Cage called the white paintings “airports for lights, shadows, and particles.”

The first record of the worship of “John From America,” or John Frum, dates back to 1940, when reports from British colonial administrators on the island of Tanna in New Hebrides, today’s Vanuatu, warned that the natives had all stopped going to church and spoke of an American who existed in two places at once—beneath the seething red lava of the Mount Yasur volcano and in the United States, from whence he would arrive one day in an airplane, bringing with him great wealth. The prophecies came true two years later, when the US Army descended in a flurry of strange gear, military drills, and marching bands. The Americans occupied Tanna until 1945, only to vanish as suddenly as they had come, leaving behind lonely offshore islands of discarded supplies. Frumists dreaming of John’s return began to build airstrips and control towers, constructed an iconography of red wooden crosses and model aircraft, and enshrined as holy relics old Army jackets with sergeant’s stripes.