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Leap Before You Look: 1933-1957

Exhibition Overview

A small, experimental liberal arts college founded in 1933, Black Mountain College (BMC) has exerted enormous influence on the postwar cultural life of the . Influenced by the utopian ideals of the progressive education movement, it placed the arts at the center of liberal arts education and believed that in doing so it could better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society. It was a dynamic crossroads for refugees from Europe and an emerging generation of American artists. Profoundly interdisciplinary, it offered equal attention to painting, weaving, sculpture, pottery, poetry, music, and dance.

The teachers and students at BMC came to ’s Blue Ridge Mountains from around the United States and the world. Some stayed for years, others mere weeks. Their education was unlike anything else in the United States. They experimented with new ways of teaching and learning; they encouraged discussion and free inquiry; they felt that form in art had meaning; they were committed to the rigor of the studio and the laboratory; they practiced living and working together as a community; they shared the ideas and values of different cultures; they had faith in learning through experience and doing; they trusted in the new while remaining committed to ideas from the past; and they valued the idiosyncratic nature of the individual. But most of all, they believed in art, in its ability to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world. This utopian experiment came to an end in 1957, but not before it created the conditions for some of the 20th century’s most fertile ideas and most influential individual artists to emerge.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and , , , , Elaine and , , , , Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, , and , among many others, taught and studied at BMC. Teaching at the college combined the craft principles of Germany’s revolutionary school with interdisciplinary inquiry, discussion, and experimentation, forming the template for American art schools. While physically rooted in the rural South, BMC formed an unlikely cosmopolitan meeting place for American, European, Asian, and Latin American art, ideas, and individuals. The exhibition argues that BMC was as an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, democracy, and globalism. It examines the college’s critical role in shaping many major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education, including assemblage, modern dance and music, and the American studio craft movement— influence that can still be seen and felt today.

Organized by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with ICA Associate Curator Ruth Erickson, Leap Before You Look is the first comprehensive museum exhibition on the subject of Black Mountain College to take place in the United States. The exhibition features individual works by more than ninety artists, student work, archival materials, a soundscape, as well as a piano and a dance floor for performances, and it will be accompanied by robust performance and educational programs. History of Black Mountain College

The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a brilliant and mercurial scholar who left in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on ’s principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the College’s founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, and the beginning of the persecution of artists and intellectuals on the European continent. Some of these people found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty. Meanwhile, the United States was mired in the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, committed to putting people back to work, established the Public Works Arts Project (a precursor of the WPA).

The founders of the College believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student’s general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler’s Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art at this small, rebellious college in the mountains of North Carolina.

Black Mountain College was fundamentally different from other colleges and universities of the time. It was owned and operated by the faculty and was committed to democratic governance and to the idea that the arts are central to the experience of learning. All members of the College community participated in its operation, including farm work, construction projects and kitchen duty. Located in the midst of the beautiful North Carolina mountains near Asheville, the secluded environment fostered a strong sense of individuality and creative intensity within the small College community.

Legendary even in its own time, Black Mountain College attracted and created maverick spirits, some of whom went on to become well-known and extremely influential individuals in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes people such as Willem and , Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and , , Merce Cunningham, John Cage, , , Vera B. Williams, Ben Shahn, , Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, , Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and many others, famous and not-so-famous, who have impacted the world in a significant way. Even now, decades after its closing in 1957, the powerful influence of Black Mountain College continues to reverberate. http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/history/

Introduction to Progressive Education and John Dewey

Black Mountain College was a grand experiment that would last only 24 years. Conceived by idealistic and progressive faculty from other colleges and an advisory board that included John Dewey, Albert Einstein, , and Carl Jung, the college opened in rural North Carolina in 1933. The goal was to create a liberal arts college where democratic principles governed how the college was structured. Its progressive ideals put the practice of the arts at the center of the curriculum and made students responsible for their own education.

No courses were required, but students were expected to play a part in the school community by working on the farm, working in the kitchen, even building the school buildings and furniture at times. One of the founders John Rice reported that “our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content, to emphasize process, not results; to invite the students to the realization that the way of handling facts and himself amid the facts is more important than facts themselves.”

