Cheap Imitation 1971

John Cage made this score, ‘Cheap Imitation,’ with ink on paper. Looking at it feels like watching someone think out loud, like seeing the scaffolding that holds a building up. The handwritten notes and musical notations have a real presence. You can see the hand that made them, in the wobbly lines and the way the ink bleeds into the page. The texture is flat, immediate, just ink on paper. The script and symbols dance together, making their own kind of logic, their own kind of meaning. There’s a passage near the top where these squiggly lines undulate like waves, disrupting the more rigid musical notations. That area has an open feeling, like you could jump right into it. The whole thing feels like a reminder that art is an ongoing conversation, a process of imitation, of exchange, of trying things out. Like chance, Cage embraces ambiguity, and multiple interpretations here, and that's something I look for in my own work too.