Kate McQuillen
Cage’s Swimming Pool Sounds, 2021
Acrylic on clayboard panel
45 x 43 x 1.5 inches
KM042
The title of this piece alludes to a John Cage story about sounds floating through the air at an outdoor swimming pool: “Once Merce and I were driving through Vermont....
The title of this piece alludes to a John Cage story about sounds floating through the air at an outdoor swimming pool:
“Once Merce and I were driving through Vermont. We stopped at a roadhouse. We went to swim in it’s pool. Teenagers splashed and yelled around us, there was the wind in the trees, cars whooshed by on the road. From inside the roadhouse came some dance music.... So here we were in the dark, wet up to our necks, our heads in the air hearing everything around us—snatches of pop song from the Wurlitzer, the bells of the pinball machine, the kids’ laughs, cars, wind, water—all at once and the same time. We were inside it all. We were inside this mix, it was a piece of music.”
--Ninth Street Women, page 395, via Edith Schloss, The Loft Generation, Edith Schloss Burkhardt Papers, Columbia, 191
“Once Merce and I were driving through Vermont. We stopped at a roadhouse. We went to swim in it’s pool. Teenagers splashed and yelled around us, there was the wind in the trees, cars whooshed by on the road. From inside the roadhouse came some dance music.... So here we were in the dark, wet up to our necks, our heads in the air hearing everything around us—snatches of pop song from the Wurlitzer, the bells of the pinball machine, the kids’ laughs, cars, wind, water—all at once and the same time. We were inside it all. We were inside this mix, it was a piece of music.”
--Ninth Street Women, page 395, via Edith Schloss, The Loft Generation, Edith Schloss Burkhardt Papers, Columbia, 191