[...]

Cage is among the most important creative figures of the twentieth century. As a musician, composer, teacher, artist and as a friend of Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik and others, he had a significant impact on the evolution of art forms that straddled the conventionally perceived boundaries of music, dance, the visual arts and theatre, and that disproved the supposed distinction between 'high' and 'low' art. Alongside Duchamp, Cage was one of the first artists to combine various media in his work, and to produce what could truly be called multimedia art. Of crucial importance in Cage's work are compositional procedures based on allowing chance to determine the choices made and aleatory methods of composing. He was first alerted to this notion through discovering the highly complex counting processes informing the Chinese oracle book, the »I Ching«. This showed Cage that it was possible to work in a 'non-intentional' manner; that is to say, to keep personal elements out of the work and, at the same time, to offer performers a greater degree of freedom in their interpretations. In his musical compositions, Cage used silence and emptiness, non-tones and noises occurring by chance in both the immediate and the more distant environment together with instrumentally generated sounds. In Cage's work, we find a union of the unregulated, playful and anarchic elements of Dada and of fluxus (Cage had a great influence on the origin and evolution of this last) with the meditative, indifferent and disciplined character of Zen Buddhism and the wisdom of Oriental philosophy.

[...]

https://zkm.de/en/person/john-cage (15.09.2021)