By the time Ruth Asawa arrived in the summer of 1946, it had been in operation 13 years. Protected by its rural isolation, the college had succeeded in creating a safe environment where a truly individualized education was possible. According to Asawa, “Teachers there were practicing artists, there was no separation between studying, performing the daily chores, and relating to many art forms. I spent three years there and encountered great teachers who gave me enough stimulation to last me for the rest of my life — Josef Albers, painter, Buckminster Fuller, inventor, , the mathematician, and many others. Through them I came to understand the total commitment required if one must be an artist.” http://www.ruthasawa.com/life/black-mountain-college/

• Jim Garrison offers a comprehensive biography of Dewey and overview of his professional appointments, pedagogical innovations, and publications in his entry for The Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, which you can read here: http://eepat.net/doku.php?id=dewey_john

• The John Dewey Project on Progressive Education offers a brief overview of progressive education throughout the 20th century: http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html

The Bauhaus, in Brief

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883– 1969). Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

The Bauhaus combined elements of both fine arts and design education. The curriculum commenced with a preliminary course that immersed the students, who came from a diverse range of social and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, color theory, and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This preliminary course was often taught by visual artists, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers, among others.

Following their immersion in Bauhaus theory, students entered specialized workshops, which included metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, typography, and wall painting. Although Gropius’ initial aim was a unification of the arts through craft, aspects of this approach proved financially impractical. While maintaining the emphasis on craft, he repositioned the goals of the Bauhaus in 1923, stressing the importance of designing for mass production. It was at this time that the school adopted the slogan “Art into Industry.”

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic.

The cabinetmaking workshop was one of the most popular at the Bauhaus. Under the direction of Marcel Breuer from 1924 to 1928, this studio reconceived the very essence of furniture, often seeking to dematerialize conventional forms such as chairs to their minimal existence. Breuer theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. Inspired by the extruded steel tubes of his bicycle, he experimented with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible metal chairs. Some of these chairs were deployed in the theater of the Dessau building.

The textile workshop, especially under the direction of designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), created abstract textiles suitable for use in Bauhaus environments. Students studied color theory and design as well as the technical aspects of weaving. Stölzl encouraged experimentation with unorthodox materials, including cellophane, fiberglass, and metal. Fabrics from the weaving workshop were commercially successful, providing vital and much needed funds to the Bauhaus. The studio’s textiles, along with architectural wall painting, adorned the interiors of Bauhaus buildings, providing polychromatic yet abstract visual interest to these somewhat severe spaces. While the weaving studio was primarily comprised of women, this was in part due to the fact that they were discouraged from participating in other areas. The workshop trained a number of prominent textile artists, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), who continued to create and write about modernist textiles throughout her life.

Metalworking was another popular workshop at the Bauhaus and, along with the cabinetmaking studio, was the most successful in developing design prototypes for mass production. In this studio, designers such as Marianne Brandt, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, and Christian Dell (1893–1974) created beautiful, modern items such as lighting fixtures and tableware. Occasionally, these objects were used in the Bauhaus campus itself; light fixtures designed in the metalwork shop illuminated the Bauhaus building and some faculty housing. Brandt was the first woman to attend the metalworking studio, and replaced László Moholy-Nagy as studio director in 1928. Many of her designs became iconic expressions of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Her sculptural and geometric silver and ebony teapot, while never mass-produced, reflects both the influence of her mentor, Moholy-Nagy, and the Bauhaus emphasis on industrial forms. It was designed with careful attention to functionality and ease of use, from the nondrip spout to the heat-resistant ebony handle.

The typography workshop, while not initially a priority of the Bauhaus, became increasingly important under figures like Moholy-Nagy and the graphic designer Herbert Bayer. At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Concurrently, typography became increasingly connected to corporate identity and advertising. The promotional materials prepared for the Bauhaus at the workshop, with their use of sans serif typefaces and the incorporation of photography as a key graphic element, served as visual symbols of the avant-garde institution.

Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, succeeded by the architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954). Meyer maintained the emphasis on mass-producible design and eliminated parts of the curriculum he felt were overly formalist in nature. Additionally, he stressed the social function of architecture and design, favoring concern for the public good rather than private luxury. Advertising and photography continued to gain prominence under his leadership.

