An exhibition at Rovereto offers an unusual look at the American composer with an evocative reconstruction of the New York loft where he worked for many years. A journey through suggestive sounds, images, flavours and smells, described by Maurizio Bortolotti.

The complex character of John Cage is examined in this exhibition from an unusual angle. What is displayed is in fact the place in which the American musician produced his work, the studio in New York close to 6th Avenue where spent many years.

The exhibition consists of twenty five photographs which portray corners and objects from this special place, representing the production environment inside of which the work of the American composer, artist and theorist was developed.

The images are alternated with scores-paintings by Brazilian musician – also architect, photographer and writer – Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, pupil and friend of Cage, forming the main nucleus of the exhibition, alongside other objects: a cactus, a group of stones and a table covered in the spices that Cage used for cooking with. In the background, music by the younger composer accompanies the visitor.

The exhibition, curated by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini with the help of Giovanna Nicoletti, reconstructs in this way the artist’s place of creation, the resonant environment where he carried out a substantial part of his work and in which he found inspiration. It is not however to be considered in a documentary sense. What was important for Cage was the notion of silence as a moment which generated sound.

The studio therefore becomes an active image of silence as an empty moment filled with promise and the photographic images which portray it continually recall this idea. In one of these, a series of small plants, seems to indicate a sense of natural growth as imperceptible motion. And it is perhaps precisely this sense of silent growth that more than anything else resided in the mind of Cage and that can best express his notion of music. In another, the kettle brings back one of the domestic sounds which shaped the never ending well of inspiration of the musician.

Different from the photographs of the studio, the scores-paintings made by Emanuel Dimas Melo de Pimenta are instead the organised image of sound and the interaction between the two series constitutes the active core of the exhibition. In it, however, the visual dimension becomes the vehicle across which a more complex dimension is introduced.

The silence is, in fact, a cross condition, which feeds a creative process that involves art in its multiple manifestations. In this way the exhibition is the unfurling of a multiple condition, made from sounds, images, flavours and odours of the spices for the food, which produce in the end a kind of fluid field of creation. And it is on this terrain that Cage the artist moved, influencing much of the art of the Sixties. The successful experiment of the exhibition is in re-establishing the domain of the artist’s mind, at the centre of which is located the powerful notion of silence, an unlimited reserve of creative stimulus which influenced the artistic avant garde of those years.

fino a 30.4.2003
John Cage. Il silenzio della musica
MART di Rovereto
https://www.mart.tn.it