Cageian Space

John Cage tv interview                          Photo R. Allen-Sherwood 2014

Happy New Year everyone. With the start of the new year I've been re-organising my living spaces and came upon my university research file on artists who, like myself, were inspired or influenced by karesansui or Zen gardens. It was like finding a long lost friend!

                  John Cage tv interview  Ryoanji garden                    R Allen-Sherwood 2014                  

One artist who takes up a goodly chunk of the file is the late, great John Cage. His one-of-a-kind musings on sound, silence, space and life continue to inspire me to this very day. Cage also loved Zen gardens and they influenced his work for much of the later part of his life.

  

Ryoanji music score    www.soundstation.dk

Laura Kuhn from the John Cage Trust describes his first encounter with Ryoanji Zen Garden:

"Cage first visited the Ryoanji Temple and its early 16th-century rock garden in 1962, during a concert tour of Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Sapporo) with David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Yoko Ono.

Measuring 30 x 10 meters, the garden consists of carefully raked white pebbles with 15 rocks arranged seemingly at random.  Over a period of ten years, the last decade of his life, Cage devoted himself to drawings addressing the aesthetic order of the complex that is revered in Japan as a perfect depiction of nature".

Courtesy of John Cage Trust

I chose several of his "R= Ryoanji" drawings for my undergraduate dissertation on  Space, Form and Emptiness:The Influence of Japanese Zen Rock Gardens on Eastern andWestern Art.  It was

 a hit as many people did not know he was also a visual artist as well as music composer.

www.discogs.com

In 2016 I am looking forward finding more space/mind changers in my continuing investigations into the meaning of space, self and nothingness Hi ho Silver!