Transformed Strangely: Lyotardian Indeterminacy in John Cage’s Child of Tree

The author sketches a Lyotardian reading of John Cage’s plant pieces of the mid-1970s. Given that at the time both Jean-François Lyotard and Cage were concerned with working through Marcel Duchamp’s multifarious legacies, the author uses Lyotard’s writings on Duchamp to unpack the operation of indeterminacy in Cage’s ecological events.