this spring the Rail's publishing arm, Black Square Editions, will be issuing fellow Kresge Fellow Lynn Crawford's new novel, an excerpt from which she read at the DIA during the literary event I curated there last October. But back to Joe....

Bernard's recent work is in my opinion the best he has ever done. He's really focused in on a format that provides coherence to the work but he's mixing up imagery, techniques, and mediums with a mastery that has opened up seemingly endless horizons of creative possibility. The Rail only published one image. So I put a few more below to give a better sense of what the recent work is about. (All works acrylic, ink, and objects on wood panel. Images courtesy of the artist.) For more on Joseph Bernard, go to his website.

Angola, 2009

Alterpiece, 2009

Nine Very Deep Drums, 2009

Chief, 2009

Still, Still Moving, 2010

Scattered Ashes, 2010

Death Chant, 2010

The Art of Dead Labor

Dylan A.T. Miner, Damos Gracias (Wal-Muerto), 2007, relief print on recycled grocery bag. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

-- Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol I, Chap X, Sec 1

Although the exhibition of work in the CCS Alumni and Faculty Hall by artist/activist Dylan Miner (which ran concurrently with the Center Galleries show of Todd Erickson and Faina Lerman I previously reviewed) closed a couple of weeks ago, I still wanted to write about it. Miner went to CCS in the mid-1990s but got his BA at Western Michigan University and then an MA and a PhD at University of New Mexico. He now teaches in the Residential College at Michigan State and is also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, a group of 26 artists working in the US, Canada, and Mexico who use the printmaking medium as a form of social, environmental, and political activism.

Set between the Center Galleries main exhibition space and the CCS Library, the Alumni and Faculty Hall might seem like a less-than-auspicious venue, but artists who have shown there have generally used its bad lighting and odd dimensions as the jumping-off point for creating some pretty engaging environments to showcase their work. (Check out, for example, the current installation, Transition by Annica Cuppetelli, which uses hanging layers of white mesh scrim and translucent blue theater lighting gels to completely transform an otherwise bland institutional corridor into a promenade of ethereal beauty.) Miner's project was no exception.

The show's title "Big Enough to Win, Big Enough to Lose" took its cue from legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther's famous quote on the character of risk in the face of adversity: "If you are not big enough to lose, you are not big enough to win." It also evoked analytical Marxist economist John E. Roehmer's treatise Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy, which challenges the conventional Marxist theory of exploitation grounded in the labor theory of value and replaces it with one based on a version of neoclassical rational choice theory.

Installed on the walls were a variety of printed matter related to Miner's practice as an artist/activist. Among the materials on one side were mass-produced posters for an immigrant rights campaign featuring an illustration of an indigenous tattooed face filling up the left side of the frame out of whose mouth flows the phrases "We are workers. We are humans. We have rights" in several languages to cover the globe. Another commemorated the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37 that led to the consolidation of the UAW,  a watershed in the American labor movement.

On the other wall was a collection of relief prints, mostly in black and red, on recycled grocery bags. Several featured imagery based on the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) during which people remember family and friends who have passed on, a reference perhaps to the union movement in its moribund state but also Marx's idea of capital as dead labor, the remains of surplus value appropriated by the bosses during the working day. Others commemorated significant figures in leftist thought, such as Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin, and one series riffed on the folk songs of labor organizer and troubadour Joe Hill. Traversing the entire space from front to back and tying the two elements together was a series of hand-printed and -sewn pennants bearing the slogans "Labor," "Resist," "In the Shell of the Old," and "Remembering to Resist."

An absorbing piece was the wall-mounted cardboard construction Wobbly Radio, inside of which was a recording of the artist reading archival transcripts of 1930s broadcasts originating from the Industrial Workers of World (IWW) Detroit chapter. The IWW, of course, is also known as the Wobblies. Joe Hill was a Wobbly as was Eugene V. Debs. The Wobblies also figure prominently in Thomas Pynchon's sprawling, anarchic opus Against the Day. Detroit has an interesting chapter in Wobbly history, in the early twentieth-century controversy over indirect political action vs. direct militancy against management, the so-called "yellow" vs. "red" factions. By 1925, the yellow Wobblies, based in Detroit initially under the leadership of Daniel De Leon, dissolved, leaving the Chicago-based organization in command. Hence the broadcasts date from the later period when Michigan-based Wobblies more or less freelanced confrontations with management, including taking part in the Flint Sit-Down Strike and other automotive union organizing. A Detroit Wobbly branch still exists. (Click here for the Wobbly Kitchen Detroit Facebook page.)

Delivered via a set of headphones hooked up to an "i(ww)Pod," the readings of Wobbly Radio detailed union programs for food relief, announcements for social gatherings, and other solidarity activities. They hearkened back to the days gone by of robust union communications initiatives, when labor had a strong voice in the broadcast landscape through ownership of the means of media production. WDET-FM, for example, started out in 1948 as the radio station of the United Auto Workers union, which sold it for $1 to Wayne State University in 1952. (See Elizabeth Fones-Wolf's 2006 study Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio for a good history of the golden age of union broadcasting that lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s.)

