John Cage

American composer, music theorist, and artist (1912–1992), the century's most influential experimental composer — of chance-based works, prepared piano, and the silent 4′33″ — and a central figure at Black Mountain College.

Cage made indeterminacy and everyday sound into art, staging at Black Mountain the untitled event often called the first "happening." His aesthetic of letting go of authorial control shaped postwar art, dance, and music.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary (Black Mountain College). Cage and R. Buckminster Fuller overlapped at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, where Fuller taught, staged his geodesic experiments, and played a lead role in a production of Satie's Ruse of Medusa. Eva Díaz's The Experimenters frames the two as opposite poles of postwar experiment — Cage's embrace of chance against Fuller's pursuit of predictive, comprehensive design.

See Also

• The Experimenters (The Experimenters) — study contrasting Cage's and Fuller's experimental methods
• Josef Albers (Josef Albers) — Black Mountain colleague and a third pole of experiment there
• Merce Cunningham (Merce Cunningham) — his lifelong collaborator and fellow Black Mountain figure
• László Moholy-Nagy (László Moholy-Nagy) — Bauhaus master of the same mid-century avant-garde
• Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp) — central figure of Cage's avant-garde circle
• Stan VanDerBeek (Stan VanDerBeek) — fellow expanded-media artist

Sources

• The Experimenters (source reference) — study of Black Mountain experiment including Cage and Fuller