Madness in Highbrow Sound Art and New Music (2026)

A recent exhibition in Munich this past year titled “Five Friends” highlighted the relationship between John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. I see the connection between expressionism and the sound art tradition of John Cage, but I don’t always think that those connections are obvious in new contemporary art. Is that because we have to brand our work into these neat little packages in order to be noticed amidst the visual noise of Internet promo? Is it because highbrow new music is always marketed with visuals derived from Minimalism, a reaction to Expressionism, in order for buyers to identify its genre and intentions?

As four friends John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg were coupled gay friends during a time when being out of the closet in the art world was not celebrated as it is now. I also don’t think that this friendship is an unlikely one on artistic grounds. All of these artists celebrated chance and experimentation in their work and were influenced by Dada-ism. Fluxus— which Merce Cunningham and John Cage are associated with— has been called Neo-Dada by some art historians.

A show from 2012 at the Philadelphia Museum looked at these four artists’ relationship to Marcel Duchamp. Both Cage and Duchamp used aleatoric methods to arrive at their work. Chance operations are the foundation for Abstract Expressionism as Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Rauschenberg, Lee Krasner, and more use Surrealism’s automatic drawing to arrive at their work. The early work of these expressionist artists actually looks a lot more like Surrealism than like what later became known as Abstract Expressionism. At that time critics like Clement Greenberg felt that these Surrealist-inspired gestures, which included pattern and figuration, were inferior to what is now colloquially known as “all-over” painting.

Dadaism and Surrealism approached chance operations and automatism with the intention of unearthing the madness the artists felt during wartime. In a recent essay I touched on the relationship of Surrealism to art brut. Surrealists did not only unearth madness, they also saw mad women as muses. The mysterious Nadja was Breton’s muse and Hans Bellmer’s was Unica Zurn—an artist in her own right who is now included in the Surrealist canon as an equal rather than as an art brut outsider.

John Cage collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg on performances at Black Mountain College. John Cage also produced his own paintings that appear to be influenced by the automatic techniques of Rauschenberg. Recently, the paintings of John Cage have been exhibited alongside the work of Robert Rauschenberg. I think that it’s important to note that what connects these artists-chance and improvisation-is derived from the Dadaists’ and Surrealists’ interest in madness. In that sense even highbrow work based in improvisation or work of the John Cage tradition has its roots in madness as its muse.

To many people in the highbrow music scene the thing that sets highbrow music above openly outsider-inspired noise music even when they sound the same is the fact that highbrow musicians must not be mad or must not be making work that is inspired by madness. However, the work of John Cage is inspired by expressionism and Dadaism and so these works are actually still a little like crazy-person art. Anyone who has no background in experimental music perceives most highbrow music that way when it’s performed live, especially when these artists tour to smaller cities.

The influence of madness on Abstract Expressionism is well-known amongst painters, but it’s acknowledged less as an influence in sound art circles and among new music composers. John Cage really was not making music for sound healing. He had a huge number of goals for his works with each of them often changing according to the project he was working on at the time or according to who his collaborators were.

Now sound healing work is marketed as a highbrow form in a big way, led in part by the explosive resurgence of drone music in experimental circles, but this form of music therapy or art therapy has not always been a huge part of the history of sound art.