Pour ne rien dire sur Marcel : John Cage au miroir de Duchamp

This paper proposes a reading of John Cage's artwork Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel. The work is emblematic of Cage's practice of art by virtue of the aleatory processes that are at the basis of its creation as well as of the desire to express silence through the act of creation. The work is a celebration of one of the most often proclaimed influences on Cage (Duchamp), but the composition becomes a celebration of creation and also a celebration of a community - that of the viewers and the artists — becoming an icon of influences working in infinite ways. The use of transparency creates an open field of reverberations from one field to the next, as from one layer of glass to the next. What remains is therefore only the trace of a meaning which cannot appear in a linear fashion, but only at the moment of its disappearance.