“It’s kind of an art circus,” Jeffery Lependorf remarks, about “Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition,” which opened at the Bard College Stevenson Library on June 27. Lependorf is executive director of the John Cage Trust, and would be called the curator of the show, if he hadn’t chosen everything using chance operations.
John Cage was fascinated by the I Ching, and composed many of his musical scores by flipping coins—and later using a computer program that generated random numbers. Lependorf employed that same program during an “open curatorial workshop” on April 23 to choose the (roughly) 93 items in “Cagecircle.”
In 1991 Cage curated a show called “Museumcircle” at the Chemnitz Industrial Museum in Munich. He drew a circle on a map with the museum at the center; within the circle were 19 museums. Cage wrote to each institution asking for 10 representative items. Then he used chance procedures to pick one item from each list, so “Museumcircle” comprised 19 items. “I wanted to do the same thing, but when you loan an artwork from a museum, it takes about a year, and it’s expensive—you need insurance, there’s cartage,” Lependorf explains, “so I asked the wonderful archivist at the library and we came up with a list of 22 collections throughout the Bard community.”
Some of the choices were obvious: the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Cage Trust itself, Stevenson Library, the Hannah Arendt Center, the indigenous studies department. “Then we thought of other possible collections,” recalls Lependorf. “We wrote to Buildings and Grounds, and said, ‘Do you have things?’ and they said, ‘We have lots of cool things here!’ There’s everything from a photo of when the Buildings and Grounds building caught on fire in the `50s, to a hammer they dug up somewhere.”
The Hannah Arendt Center supplied a poster from the conference “Being Human in an Inhuman Age,” the original New Yorker magazine in which Arendt’s “Eichman in Jerusalem” appeared, and the writer’s kitchen cabinet door. The architecture department came up with a scale model of the Bard garage. “Cagecircle” will also include a library robot, a Super 8 film of The French Connection 2, and a photo of Todd Haynes while he was a student at Bard making The Karen Carpenter Story, the cult classic that tells the singer’s story entirely with Barbie dolls.
When Lependorf approached the chemistry department, they said, “We don’t have anything interesting,” and he replied, “Yes, you do. It’s interesting to us non-chemists.” The chemists eventually provided an agate mortar and pestle, a volumetric flask, and a watchglass.
Cage invented the “prepared piano,” a way of modifying a piano by placing small objects under the strings, giving it a toy-like sound. The show will include Cage’s own kit for “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano”—mostly bolts and screws.
One of the items selected was a roll of tape! (It’s 3M Duraflex Binding Tape—two inches wide—provided by the American Symphony Orchestra, presumably used to bind musical scores.)
It’s impossible to discuss this show without mentioning Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the “readymade,” an ordinary object that the artist decides is already a work of art. (Typically Duchamp would walk into a hardware store, choose an item, and declare it his new artwork.) The most famous readymade was a urinal that Duchamp turned upside down and signed “R. Mutt.” The piece was rejected by The Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, and was later lost, but an authorized replica is now valued at $2.5 million. If a urinal is worth that much, a roll of tape must be worth at least $200,000.
Duchamp and Cage were friends. In order to “apprentice” himself to the French artist, Cage asked for chess lessons. (Duchamp was a chessmaster.) Every day for several months, the young composer visited Duchamp’s house to play chess with the artist’s wife, Alexina, while the two men conversed.
Knowing that John Cage loved to forage for mushrooms, Duchamp created a membership card to the “Czechoslovakian Mycological Society.” Where the president of the organization should have signed it, Duchamp inserted his own signature. Since Duchamp signed the card, it’s a work of art—in fact, a readymade! The piece, titled Czech Check (Duchamp was fond of puns), is part of the John Cage Trust’s collection. The morning I spoke to him, Lependorf had just received a request from the Pompidou Center in Paris to borrow the artwork, after this exhibit.
“People think that chance is random; it’s not random,” Lependorf explicates. “Here’s why: It’s an answer to a question, but you have to come up with a question. And the question is you. Cage would say, ‘If you don’t like the answers you’re getting, you’re asking the wrong questions.’”
This article appears in July 2026.
