Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005

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Andy and John Get Ordinary:

Ontological Issues in the 1960’s Work of Warhol and Cage

by

Simon Shaw-Miller

…that which is outside the frame…:naturalization of the frame. There is no natural frame.There is frame, but the frame does not exist.[i]

It leads to the thought about hearing anything in the world since we know that everything is in a state of vibration…chairs and tables, for instance, could be heard. One could go to an exhibition of sounds in which you would see something and hear it as well. I would like to do that.[ii]

      During a visit to John Cage’s home in Stony Point, in speaking of Cage’s remarkable achievements and innovations, Cage was praised for the enormous progress he had brought to music. ‘Cage walked over to the window, looked out into the woods, and finally said, “I just can’t believe I am better than anything out there.” [iii]       

       In what follows I want to investigate this idea of liminal art making; between ‘inside’ and ‘out there’, across binary divides. To do this I want to broach another divide, that between the practices of the art historian and the musicologist. By working across this border interesting ontological issues connecting contemporary, but seldom related artists, can be reviewed. Both John Cage and Andy Warhol made art in a wide variety of media, Cage made prints, drew and painted, wrote poetry and made music. Warhol too produced work in different media. As regards his interest in music the most obvious relationship is the extension of his obsession with popular culture into The Exploding Plastic Inevitable that combined the live music of The Velvet Underground with projections of film and coloured light. Much can be said about Warhol’s multi-media interests, and his involvement with popular music, which in its distance from ‘classical’ or art music has always been hybrid, as much concerned with image as sound. However, I want to consider what we might best call art music. Art music was the context within which Cage worked, and since the Romantics it came to be identified throughout the modern period as qualitatively distinct, in a formalist state of autonomous ‘pure’ sound characterized in the concept of ‘absolute music’. Art music is most often conceived as a special category of sound standing alone from the world of sights and ordinary sounds (the later often defined as noise). In this way art music became a model for art, and specifically the paradigm for Clement Greenberg’s project to define the essential characteristics of Modernism. It is the art to which all arts aspire, in Walter Pater’s famous words.  Popular music and culture, on the other hand (what Greenberg might have defined as kitsch) was a vibrant site of alternative meanings, one which attracted a new generation of artists who, for various reasons, found this Modernist and formalist sensibility less than satisfactory.

My analysis is not going to focus on Warhol and rock music. Rather, I want to bring Andy Warhol together with John Cage, to deconstruct this notion of art music from the inside via Cage’s aesthetics.  In doing this I shall build points of contact with Warhol’s aesthetic. I shall expose what I consider to be some of the most important consequences of their work, and to help understand the moment of which they are both, in their different ways, emblematic - the moment of a fundamental crisis in the ideology of Modernism.

      One of the main engines that powers modernist concepts is binary configurations, dividing the world in ‘either/or’ categories. The binary pairing I want to address here is not so much that of popular verses high culture, but another ubiquitous coupling. It manifests itself in different guises; sometimes as ‘art or nature’ and often as ‘art or the everyday’, to which the opening quote made reference.

      One thinker who has been particularly interested in theorizing the relationship between art and the everyday, who is of importance to what I want to say, is the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto. The relationship between art and the world outside it, through its modes of re-presentation, makes art fundamental to Danto’s whole philosophy. As he wrote in the preface to a recent book The Body/Body Problem.

In the past some years I have written extensively on the concept of art, but what these essays make vivid is the degree to which that concept has dominated the way I have thought philosophically about any topic...Philosophy and art are not discontinuous fragments of a divided subject, but facets of a single unitary philosophy which thinks of art philosophically and of philosophy from the perspective of art.[iv]

       To clarify his terms for those unfamiliar with his philosophy; Danto’s conception of humanity is of ‘beings who represent’ (actual or possible worlds, and who can in addition misrepresent); works of art he understands as materially embodied representations; philosophy is defined as the discipline concerned with the various borders between reality and its alternatives, and from this it is clear how art becomes axiomatic to his ideology.