Under pressure from an increasingly right-wing municipal government, Meyer resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1930. He was replaced by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies once again reconfigured the curriculum, with an increased emphasis on architecture. Lily Reich (1885–1947), who collaborated with Mies on a number of his private commissions, assumed control of the new interior design department. Other departments included weaving, photography, the fine arts, and building. The increasingly unstable political situation in Germany, combined with the perilous financial condition of the Bauhaus, caused Mies to relocate the school to Berlin in 1930, where it operated on a reduced scale. He ultimately shuttered the Bauhaus in 1933. During the turbulent and often dangerous years of World War II, many of the key figures of the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States, where their work and their teaching philosophies influenced generations of young architects and designers. Marcel Breuer and Joseph Albers taught at Yale, Walter Gropius went to Harvard, and Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bauh/hd_bauh.htm

• Michael Beggs wrote an article for Bauhaus magazine that more explicitly compares the philosophies of Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus, which you can read here: http://bauhaus-online.de/en/magazin/artikel/two-utopias-the-bauhaus-and-black-mountain- college

Josef Albers teaching color class at Black Mountain College, summer 1944. Photo by Biographies of Major Figures at Black Mountain College

Anni & Josef Albers

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an influential teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist—now best known for the Homages to the Square he painted between 1950 and 1976 and for his innovative 1963 publication Interaction of Color. Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer, and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wallhangings.

The couple met in Weimar, Germany in 1922 at the Bauhaus. This new teaching institution, which transformed modern design, had been founded three years earlier, and emphasized the connection between artists, architects, and craftspeople.

Before enrolling as a student at the Bauhaus in 1920, Josef had been a school teacher in and near his hometown of Bottrop, in the northwestern industrial Ruhr region of Germany. Initially he taught a general elementary school course; then, following studies in Berlin, he gave art instruction. At the same time, he developed as a figurative artist and printmaker. Once he was at the Bauhaus, he started to make glass assemblages from detritus he found at the Weimar town dump and from stained glass; he then made sandblasted glass constructions and designed large stained-glass windows for houses and buildings. He also designed furniture, household objects, and an alphabet. In 1925, he was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty and become a master. At the end of the decade he made exceptional photographs and photo-collages, documenting Bauhaus life with flair. By 1933, when pressure from the Nazis forced the school to shut its doors, Josef Albers had become one of its best-known artists and teachers, and was among those who decided to close the school rather than comply with the Third Reich and reopen adhering to its rules and regulations.

Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann went to the Bauhaus as a young student in 1922. Throughout her childhood in Berlin, she had been fascinated by the visual world, and her parents had encouraged her to study drawing and painting. Having been brought up in an affluent household where she was expected simply to continue living the sort of comfortable domestic life enjoyed by her mother, she rebelled by deciding to be an artist and going off to an art school that embraced modernism and where the living conditions were rugged and the challenges immense. She entered the weaving workshop because it was the only one open to her, but soon embraced the possibilities of textiles. She and Josef, eleven years apart in age, met shortly after her arrival in Weimar. They were married in Berlin in 1925—and Annelise Fleischmann became Anni Albers. At the Bauhaus, Anni experimented with new materials for weaving and became a bold abstract artist. She used straight lines and solid colors to make works on paper and wall hangings devoid of representation. In her functional textiles she experimented with metallic thread and horsehair as well as traditional yarns, and utilized the raw materials and components of structure as the source of design and beauty.

In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to the city of Dessau to a streamlined and revolutionary building designed by Walter Gropius, the architect who had founded the school. The Alberses—who had become friends with Paul and Lily Klee, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, Oscar and Tut Schlemmer and Lyonel and Julia Feininger—eventually moved into one of the masters' houses designed by Gropius. In November of 1933, Josef and Anni Albers were invited to the USA when Josef was asked to make the visual arts the center of the curriculum at the newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They remained at Black Mountain until 1949, while Josef continued his exploration of a range of printmaking techniques, took off as an abstract painter, made collages of autumn leaves, kept writing, became an ever more influential teacher and wrote about art and education. Anni made extraordinary weavings, developed new textiles, and taught, while also writing essays on design that reflected her independent and passionate vision. Meanwhile, the Alberses began making frequent trips to Mexico, a country that captivated their imagination and had a strong effect on both of their art. They often said that, “In Mexico, art is everywhere”: this was their ideal for human life.

In 1950, the Alberses moved to Connecticut. From 1950 to 1958, Josef Albers was chairman of the Department of Design at the School of Art. There, and as guest teacher at art schools throughout North and South America and in Europe, he trained a whole new generation of art teachers. He also continued to write, paint, and make prints. In 1971, he was the first living artist ever to be honored with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the time of his death in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976, he was still working on his Homages to the Square and his Structural Constellations, deceptively simple compositions in which straight lines create illusory forms, and which became the basis of prints, drawings, and large wall reliefs on public buildings all over the world. In those same years, Anni Albers continued to weave, design, and write. In 1963 she began to explore printmaking, and experimented with the medium in unprecedented ways while developing further as a highly original abstract artist. Her seminal text On Weaving was published in 1965.

