(Los Angeles 1912–1992 New York)
Not wanting to say anything about Marcel-Plexigrams I-VIII, 1969, signed on the base by John Cage and Calvin J. Sumsion, 8 screenprints on 8 movable plexiglass discs fitted into a walnut base. Edition of 125 + 18 artist’s proofs, 35.6 x 61 x 36.8 cm. Published by Eye Editions, Cincinnati. Printed by Hollanders Workshop, Inc., New York (stamped mark on the base)

Provenance:
Galleria Dell’Obelisco, Rome
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, John Cage, Galleria Schwarz, March 1971 (another example illustrated in catalogue) Rome, Plexigrams, Galleria dell’Obelisco, January 1973

Literature:
David Nicholls et al., The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 112–113

Note:
The Plexigrams are Cage’s first visual art project. “Not wanting to say anything about Marcel” was created in 1969 to honour the passing of Cage’s friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp. The title refers to a comment Jasper Johns made to Cage when the artist was encouraged to respond in memoriam to Duchamp’s death. With the collaboration of his friend, the artist and designer Calvin J. Sumsion and through chance operations, Cage randomly selected dictionary-like pictures and words from The American Dictionary and the New York Public Library Picture Collection and transposed them onto plexiglass in a disintegrated composition. Altogether there are sixty-four different panels, the number of the hexagrams in the I Ching. Cage laid a grid over the page, then asked the I Ching for coordinates on it. After locating an image on the grid at those coordinates, he would turn it against a protractor to the number of degrees specified by chance operations. He used this method with or without protractor, for most of his graphic works and some of his music over the rest of his life. The eight plexiglass panels could be recorded at will and when assembled together, the “Plexigrams” resemble a translucent image with ghostly, fading inscriptions, reminding us of Duchamp’s famous work, Le Grand Verre, with its different ways to suggest reality.