        In his earlier, and perhaps most influential book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace  (1981), [v] Danto argues that, beginning in the late 1880’s, painters throughout Europe and America began to break away from pure representation and became increasingly preoccupied with the question of what constitutes a work of art. For a variety of reason mimesis - technological, political, philosophical etc. - became weakened as the primary mode through which painters and sculptors sought to convey their ideas and intentions. The nature of the medium became a point of focus, especially in abstract art. However, the most radical challenge to mimesis was not made by moving further from the likeness of the world (into the realm of abstract art), but rather the opposite, by moving closer to it. This is not directly stated in Danto’s account, but is, I think worth making explicit. Dada introduced the phenomenon of ready-made objects, replacing representation with re-presentation. This culminated in the art of the 1960’s when art for the first time achieved a philosophical understanding of its own essence. At this point, as Danto has more recently expressed it, art ended. He uses end in this context not to mean termination, this would obviously be absurd. What he means by ‘the end of art’ is the conclusion of a narrative: ‘There was no question in artistic practice but that a certain idea of painting in place since about 1300, had come to an end. The issue was what was painting now to be, and this in the end could only be answered with a philosophical theory which...the painting movements of the twentieth century (made) a massive effort to furnish.’ [vi] This Modernist phase ended with the introduction into art of objects with no visible difference for their everyday equivalent, and the concomitant turning from painting as the principle vehicle of artistic expression. The emergence of sculpture as a more dominant medium is in part generated from the ready-made, concerned with objects or re-presentation, rather than painting, which more commonly represents.  With Pop Art this is most paradigmatically manifested, for Danto, in the example of Warhol’s sculptures of commercial packaging, dated from the early sixties

        Brillo Box was first exhibited at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan in the spring of 1964. It would not be an exaggeration to describe Danto’s experience of this work as epiphanic - ‘my revelatory moment in art’ is how he retrospectively expressed it in 1994. The question that presented itself to Danto’s receptive mind was ‘why should this object be seen as a work of art, when something that looks just like it (an ordinary box of twenty four brillo packages) should not’? It is an ontological question of great significance, but it should be noted it is generated from a mistake. That is, Danto on first seeing Warhol’s work mistook the artist’s object for the real everyday thing. However, close visual consideration of Warhol’s sculpture reveals that these slightly oversized, painted and silk screened plywood boxes are indeed representations, in fact almost parodies of the real thing, not true identical simulacra. They are significantly not ready-made and re-presented, but handmade representations. However, through another form of reproduction, namely photographs (and slides), and in Danto’s first encounter, one can mistake the imitation (signifier) for the real thing (referent). This can clearly be seen in Danto’s own account of his first experience of the advent of pop – in a passage that is also a description of the contemporary sixties photographs of bland urban intersections by Dennis Hopper or Edward Ruscha:

  Pop redeemed the world in an intoxicating way. I have a most vivid recollection of standing at an intersection in some American city, waiting to be picked up. There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs proclaiming unbeatable deals, crazy prices, insane bargains. There was a huge self-service gas station on a third corner, and a supermarket on the fourth, with signs in the window announcing sales of Del Monte, Cheerios, Land O Lakes butter, Long Island ducklings, Velveeta, Sealtest, Chicken of the Sea…I was educated to hate all this. I would have found it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up an aesthete…But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable.[vii]

       Danto’s personal disavowal of taste again follows Duchamp, but his conception is more complex than some criticism of it might lead us to think. He has generally not been closely read, and in this regard his clear and lucid prose sometimes works against him. Some of his readers tend to paraphrase his words too easily, adopting a more cavalier attitude to his expression than they might with the more opaque jargon of some other philosophers.

