1.7.1 Get with it: Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. (Cage, 1967, pg. 90)

1.7.2 It was the early 1930's when John Cage started composing music. Ten years later he invented the "prepared piano," a piano transformed into a percussion instrument of diverse timbres by insertion of certain objects between the strings at certain points. Very early on he rejected the authoritarian system of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and started stressing (inspired by Zen Buddhism) art as life, exploring duration, repetition and random elements.

1.7.3 Although primarily a sound artist, his work had an enormous impact on the visual arts. He moved to New York in the 1940's and met Duchamp a few years before being appointed to teach at Black Mountain College. Cage's influence can be felt in many movements that emerged in the 1950's and 60's, such as Neo-Dada, Fluxus, Arte Povera, and an entire generation of music artists that followed later in the 70's.

1.7.4 Cage became enamoured with Fuller during the first summer at Black Mountain College, and his admiration grew over the years. In One Week from Monday, Cage writes that "the work and thought of B. Fuller is of prime importance to me. He more than any other to my knowledge sees the world situation-all of it-clearly and has reasoned projects from turning our attention from 'killingry' to 'livingry.'" (Cage, 1967, pg. xi)

1.7.5 During the summer they met at Black Mountain College, Cage, in his infamous "Defense of Satie" lecture, in which he laid the groundwork for his artistic position, included Fuller in his narrative. Two years later, in the "Lecture on Something," he again cites Fuller as well: " . . . as Bucky Fuller is fond of pointing out: the movement of the wind of the Orient and the movement against the wind of the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air-the space, the silence, the nothingness that supports us." (1961, pg. 130-131) [6] Richard Kostelanetz, a biographer of Cage, notes that Cage refused to acknowledge the "totalitarian tendencies" in Buckminster Fuller's thought. (Schimmel, 1998, pg. 206) But even though Cage's exploration of space differs from that of Fuller, by fully embracing chance and unpredictability he is inspired by Fuller's more uniform and idealistic abstract space. As Martin Rheinhold notes, it is ironic that the very concept of "eermentation" that Cage linked to Fuller's image of airborne movement is what most clearly distinguished his outlook from Fuller's. (Rheinhold, 1997, pp.17.4)

1.7.6 Cage, with his open-ended, conceptually driven performances, was influential and liberating to visual artists wanting to break out of the wall and frame. He rejected dualistic thinking and, through his work, explored the multiplicitous realms of chance and indeterminacy. Fuller and Cage's connection to each other was based on their deep appreciation for something beyond thought-intuition, unmediated insight, intelligence-experience that can be accessed only through silence. Both men were rooted spiritually yet actively worked in the physical realm considering the world condition. It is true that Cage was conceptually able to go beyond Fuller's utopian prophesying by introducing chance and random possibilities into his work, but equally significant is that Fuller consistently acted as an inspirational force throughout his creative life. In 1992, the year he died, in his last public reading entitled "Overpopulation and Art," Cage clearly points to the importance of re-examining Fuller's ideas:

1.7.7 . . . R. Buckminster Fuller called it killingry as opposed to livingry. Fuller is dead but his spirit is now more than ever the spirit the world needs, it is alive, we have it in his work, his writings . . . Let us not forget we are having to continue his work, in music the absence of the conductoru, score, and barline, spaceship earth . . . (Perloff,1992, pg. 27) [top]