“All Things Cage” continues its break from its usual conversational format to allow for a program that celebrates John Cage’s 40-odd year relationship with Jasper Johns (who celebrates his 91st birthday this month) by airing two late-life mesostic poems by John Cage that were written in the 1980s on texts by Jasper Johns.

The first is What You Say (1986) with a source text comprising words by Johns from his last response in an interview with Christian Geelhaar that appears in Jasper Johns Working Proofs (Basel, 1979), as follows:

What you say about my tendency to add things is correct. But, how does one make a painting? How does one deal with the space? Does one have something and proceed to add another thing or does one have something: move into it; occupy it; divide it; make the best one can of it? I think I do different things at different times and perhaps at the same time. It interests me that a part can function as a whole or that a whole can be thrown into a situation in which it is only a part. It interests me that what one takes to be a whole subject can suddenly be miniaturized, or something, and then be inserted into another world, as it were.

The second is Art is Either a Complaint…Or Do Something Else (1988), also based on select quotations by Jasper Johns, which Cage reads and describes at some length in advance of his reading of the mesostic proper.

This program also means to give a shout-out to JASPER JOHNS: MIND/MIRROR, a much-anticipated retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art that will open in both venues on Sept. 29, 2021 and run through Feb. 13, 2022. No ticket or registration is required for The Philadelphia Museum of Art on opening day and admission is free. Advance Tickets are required at the Whitney, and are available here: https://whitney.org/ticketing-info.

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!