Losing the Ground

This chapter centers on the relationships between acoustic projection and cinematic space. I start with Cage’s rhetoric on the medium of magnetic tape as the second transformation of sound materiality. Building on Julia Robinson’s notion of “symbolic investiture,” I survey the divided interpretations of Cage’s platform between musicologists that decode his music according to style analysis that established a compositional logic for his move to indeterminacy and the larger debate among art historians on the split between Neo-Avant-Garde and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics. I argue that Cage’s interaction with film and filmmakers provides a meeting ground for these debates within cinematic space in two films: Cage’s score for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder and colleague Morton Feldman’s score for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Last, I examine a film collaboration I discovered with the sculptor Richard Lippold that documented his monumental wire sculpture, “The Sun,” in which Cage and Lippold applied chance procedures to the editing process. Lippold’s commission came about as a result of his split with the so-called Irascible 18 collective of New York artists, and the history of its commission and reception reflects both an ideological divide on the materiality of sculpture and larger postwar McCarthy-era politics of passivity and resistance.