Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Richard Brown <>]

Here is my short introduction to the recent screening at The Hammer in Los Angeles for those interested, plus the LA times review again http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-the-sun-20131211,0,2977942.story#ixzz2nKccmVyt

Happy Holidays!

Richard H. Brown

www.richardhbrownjr.com

www.ayearfrommonday.com

In 1956 John Cage and Wisconsin-born sculptor Richard Lippold convened in Danville, Vermont to assemble a film documenting Lippold’s recent creation, The Sun, Variation Within a Sphere No. 10. The product of four years of intense labor, Lippold’s sculpture, which contained over two miles of hair-thin, 22-carat gold wire, was the first piece to be commissioned from a living artist by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Throughout the process of assembling the sculpture, photographer John Schiff filmed Lippold at work, leaving him with approximately 4500 feet of 16mm footage. After Schiff suffered a debilitating eye injury, Lippold consulted John Cage to help edit the film; Cage then conceived of a method for organizing the edits according to chance procedures in which a random array of points set on graph paper determined the specific edits. Over the course of two weeks, Cage and Lippold labored over a crude film cutting board, meticulously adhering to a complex graphic score Cage had assembled. This score, which was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2001, was considered the only extant material to survive from the project. While conducting research for my dissertation on John Cage’s work in film and multimedia, I came across a most fortuitous discovery: a cold call on Memorial Day 2010, following a lead by Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, brought me to a small storage facility on Long Island in an area known as Locust Valley, where I was greeted by the executor of the Richard Lippold Foundation, Augusto Gianni Morselli. After hours of digging through boxes we were delighted to find these two surviving films, both of which follow Cage’s score to every detail, and through the diligent efforts of both Cindy Keefer, director of the Center for Visual Music, and Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, we are pleased to present these restored prints.

             The relationship between Cage and Lippold has been largely overshadowed in the Cage narrative in favor of the more familiar names of the New York School. Lippold remained at a distance from the mainstream, particularly after he left New York in 1952 following the demolition of the infamous “Bozza mansion” residence, where he lived alongside Cage, Morton Feldman and others. However, his large-scale sculpture commissions remain a dominant presence in the architectural landscape of New York City and beyond. Works such as Orpheus and Apollo at Avery Fischer Hall (1961), and Flight (1963) at the Pan Am building (now the MetLife Building), represent the postwar revitalization of large-scale site-specific installation sculpture, a period that favored abstract metallurgical reflections on the public interaction with architectural spaces.

            Cage and Lippold first met around 1945 through Lippold’s wife, Louise, a dancer who commissioned a number of works from Cage, including the well-known piece, In a Landscape (1948). Their mutual concern for geometric abstraction, elaborate mathematical structures, and an open-ended spiritual discourse on the nature of the work of art sparked an important dialogue leading to the period of Cage’s most dramatic artistic gestures in the early 1950s. Cage dedicated several movements of his monumental pieces for the prepared piano, the  Sonatas and Interludes to Lippold, and in turn Lippold dedicated the first five sculptures of a series of variations on a sphere, then tenth of which became The Sun.

            The two films screened tonight are separated by a short head credit. In the first reel we witness Lippold at work constructing The Sun. This footage was divided into 24 different categories, and Cage’s graphic score plots the succession of shot categories edited over time in strict accordance with the random array of points in the score. Chance often led to pesky corners, but being true to his system Cage diligently adhered to the results, and the first reel contains 116 individual edits in just six minutes, with cuts as short as two frames and as long as 839. The result is very much a visual analog to Cage’s monumental experiment for magnetic tape, Williams Mix, which contained thousands of small fragments of audio recordings spliced in detail according to chance procedures. The second reel documents the completed sculpture, and was edited according to a similar graphic score using six categories of shots plotted over time. Cage’s participation in the creation of a documentary film on Lippold’s work bespeaks of a deeper connection between the two artists that spanned nearly a decade and beyond. The resultant film functions not only as a piece of documentary evidence of the creation of the sculpture, it represents a unique usage of the film medium to approach the phenomenal presence of Lippold’s kinetic sculpture. By utilizing chance procedures to select the shot arrangement, Cage’s approach to the film gives a sense of the transparent three-dimensional experience the sculpture itself projects on the viewer. The resulting film is but one of countless interpolations following the graphic score, and provides a truly indeterminate glimpse both of the artistic process and the phenomenological experience of kinetic sculpture.

---

To:
From:
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 13:56:51 +0100
Subject: [silence] question re The Sun Film by John Cage/Richard Lippold

dear silencers,

does anybody know more details about the John Cage/Richard Lippold film “The Sun, Variations Within a Sphere No. 10” ?

tate.org.uk | Found: new restorations and discoveries from Center for Visual Music | The Sun Film by John Cage/Richard Lippold

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/film/found-new-restorations-and-discoveries-center-visual-music

thanks and kind regards

Ralph Lichtensteiger

http://www.lichtensteiger.net