"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If youd like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org.
Laura Kuhn is joined this week by Ray Kass, founder and director of The Mountain Lake Workshop, an ongoing series of collaborative and interrelated workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The Mountain Lake Workshops have resulted in many unique, collaborative works of art that have been widely exhibited, including John Cages significant body of watercolors " New River Watercolors, Steps, River Rocks and Smoke, New River Rocks and Washes and New River Rocks and Smoke " produced between 1983 and 1990. Ray studied Cages manner of working with chance operations before they began, which helped to lure Cage to Virginia and which greatly facilitated Cages work and their time together; conversation this evening speaks to Cages methods of working in the visual arts utilizing chance operations, or methods he first developed in his composition of music.
Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida, also joins us, as both Jade and Ray have exhibitions opening in Asheville, North Carolina, this year " Rays, which is running now at the Asheville Art Museum, is entitled Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience, and Jades, which opens in September at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, is entitled "Dont Blame It on Zen: The Way of John Cage and Friends." Jade will also perform with Kuhn in a presentation of Cages Indeterminacy stories at BMCM + AC during its international conference, ReVIEWING Black Mountain 12, taking place Nov. 12-14, 2021.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his "Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage" (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book hed ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and theres John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 433, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.
Ray Kass, Jade Dellinger
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:59:16
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Sept. 2, 2021
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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