A new edition of the beloved out-of-print artist’s book that makes material, through unbound pages, Cage’s concept of indeterminacyLike a mushroom hunting trip full of unexpected pleasures, Iris Garden combines 22 of John Cage’s stories from his 1959 spoken word album Indeterminacy—for which he read aloud texts of varying length within one-minute increments—with 44 of William Gedney’s photographs shot from the 1950s to 1989, several of which are portraits of the famed composer. Together, Cage’s anecdotal prose about everyday life and Gedney’s austere photographs articulate an aesthetic sensibility of openness—one which allows the reader to fill in the narrative blanks. The book’s design ingeniously mirrors Cage’s devotion to chance by leaving its pages loose and unbound so that they may be shuffled and reordered by the reader. Originally published in a small print run by photographer Alec Soth’s independent press, Little Brown Mushroom, in 2013, this new edition brings a rare out-of-print book back into the world. Soth founded his press as a space to experiment with image and text—a spirit saliently reflected in Iris Garden’s quietly radical collaboration. John Cage (1912–92) was one of the most influential and transformative figures in 20th-century music and art. A pioneer of chance operations, experimental composition and the use of silence—most famously in his work “4'33"”—Cage reshaped the boundaries of artistic practice, extending his ideas into writing, visual art and philosophy. Working largely outside the commercial mainstream and recognized more fully after his death, William Gedney (1932–89) was an American photographer who developed a lyrical documentary style shooting across the United States, from rural Kentucky to San Francisco.
