3. John Cage and David Wojnarowicz
Wojnarowicz: “no one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good or a bad photograph other than the artist’s intent…you can always get something on film and if it is blurry and out of focus ‘badly’ lit you only have to claim intent and the art world will consider it.’ Which is an interesting reversal of Cage’s rejection of the author/composer’s desires. Here, for Wojnarowicz, the ambiguity lies in the medium of photography itself, comes along with the technology. From his perspective, it would seem then that Cage’s ‘discovery’ of an un-focus, the attention going here or there, the unfixed terrain of meaning, narrative, and attention, the blurring of art and life, these are qualities of the world, bound in social forces that complicate things, and helplessly so. In Cage and friends we get the impression these things are the product of an aesthetic intervention, a novel and at least somewhat proprietary intervention.
kevin sims 