"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 talks this week with Larry List, a New York-based curator and artist whos been engaged for years with artists and composers whose works and lives have involved chess. They talk primarily about Lists The Imagery of Chess Revisited, an exhibition that recreated a show that originally took place at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York City in 1944, which in its re-creation took place at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, in 2005-2006; most of the original artists were featured, including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Motherwell, Andr Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, and others, including Cages wife at the time, Xenia.
Cages contribution to the 1944 Levy Gallery show was a work made especially for it " Chess Pieces " originally conceived as an ink-and-goache piece that contained black and white music notation that filled an array of squares on a 19 x 19 Masonite board. In Lists preparatory work, he managed to locate, borrow, and then closely examine virtually all of the works from the original show. Soliciting the expertise of the well-known Cage pianist, Margaret Leng Tan, it was discovered that Cages Chess Pieces was not only a compelling visual artwork but also a coherent musical composition: a through-composed score, consisting of 22 systems of music read conventionally from left to right. Leng Tan subsequently recorded the work and thus Chess Pieces was both exhibited and first heard at The Imagery of Chess Revisited exhibition. As Leng Tan rightly observed, Chess Pieces stands at the confluences of three of John Cage's primary life-long interests: music, visual arts and chess."
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. Episode 076. EVERGREEN.
Larry List on The Imagery of Chess Revisited Exhibition (2006) and John Cages Chess Pieces (1944)
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
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July 7, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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