The work of Miner's that best summed up his project for me, however, was the relief print Damos Gracias (Wal-Muerto) (above). Printed on a recycled grocery bag, the image's central skeletal figure is wearing a store clerk's smock with an "un-smiley" face pin above the employee (oh, I'm sorry, I meant associate) nametag. She stands before a big-box store facade bearing the slogan "Siempre Pobre" (Always Poor), a reference to Walmart's advertising tagline "Always Low Prices" and its direct connection to the immiseration of workers both within and outside of the company in the global economic race to the bottom driven by the enormous retailer's ruthless cost-cutting business model. The neoliberal ideology of so-called free markets (which in fact are rigged to give advantage to the haves and even more to the have-mores) is represented in a prayer at the bottom left that translates to the effect of "Let us give thanks to the Virgin of Capitalism for delivering us from poverty," a statement of false consciousness that the dead laborer reveals, along with the shopping cart she pushes representing commodity consumption as the reproduction of the inequality low wages initiate.

According to his artist's statement, Miner's use of humble handcrafted and recycled materials and indigenous-based imagery are an act of resistance to the alienation at the core of the modern capitalist system (that our relations with one another are estranged, mediated by the cash nexus). Together, form and content constitute a material-semiotic relation, a meme (the basic unit of communication similar to the gene in biology) that can be replicated and transmitted, released into the cultural idea pool so that it might have a chance of changing our way of thinking. I, for one, hope it goes viral.

Todd Erickson & Faina Lerman @ CCS

Todd Erickson, Manistee River, 2010, bronze. (Photo: courtesy of CCS Center Galleries.)

Faina Lerman, Seeping In, Seeping Out: The Bubble's Inner Circle, 2010, gouache, mixed media on paper. (Photo: courtesy of CCS Center Galleries.)

A few weeks ago as part of discussing a video by Kristin Gallerneaux on Scott Hocking, I went off on this thing about a research method known as actor network theory (ANT). And although I knew it was more than a bit nerdy, it seemed appropos of Gallerneaux's tracking of Hocking so I went with it. In looking at the show currently up at CCS Center Galleries of new work by Todd Erickson and Faina Lerman, I found myself coming back to that concept. In particular, the ANT practice of tracing the connections between things and ideas, expressed as the "material-semiotic" relation, which offers a way into the work of both Erickson and Lerman, albeit from different directions.

Erickson's new work, all created in 2010, consists entirely of bronze castings of branches and twigs, twisted and bent and intertwined so as to stand up on their own, limning positive and negative sculptural space in the process. Named after rivers in Michigan, these sculptures are among the best Erickson has ever done. First of all is the sheer technical aspect of their construction: each element is flawlessly cast with incredible detail and the sculptures are seamlessly put together. But more than that, the work dispenses with the back-to-nature narrative of his earlier diorama-type stuff and simply goes back to the thing itself.

In his artist's statement, Erickson talks about memories of outdoor trips around Michigan -- canoeing, camping, hiking, and such -- that the sculptures are meant to evoke. But rather than simply collecting bits of environmental souvenirs and presenting them as mementos, Erickson takes an intermediate step, casting the material, which in the process obliterates it, leaving but a trace of the fleeting world, and his perception of it, timelessly embodied in metalwork. This turns his production from scavenging into art, fusing the thing with a concept, creating a material-semiotic relation without any expressive overload getting in the way.

Where Erickson's work seeks to arrest contingency, Lerman releases it. Her mixed-medium paintings and constructions present form and content only to subvert it, foregrounding the dependence of meaning on its material apparatus of conveyance (i.e., the medium, which as it turns out is and isn't the message). A perfect example of this is the aptly titled Seeping In, Seeping Out: The Bubble's Inner Circle (2010).  Little striped blobs scattered around the composition could be insects or just a step-and-repeat pattern of surface ornamentation. Slaps and dashes of color could be floral tendrils or simply loose gestures. The entire painting could be read as a still life or perhaps just the push-pull of painterly abstraction. The aspect ratio of the work is square, denying the ability to read it as definitively horizontal (landscape) or vertical (portrait).

In several smaller works, Lerman mixes in kitschy craft materials and found objects in another kind of subversion. Taken out of context, these bits of the broken world lose their original meaning while also short-circuiting conventional artworld systems of signification. With deliriously wacky titles like Mouse Herd (2009) and Cloud Storm Invaders (2010), they evoke a parallel universe where they somehow might make sense, a place where the connection between the thing and the idea, the material-semiotic relation, can be clarified once and for all, while at the same time proclaiming, "Yeah, good luck with that!"

As a yin and yang of aesthetic sensibilities, of ways in which to connect form and content, and thereby establish the material-semiotic relation, this show makes for some pretty satisfying viewing.

"Todd Erickson and Faina Lerman: New Work" runs until October 23 at CCS Center Galleries, located in the Manoogian Visual Resources Center, College for Creative Studies Ford Campus in Detroit (behind the Detroit Institute of Arts). Call 313 664 7800 for information.