Cover of The Experimenters
The Experimenters Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
by Eva Díaz
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-06798-8 | Electronic: 978-0-226-06803-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226068039.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the years immediately following World War II, Black Mountain College, an unaccredited school in rural Appalachia, became a vital hub of cultural innovation. Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time there: Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly—the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists’ time at the College as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With The Experimenters, Eva Díaz reveals the importance of Black Mountain College—and especially of three key teachers, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller—to be much greater than that.

Díaz’s focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. These methodologies represented incipient directions for postwar art practice, elements of which would be sampled, and often wholly adopted, by Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners. The resulting works, which interrelate art and life in a way that imbues these projects with crucial relevance, not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design—they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.

Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative figures of modern times, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eva Díaz is assistant professor of art history at the Pratt Institute.

REVIEWS

“In this highly evocative and well-executed study, Díaz explores the innovative pedagogical practices that were developed at Black Mountain College in its heyday. Respectful of the distinct teaching methods of the College’s most notable faculty, Diaz nonetheless finds a common experimental basis to the artworks and inventions produced by their students in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Experimenters is nuanced, erudite, and intellectually wide-ranging. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the development of mid-twentieth-century art in the United States.”
— Alexander Alberro, author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity

“By parsing three different versions of experimentation—performed by Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller—Díaz shows us how their individual efforts were part of a shared commitment to art’s capacity to reinvent the world, to alter how we see, experience, and shape it in our own image. In the name of experimentation each of the artists suspended, if only for a moment, the metrics of failure and success, and replaced them instead with the values of intellectual pleasure, expanded sensory experiences, and aesthetic innovation. While the book is undoubtedly a historical account of a particular time and place, it is also a road map for many paths that, while not taken, still remain open.”
— Helen Molesworth, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

“Terrific. Black Mountain College has long been a lodestone for those interested in alternative educational models and in artistic innovation. Nevertheless, the major historical literature on the College still rests on largely anecdotal histories, with a tendency to jaunty optimism in lieu of criticality. There is nothing quite like The Experimenters out there—not on Black Mountain College, not on art making, and not on pedagogy.”
— Judith Rodenbeck, Sarah Lawrence College

“What links systems theorist and architect R. Buckminster Fuller with artistic innovators such as Josef Albers and John Cage? The answer is Black Mountain College, North Carolina. . . . As art historian Eva Díaz reveals in this engrossing study, their explorations in materials, form, chance, and indeterminacy were never less than electrifying. Her sympathetic portrait of Fuller as a utopian saving the world through geodesic geometry is particularly assured.”
— Nature

“Provides readers with clarity and elucidation about a college, three of its professors and an outside-the-mainstream educational experience. . . . Engaging.”
— New York-Pennsylvania Collector

“Insightful. . . . What distinguishes this book is Díaz’s lucid, comprehensive explanations of the ways in which Albers, Cage, and Fuller employed experimentation, or chance, and even failure as agents to advance perception in art specifically and, more broadly, to improve society and the body politic. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Choice

“With well-developed prose and a good narrative, Díaz excels at providing context and content for an important story of experimentation on this campus and in subsequent locations inspired or directly impacted by the Black Mountain College approach to education.”
— Journal of Southern History

“Highly enjoyable and even inspirational for anyone interested in art practice or simply the power of challenging accepted ways of thinking. . . . Reminds us that the restless spirit of experimentation is often best fostered in environments that expose the rules governing life and art before pushing us, in a collective effort, to break them.”
— MAKE Literary Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Black Mountain College between Chance and Design


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226068039.004.0001
[Perception, Experimentation, Design, Geometric Abstraction, Laboratory, Drawing, Color, Ethics, Efficiency / Economy of means, John Dewey]
To Josef Albers, art was the experimental arm of culture, investigating better forms that are the precondition of cultural production and progress. In his drawing, color, and design classes at Black Mountain, Albers proposed an ordered and disciplined testing of the various qualities and appearances of readily available materials such as construction paper and household paint samples. His approach brought out the correlation between formal arrangement and underlying structure, and placed a high value on economy of labor and resources. As a parallel project to that of College sympathizer John Dewey, Albers stressed the experience, rather than any definite outcomes, of a laboratory educational environment and promoted forms of experimentation and learning in action that could dynamically change routine habits of seeing and improve society. Examination of Albers's work, writings, and practical teaching materials undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s reveals that he encouraged a close relation between better art production and a better social performance. As he claimed, "For me studying art is to be on an ethical basis." A nervy claim, and yet a thoughtful argument for artistic responsibility: Albers's ethics of perception maintains that the arrangement of a work of art mirrors the way one organizes life. (pages 15 - 52)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226068039.004.0002
[Experimentation, Chance / Aleatory, Bauhaus, Xanti Schawinsky, Performance, Erik Satie, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Zen Buddhism, Void]
John Cage's method of chance-based experimentation first emerged in the work he produced when he taught at Black Mountain College from 1948 through 1953. In this period Cage initiated a series of practices that were highly structured, yet which paradoxically attempted to sever the performance of a work from intention, argumentation, or "authorial" control. To investigate this apparent contradiction in Cage's careful organization of situations of greater contingency, of his use of order to obtain indeterminate outcomes, this chapter proposes a seemingly oxymoronic phrase: "chance protocol." This chapter explores the existing tradition of Bauhaus experimental theater at Black Mountain, undertaken by former Bauhaus student Xanti Schawinsky, that was supplanted by Cage's chance protocols; together these models represent two of the most radical explorations of U.S.-based experimental performance taking place between the wars and after. Cage's work at Black Mountain joined seemingly incompatible threads—the French modernism of Erik Satie, Antonin Artaud and Marcel Duchamp with Zen Buddhism. Cage's explorations of dispersion, disorder, and void-like mindlessness came to spurn purposeful communication between performer and audience, estranged the traditional, "scored" relationship between a composition and its performance, and drew instead on aleatory systems that structured and controlled unexpected results beyond human prediction. (pages 53 - 116)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226068039.004.0003
[Design, Experimentation, Geodesic Dome, Technocratic, Specialization, Politics, Pattern Theory, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy , Gyorgy Kepes, Tensegrity / tension]
R. Buckminster Fuller's work and writings of the 1940s and 1950s elaborate upon his idea of experimentation as a technophilic and teleological form of design. Analysis of his methodology of experimenting, a method formed in the two productive summers he taught at Black Mountain College while beginning to engineer plans for large-scale geodesic domes using tensegrity innovations, elucidates how an acceptance of passing failures in the interest of a deductive model of total design formed a potent argument against the vulnerability of experimental testing to specialization. He proclaimed that tests toward efficient design could prevent social-political stagnation; according to Fuller he was "solving problems by design competence instead of by political reform." His version of experiment as a test and proof of total systems found company with many postwar iterations of pattern, network, and systems theories emerging out of the Institute of Design in Chicago where he taught after Black Mountain (and with cybernetics theories coming out of MIT in Cambridge), and this chapter also takes up Fuller's relation to his ID colleagues Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes. Design for these men was not a product but a social process; experimentation proved that structures are not things but patterns. (pages 101 - 148)

Epilogue: Legacies of Black Mountain College

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. Page maintained by BiblioVault.