“A ‘prepared’ train, as envisaged by John Cage, would be a large-scale equivalent of Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ but one in motion.” In a posthumously published writing, former Walker director Martin Friedman recalls Il Treno di John Cage (1978), a three-day musical train ride across Italy.
Mesmerized by boxes containing “fragments of the everyday world that alluded to fragments of imaginary ones,” he set out in the rain from Manhattan one day in 1967 to visit their wizardly creator at his home on Utopia Parkway.
“It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen daredevil events before,” recalls former Walker director Martin Friedman of a lone 1965 performance by the ONCE Group in the Walker lobby, “but this was the first time I was responsible for them, all in the name of art.”
“My first question was, did he feel that the revolutionary spirit that had inspired Dada and other early twentieth-century Modernist movements was still alive?” Martin Friedman recalls a 1965 meeting with Marcel Duchamp in Minneapolis.
With an apprehensive glance, Oldenburg slowly removed the layers of Kleenex to reveal a captivating object: a spoon, whose bowl rested on an island in a small pond and contained a rubicund cherry.
