273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory) (2011)

296-page book
Digital printing
Perfect bound
Edition of 25

273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory) was an installation of printed works and video that explored chance, memory and the photographic image. It included an edition of ten books, a unique large-format photograph, six silkscreen prints, and video. The book featured 273 images, texts, and other artifacts (“relics”) that were assembled and chosen by chance operations, including visual artifacts sampled from a single photograph of Cage’s mushroom-collecting basket, captured at the John Cage Trust on August 22, 2011.

The volume also included 52 poems that I generated and assembled by chance operations, using Aristotle’s “On Memory and Recollection” (350 B.C), John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1961), M.E. Hard’s “The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise” (1908), and fragments of conversation recorded at the John Cage Trust. 273 Relics for John Cage was installed at “Revisiting Black Mountain College 3: John Cage’s Circle of Influence,” a conference and exhibition celebrating John Cage’s centennial, co-sponsored by the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and the John Cage Trust, October 7–November 7, 2011, at Highsmith Gallery, Asheville.

Each relic is numbered and refers to each of the 273 seconds of silence in 4′33″. 273 Relics for John Cage was an experimental portrait and a performative tribute, exploring the impossibility of the image by dismantling the photograph to render it irrelevant, as it disappears. The viewer is left with faint traces of source material and the freedom to investigate phantom images, imagined narratives, and other associations.

Download 273 Relics for John Cage [PDF]