273 Relics for John Cage


Installing the book.

So how does one install a book?







Ink and paper




Untitled pixel



Moving pictures






A canvas is never empty







is it a photograph?
is it photographic?
does it depict?
does it refer?
does it demand?
is it empty?
what is the space of this image?
what is its narrative?
what does it carry?



Obtain photographic records which no longer look like photographs of something

I picked up John Cage’s “X: Writings ’79–’82” today at Spoonbill. A gorgeous book for a lot of reasons, and a few specific surprises. First of all, the book is

“illustrated fortuitously by twelve photographs made at my request by Paul Barton of twelve weathered images on the Siegel Cooper Building, first balcony level (eight images on the Avenue of the Americas, two on 18th Street, two on 19th Street, New York City). I call them Weather-ed I-XII. I did nothing to make them the way they are. I merely noticed them. They are changing, as are the sounds of the traffic I also enjoy as each day I look out the window.”

The images appear to be degraded photocopies, or to have gone through some kind of process to take away any representational quality. They’re beautiful, and I wonder what kind of life, if any, they had outside of this book.

But most astonishing was my discovery of a passage on page 92, within the work “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet,” describing a book project — a kind of dictionary based on photography. Cage has lifted Duchamp’s writing here, I think, from Á l’infinitif (The White Box), 1967:

“Dictionary — With films, taken close up, of parts of very large objects, obtain photographic records which no longer look like photographs of something. With these semi-microscopics constitute a dictionary of which each film would be the representation of a group of words in a sentence or separated so that this film would assume a new significance or rather after the concentration on this film of the sentences or words chosen would give a form of meaning to this film and that, once learned, this relation between film and meaning translated into words would be “striking” and would serve as a basis for a kind of writing which no longer has an alphabet or words but signs (films) already freed from the “baby talk” of all ordinary languages. — Find a means of filing all these films in such order that one could refer to them as in a dictionary.”

As though Duchamp is speaking to me, through Cage, and proposing a project for me to do — as I’m doing it.


Two different ways to mock-up

Installation studies. On the screen, at the fabricator.

And by the way, what a fabricator. Tim Spelios is a furniture/fixture/cabinet-maker with Donald Judd-like craftsmanship.


Book object

A name change. I liked “JC273” but the longer name feels better as a title for the project. And this morning I realized why — “273 Relics for John Cage” is precise and accurate. I like the explicitness. The book is just a reliquary to hold all 273 relics (texts, photo extractions, and yes, blank pages), and the name reflects this simplicity.

Now, after uploading the book files to the printer, I’m starting to think about which relics to realize at a larger scale. And as they’re selected and produced (a single gigantic digital print, a series of screen prints), each one will take on the “JC + number” structure. Following this logic, JC273 would be the last relic, which in fact is a blank page.

And I really love this logic. It’s a system that’s revealing itself to me as the process unfolds (“a series of actions”).

“A likeness is an aid to memory” is one of my favorite phrases from Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection, and makes several appearances within the texts of “273 Relics for John Cage.” Aristotle’s full passage refers to the exact process of remembering, as an act of imagination. Memory as the internal production of an image, which is both an object of contemplation in itself and a mental picture of something else. Aristotle asks:

“What does one actually remember?

Is what one remembers the present affection, or the original from which it arose? If the former, then we could not remember anything in its absence; if the latter, how can we, by perceiving the affection, remember the absent fact which we do not perceive? If there is in us something like an impression or a picture, why should the perception of just this be memory of something else and not of itself? For when one exercises his memory this affection is what he considers and perceives. How, then, does he remember what is not present? This would imply that one can also see and hear what is not present. But surely in a sense this can and does occur. Just as the picture painted on the panel is at once a picture and a portrait, and though one and the same, is both, yet the essence of the two is not the same, and it is possible to think of it both as a picture and as a portrait, so in the same way we must regard the mental picture within us both as an object of contemplation in itself and as a mental picture of something else. In so far as we consider it in itself, it is an object of contemplation or a mental picture, but in so far as we consider it in relation to something else, e.g., as a likeness, it is also an aid to memory.”