John Cage was a pioneer in avant garde sound design and performance pieces, helping shape many future artists in creating material that was both intentional yet seemingly random. Cage utilized chance happenings as the skeleton of a majority of his works, which include The Untitled Event, 4’33”, and Water Walk. When conceptualizing these pieces and arranging them, he would utilize the methods of I Ching to have the chance of an event determine the outcome of the time measure. By looking at Cage’s works we can explore the method of having the universe manipulate the surroundings and end all.
One way to define what a happening consists of one can approach it as, “Happenings happen when something happens”. While that sentence might be a tough one to wrap around your head, the idea that is being discussed is simple and complex simultaneously. The universe consists of infinite amounts of events that are either predetermined or random, and all of these events have some actions that is changing something else. This event is considered a happening, when looked at as not connected to any other event. Everyday there are many things that influence our day, the meetings we have and the people we run into, each of those encounters change the outcome of the next event and this is how life is ran. Looking at The Untitled Event, there were several events happening simultaneously in the dining hall, surrounding the audience; however, the experience was created as a result of each event in relation to the others, although these events were not related or connected in any way. So it seems that happenings can be connected to the events that are occurring in the same space and time, but there is an emphasize on the lack of connection of the pieces. This is the approach that artists like John Cage, Dick Higgins, and Yoko Ono take to make their art have a natural flow.
There is a lecture by Allan Kaprow, which explains the formulation of a happening, as if you can create one. However, I like to think of it as just setting up an environment that will promote that happening to occur. One point that Kaprow makes is to just “take things as they come, and arrange them in whatever way that is least artificial and easiest to do,” which allows the universe to run its course and encourages the outcome to occur without human intervention. In Cage’s piece Water Walk, he is pouring water into various containers for a predetermined amount of time before moving on to the next container. The various happenings allow the audience to create their own narrative and understand the change in events from each water pitcher spilled.
One of the most intriguing pieces is 4’33”, which has the performer follow a stopwatch and perform specific movements while seated a piano. This could be seen as an “anti-happening,” but the lack of an event forces the happening onto the audience. By allowing chance to be a factor in the work, the amount of audience coughs or sneezes are always going to be different. The performer is creating the parameters of the random events, but this retrospective piece shows that happenings occur by themselves and by the chance of the universe.
ELFOREO 