Notes on John Cage, Eric Satie's Vexations and Andy Warhol's SleepOn Sunday, May 27, 2007 the Tate Modern in London showed Andy Warhol's Sleep accompanied by Eric Satie's Vexations from 7:30 pm to 3:00 pm the following day. They claimed in their blurb for the project that "Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s (1912–92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866–1925) epic repetitive work for piano, Vexations, 1893.1 However, there is only hearsay evidence that Warhol attended the concert and even less evidence to suggest that Vexations somehow inspired the repetitive editing structure of Sleep.
John Cale, one of the pianists at the Vexations concert and later a member of the Velvet Underground managed by Andy Warhol, recalls the circumstances of the concert although does not mention Warhol being there.
John Cale:
"Between 9 and 10 September 1963 I was one of a relay team of pianists, under the direction of John Cage, who played Vexations by Eric Satie at Pocket Theatre, 100 Third Avenue near 13th Street, in 18 hours and 40 minutes. The 180 notes of this 80-second work were played 840 times. The whole thing was John Cage's idea. The admission was $5, but members of the audience got a refund of five cents per twenty minutes, and those who stayed to the bitter end got a 20 cent bonus.2
There is no reason to assume that even if Warhol had been there Cale would have known, but apparently John Cage, himself, was unaware that Warhol attended.
John Cage:
"In September, 1963, we had ten pianists to play one of Satie's Vexations in relays, including me and one music critic who thought he could play the piece and wanted to get in the act... I hadn't realized that Andy was there. But even if he wasn't, it doesn't surprise me that his work followed the same lines. Of course, artists are encouraged by other things that happen, but mostly by what is either in the air or already inside them.3
Yet, according to Billy Name, Warhol did attend the concert and spoke to Cage about repetition afterwards.4 However, if Warhol had been at the concert and had talked to John Cage afterwards, John Cage probably would have remembered. Yet Cage in his comment above does not recall such a conversation. In 1994, using Billy Name as her source, Callie Angell wrote that "Warhol's use of repetition in the editing of Sleep was probably influenced by the September 1963 performance of Erik Satie's Vexations (1893-95), which he attended at a time when he had shot most of the footage for his film but had not yet begun to edit it."5
George Plimpton also apparently recalled a conversation with Warhol in which Warhol told him that he had sat through the entire concert.
George Plimpton:
"I remember riding in a large freight elevator with Andy in the early Sixties... and mentioning in passing that I had been reading an account in The New Yorker of an Erik Satie musical composition being played over and over for eighteen hours by relays of painists in a recital room in Carnegie Hall... He said 'Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh!' I'd never seen his face so animated. It made a distinct impression. Between ohhh's he told me that he'd actually gone to the concert and sat through the whole thing. He couldn't have been more delighted to be telling me about it."6
Yet when asked about Cage in interviews, Warhol denied that Cage had any influence on his own ideas and when both Sleep and Cage's concert were mentioned in the same interview, Warhol did not draw any connection between them nor did he mention that he had attended the Cage concert.
Warhol was asked about Cage's influence on his work in several interviews including the often quoted 1963 interview by G.R. Swenson; an interview for L.A. radio station KPFK in 1963; and an interview conducted by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in 1985. It was during the KPFK radio interview that both Sleep and John Cage's concert were mentioned.
The KPFK interview took place in Los Angeles when Warhol was visiting his second Pop Art exhibit at the Ferus Gallery. (The exhibition opened on September 30, 1963.) The interview was conducted by Ruth Hirschman (later Ruth Seymour) and included both Andy Warhol and Taylor Mead. At the time of the KPFK interview Warhol had already shot footage for Sleep in New York and the film had been mentioned by Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice newspaper.
During the interview Hirschman asks Warhol whether he is going to have Sleep reviewed "the way the last Cage concert was, with all the reviewers going from 11 to 12." This is a reference to the Vexations concert. Warhol responds by saying that Jonas Mekas had already reviewed Sleep in the Village Voice. He does not make a connection between Sleep and the concert even though the interviewer has just referred to the concert.
Although Benjamin H.D Buchloh does not mention the Vexations concert during an interview with Warhol conducted in 1985, he does specifically ask Warhol about "serial repetition" and Cage's influence. Buchloh asks "But how did you start serial repetition as a formal structure?" Warhol responds "I just made one screen and repeated it over and over again. But I was doing the reproduction of the thing, of the Coca-Cola bottles and the dollar bills." Buchloh continues "So it had nothing to do with a general concern for seriality? It was not coming out of John Cage and concepts of musical seriality; those were not issues you were involved with at the time?" Warhol answers the question in his usual nebulous manner, saying that he "didn't know" that Cage "did serial things" although he admits to meeting Cage when he (Warhol) "was fifteen or something like that."7 As a further denial that he borrowed the idea of repetition from Cage's musical theories, Warhol adds "I didn't know about music."
