Gurdon Woods became the university’s first art director in 1966. He was determined to develop an interdisciplinary university curriculum that emphasized contemporary and experimental art as its basis for the teaching and training of young artists. [1] In May of 1968, Woods received a Carnegie Foundation grant. The music, art, and theatre complexes had not yet been built, so part of the endowment was meant to influence the design of the performing arts buildings and visual arts studios.

The grant was also meant to influence the design of the scholastic programs through inviting artists to speak about their ideas on pedagogy. Woods hired Fluxus artist Robert Watts, art historian Sidney Simon, and anthropologist Ted Carpenter for one year to advance the program's progressive research and teaching initiatives. [2] To enrich the program, several artists were invited to participate in a guest lecture series to give talks on experimental art and education– John Cage and Merce Cunningham were two artists that were solicited for their expertise. [3] Cage’s invitation to speak about experimental art and education came as no surprise. The teaching methods he designed during his tenure at the New School for Social Research between 1950–1960 veered away from a more traditional teacher–student lecturing. [4]  

On November 4, 1968, a mix UC Santa Cruz professors and administrators filled a room at Merrill College. The opening question to Cage was “What kind of learning experience is it possible to provide; do you have any suggestions that would be possible for us to consider?” Encapsulated in the high experimentation and utopia of the era, Cage advocated for electronic music studios and considered the conservative nature of american universities and their schools of music. He felt they taught models based on European art standards:

I don't mean to speak badly of what conventional music schools teach. I think that also should be taught and that is why I used the word “abundance” at the beginning. I think one should make available, if we are speaking just of music, one would ideally make available so-called classical music of Europe, as many of the classical cultures of the Orient as possible, studios for the making of electronic music live, and electronic music canned; namely, tape. Music, and music on tape, and one should also make available computer facilities and the existing music programs for computers so that all those things could be available for the use of people interested in music. [5]

In this spirit, Gordon Mumma was hired to develop an electronic music program for the department of music in 1974.
Two pages from the unpublished transcript of Cage’s and Cunningham’s panel on the Arts and Education at UC Santa Cruz, November 6, 1968. I would like to thank Rita Bottoms for giving me this document.

Cage recommended that there should be a place where students could gather and eat together to share their ideas. One of the more memorable moments from this lecture that Rita Bottoms recalled was Cage talking about community and in particular, his reflection on Black Mountain College:

all of the learning took place in the cafeteria, where people gathered together, and that when you think about artists and musicians having studios, you need to make sure that they intersect one another, that you have to walk through somebody’s studio to get to your own, so you have to encounter one another. [6]

Cage understood university education as a restrictive environment. [7] Throughout his talk, he discussed how universities should give students more liberty in their studies. This concept was immediately challenged by some members on the panel. Cage responded to this criticism by remarking on his ideas of organization.

I think that this is not a quality that is inherent in people but rather a quality which has been imposed on them so that if you speak, as I often do, or ridding music of structure almost anyone will argue that if you get rid of the structures you will have to have another one. They do not believe in the possibility of an unstructured situation. [8]

Bottoms agreed with Cage’s assessment. Through observing students in the early days of the “broom closet” special collections department, she felt that students wanted to “break out of a bag” that had been imposed on them since their early education. [9]

A conceptual thread can be read through Cage’s thoughts on education, mushrooming, and music. He advocated for stretching boundaries and encouraged exploration and innovation. This idea fueled Cage’s insatiable curiosity and in many ways, he saw the young city on a hill as an educational experiment with a lot of potential. In the next section I explore this idea in more detail and how this influenced Cage’s decision to donate his collection to UC Santa Cruz.

References:

Bottoms, Rita and Irene Reti. “Rita Bottoms: John Cage.” In Rita Bottoms: Polyartist Librarian, 64–172. Santa Cruz, CA: The University of California, 2005.

Foreman, Selma J., transcriber. Unpublished Transcript of a Discussion on Art and Education: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Gurdon Woods, Siegfried Punknat, Donald Weygandt, Robert Watts, Edmund Carpenter, Sidney Simon, Patrick Ahearn, Doyle Foreman, Jasper Rose, Albert Hofstadter, and Rita Berner. University of California Santa Cruz Campus. Merrill College. November 6, 1968.

Krstich, Vesna. “The Pedagogy of Play: Fluxus, Happenings and Curriculum Reform in the 1960s.” In C: International Contemporary Art No. 131 (Autumn 2016): 14–18. 

Lewallen, Constance and Karen Moss. State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.

Nicholls, David. “Cage in America.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. David Nicholls ed., 3–19. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pigza, Jessica. Education and the Avant Garde: How Fluxus Artists Shaped the Arts at UC Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz: University of California Santa Cruz Exhibition, 2019.