THEY HAD come in from different places. Cage had been teaching his experimental music lab at the New School; Cunningham came from rehearsal; Rauschenberg had been in his studio trying to sort out a problem with a lithographic stone. Avedon, who had been at a fashion sitting, was there first; he and his assistants were setting up. Cage and Cunningham came in at roughly the same time and they all three chatted a bit and waited for Rauschenberg, who stuck his head in the door, and said, Sorry, the stone broke completely in half, and he laughed, and they all laughed, and they got started.
Avedon had been taking portraits for twenty years—his collection was in the line of Brady’s and Steichen’s, though, in reaction to Steichen’s style and what Avedon thought of as “all that backlighting,” the younger photographer’s aesthetic was stark. Avedon had an eye for what Brady called the “illustrious”; Charlie Chaplin and Marianne Moore sat for Avedon as they had for Steichen; so did Marcel Duchamp. Though he didn’t have Whitman’s faith in photography’s objectivity, Avedon was interested in all the different kinds of character a camera could document; perhaps Whitman would have enjoyed Avedon’s photograph of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, shirts off, beards flowing, their tongues visibly touching.
There were elements of theater in many of Avedon’s photographs, and he sometimes felt that he was a director who got people to perform themselves. In 1960, he was interested in the collaborations of Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. Avedon had seen a Cunningham performance not too long before, and he had been struck by how separate the dancers were from each other and from Cage’s music and Rauschenberg’s sets. Everything just went along on its own, not really intersecting—the dancers moved neither with nor against the music or each other.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg by Richard Avedon, 1960.
Avedon would have watched his three guests moving around the studio and tried to guess their right arrangement. Perhaps he had assumed that Cunningham’s would be the commanding presence. But this turned out not to be true at all; the clear center of energy in the room was Cage.
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The year before, in 1959, John Cage and his friend the pianist David Tudor had recorded ninety one-minute stories from Cage’s life that made up the piece Indeterminacy. Cage had a high, sweet voice, and he pronounced words very precisely—when he referred to Tudor, he always said he was a “piahnist.” Cage’s anecdotal style owed something to Gertrude Stein—whose texts had been among the first things Cage had set to music—and something to Mark Twain. Merce Cunningham thought John Cage was one of the funniest men who had ever lived.
Some of Cage’s stories were from his childhood in southern California. Cage found it natural to be enterprising—he would just wander into places and ask for things, which was how he’d had his own radio show at the age of twelve, a story that was even more fun to tell after he wrote a piece to be performed on twelve radios that became one of his best-known works. At nineteen, Cage went door to door in Santa Monica canvassing people to come to his lectures on modern art and music. Ten lectures cost $2.50. During the months he was lecturing—his first venture into the art of explaining—Cage became devoted to the work of Arnold Schoenberg and, two years later, attended a course taught by the twelve-tone composer, who had recently moved from Vienna to Los Angeles. Cage always liked Schoenberg’s later characterization of his music. Someone asked Schoenberg if there were any American composers, and Schoenberg said no and then corrected himself: There is Cage, though “of course he’s not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.”
For Indeterminacy Cage read the stories, sometimes slowly, and sometimes very quickly to reduce them to a minute, and Tudor played a piano and a combination of taped sounds that went on independently. Part of what Cage liked in stories about artists and composers was the way they were just revealing enough to make the people feel familiar without stripping them of their mystery. Some of the stories were ones told by Zen masters and by Sri Ramakrishna—Cage was interested in religion, and was something of a guru to those who knew him.
Cage liked assembling people, as he took pleasure in what he called “collecting” sounds. When they were all photographed by Richard Avedon, Cage and Cunningham had been a couple for nearly fifteen years, and Rauschenberg had known them for nine. Rauschenberg met Cage in the summer of 1951. The next summer they were all together at Black Mountain College, where Cage and Cunningham used to teach and where Rauschenberg had been a student sometime after he had come out of the navy. He had worked with psychiatric patients at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg had done a lot of photography and had conceived of a project to photograph every square inch of America. He used photographs in his prints and collages, and the first Rauschenberg to be purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, in 1952, was a photograph, bought by the director of the photography department, Edward Steichen.
