03/25/2026
INDETERMINACY
John Cage: Works on Paper
through April 22, 2026
For more Information, contact us at [email protected]
INDETERMINACY features a carefully curated selection of John Cage's most influential works on paper. The exhibition examines Cage's intentional, unbiased approach to removing personal bias from the creative process. The theme of silence, represented in INDETERMINACY, is expressed through visual works that encompass a wide range of philosophical perspectives.
John Cage's engagement with Gertrude Stein's work spanned his entire career, beginning with his early musical settings of her poems in the 1930s and evolving into a philosophical connection to her ‘landscape’ approach to language. He believed that meaning was flexible and that words were often used beyond their usual senses. This view created a surface of sound and text characterized by a non-hierarchical structure. Immediate perception, similar to Stein's ‘continuous present,’ aimed to immerse the audience in the world as it is and eliminate symbolic baggage from art.
While John Cage used the term to describe his 1959 collection of 90 stories, "indeterminacy" is a fundamental aspect of his visual art practice. Cage's works on paper function as musical scores with graphic notation. These scores are indeterminate in performance and open to multiple interpretations. In this
exhibition, chance refers to the random methods employed in composition, and indeterminacy emphasizes the open-ended nature of the final work. By removing the self from the center of the artwork, John Cage encourages us to view the paper as a window into a constantly changing yet still present world. INDETERMINACY closely aligns with his intent, as the works rely on chance to shape their unconstrained final form.
IMAGE:
John Cage, Where There Is Where There Urban Landscape 31, 1987-89, a series of 48 unique color aquatints with flat bite etching, 22.75 × 30 in.
