video production, dance, music, scent The Possible: design, artists’ correspondence, photography, A Thread of instruction, song-writing, poetry, book- making, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, Change felting, games, yoga, lectures, meditation, hiking, bathing, fashion, collage, kite-making, Lawrence Rinder cooking, and display. The designers of the exhibition’s furnishings, the craft specialists who facilitated the various workshops, and the guest artists were all given equal weight, so that the exhibition offered a creative environment without hierarchy among design, craft, and art. More than one hundred people, children as well as adults, participated as core creators, deepening existing collaborative relation- ships and creating new ones across many disciplines. The exhibition had no clear 27 beginning or end: it evolved over two and a half years of preparation through a series of correspondence projects and gatherings that took place across the country. Even after the galleries opened to the public the exhibition continued to evolve: new artists were welcomed, and surprising objects appeared in the galleries. Visitors’ experiences of the show were never the same twice. David Wilson, the curator of The Possible, The Possible grew out of Wilson’s prior is an artist. He brought an artist’s sensibility to work creating site-specific installations the exhibition, creating an open-ended, and festivals; however, whereas these earlier nondidactic framework for the generation of projects usually took place in and responded creativity, collaboration, and community. to natural settings (for example, Angel The Possible encompassed furniture design, Island, Wildcat Canyon, and Rodeo Beach), mail art, historical archives, video, ceramics, The Possible was set in the dramatic BAM/ textile dyeing, weaving, sound recording, PFA building, a 1960s Brutalist structure fig.1 designed by Mario Ciampi. Wilson took with the museum’s role as a cultural Mountain — Anni Albers, Josef Albers, John full advantage of the building’s unique bellwether, The Possible represented a Cage, Anna Halprin, Sheila Hicks — as physical and sonic properties. He set up a dynamic and influential dimension of inspirations. Whether they are conscious recording studio to allow artists to capture contemporary creative practice; however, it of it or not, the cultural ethos of the Arts and its resonant acoustics, hung textiles made in was less a summation than a provocation. Crafts Movement remains a powerful the fabric workshop from the overhanging The Possible asked not only its audiences force among artists, designers, and crafts balconies, and engaged the rarely used but also its enactors and its hosts — the BAM/ makers in the Bay Area and also in pockets outdoor terraces — even the generally PFA staff — to imagine things to be different throughout the United States. In addition, neglected garden became the setting for an than they are. It was more carnivalesque a number of specific legacies connect artists outdoor shower for the workshops devoted than utopian insofar as it offered no ideology of The Possible to teachers — especially to physical activities. Fritz Haeg’s Domestic of change and no program for social better- at the California College of the Arts — whose Integrities rug acted as an enormous colorful ment other than the proposition that own work and ideology was formed by punctum at the center of the vast concrete collaboration can be both productive and fun. contact with those who studied or taught at atrium. The Possible also delved into Explicit politics were notably absent from Black Mountain College or the Bauhaus. BAM/PFA’s institutional history, presenting The Possible; however, the very breakdown Among the principles linking The Possible to in its “library” materials gleaned from the of conventions and opportunities for these antecedents are the breakdown of the archives, such as correspondence and other engagement provided by the exhibition hierarchies among fine art, craft, and design; documentation related to past exhibitions, can be seen as object lessons in a creative support of experimentation; interest in global as well as videos of historical performances. cultural currents; emphasis on group activity Besides echoing Wilson’s own prior site- and collaboration; holistic approaches to specific work, his comprehensive approach creativity encompassing the body, health, to The Possible — incorporating the museum’s reimagining and remaking of our collective and well-being; an embrace of play; and the architecture as a key element — paid homage social experience. Wilson is more a convener aspiration to evolve a gesamtkunstwerk, or to the site and its history at a particular mo- than a polemicist and his practice embraces “total work of art.” The development of these ment in BAM/PFA’s history, just prior to a radical diversity of methods and points earlier movements and institutions, which the building’s closure the institution’s move of view. evolved one into the other, serves as to a new facility. If The Possible was nearly sui generis an illuminating background for Wilson’s The Possible was an exhibition, but it as an exhibition, its form and spirit resonated The Possible. could easily have been called something else: with a number of historical cultural move- The Arts and Crafts Movement emerged a school, a festival, a happening, a movement, ments and institutions, most notably the Arts in Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth a total work of art. Its principles and methods and Crafts Movement, the Bauhaus, and century and spread throughout the world, were antithetical to normal museum practice: Black Mountain College. It is unclear how becoming particularly influential in California the precise contents of the exhibition were many of the practitioners involved in The in the early decades of the twentieth century. never known, most works of art were not Possible saw themselves as working in these The movement’s initial impetus was social physically secured, and determinations traditions, although many named figures and political, a reaction to the negative of quality were left open-ended. In keeping associated with the Bauhaus or Black impact of rapid industrialization on living and fig.2 fig.3 could solve the core problem of modern While Shaw celebrated the overturning society; that is, in the words of Thomas of the hierarchical dominance of painting, Carlyle, “men are grown mechanical in head Morris himself took the matter one step and heart, as well as in hand.” 1 Admittedly, for further by setting up an actual loom in the some the problem was more aesthetic than Society’s 1889 exhibition and personally revolutionary. George Bernard Shaw, for demonstrating the craft of tapestry weaving. example, in reviewing the first exhibition of The rapprochement between art and craft the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had many fascinating outcomes including working conditions. William Morris, the Ironically, in this return to the past was in 1888 wrote, “It has been for a long time the first magazine designed also to be a work movement’s chief progenitor, was as much a embedded some of the principles that past evident that the first step towards of art, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo’s The political theorist and organizer as he was would become the seeds of the Modernist making our picture galleries endurable is to Hobby Horse (1882) (an early precedent for a craftsman, poet, and businessman. Morris’s revolution: wholesale social reinvention, get rid of the pictures… signboards all of this very publication), and Morris’s own home, solution to the dehumanizing effects of striving for truth to materials and structural them of the wasted and perverted ambition The Red House (1860), which he designed modern industry was to return to the hand- honesty, the evolution of form from function, of men who might have been passably useful with Philip Webb as a gesamtkunstwerk made, skill-based, communally defined and the elevation of the everyday as a as architects, engineers, potters, cabinet incorporating painting, textiles, furniture, practices of the medieval guilds. Utopian matter of artistic concern. makers, smiths, or bookbinders.”2 and stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones, and ultimately impractical on a large scale, The Arts and Crafts Movement was Christina Rossetti, and William and May Morris’s experiment led to a resurgence not a style and did not result in a common Morris, among others. of interest in nearly forgotten antique crafts visual vocabulary; rather, it was based on 1 . Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Rosalind P. Blakesley, The most significant problem facing as well as in the traditional roots of a variety shared principles, most importantly the idea The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Phaidon Press the Arts and Crafts Movement was the of cultural practices, from music and that the reintegration of art and craft — Limited, 2006), 12. contradiction between its Socialist aims and dance to architecture and agriculture. both with each other and with life itself — 2 . George Bernard Shaw, quoted in Blakesley, 62. fig.4 fig.5 Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lyonel regardless of their ultimate métier, em- Feininger who celebrated the individual phasized direct experience of materials and creative vision of the students, employed processes over reference to past styles free-spirited — even at times Dadaistic and approaches: experimentation was —pedagogical approaches, and based their the essence of the Bauhaus. From the very work on metaphysical as well as