Performing Silence. The Bird Cage of John Cage

From May 18 through May 23, the grand hall of the Museo de Arte of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia will be transformed into a box containing the world of John Cage. Like Duchamp, Cage gave birth to a revolutionary thought that transformed the arts and encouraged processes like those by the Fluxus group, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik. Boundaries between art and life were erased through micropolitical actions that permeate aesthetics with the mundane, and vice versa, in search for the negation of truth and knowledge, symptoms of a feeling of social desperation. In this manner, "Performing Silence. The Bird Cage of John Cage" offers a powerful sound environment, films and video art by other artists, as well as Cage's writings, poems and displays from his artist's book Silence. The audiovisual program ranges from the composer's own cinematographic experiences, developed in collaboration with Henning Lohner, Don Gillespie, Frank Scheffer, and Andrew Culver, to films by key artists from the US vanguard and the electronic arts greatly influenced by Cage: films by a pioneer of experimental filmmaking, Stan Brakhage, Cut-Up films by William Burroughs, and other audiovisuals by Fluxus artists like Nam June Paik and George Maciunas. Inspired by and based on the book of changes, the I-Ching, and on chance, "the box of Cage" will include live performances by experts on his work who actively collaborated with him, like: Jole Chadabe, who worked alongside Cage in the piece Birdcage for a magnetic band, as well as prominent violinist Irvine Arditti, who worked with Cage in the four books with thirty-two studies that make the Freeman Etudes for solo violin, which he interpreted entirely for the first time in Colombia. Every day and throughout the period in which the exhibition will remain open, several improvisations and happenings will be featured and randomly repeated in the intervened sound space. The exhibition will also offer a program of live performances. More information available at: http://patrimoniocultural.bogota.unal.edu.co/eventos/article/performing-silence-la-jaula-de-pajaros-de-john-cage.html On May 18, the museum issues an invitation to participate in the continuous play (840 times) of the sheet music piece for piano titled Vexations, composed by Erik Satie: http://patrimoniocultural.bogota.unal.edu.co/vexations.pdf