Forthcoming John Cage book in the news again!

Publisher's Weekly decided that one review just wasn't enough on our fall release, John Cage: Zen Ox-herding Pictures, so they included another one in their recent Nonfiction Reviews:

"Known best for his music and performances, John Cage also painted and wrote extensively. Zen Buddhism influenced his approach to his work—nature as a path to self, collaboration in performance and happenstance in composition. The art and poetry in this book represent a collaboration both accidental and deliberate between Cage, Addiss and Kass. Cage was working on another series of paintings when he marked a series of brown paper towels. Artist Kass and artist/composer Addiss ordered the towels into a sequence, then Addiss culled Cage's writings to create a cutup or recomposition of found words and phrases into a new work.

Cage recognized the importance of the remix long before it became fashionable. The accidental circumstances of this work's assemblage doesn't diminish its charm or delicacy. The introductory material provides essential context, but the best approach may be to read and view the work, read the essays, then review the piece again. Addiss and Kass prove the continuing relevance of the tradition of ox-herding as a format for teaching and connecting the heart to the mind. 50 color and 12 b&w illus. (Oct.)"

—Publishers Weekly

Nonfiction Reviews: 8/17/2009:

John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures
Stephen Addiss and Ray Kass. Braziller, $34.95 (128p)

ISBN 978-0-8076-1601-7

John Cage at the Guggenheim

Have you been out to see The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 at the Guggenheim? It's a fascinating look on the influence of Asian art and culture (particularly that of Zen Buddhism among the Beats, who are well-represented) on America's artistic development. The New York Times recently featured a review of the exhibit.

Reading the biographical information for many of the artists, it's hard not to come across John Cage's name. As Holland Cotter writes in the New York Times review:

A section of the show is dedicated to him, or rather to a concept he embodied, one absolutely central to Asian culture: the idea of lineage, the transmission of forms and knowledge from mind to mind.

Cage developed his aesthetic of chance operation in part through study with the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, and shared what he learned with contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns...

But Cage’s creative DNA also passed on to a generation of younger, Zen-tinged, Neo-Dada artists who used the group name Fluxus. Work by several of them — Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Alison Knowles — is assembled near Cage’s, along with a ready-for-the-future-travel suitcase packed with Fluxiana.

In the fall, we'll be publishing John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures which assembles fifty watercolor pieces made by Cage at the Mountain Lake Workshop as practice for his larger works. These pieces were preserved by Ray Kass, the founder of the workshop, and will be presented for the first time in this book along with essays by Kass and co-author Stephen Addiss about the significance of the pictures and the influence of Zen on the life and art of John Cage.

In short, go see the exhibit and keep an eye out for John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures this fall!