unCage your
mind
By Teresa Vila
Verde
At CAGE101’s
conference I want to get inside John Cage’s mind to uncage our minds about what
art is. Indeed, the knowledge of Cage’s work and philosophy is crucial to understand
of what art means today. And I am not just referring to music, but to a large
arena of activities that are usually called by the umbrella name of performance.
Cage’s interest in improvisation
and free association challenged many art conventions in the fifties and paved
the way for the happenings and other
performance activities that happened during the sixties and seventies. But we
can find echoes of his experiments in today’s art discourse and practice. Therefore,
my presentation will be guided and fuelled by the questions: where can we find
Cage today? How did Cage’s experiments contribute to a paradigm change in the
art world? How can Cage uncage our mind about art? To answer these questions I
will put my attention in some pivotal contemporary artists, like for example the
body artist Marina Abramovic, whose work express, in my opinion, why John
Cage’s mind is so important to us understand contemporary acts.
This
undertaking seems to me urgent to do because, even 101 years after his birth, his
work is still controversial, especially among musicians and music students,
which tend to ignore it or to ironize it. Acknowledging this I will endeavour
to demonstrate why there is an art world before Cage and an art world after
Cage. To do this I will make a lecture-performance that will interlink Cage’s work
with silence, words, video, performance and, hopefully, spirituality.
Teresa VV
Proposta aceite!!
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