Every Day Is A Good Day

This book is published to accompany the first major retrospective in the UK of the visual art of the pioneering American composer and artist John Cage (1912-1992), and is lavishly illustrated with full colour plates of his drawings, watercolours and prints. The use of chance operations, in particular the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, was central to Cage's compositional method and his approach to visual art. In his series Where R=Ryoanji (1983-92), pencil drawings on handmade Indian rag paper, Cage traced around the contours of stones using the I Ching in order to determine the position of each; a similar process was used to create the New River Watercolors (1988), New River Rocks and Washes (1990) and other works. Cage also used the I Ching to determine the technique, composition and tonal values of the prints he created at Crown Point Press. An introduction by curator Jeremy Millar explores Cage's visual art and his unique practice. His working methods and philosophies are brought to light in new interviews with key collaborators: printmaker Kathan Brown; Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust; artist Ray Kass; and Julie Lazar, curator of Cage's 1992 'composition for a museum', Rolywholyover: A Circus. Extracts from a 1966 interview between Cage and the critic Irving Sandler are also included. At the heart of the book is a 'Companion to Cage': a selection of quotations by Cage and notes on key themes and influences from 'Alphabet' to 'Zen', making it essential reading on this important figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde.