“Looking at Music” @ MOMA

John Cage and Steve Reich opened new directions in music by foregrounding processes of composition and production. But their approaches were quite different: While the chance operations Cage used to compose are impossible to discern in the sounds that they yielded, Reich’s method of concatenating minimal phrases is explicit in his music’s pulsating physicality. “Looking at Music” features the composers in separate rooms, each in the company of works by artists with similar sensibilities. A 1966 Cage score—gridded sets of numbers pitted with pen marks—hangs near Otto Piene’s partially aleatoric Untitled (Smoke Drawing), 1959, a sheet of paper that captured the residue of burned pigment. In the next room, Bruce Conner’s Mandala April 1–9, 1965, where palpable detail manifests the artist’s method, makes an analogous pair for a recording of Reich’s Come Out (1966). In her video Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1972, Joan Jonas chants and wears masks with a mystical opacity reminiscent of Cage, while Lip Sync, 1969, shows Bruce Nauman repeating the words of the title as he hears himself in his headphones saying them, producing a shifty beat like the one in Come Out.

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