Jennifer Krasinski
A new show of drawings, notebooks, and scores by the avant-garde composer reveals the private practices and processes of over
fifty years of genre-defying works.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, organized by Olivia Shao and Jay Sanders, the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York City,
through May 11, 2025
• • •
Composer, musician, publisher, and devout avant-gardist, John Zorn has always seemed to work at a higher frequency than most. Invincibly prolific, he devours genres (classical, jazz, hardcore, Jewish traditional, you name it) then shoots back into the world harmonies, melodies, rhythms, cacophonies, and other expansive arrangements of sounds that, to this ear, are fueled equally by awe and defiance. The marvelous Hermetic Cartography, sharply curated for the Drawing Center by Olivia Shao and Jay Sanders, features over five decades of drawings, notebooks, scores, and more, surveying the private processes, the contemplative practices, that have nourished and sustained Zorn’s live-wire mind.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna. Pictured: Ubu, 2020; Mount Analogue, 2011.
The exhibition begins at his beginnings, with select juvenilia from the late 1960s to the mid-’70s, when Zorn was having some of his earliest aesthetic inklings. The sophisticated teen clearly honed his craft first by spending time as an audience member. My Wife Remodeled (1972), made when he was sixteen, is a Dada-inspired collage portrait he created out of ticket stubs from Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, the Thalia Theater, and other venues. In effect, his wife, his love, is presented as a fusion of art, music, and film. Zorn would seek and deploy that quality of synthesis throughout his work. As he wrote in one of the notebooks from 1975:
Why not dehydrate the PROCESS to
include just the inspiration – the
act + the result – MERGED TOGETHER –
no period of dormancy – LIFE AT
THE PEAK OF ORGASM – prolonged to
form the process.
To eternally quake at the brink of possible conception. To propose ecstasy as the condition rather than as the interlude or the relief. To think of revelation as a complete work unto itself: Zorn models a way of being as much as he does a way of producing. He’s too irreverent, too playful, to be squarely cast as a mystic, but holding that analogy lightly, one glimpses in his output that rarest of artistic pursuits: purity—of mind, of intention, of offering, of experience.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna.
Zorn’s theology is inherited in part from some of the New York gods of his youth. John Cage, who embraced chance as a key force in the creation of any artwork, loomed large. An openness to arbitrary events and the creative contributions of others not only rightsized an artist—ego now aerated by the unknown—but allowed a composition to take on life of its own. The plays of Zorn’s friend and sometimes collaborator Richard Foreman were devoted to capturing the luminous chaos of being human. In his off-kilter worlds, dialogue falls like existential shrapnel from the mouths of his characters, many of whom, each in their own bizarro way, are seeking Truth. Underground filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith, whom Zorn assisted for a number of years, transformed trash into high art, made headlines for breaking the city’s obscenity laws, and was so devoted to his work that he still presented his live shows even if no one showed up to watch them.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna. Pictured: Theatre of Musical Optics, 1974–present.
Foreman and Smith live on in Zorn’s Theatre of Musical Optics, a bona fide magnum opus that was last on view for the public in 2014 as part of the Whitney Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980, also curated by Sanders. A series of performances that Zorn conducted in his apartment starting in the mid-1970s, the work is installed here as a collection of objects (found and made), notes, notations, and a short film, all displayed in a room of its own.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna. Pictured: Theatre of Musical Optics, 1974–present (detail).
Zorn’s idea was to compose, in his words, “music without sound.” Instead of notes, he used everyday, throwaway stuff he found on the city sidewalks as his materials, in essence conducting a piece visually rather than sonically. Some of them are recognizable—a button, a zipper pull, a teensy spoon for a doll-house dinner table, a dried rosebud, a pebble, a bit of a Band-Aid with blood on it. Other stuff is more mysterious, perhaps shards of larger, broken things, but to be apprehended as themselves wasn’t really the point. As Zorn wrote: “The objects became for me like solid sounds, different shapes, textures, colors, histories, to be ordered in musical fashion.”
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna. Pictured: Theatre of Musical Optics, 1974–present (detail).
With an invited audience of no more than ten people gathered around him at midnight, he would select and place these things, one at a time, on a two-by-two-inch playing space made of paper. Swapping object after object gave the composer the aura of a sleight-of-hand magician, or street con conducting some oddball version of a three-card monte. With titles like Dracula, Fidel, and Requiem for Jack Smith, his mini-spectacles would sometimes last for hours, reversing one’s perception of scale, every tiny object blooming before the eye into a microcosmos where viewers could make whatever sense of it all that they wished.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna. Pictured, center bottom (in vitrine) and right (on wall): flyers for Live at the Saint. Ink on paper, 1983.
Zorn not only knows how to command attention onstage but also in the streets. On display are a selection of his handmade flyers, two drawn in black ink on paper napkins; on one, Zorn pasted yellowing cutout images of a Campbell’s soup can and a camera. Some are rather spare, like the announcement for his 1974 opera Mikhail Zoetrope, for which he includes no information about the where or when, but reels ’em in with a carny’s line that’s hard to make heads or tails of: “Chingo the Monkey zips me for five Bananas.” Others are more intricate, chock-full of dates and times and instructions surrounded by decorative details rendered in a precise hand—proof that the composer never lowered his standards of artfulness even when promoting himself.
John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, installation view. Courtesy the Drawing Center. Photo: Daniel Terna.
Meticulously drawn notations for the “game pieces” that give his live performers frameworks to play around and improvise in; the scribbled-on file cards and handwritten drafts of the scores for his songs Mount Analogue (2011) and Ubu (2020): at once the source and a kind of memento mori for the music. Strange how these works lead to live performances yet seem more static, more concrete, when considered alongside the abstractions on paper in charcoal, ink, graphite, and more that Zorn has made since 2012 as an almost-daily practice. It’s inevitable to see abstraction and think of, turning every gesture, line, and shape into a measly Rorschach test, but for these drawings, which here feel like elegant counterpoints to the Theatre of Musical Optics, seeing is releasing. Zorn’s improvised marks can resemble language loosened from the confines of legibility, or billowing columns of smoke, or the ectoplasms that traveled from the spirit world via the mouths and nostrils of turn-of-the-century mediums—somehow a most apposite image for Zorn’s preternatural artistry.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and editor.