It was that same year, 1952, when they were all at Black Mountain, that they decided to make what was later called “The Event” in the cafeteria. Cage stood on a ladder and delivered a lecture; Cunningham danced and was for a little while followed by a curious dog; David Tudor played a Cage composition on the piano; Charles Olson and Mary Caroline Richards read poetry; and Rauschenberg projected photographs onto his white paintings hung at angles from the rafters and also played old records on a windup Victrola. At the end, people came out and poured coffee for the audience into the white cups that had been sitting on every chair before the performance began.
In 1953, Rauschenberg, who had earlier gotten a fairly amicable divorce from the artist Susan Weil, came back from traveling in Europe and North Africa with the painter Cy Twombly, and made a project with Cage. Rauschenberg laid big sheets of paper out on the sidewalk and, where the sidewalk was still bare, poured paint on the concrete, and then Cage drove his Model A Ford through the paint and all over the paper. Or at least they were pretty sure later that Cage had been the one driving, but they couldn’t quite remember if it might have been Rauschenberg. That fall, Rauschenberg met and became involved with Jasper Johns, who already knew Cage, and then the four of them went out together, Cage and Cunningham and Johns and Rauschenberg. By the late fifties, Johns and Rauschenberg were doing sets and costumes for Cunningham performances and Cage was the music director, and they all thought Cunningham was the most exciting thing happening. They loved the feeling of things existing next to each other but each being independent. Cage used to say that “nothing in life or art needs accompaniment.”
Rauschenberg and Johns couldn’t get enough of Cunningham’s invention and his discipline. Rauschenberg always sought discipline—in part because he wanted his own work to be messy and conglomerate; Cage and Cunningham had a rigor he could work against. Johns, more hermetic and controlled by nature, liked the ebullience of the other three, but he hated to appear in public, and refused to be part of the happenings. He was withdrawing somewhat from the Cunningham collaboration, and, although the final break with Rauschenberg wouldn’t come until 1962, it was already no surprise that he wasn’t there to be photographed. Rauschenberg, on the other hand, had recently started figuring out how to do the lights for Cunningham’s company—he wanted his sets and costumes to be lit right—and he was going on tour with the company quite a lot, which he liked, though sometimes he got irritated at having to do more company management than he thought was his job. They were low-budget tours, mostly around the United States, and they would drive Cage’s Volkswagen bus, bought for this purpose with the money Cage had made answering questions about mushrooms on an Italian television quiz show. Cage had become a celebrity in Italy, appearing on the show five weeks in a row, answering increasingly specific questions about mycology. In his books, Cage told stories about being recognized as the mushroom man by children on the streets in Rome.
In those days of touring, they all liked leaving New York, and they all liked coming back. Cage said that the first thing you notice about New York is what an incredible number of things are going on. They all liked to see what happened if you set a bunch of things in motion and then watched them over time.
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Richard Avedon collected faces rather than stories, but, like Cage, he was interested in making a long narrative out of lots of small pieces and, like the composer, he had started at an enterprisingly early age. His sister, Louise Avedon, had been his first portrait subject. While he was still in elementary school, Avedon realized that he could use his skin as a kind of film. He taped a negative of Louise to his shoulder, wore it out in the sun for two or three days, and revealed to his family an image of her sunburned into his shoulder. By the time he was twelve he was collecting in all directions; he had an autograph album that he called “Great Jews and Judges,” and he was so engrossed in the history of the Civil War that he begged his father to let him go to Washington, D.C., alone so that he could visit the monuments and the Smithsonian. His father jokingly said he could go by himself if he got a letter from Mayor La Guardia; Richard Avedon sent off a letter posthaste. And when the mayor’s letter did come, telling him how to reach his senator and to stay at the Y, his father agreed and the son went to Washington and stood in the Smithsonian in front of the Civil War photographs from Mathew Brady’s collection. “Brady,” Avedon later said, “was the first photographer I was aware of as a person. Daguerreotypes had been a technical, mechanical process—Brady and Nadar were really the first to make portrait photographs an art form.”
