Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: December, 2020

December 17, 2020

John Cage

Cage Foraging in Grenoble, France, 1971. 
Photograph by James Klosty.
1.

In 1959, composer John Cage appeared on the popular Italian TV game show Lascia o Raddoppia? (Double or Nothing?). Specialist subject: mushroom identification. Cage was in Milan as the guest of fellow avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, and was performing a series of concerts. Berio was at that time working for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), the state media channel that included, improbably, an “experimental studio for audio research.” Others in Berio’s circle, including writer Umberto Eco and sound engineer Marino Zuccheri, also worked with RAI, and together the cohort had finagled Cage a spot on the show. 

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December 12, 2020

Diana Markosian

Diana Markosian, “The Arrival” (2019) from “Santa Barbara” (Aperture, 2020)

In a soundstage on a quiet street in Glendale, Calif., a whisper passed among the crew. Svetlana, the director’s mother, had arrived.

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December 8, 2020

Gianfranco Gorgoni

Gianfranco Gorgoni, Michael Heizer’s Circular Surface Planar Displacement, Jean Dry Lake, Nevada, 1970, 1970, photograph. 
Courtesy: Carol Franc Buck Collection, Nevada Museum of Art; photograph: © Estate of Gianfranco Gorgoni; artwork: © Michael Heizer

On Christmas Eve 1968, astronauts on the Apollo 8 Moon mission took the first photographs of the Earth by someone not on it. William Anders’s Earthrise, the best-known image, immeasurably altered humanity’s consciousness of its environment, but it also changed forever the way landscape was viewed in art.

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