The key issue here is the constitution of philosophical understanding. Danto’s position depends on the possibility of separating off something called philosophy from something called art, despite the fact that are ‘facets of the same thing.’ It is a metaphysics with its own modernist characteristics. Danto’s view it seems, is essentially Kantian, in that philosophy is primarily concerned with concepts, while art is concerned with making visible, with the production of ‘materially embodied representations.’ Philosophy and art stand as opposing facets of the same thing. Philosophy, as described in the title of one of his most important essays, disenfranchises art - it takes away art’s freedom. It does this by making art aspire to be a form of itself, a form of philosophy. Art and theory have an increasing tendency to meld. This is encapsulated by Marcel Duchamp  (philosopher manqué) who recognized in his work the necessity for art to transcend the ideology of the ‘purely’ retinal - the definitive characterization of art as visual art, encapsulated in Greenberg’s theory that art seemed orientated towards discovering a purely visual practice. The conception of art as simply visual founders on its mono-sensory characterization; that is, it understands it as possible, and desirable that one sense, sight, can encapsulate all that art was, is, or could be. It is the conceptual corollary of absolute music.

For Danto, Duchamp aspires to the philosophical saturation of art. As the visual loses its dominance, so theory become more influential. This is only a significant issue if theory is always associated with language, and that language  (problematically in my view) is seen as outside visual art, rather than always, and necessarily, entangled with it.[viii] Duchamp was well aware of the coexistence of language and image, as can be seen in for example, his ‘assisted’ ready-mades Apolinere Enameled (1916) and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), the notes for the Large Glass, and most tellingly the fact that he referred to the titles of art works as their ‘invisible colour’. The ‘ready-made’, before Warhol, demonstrated that ‘art and reality could resemble one another to whatever degree one desired.’ [ix]

The subject of Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, was reminiscent of such assisted ready-made images: what amounted to portraits of thirty-two individual Campbell’s soup cans, each different only by virtue of its contents, signified by words (Tomatoes, Beef Broth, or Minestrone etc.), not its formal composition, which in all cases was identical – text was the difference. The mode of display, a row of his ‘products’ at eye level – as if on a store shelf - was an echo of the aesthetics of supermarkets and mass-production.

In the following year, October 1963, in Pasadena, the new director of the Art Museum, Walter Hopps, who had previously been the director of the Ferus, organised Duchamp’s first American museum retrospective: By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy. This exhibition was the first opportunity for many American artists to see the range of Duchamp’s oeuvre. Edward Kienholz, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses and Edward Ruscha were among the visitors, and it was the occasion of Richard Hamilton’s first visit to the United States (following his translation of the notes for the Green Box, and his work on the copy of the Large Glass now in the Tate Modern). Also showing during the Duchamp retrospective, again in the Ferus Gallery, was Warhol’s second one-man show. He had sent the director of the gallery, Irving Blum, an uncut roll of canvas on which the same photographic stencil of Elvis Presley had been repeated, leaving it to his dealer to decide on how to ‘package’ the images into art works. It is notable that although both Duchamp and Warhol were long time residents of New York city, they first met thousands of miles away on the West Coast. It is also worth remembering that Warhol’s homosexuality and camp sensibility found a more supportive environment (he was more visible) here than in the more macho post-Abstract Expressionist New York art world.

Pop art inhabits a post-Duchampian site and is important for Danto because it ‘drew its energy in part from the fact that it allowed itself everything that had been repudiated as extrinsic to painting by earlier revolutions.’[x] In the use of objects and images perceptually indistinct from non-art, Pop art showed ‘whatever was to distinguish art from reality was not going to be something evident to the eye’. It is in this sense an inheritor of Duchamp’s non-retinal emphasis. However, if we take a slightly longer historical perspective, we can see that both Cubism and Dada, in their different ways, did much the same - in the former’s development of collage and the latter’s Merz and anti-art aesthetic. Closer to Pop in time are the ‘Combines’ of Rauschenberg in the early 50’s. In Pop art and other movements at this time there was a challenge to ‘the formal boundaries that segregated painting from sculpture, from dance, from poetry or music or drama,’[xi] the same boundaries that certain critics of modernity saw as fundamental to art’s progress and its securing of quality. This maybe true, but again it did not originate with Pop art. It was equally the case half a century earlier with Italian Futurism, or even earlier in Greek tragedy, in fact as I’ve argued elsewhere, Modernism, with its origins in Lessing’s spatio-temporal divide, is in many ways historically anachronistic, in its dogged pursuit of media purity.[xii] Pop art, like Dada, Futurism and even Cubism before it, soils the purity of art by trafficking in the ordinary. 

