Gregory Sholette
68 years ago the experimental composer John Cage wrote what he considered to be his most important piece, 4â33,â or simply four minutes, thirty-three seconds. It consists of a musical composition in which performers are instructed not to play their instruments for the entire length of the work, which lasts exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In the proposed 2020 version presented here, a video of pianist David Tudor performing the work is reedited. We see Tudor sit down at the piano, open up its fallboard or keyboard cover, and then do nothing except check a stopwatch and turn the pages of the score before he replaces the cover concluding the performance. But in this revised version of work the composition has been almost doubled in length to eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the amount of time that it took a White police officer to suffocate 46 year-old Black man George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota after placing a knee on his neck. This proposed 8’46” minute re-interpretation of the Cage composition maintains that the avant-garde piece can never be performed using its original timing ever again in the aftermath of Floydâs murder.
Artist, writer, activist and teacher Gregory Sholette specializes in the history and theory of contemporary socially engaged art. His research and artistic practices focus on issues of equitable labor justice for artists, archiving alternative genealogies of dissident culture, investigating innovative pedagogies, supporting urban cultural justice for low-income and communities of color and exploring new forms of spatial and aesthetic organizing opposed to neoliberalism, gentrification, racialized nationalism, environmental degradation, and oppressive dominant historical narratives. His most recent publications include a special double issue of FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art with over thirty global reports focusing on âArt, Anti-Globalism, and the Neo-Authoritarian Turn,â and the books Art as Social Action (with ChloĂ«Â Bass, 2018, Skyhorse Press); Delirium & Resistance: Art Activism & the Crisis of Capitalism Dark Matter (Pluto Press 2017 & 2010). For the past decade he has co-directed the pedagogical art and social justice initiative Social Practice Queens. He blogs at Welcome To Our Bare Art World: https://gregsholette.tumblr.com/