The Alberses were in some ways like a two-person religious sect, focusing above all on their work and happy to pursue it at a remove from the trends and shifting fashions of the art world. They had an extraordinary relationship, and, while never collaborating on art work other than their highly inventive Christmas cards and Easter eggs, fostered one another’s creativity and shared their profound conviction that art was central to human existence and that morality and creativity were aligned. Following Josef’s death, Anni Albers helped oversee her husband’s legacy while expanding her own printmaking and textile design until her death in 1994. In 1984, Anni wrote," . . . to comprehend art is to confide in a constant." She and Josef lived their lives devoted to that irrefutable, uplifting constant. http://www.albersfoundation.org/artists/biographies/

Ruth Asawa

“An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” – Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in , where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.” By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.” Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third- grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in . Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in , where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/arts/design/ruth-asawa-an-artist-who-wove-wire-dies-at- 87.html?_r=0

John Cage

In 1952, David Tudor sat down in front of a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and did nothing. The piece 4’33” written by John Cage, is possibly the most famous and important piece in twentieth century avant-garde. 4’33” was a distillation of years of working with found sound, noise, and alternative instruments. In one short piece, Cage broke from the history of classical composition and proposed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music, but listening.

Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg. There he realized that the music he wanted to make was radically different from the music of his time. “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.'” But it wasn’t long before Cage found that there were others equally interested in making art in ways that broke from the rigid forms of the past. Two of the most important of Cage’s early collaborators were the dancer Merce Cunningham and the painter Robert Rauschenberg.

Together with Cunningham and Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College, Cage began to create sound for performances and to investigate the ways music composed through chance procedures could become something beautiful. Many of Cage’s ideas about what music could be were inspired by Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionized twentieth-century art by presenting everyday, unadulterated objects in museum settings as finished works of art, which were called “found art,” or ready-mades by later scholars. Like Duchamp, Cage found music around him and did not necessarily rely on expressing something from within.

Cage’s first experiments involved altering standard instruments, such as putting plates and screws between a piano’s strings before playing it. As his alterations of traditional instruments became more drastic, he realized that what he needed were entirely new instruments. Pieces such as “Imaginary Landscape No 4″(1951) used twelve radios played at once and depended entirely on the chance broadcasts at the time of the performance for its actual sound. In “Water Music” (1952), he used shells and water to create another piece that was motivated by the desire to reproduce the operations that form the world of sound we find around us each day. While his interest in chance procedures and found sound continued throughout the sixties, Cage began to focus his attention on the technologies of recording and amplification. One of his better known pieces was “Cartridge Music” (1960), during which he amplified small household objects at a live performance. Taking the notions of chance composition even further, he often consulted the “I Ching,” or Book of Changes, to decide how he would cut up a tape of a recording and put it back together. At the same time, Cage began to focus on writing and published his first book, “Silence” (1961). This marked a shift in his attention toward literature.

In the ’70’s, with inspirations like Thoreau and Joyce, Cage began to take literary texts and transform them into music. “Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake” (1979), was an outline for transforming any work of literature into a work of music. His sense that music was everywhere and could be made from anything brought a dynamic optimism to everything he did. While recognized as one of the most important composers of the century, John Cage’s true legacy extends far beyond the world of contemporary classical music. After him, no one could look at a painting, a book, or a person without wondering how they might sound if you listened closely.

• John Cage also wrote about his own life in 1990, in an essay called “An Autobiographical Statement,” which can be found here: http://johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html

• Watch Cage performing “Water Walk” on the 1960 tv show, “I’ve Got a Secret” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

A page from the score for “Water Music: by John Cage. Merce Cunningham

The title of Charles Atlas’ new documentary on Merce Cunningham [Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance] may be taken quite literally: his mother described his dancing down the aisle of the church the family attended in Centralia, Washington, at the age of four. At 82, Cunningham is still making new work for the dance company he formed at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in the summer of 1953. He has rarely stopped dancing, certainly not since as a teenager he took classes in tap and ballroom dancing from a local teacher. Even today, in spite of the physical limitations imposed by age, he still demonstrates to his company the movements he wants them to perform in class or in a new dance, and at the end of rehearsal every day he demands five minutes alone in the studio when he works by himself. As he has often said, his fascination with movement is as strong today as it was when he started.

