Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#12297

Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

Artist
John Cage
Date
2015
Publisher
siglio
Format
Artists' Books
Size
6 × 8.5 in
Length
176 pages
Genre
Music, Theory, Poetry
Description

Composed over the course of 16 years, John Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) is one of his most prescient and personal works. A repository of observations, anecdotes, obsessions, jokes and koan like stories, the diary registers Cage’s assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny predictions about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from postwar music to Watergate, from domestic minutiae to ideas on how to feed the world.

Typing on an IBM Selectric, Cage used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation and – in the case of Part Three (published as a Great Bear pamphlet by Something Else Press)—color. The beautiful and unusual visual variances become almost musical as the physicality of the language on the page suggests the sonic. This first complete hardcover edition collects all eight parts Cage originally published in A Year from Monday, M and X. Coeditors Kraft and Biel have consulted these publications along with Cage’s original manuscripts, and – with the Great Bear pamphlet as a guide – they have used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of red and blue as well as apply a set of 18 typefaces to the entire work.

Composer, philosopher, writer and artist, John Cage (1912-92) is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. A pioneer in extending the boundaries of music, often composing works through chance operations, Cage also had an extraordinary impact on dance, poetry, performance and visual art.

  1. john cage: diary
 

Related Items

  1. Arisa Odawara: My Diary
  2. Robert Seydel: A Picture is Always a Book
  3. Erkki Kurenniemi
  4. Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss
  5. Izabela Oldak: A Diary With Kaleidoscope Eyes
  6. Jessica Williams: Diary
  7. Art or Sound
  8. Fito Conesa: Suite for ordinary Machinery
  9. Mark Connery: Hell Passport #15
  10. Angela Bulloch: Source Book 10
  11. Ryan Foerster
  12. K8 Hardy: How To
  13. Ryan Trecartin: Yet
  14. Dan Graham: Nuggets: New and Old Writing on Art, Architecture, and Culture
  15. Protocol Warum: Care Not Care no. 6
  16. Animal Spirits
  17. Sean Landers, Art, Life and God
  18. A Critical (Ninth) Assembling (Precisely: 6789)
  19. Merce Cunningham: Changes
  20. Ian Wallace: The First documenta, 1955
  21. Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and on a “Sociology of Art,“ c. 1909
  22. Christoph Menke: Aesthetics of Equality
  23. Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait“
  24. G.M. Tamás: Innocent Power
  25. Paul Ryan: Two Is Not a Number, A Conversation with Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
  26. Péter György: The Two Kassels
  27. Kenneth Goldsmith: Letter to Bettina Funcke
  28. David Robbins: Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy
  29. Source Book 5 / 2008 Geoffrey Farmer
  30. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  31. The New Public
  32. It is what it is. Or is it?
  33. Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory
  34. Paul McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble
  35. Jon Beacham: The Brother in Elysium - Artwork and Publications 2008-2013
  36. Michael Schmelling: Land Line