smile of Buddha

-the sound of the mind-

John cage's fundamental artistic contribution was to definitively eliminate the boundary between art and life.

For cage, the purpose of art, for both maker and perceiver, was "to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens." Thanks to Cage, the integration of art and life reched its culmination in the discipline of music.

Cage's breakthrough was to teach us that our listening is as directed by habits of the mind as our seeing.

The purpose of art is to open our hearts and minds to the experience of that richness.

Fortified by the teaching of Zen Buddhism, Cage broke ground in three areas.
1. He incorporated chance happenings from "real" life-specifically ambient sound- into his work

2. He eliminated the hierarchies between composer and performer and performer and audience by "letting go" of creative responsibility and by incorporating his audience into his performance.

3. The experiential , performative nature of his work emphasized the process of creation over its product.

Happening and Fluxus-they wanted to give art back to the social realm, to make it continuous with everyday living.

"Happening" -Allan Kaprow's Eighteen Happenings in six parts,
Happenings were events of indeterminate length with no narrative, usually involving members of the audience and incorporating everyday as well as artist-made objects.

Fluxus art "could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art including the eventual needlessness of itself."

"Fluxus" is the "act of flowing: a continuous moving on or passing by ... a continuous succession of changes."

Nam june Paik said:

zen consists of two negations.
The first negation:
the absolute IS the relative.
The second negation:
The relative IS the absolute.

The second negation is the KEY-point of Zen.

That means...
The NOW is utopia, what it may be.
The NOW in 10 minutes is also utopia, what is may be.
The NOW in 20 hours is also utopia, what is may be.
The NOW in 30 months is also utopia, what is may be.
The NOW in 40 million years is also utopia, what is may be.

Therefore
We should learn,
how to be satisfied with 75%
how to be satisfied with 50%
how to be satisfied with 38%
how to be satisfied with 9%
how to be satisfied with 0%
how to be satisfied with -1000%
Zen is anti-avant-garde, anti-frontier spirit, anti-Kennedy.


The cultural dichotomy between East and West had all but disappeared, and Buddhism was as likely to inform the art of a Western artist like Laurie Anderson as artist with Asian backgrounds, like Paik and Ono.

But while Ono is a visual poet, creating sensuous, highly focused images and actions for the mind, Anderson is self-described storyteller whose medium is multilayered, mutidisciplinary narrative.

All four of the musician/artists in this section-Cage, Paik, Ono and Anderson-have applied and extended Thoreau's observation that music is always present in our environment; it is only our hearing that is intermittent. As Cage put it, "Art is everywhere; it is only seeing which stops now and then."