Actors and Onlookers (Natalie Crohn Schmitt, 1990)

1. John Cage, Nature, and Theatre P.5 - 37

Chance, Indeterminacy, Purposelessness (P.26 - 30)

• P.26 Art, in Cage's view, must similarly demonstrate nature's chanciness and indeterminacy. Such art is not easy to create, however, because artists, like all persons, have intentions.
• To render art even less subject to human control, Cage utilizes the performers' intentions, at variance from one another, to make the performance, like much of daily life, nonintentional and unstructured.
• P.28 Art, Cage says, must teach us to cease defining our lives in terms of ends and to appreciate our purposelessness. What we are doing is living; rather than moving toward a goal.....Cage's own work, therefore, moves toward no end.
• P.30 New art and music, following Cage, do not communicate an individual's conceptions in ordered structures; rather, they implement processes that, like our daily lives, are opportunities for perception and emotion.
• Cage admires Marchall McLuhan, for one reason among many, because he emphasizes this shift from life that is shaped and made meaningful for us to life that we must shape and make meaningful for ourselves.

Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.