Movement itself is the principal subject matter of his dances: neither narrative nor musical form determines their structure. His with the composer John Cage began with Cunningham’s first independent choreography, in 1942, and lasted until Cage’s death fifty years later. In the course of their work together they proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous, and controversial, of these concerned the relationship of dance and music. In the early dances, dance and music shared an agreed time structure, coming together at certain key points but otherwise pursuing independent paths. As time went on, even those key points disappeared, and the relationship became still freer. The independence is now total–famously, the dancers in Cunningham’s company learn and rehearse a work in silence and often do not hear the music until the first performance, or at any rate the dress rehearsal.

Other conventional elements of dance structure were also abandoned: conflict and resolution, cause and effect, climax and anti-climax. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological states. This does not mean that drama is absent, but it arises from the intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience, and the human situation on stage. Cunningham’s dancers are not pretending to be anything other than themselves-as he once said, “you are not necessarily at your best, but at your most human.”

The other principle that Cunningham and Cage shared was the use of chance procedures in the composition of their works. Cage carried them through to the process of realizing a work in performance, while Cunningham has preferred to use chance not in the performance of his choreography but in its composition. Even so, there are those who believe that the dancers toss coins in the wings before going on stage, where they improvise. Nothing could be further from the truth. By the time the choreography is given to the dancers in rehearsal, Cunningham has largely worked it out, using chance methods to determine the sequence of movements, where in the space they will be performed, and by how many dancers. His dances are not lacking in structure, but the structure is organic, not preconceived.

Paradoxically, Cunningham’s use of chance processes produces not chaos but order. Even in a chance piece, limitations are imposed by the existence of a gamut of available movement material from which the dance phrases must be put together-and, further, by the choice of that material that is then determined by chance. And chance results in unforeseen ways of placing the phrases in space and time. All the same, talent is clearly not excluded; as with any other way of composing, ultimately what counts is the quality of the imagination and craft that go into making the process work. If Cunningham is generally recognized as the greatest living choreographer, one reason for this is the sheer fecundity of his invention of steps: he likes to quote the story of a great tap dancer who asked a colleague, “have you made any new steps lately?” And that is what Cunningham does every day: any new work he makes starts, he says, with a step that will lead him to the discovery of something he did not know before. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/merce-cunningham-a-lifetime-of-dance/566/

Merce Cunningham in “Antic Meet” (1958), with décor and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg Buckminster Fuller

“I only learn what to do when I have failures.” – Buckminster Fuller

There are few men who can justly claim to have revolutionized their discipline. R. Buckminster Fuller revolutionized many. “Bucky,” as he was known to most, was a designer, architect, poet, educator, engineer, philosopher, environmentalist, and, above all, humanitarian. Driven by the belief that humanity’s major problems were hunger and homelessness he dedicated his life to solving those problems through inexpensive and efficient design.

The grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, Bucky was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts. He was twice expelled from Harvard. Later, Bucky married Anne Hewlett in 1917 and went into the construction business with her father. A decade later he witnessed the first of many business failures, when, due to economic difficulties, he was forced out of the company. Despondent over these failures and family problems, he resolved to focus his energies on a search for socially responsible answers to the major design problems of his time.

Recognizing the inefficiency of the automobile, Bucky spent the late twenties designing a car that would incorporate the engineering advances of the airplane. In 1933, he presented the first prototype of the Dymaxion car. The Dymaxion car could hold twelve passengers, go 120 miles per hour and used half the gas of the standard car, utilizing aerodynamics construction and only three wheels. While demonstrating the car to investors, it crashed, taking one life. Though the crash was later determined not to be the fault of the car, he was never able to find adequate funding.

As World War II ended and housing crises in America became more acute, he turned his sights to what would remain his life-long dream. Using airplane construction methods and materials, Bucky set out to create a pre- fabricated house that could be easily delivered to any location. It would be fireproof and inexpensive and constructed out of lightweight materials. In 1945 however, with thousands of orders in place for his new Dymaxion House, Fuller once again ran into difficulties with investors and had to end the project.

Unsure of his next step and without a job, Bucky accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. There, with the support of an amazing group of professors and students, he began work on the project that was to make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering. Using lightweight plastics in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) he created a small dome. As his work continued it became clear that he had made the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

Having finally received recognition for his endeavors, Buckminster Fuller spent the final fifteen years of his life traveling around the world lecturing on ways to better use the world’s resources. A favorite of the radical youth of the late 60’s and 70’s, Fuller worked to expand social activism to an international scope. Among his most famous books were NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD(1963) OPERATING MANUAL FOR THE SPACESHIP EARTH (1969), and EARTH, INC. (1973) in which he writes “In reality, the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are nothing else than a most fantastically well-designed and space-programmed team of vehicles. All of us are, always have been, and so long as we exist, always will be–nothing else but–astronauts.”

