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John Cage's Ryoanji Drawings

John Cage created over 170 pencil drawings between 1983-1992 exploring Japan's famous Zen garden Ryoanji. This was an intensive examination of the garden's aesthetic and conceptual reflections relevant to Cage's entire body of work. The book presents, for the first time, all of Cage's "Where R = Ryoanji" drawings series. It includes high quality reproductions and contextual information compiled by an art historian. Cage's Ryoanji drawings can be seen as his magnum opus of visual art, made using chance operations like those in his music to determine elements like stone positions.

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CarolBhagavatiMcDonnell
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201 views1 page

John Cage's Ryoanji Drawings

John Cage created over 170 pencil drawings between 1983-1992 exploring Japan's famous Zen garden Ryoanji. This was an intensive examination of the garden's aesthetic and conceptual reflections relevant to Cage's entire body of work. The book presents, for the first time, all of Cage's "Where R = Ryoanji" drawings series. It includes high quality reproductions and contextual information compiled by an art historian. Cage's Ryoanji drawings can be seen as his magnum opus of visual art, made using chance operations like those in his music to determine elements like stone positions.

Uploaded by

CarolBhagavatiMcDonnell
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

SCHIRMER/MOSEL VERLAG

WIDENMAYERSTRASSE 16 D-80538 MNCHEN


TELEFON 089/21 26 70-0 TELEFAX 089/33 86 95
e-mail: [email protected]

March 2013

PRESS RELEASE

John Cage: Ryoanji Catalogue Raisonn


The complete Ryoanji pencil drawings, for the first time in book form
John Cage
Ryoanji
Catalogue Raisonn of the
Visual Artworks Vol. I
Ed. By Corinna Thierolf
240 pages, 143 tritone plates
ISBN 978-3-8296-0625-7
98.-, US$ 125.-

American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912, Los Angeles 1992, New York) is one
of the extraordinary figures of the 20th century. Cage revolutionized music by making the
world of sounds and silence acceptable as music. He was not only active as a composer,
but also as a philosopher, poet, teacher, mycologist and visual artist leaving a great oeuvre.
Between 1983 and 1992 John Cage created some 170 pencil drawings, an intensive
exploration of Japans most famous Zen garden of the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. The
Ryoanji drawings can be seen as the opus magnum of Cages visual work, illustrating
aesthetic and conceptual reflections relevant to his entire oeuvre.
In cooperation with Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, which owns an extensive
selection of Ryoanji drawings, and the John Cage Trust in New York, Schirmer/Mosel is
publishing John Cage Ryoanji, which for the first time presents the complete series of
drawings Where R = Ryoanji.
John Cage first visited the Ryoanji Temple and its early 16th-century rock garden as early as
1962, during a concert tour. Measuring 30 x 10 meters, the garden consists of carefully
raked white pebbles with 15 rocks arranged seemingly at random. Over a period of ten
years Cage devoted himself to drawings addressing the aesthetic order of the complex that
is revered in Japan as a perfect depiction of nature. As with his musical works, to produce
the drawings Cage developed so-called chance operations determining, for example, the
positions of stones circled by the artists pen on the paper.
For this first volume of the catalogue raisonn of John Cages visual art, the books editor
Corinna Thierolf, chief curator at Pinakothek der Moderne, has systematically compiled
little known sources on the evolution and on the art-historical context of the Ryoanji
drawings.
Our book shows, in extraordinarily delicate reproductions, the immense breadth of the
Ryoanji drawings, their notations ranging from isolated circular lines to seemingly chaotic
and overlapping networks of strokes. Provided with the proper sequence of all works in
the series, the reader can for the first time indulge in fully experiencing the suspense and
tension Cage so skillfully created between repetition and uniqueness, order and disorder,
agitation and tranquility. One of John Cages artistic goals was to achieve maximum
insight with minimum stimulus an achievement impressively attested to in this book.

Schirmer/Mosel Press Office // [email protected] // +49 (0) 89 21 26 700

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