"Cage was not the first artist of his century to incorporate the random and indeterminate into his work. Tristan Tzara had recommended the cutting-up of newspaper stories and their reassembling as dadaist poems, while the surrealist conventions of collage and the exquisite corpse encouraged unpredictable associations between disparate images and texts. In the postwar period, such avant garde methods survived in the cut-up writings of William Burroughs and in the chaotic mythology, if not the actual composition, of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. But all of this heroic (not to say rather macho) commitment to disorder was really quite remote from Cage's methods and temperament. His interest in chance was both cooler and more determined, a matter of submitting lightly, often humorously, to a new and impersonal discipline rather than sounding the depths of his wayward unconscious. His closest precursor in this regard was Marcel Duchamp, with whom he had become friends in the early 1940s" - Brian Dillon, "The visual art of John Cage"

Sitography: DILLON, Brian, "The visual art of John Cage", www.theguardian.com, 10/07/2010.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jul/10/john-cage-composer-drawings-exhibition