Vocabulary

Abstraction: The simplification of depicted visual form so that the object of imitation (for example, a person) no longer appears as that object would in life, but still maintains features of the original object and is recognizable as such.

Avant-Garde: A militaristic metaphor for groups of intellectuals and artists who make the double claim to be able to see more than other people and from that elevated premise to function as intellectual leaders in their respective fields. At least since the Romantic period - and probably much earlier - such individuals viewed themselves as agents of historical transformations and part of the vanguard of innovation and change.

Chance: 20th century Western artists in all media sometimes sought to undo the fixity of authorship, by losing some control of the creation of the final artwork. This introduction of uncontrolled elements could occur through 3 methods: (1) using random processes in order to generate a fixed artwork; (2) allowing the performer to choose from a variety of formal options stipulated by the author of the artwork; (3) underdetermining the performance or presentation of the artwork by means of special notation.

Interdisciplinary: A field of study or creation that relates to more than one academic area.

Modern Dance: Developed in the 20th century primarily in the United States and Germany, modern dance resembles modern art and music in being experimental and iconoclastic. Modern dance began at the turn of the century; its pioneers were Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis in the United States, Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman in Germany. Each rebelled against the rigid formalism, artifice, and superficiality of classical academic ballet and against the banality of show dancing. Each sought to inspire audiences to a new awareness of inner or outer realities, a goal shared by all subsequent modern dancers.

Modernism: The tendency in art to embrace the distinguishing characteristics of Western culture from the mid-nineteenth century until at least the mid-twentieth: a culture in which processes of industrialization and urbanization are conceived of as the principal mechanisms of transformation in human experience.

Performance art: A form of modern art presented before a live audience, which synthesizes elements of the visual arts and theater, video, or poetry. was created in the 1910s, but popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Utopian communities: American utopias and utopianism are the direct offspring of much earlier European efforts first to conceptualize and then to try to establish perfect societies at home and abroad.

Themes

Art as Life, Life as Art

Artmaking in Exile

Collaboration

Craft as Art

Displacement

Intentional Community

Interdisciplinarity

Progressive pedagogy

Utopianism

Recommended Readings

Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.

Helen Molesworth is chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Ruth Erickson is assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300211917/leap- you-look

Recommended Resources

• Crossroads and Cosmopolitanism at Black Mountain College The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston created an online resource that presents different BMC figures’ biographies as well as the intersections of their background and practice. The resource maps the connections between the students and faculty at Black Mountain: http://mappingbmc.org/#

• Bauhaus: Art as Life The Barbican, an art gallery in London, put together an excellent learning resource for their exhibition on the Bauhaus. The resource includes 20 different activities that draw from the traditions of interdisciplinarity, play, creativity, utopianism, and craft that characterize the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. These activities are great for sparking writing, artmaking, or creative and analytical thought. Likewise, working through some of these resources will help you and the students get a deeper perspective of the Bauhuas pedagogy that informed many of the faculty at Black Mountain. The pdf of this resource is 21 pages long, so I have included a link instead of the full document here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/media/events/12409barbicanbauhausonlinelearningresourcefinal 3.pdf

• The Estate of Ruth Asawa Website Asawa’s estate has created an attractive, informative website that covers the artist’s life, work, and social and historical context. The site is especially good for including videos of Asawa at work, as well as interviews with the artist, and insight into her working methods: http://www.ruthasawa.com/

• Prepared Piano an app developed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, which allows you to play the piano as Cage might have. One of the many ingenious innovations of American composer/writer/artist John Cage was his creation of the "prepared piano", in which he placed objects beneath and between the strings of a grand piano to create an entirely new instrument. The sounds of John Cage's Prepared Piano are now available for you to play on your portable device with this innovative app. Play meticulously sampled sounds of a piano prepared with the actual materials used by John Cage in the preparations for his Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48) as sampled under the supervision of the John Cage Trust. http://johncage.org/cagePiano.html

• 4’ 33” app allows for performances of Cage’s famous 1952 composition and connects users to others who have recorded their own performances. You can compare the ambient noise of your own performance of the piece to performances staged around the world. http://johncage.org/4_33.html

