There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33" (MoMA, New York, USA)

"On a warm summer evening in August 1952 pianist David Tudor approached a piano on stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Stopwatch in hand, Tudor sat before the piano and, without striking a note, premiered John Cage's composition 4'33". Commonly known as Cage's “silent” piece, 4'33" comprises three movements during which a performer—or performers—are instructed to produce no intentional sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds. This radical gesture upended the conventional structure of music, shifting attention from the performer to the audience, and allowing for endless possibilities of ambient sounds to fill the space." (MoMA website).

There will never be silence is an exhibition featuring John Cage's work and other artists such as "Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and other artists associated with Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptual art who pushed preconceived boundaries of space, time, and physicality to new ends."

I love that show because it was so minimalistic and beautiful, aesthetically it was really increadible. I never heard of John Cage before and it was a really nice surprise to discover his inspiring work.

"Like much of Cage’s work, the show is suffused by a meditative wit that wears its transcendent ambitions lightly. Works that investigate chance and indeterminacy through found objects, monochrome canvases and the playful use of language invite the visitor to explore new ways of engaging not only with the art on the walls, but with the outside world, too. " This explain exactly what I thought of the exhibition and I think that this kind of work take us somewhere else and makes us think more about the how and the making etc and like the show curator, David Platzker says "It’s the possibility of passing through boredom into fascination." Which is a very good point because a lot of people tend to see this kind of art as "easy" or "boring" but this exhibition shows perfectly how wrong it is to say that. Here's an example : "Two paintings by Mark Tobey, a practicing Buddhist whom Cage met in the late 1930s, show the artist turning away from iconography and toward a mystical form of abstraction. After viewing his works one day, Cage wrote, “I happened to look at the pavement, and I noticed the experience I had was the same as the experience of looking at the Tobey.” It’s not that the pavement looked like a Tobey. It was rather the act of searching for patterns or noticing color and texture in the pavement that Cage now experienced as art." (MoMa website  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/arts/music/momas-there-will-never-be-silence-about-john-cage.html)