Tim:
<snip>
Christopher's expansion on the Cage issue [...] highlights the 'problem'
more clearly, it doesn't answer it.
<snip>

No answer, I agree. And now, rather late, only a little more in the way of
highlighting. Or possibly obfuscation.

<snip>
[Cage] shows me ideas not 'things', he induces a cerebral poetics, he gives
me the fluffy compensations of 'art' - but those are NOT the things that his
religious ideology keeps harping on about. He draws me away from the
'world', not towards it [...] because right at the last second I find myself
in [a] 'gallery'
<snip>

'Ideas' rather than 'things' does rather come with the purpose, *learning
how to fish...* It is thus a cerebral, a meta- or an 'abstract' art,
relative to (say) Morton Feldman, whose individual works I find exquisite.
And both are high or 'gallery' art relative to (say) Oum Khalsoum. (So too
is Cunningham, whose work I also find exquisite, relative to Bharat Natyam.)
The names and contexts may change but David K's point remains: we need
different sorts of stuff. And one wouldn't accuse Dickinson of not being
Lucretius, Brecht or the *Beowulf* poet, for example.

But your charge that there is a disparity between claim and practice is
substantial. Two examples.

Firstly, I don't think Cage is 'apolitical'. However, what's (avowedly)
political about his work does seem to engage with 'issues' only at a very
rarefied level. Although it's musically 'political' (and adept) in dealing
with the aftermath of serialism and with the imposition of 'meaning' upon
music, attempts at 'demilitarising' syntax don't really support, say, the
rather fine dedication in *M*: 'To us and all those who hate us, that the
USA may become just another part of the world, no more, no less'.

Secondly, Cage strikes me as in some ways very old school conservatory (and
Cunningham as very old school ballet): very broadly, it's the same regime of
Mistakes *bad*, Improvisation *bad* (generally speaking), Expressivity
*good*. So I don't agree at all with Cecil Taylor's 1970 view that Cage and
others were improvising by stealth. But Taylor's more general and angry
attack on the Sons of Cage does have a horrid force in the light of Cage's
_ambition_: 'these people [are] very bright and they're very witty, and they
can't do much of anything really. They can think, but they don't live!
There's no fucking blood!'

<snip>
[...] the artistic fetishisation of the act of negation [...] the
ritualisation of gesture
<snip>

There are three related issues here, I think.

First, recursion: the danger that learning how to fish doesn't, in fact,
produce an increase in the fish supply; just more people teaching others how
to fish, who then teach... This might be the real force of Taylor's
comments.

Second, ritualisation: if fishing with Cage is to privilege the means over
the end, so that we find ourselves casting our lines in the middle of golf
courses, landing rusty shopping trolleys, gutting and cleaning old boots
etc, then fetishising 'the act of negation' may well not address recursive
cupidity (valuing the act of valuing the object, valuing 'superb' poets who
'deserve' our attention, hanging on to hanging on), but instead simply
mirror it. That is, Rosenberg's 'anxious object' may actually be the old,
well-fed, smug one with new! improved! added hangover. As you, I think,
imply.

Third, recuperation, or how learning how to fish too often means creating a
market for the implements of fishing, and how a given practice can resist
that. How can 'we', in other words, manage to keep on being 'new' - not for
its own sake but simply in order to learn how to do whatever it is 'we do'?

And yet these faults need not always be a sort of birth defect, but rather a
fault in social construction. We may _all_ be to blame, in other words.

At which point I shall stop. It occurs to me, belatedly, that no one may
want all this.

Christopher Walker