Theatricality and performance, the return of figuration, (and, in many cases, a fictive, three-dimensional space – especially in Pop art) together with the use of everyday forms and images (kitsch), the mixing of media and such like, brought about the ‘end of art history’ (the end of one story) in Danto’s view, precisely because a movement that overturns the limitation of boundaries leaves no future boundaries for its followers to cross. Here we must add Fluxus as another, and in my view more radical paradigm, which simultaneously with Pop, was engaged in rampant border crossings. Such revolutionary, transgressive art movements bring the idea of historical progress to a stop. For Danto, pluralism is all that can possibly follow.

      I want turn now to Cage, for a consideration of his work adds much to our discussion of formal boundaries; the relationship between art and the everyday and the differences between art forms and media.

      For Cage,too, the 1960s signal an important aesthetic shift, and this can most clearly be mapped out by reference to his work 0’00”(4’33” No. 2) composed in 1962. This work, like Danto’s first encounter with the Brillo Boxes begins with a confusion, but here a confusion between composition and performance. The work was simultaneously performed and written, its first performance being its composition. It was dedicated to the then married couple Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, and scored as a solo ‘to be performed in any way by anyone’. Despite the seeming chaos of such an indication, the work is highly regulated. The score is in the form of a text that reads:

0’00”

Solo to be performed in any way by anyone

In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.    

      The first performance took place in Tokyo on October 24, 1962, and was the amplified writing of the manuscript, which is told in an indented note in the score added the following day. In addition Cage appended four qualifications to the basic score:

1]the performer should allow any interruptions of the action.

2] the action should fulfil an obligation to others.

3] the same action should not be used in more than one performance and should not be the performance of a musical composition.

4] the performer should pay no attention to the situation he finds himself in, whether electronic, musical, or theatrical.

      Perhaps the best know performance, by Cage, took place three years later in May 1965 at the invitation of Alvin Lucier at the Rose Arts Museum at Brandeis University. The museum is built on two levels, connected via a small landing by an open stairway that enables each level to be visible to the other. Before the audience entered, Cage began the performance. The sound the concert-goers heard when they did enter were loud squeaks, gulps and taps coming from speakers located in various spaces. Appropriately, Cage was to be found in the liminal space on the stair between the two floors, answering letters at an amplified typewriter, and seated on a similarly amplified squeaky chair, which he had brought with him from New York. Now and again he quaffed from a glass of water, the sound of his swallowing amplified by a Second World War aircraft pilot’s throat microphone. When he had finished writing the letters, the sound equipment was shut off and the next work on the programme began (Lucier’s marvellous Music for Solo Performer – which also employs the body of the performer as the corps sonore, a form of bio-music). But what are we to make of such a radical work and how does it relate to the rest of Cage’s aesthetic?

      One of the most striking things about 0’00’’ is that it recognizes no measurement of time at all, thus negating the fundamental element through which music is said to exist. In a similar way to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes the major problem for conventional conceptions of art is that 0’00’’ does not appear to be music at all. There are, however, a range of affiliations the work has with other contemporary art; notably some of the Fluxus artist George Brecht’s ‘event’ scores. Yet it appears to stand apart from all that Cage had composed before. Significantly, there is a different relationship between the act of composing, the outside world and the sounds that were his medium.