Buchloh persists with his questioning, trying to pin Warhol down about his serial images, saying "Serial form had become increasingly important in the early 1960s, and it coincided historically with the introduction of serial structures in your work." Buchloh's assumption that Warhol introduced "serial structures" into his work in the early 1960s is debatable - depending on how one interprets the term "serial structures." During his college years Warhol produced a cover for the November 1948 issue of the student magazine, Cano, which featured repeated images of a violin player and some of the commercial work that Warhol did for I. Miller during the 1950s featured repetitive imagery. According to Donna De Salvo in "Learning the Ropes," "I. Miller was attempting to create an entirely new image for the company and planned to employ commercial strategies that made use of repetition in order to drive home the message of this new image."8
Warhol does refer to John Cage's influence on Pop Art during an interview by Gene Swenson in 1963, but there are problems regarding the authenticity of some of his comments in that interview. Swenson asks Warhol "Is Pop a bad name?" Warhol apparently responds, "The name sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop - its so funny the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg - Neo-Dada for for all these years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use - are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham, too, maybe. Did you see that article in the Hudson Review? It was about Cage and that whole crowd, but with a lot of big words like radical empiricism and teleology." But according to Warhol biographer, David Bourdon, "Swenson and Warhol were good friends, but the artist was in one of his uncooperative moods, prompting the critic to conceal his tape recorder during the interview. Some of the more 'intellectual' sounding quotes attributed to Warhol may have been doctored by Swenson, particularly the remarks concerning the Hudson Review, a literary quarterly that Warhol was not known to read."
Swenson, and other art writers, may have thought Cage's theories influenced Pop, but Swenson's interview with Warhol is unreliable and cannot be used to illustrate what Warhol, himself, may have thought of Cage and his relationship to Pop art. Whether or not Warhol attended the Vexations concert depends on (as with so many other things about Warhol) who you believe. Cage did not recall Warhol being at the concert but Plimpton maintains that Warhol told him he sat through the whole thing. In regard to Cage's performance of Vexations influencing the editing of Sleep, we have Billy Name's assertion that Warhol discussed repetition with Cage after the concert (which Cage did not recall) but we also have Warhol's denial that Cage's theories played a part in the "serial imagery" in his art as well as the fact that Warhol, himself, never made a link between Vexations and Sleep in interviews. The Tate Modern's claim that the editing of Sleep was somehow inspired by the Vexations concert, therefore, remains unproven.
Gary Comenas (London)
April 2007/June 2008/July 2008Footnotes/Sources:
1. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/thelongweekend2007/9028.htm (accessed July 2008)
2. John Cale and Victor Bockris, What's Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale (NY/London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999) p. 57
3. Jean Stein with George Plimpton, Edie, An American Biography (NY:Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) p. 236-7
4. Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (NY: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 11, fn 10
5. Angell, p. 11
6. Stein, Plimpton, p. 234-5
7. Although Warhol says he met Cage when he (Warhol) was "fifteen or something like that," exactly when Warhol first met Cage is difficult to ascertain. Andy Warhol 365 Takes, written by the staff of the Andy Warhol Museum, refers to the Outlines gallery during Warhol's college years: "Warhol attended college from 1945 to 1949... Warhol worked hard at school and was a serious student of contemporary art. He made time to visit a local avant-garde art gallery called Outlines, where he was exposed to the work of such cutting-edge artists, architects, and musicians as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell." (p. 7) The gallery is also mentioned in Fred Lawrence Guiles, Loner at the Ball, The Life of Andy Warhol (London: Black Swan Books, 1990): "The Greenes [Balcomb and his wife, Gertrude]... had helped a local woman, Betty Rockwell Raphael, open a gallery called 'The Outline,' where every Sunday night during that fabulous summer of 1947 the avant-gardists... would convene for a cultural event. [Philip] Pearlstein described these gallery affairs as 'marvelous programs... and we saw Maya Deren, filmmaker and dancer, a lot of experimental film, John Cage, and all of these were exciting...'" (p. 39)
8. Donna De Salvo, "Learning the Ropes," in 'Success is a job in New York...' The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol exh. cat. (Grey Art Gallery & Study Center and The Carnegie Museum of Art, 1989), p. 9
The KPFK interview took place ca. early October 1963. The Swenson interview originally appeared in Art News, November 1963. The Buchloh interview originally appeared in October Files 2: Andy Warhol. Bourdon's comments originally appeared in David Bourdon, Warhol (NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989). All were reprinted in Kenneth Goldsmith, I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (NY: Caroll & Graf Publishers, 2004)