Membra Disjecta for John Cage. Wanting to Say Something About John

This catalogue was published on the occassion of the exhibition Membra Disjecta for John Cage. Wanting to Say Something About John. Part of the worldwide prigrams celebrating the 100th bithday of John Cage. Its title, Membra Disjecta for John Cage, refers to his famous method of treatment for various inspirational sources as well as to the historic, aesthetic and media heterogeneity of exhibited collection (membra disjecta or disjecta membra is a Latin term for “scattered members” and is used to refer to surviving fragments of ancient pottery, manuscripts and other cultural objects). The subtitle of the exhibition, Wanting to Say Something About John, is based on a rephrasing of the title of Cage’s commemorative visual homage to Marcel Duchamp. In 1969, Cage and several other artists were asked to contribute an idea in honor of Duchamp, who had died the previous year. Cage created a multiple consisting of one lithograph and four Plexigrams presentable in random order one after another in a special wooden frame, and all printed with text generated randomly with the help of the Chinese oracular book I Ching. He ultimately decided to title the work after Jasper Johns’ statement “I don’t want to say anything about Marcel”.