Most of Cage’ previous works had used scores to filter intention away from the performer towards ‘sounds in themselves’. Here, however, there is no reference to sound at all, only to its possible enhancement; the sonic element already exists in a sense, the performer acts simply to magnify it. The only possible acoustic information provided by the score is that the performance should be amplified; but this only implies that sound will be audible. We know from Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber that while there is life there is sound, but this theoretical knowledge is not the same as hearing sound. Although conceptual sound is always present in the mind’s ear - in the act, for example, of asking ‘is there any sound?’, the words themselves sound[xiii] In short 0’00’’ does not exist as a compositional object, but only as a process.

 This move from objects to processes becomes characteristic of most of Cage’s works that follow. The title is significant too, 0’00” refers to the concept of ‘zero time’, derived from the work of Christian Wolff

You see, if music is conceived as an object, then it has a beginning, middle, and end, and one can feel rather confident when he makes measurements of the time. But when [music] is a process, those measurements become less meaningful, and the process itself, involving if it happened to, the idea of Zero Time (that is to say no time at all), becomes mysterious and therefore eminently useful.[xiv]

      What Cage is pursuing here, then, is music beyond space - which  is its objective presence - and music beyond the element that has been thought of as synonymous with it, time. The model Cage holds as paradigmatic here is nature itself; indeed a rather Bergsonian conception of nature. The world of nature is perceived as immeasurable, the site of a vast number of simultaneous, apparently unrelated activities, outside human conceptions manifested in the fluid flux of experience which is not susceptible to static measurement (beyond the ‘veil of appearance,’ as Kant put it). Any attempt at measurement restricts and curtails that fluid experience. The aesthetic corollary to this for Cage was the promotion of action and environment over sound-as-object. That is, he came to focus on facilitating sites for action, or producing a situation for action which is focused on as action, but allowing the sonic results of such action to function as music. 4’ 33” (number 1) had shown the impossibility of absolute silence and the interdependence of sight, sound, and embodiment in musical discourse[xv], 0’00”  (4’33” number 2) focused on unintentionallity in a different way. In 4’33” music arose from inaction; apart from raising and lowering the keyboard cover of the piano, David Tudor remained still and inactive. In O’00” music arose from unintentional action: writing a letter is an intentional action, but the amplified sound is not, and this constitutes the music. Amplification acted to focus attention on the sonic results of unintended acts; acts that were to be performed in an unselfconscious and unselfish way.

It is a work that cannot, in any meaningful way, be rehearsed. It is, from a performing point of view, a technique which results in no technique. The action will have a spontaneous, although disciplined, quality. Diverse actions are perceived as a single event, as the work. Andrew Culver has described it, ‘Anybody can do anything with it; the piece won’t change if I do something with it different than anybody else. The score is still the same.’[xvi] We therefore arrive at the conventionally paradoxical situation, where the traditional conception of a score as a fixer of musical meaning is inverted; the score’s identity is stable, but the resulting event is potentially infinitely variable. In the way Danto saw Brillo Box as art and non-art at the same time (this is indeed a prerequisite of the experience of the revelation), so the sympathetic recipient of Cage’s work is the agent, the bringer of meaning:

      We need first of all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds but in which people are just people, not subject, that is to laws established by anyone of them, even if he is “the composer” or “the conductor”.

The situation relates to individuals differently, because attention isn’t focused in one direction.” [xvii]

      Boundaries between art and life were to be breached via the act of reception. A rapprochement between aesthetic and everyday experience was the intention:

the piece tries to say...that everything we do is music, or can become music through the use of microphones...By means of electronics, it has been made apparent that everything is musical.[xviii]

      Everything being music was possible only by the mid-twentieth century, a technological moment that extended the range of human hearing by means of amplification technology.