• Student Experience in the Experimental Education in the Early Years (1933-41) Robert Sunley, a scholar of Black Mountain College, conducted a study in 1997 in which he collected memoirs and recollections from 40 students of the college who attended between 1933 and 1941. Sunley analyzed the data and created an online resource of these recollections, categorized into sections that addressed either the role of the arts at the college and in student life, or different facets of the teaching and teachers. This study provides firsthand insight into the life of a student at the college, what the educational expectations were, how students learned, and also what the faculty were like. Life outside the classroom is also addressed, to provide a unique view of the institution. The study may be found here: http://blackmountaincollegeproject.org/Features/SUNLEY/SunleyFeature1/SunleyIntroduction. htm

• Mondays with Merce is a series of brief (15-20 minute) episodes discussing the work of Merce Cunningham that were filmed in 2008, at the end of Cunningham’s life. The episodes are valuable because they feature interviews with the choreographer and dancer, as well as with Cunningham’s collaborators—be they other dancers, artists, or musicians. Some episodes of special interest for this exhibition are: o “The Prepared Mind: John Cage and David Tudor,” which features archival footage of Cage performing his ‘silent piece’ 4’33” alongside footage from Cunningham’s work from the early 1960s: http://www.mercecunningham.org/film-media/mondays-with- merce/episode-15-the-prepared-mind-john-cage-and-david-tudor/ o “Dancing as Yourself” What is it like to perform as yourself—in choreography made with no story line, and no matching music? In this webisode dancers Julie Cunningham and Daniel Madoff discuss how it feels to perform, as you watch them perform an Event set in the Bruce Nauman bleachers at Dia: Beacon. With an historical excerpt from the 1960 work Crises, and more recent footage of BIPED. Also, a Mondays with Merce interview with Merce Cunningham, and our footage of Merce teaching class. http://www.mercecunningham.org/film-media/mondays-with-merce/episode-6- dancing-as-yourself/ o “Dancing for Merce” Holley Farmer, a member of the Company for more than a decade, on dancing for Merce. Footage of her signature solo from Cunningham’ s Loosetime performed in front of a Robert Rauschenberg backdrop as part of a “ MinEvent.” Film from the Mondays with Merce Film Library of Merce teaching the company, and an interview in which Merce answers the question, "Does Dance Need Music?" Last, with Sigur Rós and Radiohead performing original scores, Cunningham’ s Split Sides, in an excerpt from a film of that dance by Charles Atlas. http://www.mercecunningham.org/film-media/mondays-with-merce/episode-2- dancing-for-merce/

The Poetry and Poets of Black Mountain College

“A Brief Guide to the Black Mountain School”

Black Mountain College, located in a collection of church buildings in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was an educational experiment that lasted from 1933 to 1956. It was one of the first schools to stress the importance of teaching creative arts and the belief that, in combination with technical and analytical skills, the arts are essential to human understanding. The group of influential poets who studied there, taught there, or were associated with the school included Robert Creeley, , Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson. Though these poets’ work was remarkably different, they shared creative philosophies that came to be known as “projective verse.”

Olson, who taught at the college from 1948 to 1956 and was its last rector, coined the term “projective verse” in 1950. The idea of projective verse centers around process rather than product and owes much to objectivists like William Carlos Williams and modernists like Ezra Pound. This “composition by field” urges poets to simultaneously remove their subjectivity from their poems and “project” the energy of their work directly to the reader. Spontaneity and “the act of the poem” therefore take the place of reason and description.

Creeley was a student and a teacher at the college. At once Olson’s pupil and his peer, Creeley quickly became a tremendously influential figure, especially as editor of the groundbreaking Black Mountain Review. Derived from the same theories, Olson’s work was expansive and filled the page while Creeley’s operated by means of compressed, narrow columns.

Duncan and Levertov spent time at the college, became prominent projectivist figures, and were themselves a dichotomous pair. Intimate friends for years, the relationship between the two became strained when Levertov deviated from Duncan’s “grand collage” poetics and infused humanist politics into her verse.

The projectivist approach extended easily into open long-forms, beautifully rendered—and some might say completed—in Olson’s Maximus poems, Creeley’s Pieces, and Duncan’s “Structure of Rime” and “Passages.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-black-mountain-school

“Robert Creeley: Picking up the Painting’s Vibes”

Robert Creeley has said that presenting people with both poetry and visual art “shifts the emotional center.” Speaking of artist Francesco Clemente, he said, “Any person reading what I’ve written and seeing what he’s made is moving back and forth between two emotional fields.”

