I’m going to tell you about a thing that happened. Late. Really late. The kind of late where you’re not even tired anymore, you’ve crossed over into some weird second-wind territory where everything either means nothing or everything means too much.
Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips doing John Cage‘s Lecture on Nothing at the Performance Studies International conference, Roble Gym. The old fencing studio, before they cleaned it up and sucked all the soul out of it. You know how it goes—somebody decides a place needs a “makeover,” and what they really mean is they’re going to strip out everything that made it matter. But this was before all that. When the space still had ghosts. When it had weight.
They’d done the piece before. Franconia Performance Salon. Worked out the kinks. But this one? This was the one that counted.
So here’s what they’re doing: reconstructing, reinterpreting Cage’s 1949 lecture. Vocal performance, sure. But the soundtrack, they’re building it live from digitally manipulated sounds pulled from the area around the venue. The place itself becomes part of the thing. They’re making the room talk back at you.
It felt like after midnight. Maybe it was. Nobody there. Well, almost nobody. Maybe two people wandered in while it was happening. You, exhausted, running on fumes and stubbornness. And Michael and Derek, committed to the bit, doing the work.
Here’s the thing: Brian Yarish made this chair. Just a chair, right? Wrong. It was the chair. The chair that made the whole thing work. Don’t ask me to explain it, you either get it or you don’t. The chair, the mirrors, the late hour, the empty room, the two guys who gave enough of a shit to do Cage at midnight for almost nobody.
That’s the real thing. That’s when it matters. Not when the house is packed and everybody’s impressed with themselves for being there. When it’s late, when you’re exhausted, when almost nobody shows up, and you do it anyway. When the chair is perfect and the space still has its guts intact and the sounds of the building are feeding back into the performance like some kind of closed circuit of meaning.
That was it. That was the night.
For over twenty years I have been writing articles and giving lectures.
Many of them have been unusual in form— this is especially true of the lec-
tures—because I have employed in them means of composing analogous to
my composing means in the field of music. My intention has been, often, to
say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, con-
ceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than
just hear about it. This means that, being as I am engaged in a variety of
activities, I attempt to introduce into each one of them aspects convention-
ally limited to one or more of the others.So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists’
Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists’ club started by Robert
Motherwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia,
Bill de Kooning, et al. ) . This Lecture on Nothing was written in the same
rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions
( Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc. ) . One of the structural divi-
sions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which
occurred the refrain, “If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.” Jeanne
Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said,
while I continued speaking, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear
another minute.” She then walked out. Later, during the question period,
I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question
asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.
John Cage, SILENCE Lectures and writings, 1961