Tribute to John Cage, Robert Wilson interprets the revolutionary composer's Lecture on Nothing, a central text in experimental literature of the 21st century.

With his formal approach to text and subject matter, freeing the imagination, Robert Wilson is the perfect interpreter of Cage and brings to life an inspired visual and acoustic interpretation of Cage's philosophical and poetic text, composed with the same criterion as his music, electing to subject the lecture itself and its temporal continuity. Vocal accents and pauses, as well as the rhythm and sound of the lecture are brought to the foreground creating a space where text and silence have equal roles, a language/music of the sound of silence.

"Cage's text is fascinating, often amusing, a from quote and at the same time deliberately irritating and deeply thought-provoking. The composer was in a transitional phase, moving away from somewhat traditional composition and toward making music that incorporates random elements and treats silence with devout respect [...]

Wilson creates exceptionally beautiful things; his props would be from displayed in museums. Yet his theater is nonfiction theater, understandable only by experiencing it, by living it.

'All I know about the method,' Cage writes at the end from his Lecture on Nothing, 'is that when I'm not working to times I think I know things, but when I'm working it's quite obvious that I don't know anything.'Some might call this an enlightenment. Wilson, in a sublime way, demonstrates why."

Mark Swed_ for the Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2013_.

Contaminations: Wilson to Cage

by Achille Bonito Oliva

Robert Wilson'sopera stands under the sign of total art: a synthesis and interweaving of different languages, interpenetrated with each other in an iterated, at the same time fragmentary manner. Theater-image, sculpture, installation, drawing, gesture, mimicry, dance, music, architecture, sound and light cross incessantly in a space that before being physical is mental. For of this it possesses the simultaneity of many events and the assemblage of many situations. However, what holds up the entire framework of 'opera is the Fragment, the shattering of the spatial and temporal dimension, an aphasia capable of taking the action out from every system of prediction.

A'opera of relationship is Wilson's that creates contact and tangency under the banner always of probable and indeterminate action at the same time. Where probability is the effect of a use of the stereotype, of the gesture or object recognizable in its entity, and indeterminacy is the consequence of the unprecedented, but by no means disturbed, juxtaposition of the gesture or object with other situations that challenge its normal identity.

Action is the result of a disassembly, an atomization of gesture, a reduction of gestural and verbal, hence behavioral, language to its own elementary grammars, to the minimal structures that make up its complexity. To accomplish this minimal process, Wilson adopts slowing down and repetition of gesture. Decomposition is the result of this reduction capable of producing a dilated representation, an underlining of the event but not in an emphatic sense but as a movement that starts from within and then passes outward and gives itself in the terms of expression and image.

Slowing down and repetition produce a temporality that flows along a horizontal line that fosters a happy shattering of elements, avoids condensation in an organic vision and instead leaves objects and behaviors in a situation of intentional disconnection, as in a space under vacuum, a sidereal space removed from the law of gravity. Slowing down produces attention, thus repetition, not only in the actor of the portrait but also in the viewer, who is placed in a situation of active, non-authoritarian knowledge.

In his theater, action is the result of a disassembly, an atomization of gesture, a reduction of gestural and verbal language, therefore behavioral, to its own elementary grammars and the minimal structures that make up its complexity.

To achieve this minimalist process, Wilson adopts slowing down and repetition of gesture. Decomposition is the result of this minimalism capable of producing a dilated representation, an underscoring of the event, but not in an emphatic sense, but rather as a movement that starts from the inside and then passes to the outside to giving itself in the terms of expression and image, instead leaving objects and behaviors in a situation of intentional disconnection, as in a space under pneumatic vacuum, as in a sidereal space removed from the law of gravity.

Slowing down produces attention, so does repetition, not only in the actor but also in the spectator, who is placed in a situation of active, nonauthoritative knowledge. Wilson'sopera is a tactile, visual and sound, but total machine, a construction that is also a memory machine that helps the spectator and put himself on the same wavelength, that of the conquest of a total gaze. This is why the artist proceeds by images, as they are capable of conveying evident and glaring ghosts, operating on the possibility of contagion.

For the viewer, contagion represents the end of the journey, the recognition that he or she has participated in the crossing of a threshold on which to release his or her gaze as a chance to lean out of the window of his or her eye with his or her whole body.