      The privileging of the act of reception over the prevailing emphasis on intention in composition, echo in Warhol’s love of consumption, and its place as subject in his work. Warhol too took a ‘cool’ view of the act of composing his works, often ceding aesthetic decisions and responsibilities to his ‘Factory’ workers. This aesthetics of cool has been most effectively characterized by Mora Roth in her 1977 article ‘The Aesthetics of Indifference’.[xix] It is an analysis of the work of Cage, Merce Cunningham, Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the context of the McCarthy and Cold War period. It portrays this group as emblematically cerebral, celebrating mind over expression (in distinction to the physicality of an artist such as Jackson Pollock, and the actionists). Duchamp was heterosexual, albeit with an active female alter ego, Rrose Selavy (‘co-exhibiter’ at his Pasadena show). The others, as gay artists in a highly oppressive (homophobic) environment, resorted to an aesthetics of indifference, of irony and distance. This resulted, Roth’s argument concluded, with the avoidance of overt political alignment. The key word here is overt. Cage was by no means a political artist, but neither was he apolitical. He was an anarchist, a political position that has two main paths of praxis. One is the clichéd image of the lone figure with cloak and bomb, attempting to destabilize society through violent intervention. The other is of a figure whose fundamental belief in the sanctity of the individual leads them to attempt change only through example, rather that revolution  (in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s words ‘Whoever puts his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant’ [xx]). The key concepts here, to return us to our example of 0’00”, are discipline and obligation. To live with respect for others requires the disciplining of your own desires and the obligation to care. Given the complexities of Cold War culture and the vindictiveness of McCarthy, silence ensured survival. ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’, as Cage put it – but, as Jonathan Katz has pointed out, this is not real silence, but rather the performance of silence.[xxi]  Warhol too, as Thomas Crow has argued, while grounding his art in the ubiquity of the package commodity, produced in much of his work a dramatization of the breakdown of commodity exchange.[xxii] The work of Cage and Warhol can be seen as examples of social protest, not least through their insistence on returning art to the everyday (and to everybody).

This, however, is not the same as making art into non-art; it is not the Dadaist inversion of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. It is rather to draw attention to the constant ontological struggle between art and the everyday, a dialectic that is essentially an issue of framing.

      In the chapter on parergon in his book The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida considers Kant’s Critique of Judgement and within it the ‘peripheral’ discussion of ‘ornaments’ [parerga] and frames (‘those things which do not belong to the complete representation of the object internally as elements, but only externally as complements…[xxiii]). Kant regards frames as ornamental to the work of art, but necessary to differentiate the intrinsic object of address.

“What is a frame?”…it’s a parergon, a hybrid of outside and inside, but a hybrid which is not a mixture or a half-measure, an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside…[xxiv]

Kant regards artistic form, or the work of art, as autonomous and auto-telic, that is, goal-directed but with no use in the ‘outside’ world. It signifies nothing, it has no conceptual content. The frame is what sits between this autonomous object and the outside. But, as Derrida points out, a frame, if necessary, is not just ornamental and contingent. Derrida proposes that the frame functions paradoxically to separate the work both from its context and from the frame itself. In relation to the work of art the frame appears part of the context (the museum wall for example), but in relation to the general context it appears part of the work (Seurat’s painted frames are a particular example). Thus, Derrida seeks to emphasize that ‘framing effects occur’, rather than frames. Frames are the points of liminal focus. In addition, as already implied, the frame both defines the work (is necessary) and is mere ornament (is contingent). The important point here is that the edge of a work, its border or boundary is theoretically permeable; or, to put it in other terms, text and context are in flux or in dialogue. Warhol’s work requires a frame, either a literal one in the case of the Soup cans, or an institutional one in the case of the Brillo Boxes. The frame selects and emphasizes. It necessary and contingent at the same time, just as Danto saw the Boxes as art and non-art simultaneously.

      The frame that usually surrounds music is silence, but Cage brought this outside silence into the heart of his work, fashioning his composition out of this framing silence[xxv]. The edge of his work is set up to be permeable and transparent (but also visible):(4’33”).

