Tim Allen wrote:
<snip>
Related to that, the old Cage nugget about having nothing to say and saying
it. Well, I don't need 'art' to do that for me, so why did Cage need it?
[...] You see, 'saying' that you have nothing to say is not enough unless
you can say it loudly with all the attendant trappings [Tim A]

Cage [...] and MacLow [...] demonstrated the impossibility of placing
constraints on subjectivity to the extent of achieving the mythic dystopia
of egolessness. They were always exercising their subjectivity through
decisions. these were editorial decisions about materials and grounds for
their operations and contexts for their exposition and
distribution. this does not seem dishonest.

[...] there are traditions of compendia and commentary, for example since
the middle ages, which expose the polysemy of writing, rather than seeking a
seamlessness which for many (perhaps not for you) the construction of the
author over the past few centuries has sought to conceal. [cris c]
<snip>

First off, why 'art'? When Daniel Charles asked the Old Father William
question Tim implies ('...you have composed while denying you are a
composer...?' he got the following response: 'I must confess that the
contradiction, composing and not composing, has haunted me for a long time,'
together with a short anecdote about the fatuity of psychoanalysis. Then
there's Johns on Art, as quoted by Cage: 'I can imagine a society without
any art at all, and it is not a bad society'. Or Cage's response to the
question, Why determine not sounds but their location; why this insistence
on space? 'It was an attempt to expel music, just as we send children
outdoors so the grownups may finish what they were in the midst of doing.'
Or his response to the question '[if] the world [is] only a game without
players [...] why do you continue to play?': 'SUBJECTIVITY'. In this, he's
not so far from (say) Barnett Newman or Conlon Nancarrow.

Secondly, there's the matter of his practice. The 'old Cage nugget about
having nothing to say' may or may not be an assertion (in which case it may
or not be another and equally relevant assertion that 'something and nothing
are not opposed to one another but need each other to keep on going') but it
_is_ a performative and it's part of 'an entertainment'. So it breaks those
Gricean maxims about telling the truth, giving enough relevant information,
being succinct, not being confusing or slant and so forth. It can't be
summarised. We can't rely on it, in short, as a *statement* of aesthetic,
though perhaps it expresses or embodies one: 'There is poetry as soon as we
realize that we possess nothing' ... 'getting rid of ownership, substituting
use'... making the 'composer' a 'member of the audience' so that s/he
'starts to listen' ... living 'art as life'...

The other day I came across an excellent quote, not from Cage, on
'abstraction' and 'cooperation' (in the conversational sense): 'abstraction
is uncooperative'. Cage is _not_ the gonfalonier of things Postmodern,
Corporatist or Bad. However, his practice is, I think, very 'abstract' and
thus extremely 'uncooperative'. That is, he is the director of attention and
extension; not of intention and intension, if I can put it quite that
glibly.

All of which is merely to say that I think cris is broadly right in what he
says and where he takes it.

Christopher Walker