What Are The Chances?
By Mari Matsutoya

Approaching the centennial of the grand master of indeterminacy, the art world gives a firm nod in the direction of the late John Cage, whose works have been, and will most definitely remain, a huge influence on artists, musicians, and thinkers around the globe.

With A Year from Monday. 365 Tage Cage, the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg opens its doors once again after a period of restoration to bring us
a year-long project working up to the exact date of his birth, September 5, 1912, which also loosely coincides with 50 years since the newer part of the academy opened its West Berlin location as a new centre for avant-garde art, hence some focus is put on Cage's relationship to Berlin and the center.

Starting with Cage Cunningham Xenakis, the 2011 program kicks off with a look into his works and influences in the field of dance and architecture. Merce Cunningham, a lifetime artistic partner to John Cage, set up a dance company whilst at Black Mountain College where they both studied in 1953. He was immensely inspired by Cage and his chance method using I-Ching, and in this exhibition, he himself is to be seen performing to Cage’s perhaps most well known piece 4’33” (at 88 years old!) in Tacita Deans’s video work Merce Cunnungham performs Stillness (six performances, six films). Kontrolle und Zufall - Iannis Xenakis: Komponist, Architekt, Visionär exhibits musical scores, notations, and drawings of the architect and composer exploring the theme of chance and control in relation to Cage. In Raum for John Cage the academy members bring together various collected comments and material in one room and will develop other themes during the course of the year. In addition to this, there is a whole array of music and dance programs running alongside the main exhibition, which are also worth checking out.

Across the Channel in the UK, Every Day is a Good Day saw the first major retrospective of the American composer-artist. Over 100 of his visual works were put up in a way that surely the artist himself would have been quite pleased about. Curator Jeremy Millar used I-Ching software to determine the placing, height, grouping of the works thus removing the intention from the process and letting chance determine the outcome.

www.adk.de/de/aktuell/ausstellungen/index.htm

Taken from SLIM Mag October Issue