The Ruse of Medusa was a multi-media performance devised John Cage, having stirred up outrage in by Cage and consisting of a number of the Black Mountain music department unrelated solos including dance, film by lecturing on the music of Erik Satie and slides, , poetry readings, (and condemning the German tradition) gramophone records, a lecture and piano. encouraged MC Richards to translate Satie’s Its documentation exists only through Introduction Ruse of Medusa. The performance was descriptions and memories of those who to the directed by Arthur Penn with choreography participated in and witnessed the event. by , who played the After Cage’s death, notes for one part of exhibition monkey, with a tail designed by Richard the performance, the Projector, were found Lippold. The sets were designed by Willem amongst his papers. and Elaine de Kooning and the performance was documented by Clemens Kalischer. Cage described the event later: ‘At one end Starting at Zero: 1933 - 57 of the rectangular hall… was a movie, and 5 November 2005 – 15 January 2006 The Glyph Exchange at the other end were slides. I was on a The Glyph Exchange was a multi media ladder delivering a lecture which included event that took place in summer 1951. silences and there was another ladder which Charles Olson (Gallery 4), the poet, MC Richards and Charles Olson went up had a longstanding passion for Mayan at different times… Robert Rauschenberg Set in rural North Carolina, Black Mountain Gallery 2: hieroglyphics, coded messages and was playing an old fashioned phonograph was not an art school. Its wide-ranging First Principles expressive gestures. He saw something that had a horn…, and David Tudor was curriculum put the arts at the centre of life, elemental and mythic in the dance of Merce playing piano, and Merce Cunningham in an environment intended to encourage In December 1933 the painter Cunningham, the of Cy Twombly and other dancers were moving through learning through doing. At Black Mountain and his wife the weaver Anni Albers arrived (Gallery 4) and abstract expressionsists the audience. Rauschenberg’s pictures (the it was believed that the imagination could from Germany to run Black Mountain’s such as (Gallery 4) - and in White Paintings) were suspended above the be trained to equip people to deal humanely art courses. In America, the Alberses were the movement of the potter shaping clay audience… They were suspended at various with a complex and uncertain world. making their new beginning; they looked on a wheel. For the Glyph exchange the angles, a canopy of painting above the not back to Europe but to the history composer Lou Harrison wrote a score for audience.’ Black Mountain College, like the modern of South and Latin America to orientate prepared piano and Ben Shahn (Gallery 4) arts in America, was formed in great part themselves. contributed glyph-like paintings. Katherine The audience was part of the event. by the migration from Europe in the 1930s. Litz interpreted Olson’s glyph poem in Performers were given time brackets within Its ethos, linked to multi-disciplinary arts Other colleagues from the Bauhaus, now dance. which to perform with no indication of practice and to a philosophy that bound art also in America, were asked to participate at content, giving the event what has been and living together, was founded on the Black Mountain, amongst them the architect Untitled Event, 1952 termed a score of ‘indeterminate notation’. structured programme of the Bauhaus, the Walter Gropius, a former Bauhaus Director, By contrast, Olson was suspicious of Robert The performance, known as the first art and design teaching institute, recently the painter Lyonel Feininger and Xanti Rauschenberg’s white paintings and Cage’s 'happening’ has become legendary. closed by Hitler. Schawinsky, who brought experimental chance-determined music. Untitled Event theatre to the college. For fifteen years, Starting at Zero, presents traces of until they left in 1949, it was the Alberses’ events and performances, memories and powerful philosophy of art and life, Josef photographs, letters and exam papers, Albers’s drive to ‘open eyes’, that gave the reconstructions and work produced at the founding ideals of the college their most far College. reaching expression. 16 Narrow Quay Bristol BS1 4QA This sheet is intended as an introduction T: 0117 917 2300 to the exhibition. Please speak to a F: 0117 917 2303 steward for further information. An E: [email protected] exhibition catalogue is available from the www.arnolfini.org.uk bookshop price £12.95. Gallery 3: important to the crafts in America and the elements, with an emphasis on the process Some Black Mountain Events last years of the college saw the publication of art, created an atmosphere where expression and experiment of a periodical of new American writing, rigorous analysis and juxtaposition became The Geodesic Dome From 1945 onwards summer arts institutes The Black Mountain Review, and the aesthetic and moral principles. Card, Josef Albers organised the 1948 summer were held at Black Mountain. These growing reputation of the Black Mountain newspaper and brown paper were made institute. The faculty included John Cage attracted extraordinary groupings of then poets. use of, grasses, seeds and metallic threads and Merce Cunningham,who had visited more or less