Oral Culture starts off with John Cage and Robert Barry

From January 2008, the gallery runs a parallel program under the title ‘Oral Culture’. The objective is to produce a life performance once a month which is ‘orally based’, in the presence of an audience. These events will take place in the gallery or any alternative venue if required by the artist. Older and existing works will be combined with new, commisioned works. The performances will be announced through the gallery’s newspaper, website and e-mail newsletters.

The first event will be John Cage’s lecture on Indeterminacy. This lecture was originally given in Brussels in 1958, exactly fifty years ago, during the World Expo. It was the result of a suggestion by David Tudor to do a lecture with only stories. Each story, whatever it’s length, is told in one minute. In Cage’s words: ‘My intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.’
In 1965 Merce Cunningham used it as “music” for his choreography How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run. The anecdotes were recited by both Merce Cunningham himself and David Vaughan, while the dancers responded to the varying speech patterns.
The lecture in Brussels will be recited by Will Holder according to the explicit instruction that music is being played as an accompaniment from an adjacent room. The music will be from Manon de Boer’s film Attica, based on the composition of the same name by Frederic Rzewski.
Will Holder is an artist, editor and designer who once read that the oral tradition would lead us out of the post-modern condition, and has since become preoccupied with  "publishing". More often than not, the publications do not always  take the form of ink and paper, and a large part of the preoccupation is spent in finding suitable forms for transmission. True to his  typographical roots, he is interested in scoring and composition as a  set of instructions for the articulation of language, and its relationship to a sculptural, 3-dimensional space.

End of February It is, It isn’t by Robert Barry will be performed by two actors. This work, part of a small group of spoken word works, has been shown very rarely after Barry created it in the early seventies, around the same time as his famous Marcuse Piece and his first slide projections with simple verbal statements. The exact date of the event will be announced through e-mail and on this website.