Louise Avedon had more trouble taking hold of her sense of herself. Years later in an interview, her brother explained, “Louise’s beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life.” He associated her later mental illness with the way the family had reduced her to her flawless skin and her elongated neck. “With skin like that,” he remembered their mother saying, “you don’t have to open your mouth.”
Avedon began taking portraits in the merchant marine when he was nineteen; he did the pictures for ID cards in Sheepshead Bay: “I had probably photographed one hundred thousand baffled faces before I realized I had become a photographer.” Once Avedon and a friend who had been a classics major were walking through a courtyard full of busts of Roman emperors. Avedon had the friend cover the names. The photographer guessed the characters by the faces. Tiberius: “A man of family background and family frustrations, a pained hidden sensuality inside.” Augustus: “The assumed melancholy of all men of great power.” Claudius: “The face of a scholar without wisdom.” When they uncovered the names, Avedon had told very much the stories recounted by the Roman historians.
Avedon felt compelled by Cage’s face; there was something simultaneously open and contained about it that Avedon found a little hard to identify but that was close to authority, a quality that made the grouping of people around him too easily symmetrical. Perhaps Avedon told Cage to step even a little farther over to one side. The composer, the choreographer, and the painter appreciated Avedon’s quick energy and the way he never stopped moving the whole time they were in the studio.
The three men slouched a little more, and Avedon suggested to Merce Cunningham that maybe he’d like to warm up, and Cunningham bent and picked up his right foot with his left hand and settled there and it was clear he could hold that position for an hour if he needed to, and yet he looked unbalanced and spontaneous, and Cage pulled out a cigarette and Rauschenberg jammed his hands into his pockets, and, though Rauschenberg still seemed a little tense, now they were nearly ready.
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When the artists he knew tried something new and seemingly crazy, John Cage could always tell the story of what had happened with such clarity and amusement that his audience, often made up of other artists and dancers and painters and musicians, would follow right along. In the time between 1959, when he recorded his ninety-minute autobiography, and 1961, when he published the first of his influential books, Silence, Cage found his ideas turning up all over the art world. In Silence, Cage argued for ceding artistic control, for allowing chance to take over, for encouraging interruption, for drawing the environment into the piece, and, in music, for paying attention to sound and to noise and to silence. He thought contemporary American music shouldn’t try to be too European.
When it was published the following year, Silence, dedicated “to whom it may concern,” was read by much of the New York avant-garde and changed the lives of a generation of composers. Some people said it was the entrance of Zen into American music, and some people said it was the entrance of Indian philosophy and religion. Some saw the first similarities to a writer who would later deeply influence Cage, Henry David Thoreau. There were those who said Cage’s book was a game, and those who said it was an invention, and those who saw it as a contemporary record of the wide-open scenes around Cage in 1960. It seemed, to everyone, American. “America,” Cage had written in Silence, “has a climate suitable for radical experimentation. We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country of the twentieth century.”
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Cage was now standing on Avedon’s left, facing across the room, not looking at either of his compatriots. Avedon thought that might be the right arrangement. A studio assistant came in to ask a question; Avedon turned to answer. Cage looked at Avedon, smiled, and looked away again. Cunningham lowered his shoulders and went further into his body and Rauschenberg stopped thinking about his broken stone and his face cleared. Avedon could see that if he cropped Rauschenberg a little, it would feel the way it had before, as if Rauschenberg had just come in the door. Avedon felt the joy of a photographer who has his moment. He took the picture.