John Cage, Joan Retallack: Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (1996)

“The entire range of John Cage‘s work and thought, explored in three wide-ranging dialogues, which constitute his last unified statement on his art.

‘I was obliged to find a radical way to work — to get at the real, at the root of the matter,’ John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art — with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention–earned him a reputation as one of America’s most influential contemporary artists.

Joan Retallack’s conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage’s comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world — with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies — was a source of music, Cage once claimed, “There is no noise, only sounds.” As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was “dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.” Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction — a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.”

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1996
ISBN 0819563110, 9780819563118
408 pages

Publisher

EPUB, EPUB (updated on 2019-7-4)

Jean-François Lyotard: Discourse, Figure (1971/2011)

“Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.

A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.”

Originally published in French as Discours, figure by Klincksieck, 1971

Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon
Introduction by John Mowitt
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Cultural Critique Books
ISBN 0816645655, 9780816645657
512 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-4)

Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar (eds.): Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory (2002)

“Third Text has been the world’s leading journal on art in the global context. Known for challenging received notions of art practice, art history, popular media and cultural theory, it has never accepted unquestioningly the claims of anti-racism, multiculturalism or postcolonialism. Similarly, Third Text has not only championed new artists from six continents, it has raised the critical temperature and the political stakes for art and cultural practice in the age of globalization. This Reader brings together classic essays by some of the best-known critics in global art and cultural studies, together with some of the most exciting new voices to emerge over the last decades. Divided into sections that cover history, representation, identity, film, “post” theory, globalization, the Reader will be invaluable to students and teachers of art, cultural studies, media studies, postcolonialism and globalization.”

Selected contributors: Zygmunt Bauman, Rustom Bharucha, Zeynap Çelik, James Clifford, Sean Cubitt, Jimmie Durham, Clifford Geertz, Stuart Hall, Kobener Mercer, Benita Parry, George Ritzer, Edward Said, Ziauddin Sardar, Julian Stallabrass, Slavoj Zizek.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
ISBN 0826458513, 9780826458513
392 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)