Staatsgalerie Stuttgart celebrates the 100th birthday of John Cage with an exhibition on view July 21 – November 11, 2012, presenting twenty-three prints, two drawings, one object (Plexigram) and four rarely seen books as well as a comprehensive selection of documentary material from the Sohm Archive.
John Cage is best known as a composer. Early on in his career he began to incorporate radio and recorded sound into his compositions, to write music for non-standard instruments and everyday objects and to allow chance to play a key role in his works. By the late 1960s, the composer began to make a name for himself as a visual artist as well. He experimented, influenced by the work of his friend Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Zen Buddhism, with different printing techniques and explored ways of translating his chance-controlled compositional principles into the new visual medium. John Cage’s multidisciplinary creative practice inspired some of the key trends of 1960s visual art, among them Hap-pening, Fluxus and Pop Art. – www.staatsgalerie.de