John Cage: fungi between field walks, collections and art

Classes that grew into a community

John Cage is often introduced as a composer with an unusual enthusiasm for hunting mushrooms. That formula can reduce a sustained practice to a colourful addition to a biography. A more interesting history begins with other people, shared walks and a desire to learn. The New York Mycological Society dates the present organisation to 1962 and identifies Cage, Guy Nearing, Lois Long, Frank Ferrara and Esther Dam as co-founders. It also describes the preceding mushroom classes held at The New School from 1959.

This starting point changes how the story can be viewed. A gathering around fungi need not have a single purpose: one participant wants to understand names, another to practise drawing, another to describe where a specimen was found. Shared observation creates opportunities to compare those interests. People bring their own questions but also hear questions they would not have asked themselves. From this perspective, Cage’s mycological activity belongs to a community, rather than serving only as evidence of a famous artist’s eccentricity. The other participants’ names are part of the history, not decorative additions to the biography of its most recognisable figure.

A letter instead of a solitary-artist legend

The New York Botanical Garden describes Cage’s letter to mycologist Clark Rogerson dated 6 November 1961. It concerns collaboration involving field trips, winter study of literature, microscopy and specialist lectures. The institution also shows a specimen Cage collected in New York in 1959. These two traces illuminate his interests in different ways: one records plans, while the other physically documents a particular collection.

The letter records a plan; the specimen documents a collection. Together, they illuminate Cage’s mycological practice.

Mushroom Book has more than one maker

Mushroom Book is an artist’s book with twenty lithographs, published in 1972 in an edition of 75. MoMA’s complete catalogue record identifies John Cage and Alexander H. Smith as authors, and Cage and Lois Long as collaborating artists. The prints were made between August 1971 and May 1972. These details describe a particular printed edition; the title does not designate an ordinary field guide.

The National Gallery of Art describes a portfolio on Arches paper, with title and colophon pages, and names Fred Genis and James Sheehy as printers. Hollander Graphic Workshop was the publisher. A folded sheet measures approximately 56 by 38 centimetres. This is an object to unfold on a table: its format and construction shape the reader’s movements alongside the arrangement of its text.

Cranbrook Art Museum explains the construction of ten folded sets. They combine Cage’s handwritten reflections, Long’s illustrations and species descriptions by mycologist Alexander H. Smith. Translucent Japanese paper carries Smith’s descriptions and legible versions of Cage’s writing. Chance operations using the I Ching helped determine the artist’s words and phrases. Opening a set or lifting its overlay therefore changes which layer of the work the reader encounters.

The pair catalogued as number III offers a concrete comparison. Long’s colour lithograph, folio 11, has a composition measuring 18.1 by 17.2 centimetres. The composition in Cage’s lithograph III measures 55.9 by 37.9 centimetres. These are composition dimensions, not two different book formats. They reveal a difference in the scale of the image’s presence on the page before its rhythm is interpreted. Readers can open and compare the museum reproductions separately; thumbnails without dimensions would obscure that difference.

An older plate makes a comparison possible

The second illustration here is James Sowerby’s plate from 1797, labelled Agaricus campestris. It is not a page from Mushroom Book. It accompanies the discussion as an example of a much earlier atlas illustration showing a mushroom in several views. This makes it possible to compare the purposes of images without presenting unrelated material as a reproduction of Cage and Long’s book.

With the plate, a viewer can ask which parts of the organism are shown separately, which detail is repeated, and what comparisons the reader is invited to make. With an artist’s book, related questions may lead towards the rhythm of a page or the relationship between writing and drawing. This compares purposes rather than ranking artistic value. An image useful for one task need not answer the questions of another. A historical Latin label also needs context: the caption of an old illustration is not, by itself, a modern identification of a specimen encountered today.

An unexpected encounter and a careful description

Cage’s autobiographical statement mentions Nearing, mushrooms and lichens; elsewhere in the same account he describes the importance of chance operations in his compositional work. The New School places his teaching within a wider history of musical experimentation. Reading these sources together makes several strands of his interests visible. It does not establish that every composition resulted from a particular walk in the woods.

A reader can nevertheless propose an interpretation linking them: a willingness to notice something unplanned. An unexpected sound and a suddenly noticed fruiting body can both redirect attention. The resemblance need not stop there, but it should not be turned into a single method applicable to every activity. A composition can use chance as an organising principle. A natural-history description requires distinguishing what was observed from what was inferred, and preserving information that makes later checking possible. Maintaining that distinction leaves room for imagination alongside reliable documentation.

The useful question is therefore not whether art and mycology become identical in this story. It is how moving between different activities changes the questions somebody asks. A page, a walk and a conversation can each encourage a fresh observation, while retaining their own requirements for making sense of it.

A way to explore this history yourself

A simple reading exercise can start with a single print in the MoMA catalogue. Before reading the description, write down three things that caught your attention. Then check the contributors, date and medium. Consider which parts of the first impression still seem useful and which need revision. Afterwards return to the account of the letter held at NYBG: how does the artist’s story change when a plan for shared learning appears beside a finished work?

A similar exercise on a walk can use two short notes. In the first, preserve observable details of the location and object, leaving an uncertain identification unresolved. In the second, describe a personal association, an atmosphere or an invented scene. Keeping the records separate allows both experiences to be revisited without turning imagination into evidence. Neither note has to erase the value of the other.

This is a MykoŚwiat suggestion, not a reconstruction of a historical method used by Cage. Its purpose follows from placing the sources alongside each other: a letter, a museum catalogue and a herbarium specimen perform different tasks. Together they support a richer history than a single anecdote, while allowing readers to see where documented facts end and their own interpretations begin.