John Cage: Aftershocks

John Cage's Collaborators

Collage Technique/Neo-Dadaism

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008): Painter; Cage's colleague at Black Mountain College

“I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t.  I want it to look like something it is.  And I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”

Untitled, 1955

Raushenberg used everyday objects to create conceptual art, drawing on John Cage's use of "silence" in music as a device for highlighting the ambient sounds at any given moment in time.

Collage from a stuffed goat, tire, tennis ball, and paint

Nabisco Shredded Wheat (Cardboard), 1971, Gagosian Gallery

This piece, which Rauschenberg created as a wall hanging from cardboard Nabisco boxes, amuses me because it reminds me of my college roommate.  Having little or no knowledge of John Cage or Rauschenberg's work, she formed a habit of saving all kinds of trash and taping it to her dorm wall for decoration.  Hundreds of bottle caps, brown paper bags, wads of foil, coffee warmers, and used food wrappers adorned her wall in a carefully arranged, though haphazardly conceived, display.  We moved to two different apartments the following years; both times, this collection of recycled art followed.  I remember coming home one day to discover an enormous cardboard banana hanging from our ceiling.  "I looked up, and it bothered me that nothing was there, so I decided that we must have a banana here," she explained.  

This reuse of recycled, everyday objects as art even extended to organic material: she had an attachment to gourds and developed a habit of keeping rotten pumpkins in our apartment for months.  All of these pumpkins were named "Fred" and displayed beneath a mantle covered with dead rose petals, offset by the large kite fashioned from used Chipotle bags.  When Fred(s) began to get stinky, she would say, "Oh no, I am never going to throw Fred away.  He has a soul."

Interestingly, Rauschenberg also used recycled materials as art.  When I saw this piece, Dylaby Combine Painting (1962), the concept seemed identical to that of my roommate.  This work features a Coca Cola advertisement and a wooden skateboard.