I had the choice. I could annoy Varsity and submit a blank article entitled 4’33’’, but I did not (as you can see), because I realised that John Cage’s seminal silent composition was not about annoying the audience or a result of musical ineptitude. It was born out of a genuine feeling for the integrity of his philosophy and his artistic practices and methods, something which the recent exhibition at Kettle’s Yard only confirms.

As well as footage and recordings of his performances, poems and lectures the exhibition shows his lesser known prints and watercolours, the placing of which is determined by I-Ching inspired chance procedures, and where every three days a picture is removed altogether.

Though this method of exhibiting vitalises the display, one could not help but feel that it distracted from the rather conventional quality of these pieces. While they can be beautiful and serene, I did not leave thinking that they were particularly remarkable as individual works. There was, however, the undeniable sense of having been exposed to a particularly satisfying philosophy expounded in a merging of images, sounds and words, ‘a mosaic of remarks, the juxtaposition of which is free of intentions’, echoing the words Cage used to describe one of his writings.

Cage invites us into the scope of his open-minded philosophy and beliefs, encouraging, though not prescribing, an anarcho-democratic response. The phrase ‘anarcho-democracy’, chosen by poet Drew Milne in his talk about the exhibition, is apt: though radical, Cage was not polemical or exclusive. Taking his inspiration from Zen philosophies, he wanted to ‘remove the ego from the artist’, encouraging life and art, audience and artwork to engage in meaningful and ultimately ‘self-altering’ ways: his art was not, he said, about self expression.

Milne argued that Cage’s determined rejection of the self and its choices is often over-emphasised. Instead of the word ‘chance’, he put forward the case for ‘indeterminacy’, a word which allows for paradoxes and contradictions in Cage’s methods to be assimilated. Even rigorous parameters controlled by external chance processes made room for individuality: ‘The only thing I can’t ask [the I-Ching] is the movement of the brush. I have to accept what I do’. Similarly, Cage’s ‘Mesostics’ – poems which use a central ‘spine’ word around which material is arranged – are only partly determined by chance procedures, as Cage’s aesthetic decisions cause the inclusion of literary devices such as modified negatives (‘it Not’), as well as assonance and internal rhyme (‘Shaggy nag’).

Cage could not remove himself from his works, as this exhibition and talk confirm. But why should he, when we are glad to have such a fascinating figure behind them?