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John Cage Performs James Joyce

Takahiko iimura

1991 00:15:07 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3BetacamSP video
Tags:
Language, Literature, Music, Performance

Description

An extremely rare documentation of a private performance of John Cage, one of the leading avant-garde composers of the 20th century, who created "Writing for the Fifth Time through Finnegan's Wake" using I-Ching chance operation: Chinese fortune telling.  Here Cage performs in front of a video camera operated by Takahiko iimura, while he transforms the text of a modern literature classic by James Joyce into Cagian music in three ways: reading, singing and whispering.

"Roaratorio is one of the classics of Cage’s oeuvre and in iimura’s 15-minute recording, John Cage Performs James Joyce, Cage presents the core of the spoken part of the work. Its composition, like many of his other works, is aided by the I-Ching. Here he briefly explains that none of the sentences (sic) in Finnegan's Wake are selected, only words, syllables and letters, from different pages according to the chance decisions made by consulting the I-Ching and its representational hexagrams."

-- Mike Leggett, Leonardo Digital Review, MIT Press

About Takahiko iimura

A pioneering figure in the New York and Japanese film and video undergounds, Taka iimura has had a tremendous impact upon the development of experimental cinema in both the U.S. and Japan. iimura's work in video has concentrated on deconstructing the language of video, especially video's power to obscure the author of the image, through the audience's immediate acceptance of what is shown on screen as true. iimura establishes a relation between the self-reflexive nature of language and the simultaneous feedback characteristic of video, exploiting this relation to investigate the shifting position of video's subject (who is behind the camera) and object (who is in front of the camera). Through his videos, which read like elaborate semiotic riddles, iimura has educated audiences to the structure of video in a way that has profoundly changed the way the medium is viewed.

He is a widely established international artist, having had numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Musem of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Reina Sofia National Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in addition to artist residencies at the German Academy of Arts and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Study Center.

Recently he has been involved in using computers, publishing more than 20 DVDs/CD-ROMs, and writing several books on film, video, and multimedia, including a book published in English, "The Collected Writings of Takahiko iimura".

"I am concerned with the whole system of video, not just what you see on the screen, but including the camera, monitor, the whole system."
—Takahiko iimura