If cultural referents can be found in the culture of Japanese No theater, as far as slowing down and repetitive rituals are concerned, in the mindset of Duncan and Cunningham as far as the relationship with bodily gestures is concerned, in the great lesson of Cage as far as the relationship with sound, noise and silence is concerned; other ascendencies concern not only culture, but cultural anthropology, for what refers to the theater of Charenton, Sade and Artaud, the participation of madness in the elaboration of the scene and the gestural shattering of Balinese dancers who also privilege peripheral elements of the body.

In this way, the performance escapes all cultural categories, playing instead on the slippage of genres and with an overlapping of temporal and spatial planes in which no particular stage of expression is privileged, if anything, the state of dormancy prevails, the horizontal position within which images of wakefulness flow out from every rhythm, linked therefore to the production of dream and fantasy.

Cage's creative attitude emanates from a position that intends to oppose to every codified system, to every systematic category of artistic creation. Meanwhile, for him there is no interval between art and life, between sound and noise, between design and chance, between deputed instrument and everyday object.

He developed a poetics of total artist in which the creative method is synchronic to that of an existence that recognizes no authority whatsoever, cultural and political, media and social. Influenced from Thoreau and basically from McLuhan, he was able to traverse mass society with a spirit never collectivized by media homologation. With discipline and lightness he has been able to inhabit university chairs, traverse academic places and alternative spaces. Creation for Cage is a kind of good-natured, silent tsunami. Like madness, it requires method. But method in this case does not engulf creation in a geometry of forms, but rather foments new libertarian spaces of art production and fruition. If it is not possible to speak of active nihilism, in the Nietzschean sense of the word, if not even one can categorize Cage under the sign of Zen, we can certainly say that we are dealing with to an artist who anticipated multimedia through a creative and behavioral strategy lived under the sign of contamination and smiling.

The Jocund Smile constitutes the subtle theatrical aspect by which Cage imposed a Socratic didactics for art, in which fruition implies the movement of interactivity. In this way, the audience becomes a protagonist not only through listening, but also through a participation that arises from Cage's thousands of objective and delicate provocations. to his disposition, besides to being the whole history of music that he knows to inside out, there is a whole everyday reality at his service, which allows him to "play the world."

If, however, the futurists preached an art of trespassing and the futurist reconstruction of the universe, thus once again an alternative to the system, Cage goes further. He in fact plays the world with what he finds, responds to Mike Bongiorno from champion on mushrooms on the TV show Lascia o Raddoppia, and perhaps, sitting back, even performs a concert for kettles and coffee pots.

From his teachings to American New Dada artists such as Rauschenberg and to choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, to his personal total art performances, Cage is the bearer of a Jocund Smile, where the systemic wisdom of a behavior prevails that is not intended to give a futurist-style "slap in the face" to the audience, but rather to introduce into the consciousness of the viewer a sphere of awareness and protagonist participation.

There is never in his opera and behavior the intoxication of scandal and a pre-established strategy, if anything the anarchy of a behavior that does not ask for a set place in the banquet of contemporary art. Rather it wants to de-structure every table or round table. All this with a smile reminiscent of the enigmatic expression of Leonardo's Mona Lisa from Vinci, the bearer of an attitude in which openness and reserve coincide at the same time.

John Cage wants to take the audience not so much to identify with his creative space. Instead, he wants to lead him to the threshold of listening, to from which the audience chooses its behavior, whether active or passive, compliant or aggressive. Time is a fundamental factor in Cage'sopera , as is his aestheticization of the everyday through his assumption of the banality of life. Indeed, time punctuates not only the breath ofopera, but also that of the collective that contemplates it.

In this case, time is synthetic and analytic together. Synthetic, in that it holds the creative gesture together in a usable form, and analytic, in that such fruition allows the audience to gain knowledge and develop consciousness. A tactical element in Cage is the temporal practice of slow motion, which naturally 'punctures' the spectator's patience and develops uncontrollable responses some times. Theopera thus mirrors behavior for which the viewer is directly responsible. Indeed, Cage rejects the paternalism of a creativity that takes responsibility to the point of catechizing the social body, or showing it the best way. Brought to the threshold, accompanied Socratically by the Jocund Smile, the audience becomes the responsible protagonist of its own behavior, the regal subject of the space aestheticized byopera, which becomes, to itself, index and instigator at the same time. Index of initial creativity for the artist, instigator of terminal freedom for humanity.