unknown and sometimes were woven, collages made of leaves; the college in the spring, and Willem impoverished artists and thinkers, including Experiment jewellery was constructed from hairpins, de Kooning, who came with his wife the painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning, paperclips and grommets. For Josef the painter Elaine de Kooning. At the the polymath R. Buckminster Fuller, the Black Mountain College is often referred Albers’s students and Robert suggestion of John Cage he had replaced critic Clement Greenberg, the musician and to and discussed in terms of ‘experiment’, Rauschenberg collage became fundamental the painter Mark Tobey, who was ill. The artist John Cage and the choreographer whether it be in the context of education, to their practice. sculptor Richard Lippold and his wife Merce Cunningham. community, or art. The range of works Louise, a dancer who had studied with within this exhibition reveal that an The friendship and creative collaboration Merce Cunningham, brought their family in At Black Mountain R. Buckminster Fuller experimental approach to art, life and ideas between the musician John Cage and the hearse in which they camped. experimented with and built the first was pursued in many different ways. the choreographer Merce Cunningham Geodesic Dome, John Cage devised the predated their first visit to Black Mountain Buckminster Fuller (Gallery 3) provided the multidisciplinary event now known as the In Gallery 2, the series of abstract colour and lasted until Cage’s death in 1992. At main project of the summer: work on the first ‘happening’, incorporating Robert paintings by Josef Albers, are examples of Black Mountain their relationship with first geodesic dome. ‘Geodesic’ means Rauschenberg’s white paintings and the the artist's methodical testing of colour Robert Rauschenberg deepened. Cage’s ‘relating to the form and structure of the Cunningham Dance Company was founded. combinations, appearance and optical friendship with Robert Rauschenberg earth’. It is also a term that corresponds effects. For Albers, experiment “embraces all developed at Black Mountain in summer to straight on a curved surface: a direct means of opposing disorder and accident”. flight does not follow a straight line Gallery 4: 1952. Rauschenberg was making his black This series of works fulfills this requirement, and white paintings (Gallery 3). The white because the earth is curved. Fuller describes The Final Phase as did much of the systematic trial and error paintings were the impetus for Cage to making calculations for his dome at Black style teaching that he encouraged at the develop the silent work 4’ 33”. ‘I was Mountain. When the dome, made of strips In its final phase, Charles Olson dreamed college. of Venentian blind, failed to rise it was of encompassing the whole of experience reluctant to do the silent piece until I had the encouragement from Rauschenberg’s named ‘the supine dome’. in his experimental writing and his John Cage’s work and ideas, some of which experimental college – and wished to bring white paintings’, Cage stated. In a letter are presented in Gallery 3, (with related to his New York Dealer, Betty Parsons, The next summer Fuller returned to Black Josef and Anni Albers back to make the work by him and others in Playing John Mountain with some of his students from dream work. Rauschenberg describes his new work: Cage in Gallery 1) takes another approach ‘They are large white (1 white as 1 GOD) the Institute of Design in , having to experimentation, embracing chance, canvases organized and selected with the developed the dome further. He built a Charles Olson, the painter Ben Shahn, the randomness and accident within his ways of dome from prefabricated pieces, erected it composer Lou Harrison and the dancer experience of time and presented with the working. innocence of a virgin.’ with the use of cables and tested a plastic Katherine Litz enacted the multi-media skin. 'Tensegrity’ was the name invented by ‘glyph exchange’ in 1951, referring to Fuller for a structural principle developed Olson’s passion for Mayan writing, which Affinities and Conversations The network of associations between Cunningham, Cage, Rauschenberg and the by a student at Black mountain, Kenneth had also been an inspiration for Josef and Black Mountain College was a place for the abstract expressionists such as Willem de Snelson. He met Fuller in 1948 and made Anni Albers on their visits to Mexico in the forming - and sometimes the breaking - of Kooning and Jack Tworkov (Gallery 3) can sculptures in which compressed members 1930s and 40s. friendships and for exchanges of ideas and be seen in Rauschenberg’s photographs and were separated by tension members. Later, cross fertilisation, through teaching and in the way that works in the exhibition have there was friction between Snelson and Charles Olson believed in the mythic, association. Fuller because Snelson felt that Fuller had expansive, expressive gesture, whether been exchanged between artists, given or dedicated to friends. taken over the system he had evolved. in writing, dance, painting or pottery. The Alberses willingness to start afresh, to A Pottery Seminar took place in 1952, analyse the properties of colour, materials sparking a debate about tradition that was and design and the relationship between