With over 45 with visual artists— many of them displayed at the New York Public Library and other museums across America in 2000 and 2001—Creeley has been able to push the limits of genre. A Black Mountain School poet and longtime champion of unpredictable high- and low-culture approaches to poetry, it seems only natural that Creeley would approach visual collaborations with the idea of getting people to see poetry and art differently, perhaps to set them off balance. Whereas many lesser poets might have succumbed to writing captions, Creeley creates texts to accompany the paintings that make the words as vital as the images. He has said, “It’s not a question of understanding the paintings, but of picking up their vibes—more like playing in a band.” As a result, his collaborations with artists such as Francesco Clemente, Robert Indiana, Rene Laubies, Jim Dine, R.B. Kitaj and Sol LeWitt have taken varied approaches to the idea of collaboration. In some, he has responded to works already in existence, in some the image and words exist side by side, and in some, the text was written first and incorporated into the visual work as it was being made.

Among his first collaborations were the books The Immoral Proposition (1953), created with the French artist René Laubies, and All That Is Lovely in Men (1955), with Dan Rice. Both were published by Jargon Press, run by at Black Mountain College. These are true collaborations—text mixing with image rather than existing beside it. Creeley’s famous collaboration with Robert Indiana beginning in 1968 involved long correspondence between the poet and the artist. The result is a series of responses to Robert Indiana’s poster-like pop art paintings of numbers, his famous image “Love” (which has since been immortalized on postage stamps) and paintings for pop-culture figures as varied as Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso. The poem that accompanies the number “One” seems to be a parallel exploration of similar themes rather than a description of the painting, but includes similar formal structures and an acknowledgement of the geometrical forms and flat colors present in the painting:

One thought of integrity wants it to be an intrinsic, indestructible me, a one and only— but misses it’s one into which all has gone and from which all has come— cannot look back, see the star’s, the square’s lack, the interminable circle surrounds the fact.

Poet and art historian John Yau said in the catalog for the exhibition that, for Creeley, “collaboration has become a way for him to both designate and discover the particulars inherent to time and space. The point, as [Creeley’s] recent book Life & Death (New York: New Directions, 1998), makes clear, is to keep one’s eyes open, to be attentive to reality, and the self amidst it, for as long as humanly possible.” Creeley himself would put it differently, but the result is the same: a varied and unusual approach to such disparate media as music, painting, and even the internet. “In some sense," he once said, “if I could write poems as clear as Hank Williams’s lyrics, I would be very pleased. That’s not just feeling down- home or something. I don’t really like or enjoy the classic boundaries.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/robert-creeley-picking-paintings-vibes

A poetic and visual collaboration between poet Robert Creeley and artist R.B. Kitaj called “Silkscreen Portfolio” from 1967.

A Selection of Poems written by Black Mountain College Poets in their time at the College

Discussion Questions & Activities

Pedagogy

• If you could redesign your school, what would it look like? What classes would be offered? How would the subjects be related to each other and what subjects would they be? • One of the unusual features of Black Mountain College was that students shared responsibility for school governance with faculty. If you, as a student, were part of your school’s administration, what would you do? What do you wish your school district would do and support or change? What can you do now to advocate for those changes?

Community

• Many of the students and faculty at Black Mountain College experienced some form of displacement: Asawa was forced into a Japanese internment camp by the U.S. government during World War II; the Albers left Europe to in the face of politically hostile conditions in Germany and many of their Bauhaus colleagues migrated, too. How do you imagine that leaving home affected the Black Mountain College students’ and faculty’s desire for community? How do you think that living and working together affected students’ and teachers’ relationships? • What are some things that you might do to build community in your own school? How would these efforts connect or depart from what your school already does to build community? Are there things that students do amongst themselves to build community that the school could support? • What are the institutions and organizations that shape your life? How do they affect you? How do you contribute to them and to their work?

Artmaking

• Ruth Asawa claimed: ““An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” When have you seen someone transform the ordinary into something special? Did that transformation make the original thing seem more artful? How do you think your perspective would change if you went through your day looking for art? Not necessarily looking for art made by artists, but ordinary things or moments that seem artful to you. What makes something special or artful and how do you convey that quality to someone else? • Consider asking students to perform ordinary tasks mindfully, with the idea that they transform a simple action—stacking some papers, washing dishes, or moving through the hallway—into an artful moment. What does it feel like to make art out of the ordinary? Up the ante by having students turn these mindful moments into performances for each other, then ask them to write reflections on their own experience of performing and of seeing others perform these moments. Does seeing a performance of an ordinary action change their perception of their own similar ordinary moments? • The Barbican’s learning resources on the Bauhaus for 20 activities inspiring play and creativity: https://www.barbican.org.uk/media/events/12409barbicanbauhausonlinelearningresourcefinal 3.pdf