      There are what we might think of as two kinds of silence. The empirical, ritual and institutionally organized silence at the beginning and end of a musical work. Wagner was one of the first musicians to insist on adding a visual marker by requiring the lights of the auditorium to be lowered to prepare this framing silence. In addition, there is also silence at the limits of human hearing. But even this is challenged by Cage through the power of amplification.

       Cage’s friend La Monte Young, serves as an interesting additional example in this regard. Consider his Composition No. 5, of 1960, also known as the ‘butterfly piece’. The sound in this work is performed by the butterfly or butterflies as they are released. No one present, neither the ‘performer’ who releases the butterflies nor the audience, can hear the sound of the non-human ‘instrument.’ But they can see it; the effect is visual. An insect of celebrated  beauty, often understood as a symbol of metamorphosis in art, performs a flight which acts as a visual metaphor for the absent sound. Young is reported to have said to his colleague Tony Conrad, ‘Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?’[xxvi]

The score says;

Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.

When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.

The composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.

      The concert hall is, as the museum for the Brillo Boxes, the frame. Writing of this piece, Young raises the issue of audibility as a prerequisite for music: ‘I felt certain the butterfly made sounds, not only with the motion of its wings but also with the functioning of its body . . . and unless one was going to dictate how loud or soft the sounds had to be before they could be allowed into the realm of music . . . the butterfly piece was music.’[xxvii]

      The Modernist (post-Romantic) aesthetic urgency to place the frame as ancillary comes from the acknowledging of its necessity. Minimalism, in the eyes of Michael Fried for example, in its overt ‘theatricality’, draws attention to its context and moves it across the great divide between art and the state of objecthood, and the test of a work of art was the suspension of that very objecthood in favour of the everyday.[xxviii] Minimalism therefore committed the modernists sin of borrowing from another discipline’s effects. Such objects needed the theatre of the site to be meaningful. They were not self- possessed and were therefore unable to free spectators of their self-awareness. Rosalind Krauss has written;

...this very abstract presence, this disembodied viewer as pure desiring subject, as subject whose disembodiment is, moreover, guaranteed by its sense of total mirroring dependency on what is not itself - that is, precisely the subject constructed by the field of pop and the world into which it wants to engage, the world of the media and the solicitation of advertising.[xxix]

      This passage brings together the consumer of pop images with the idealist viewer of Fried and Greenberg’s Modernism - the gap between High Modernism and Pop art may not be so wide, or at least they may not be in opposition.

      Perhaps Warhol’s closest contact with the everyday was in the form of money. His own ‘counterfeit’ screen-printed dollar bills were produced after he was informed that he could not, as he had wished, display real dollar bills on a gallery wall, as this was a federal offence. But even with the display of real money (as ready-made) there is a play of signification, for money is by definition a medium of exchange. The 1960s were a moment of aspiration to unmediated contact with the everyday in Pop, in Minimalism, and in Arte Povera, that aspiration was symbolic of the hope for unfiltered and undistorted knowledge,  felt against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, and May 1968.

      History matters, and so does art’s history, or perhaps more accurately, art’s histories, for in the end both Cage and Warhol are in dialogue with art’s histories. Just as Danto argues that pluralism was the consequence of art after Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, so there is more than one history. Nothing can be taken for granted and perhaps the greatest task now facing us in a post-Warhol, post-Cage, pluralist art world is, as Danto has argued, that everyone is now required to be a critic. Thomas Crow has suggested that philosophy has moved out of the academy and has taken up residence in art galleries. To be an artist today is to philosophize by visual means, however broadly.  We must all learn to put together the thought embodied in the work. This consequently puts greater responsibility on viewer and audience, as both Warhol and Cage assume.  This is democratic, but it also requires an informed public. For this we need to learn from each other, to contribute our own histories and understanding - perhaps through  our 15 minuets in the spot light, or, more profoundly, by creating our own  4’33” of silence.