1 Josef Albers and the Ethics of Perception
12Experimentation means learning by experience.
3Josef Albers, 1941
4A most poignant document of Black Mountain College’s early years is the snapshot of Josef and Anni Albers’s arrival, published in North Carolina’s Asheville Citizen on December 5, 1933 (fig. 1.1). ‘‘Germans to Teach Art Near Here,’’ the caption reads, though ‘‘Fresh Off the Boat’’ would do just as well; the grainy newsprint depicts the couple posed tensely in formal attire—he in tie and jacket, she in fur, cloche, and veil. Tightly angled in a corner, they look very much the anxious, recent immigrants. While Anni’s mild gaze seeks out the viewer, Josef averts his eyes, his stiff bearing and tightly clasped hands registering trepidation, even strain. Fleeing the Nazi regime, the couple left Berlin for the site of a newly founded experimental school in rural Appalachia, a quite improbable relocation under other circumstances. Though they came from the Bauhaus, one of the most radical art institutions of the era, to what was vociferously announced as its successor in the United States, this evidence of a nervous arrival is testimony to their unexpectedly providential exile from Europe.
5 Josef knew but a few words in English, though Anni was fluent. In their first years, she would serve double duty as both faculty member at the recently founded college and as his patient translator. The newspaper article does not mention this, nor does it quote his famous response to their welcoming ceremony. Rallying his scant English when asked what he hoped to accomplish in the United States, Josef declared simply, ‘‘I want to open eyes.’’2 Typical of his plain and frank manner, Albers’s pronouncement nonetheless encapsulates two concerns that characterize his years in the United States. Most obviously, it indicates the centrality of his pedagogical commitment (the same newspaper article proclaimed Albers as ‘‘internationally known …for his unusual method of art instruction’’). His statement also foregrounds the preeminence of a study of vision in his pedagogy and in Bauhaus teaching more generally—it is eyes he wants to open, after all.3 Pedagogy and vision: together, his words represent a desire to craft an audience for abstraction and, more particularly, for his art, an audience that would be tutored in the perceptual strategies he was developing in his teaching.
7 The key elements of these perceptual strategies were set out in Albers’s three-pronged Preliminary Course, or Vorkurs, brought from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain and later to Yale University. In these drawing, color, and design classes, he 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. He 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.4 He began his drawing and design courses with mirror writing, a simple exercise in defamiliarization. He invited students to draw their names, for example, backward and in cursive, as if reflected in a mirror, and then asked them to render this script using their non-dominant hand. Drawing by automatic motor sense invariably becomes a crutch, overwriting any direct consciousness of how the actual forms of a signature are produced. Mirror exercises provided students with a sure way to begin challenging sterile habits of observation, ‘‘to develop awareness of what we do out of habit as opposed to choice.’’5
9 To grasp Albers’s proposal of what he came to term a ‘‘new visual expression’’ through acts of experimentation, it is crucial to understand the discursive field he produced around geometric abstraction, that is, how he explained the importance of a continuous study of the constitutive elements of form.6 The first section of this chapter will undertake a close reading and analysis of Albers’s large body of unpublished texts written in his budding English, which can shed light on the process of testing variations in form that his pedagogical strategies elaborated. (One could argue that given its minimal denotation of form and its refusal of naturalistic representation, geometric abstraction always relied heavily on discursive interpretations, offered both in the artists’ own writings and by critics.) He redesigned the experience of looking at art as one of ‘‘direct seeing,’’ whereby attention to perceptual habits marks routine cognitive associations as social constructions and allows these associations to be influenced and possibly transformed.7 In that vein, the second section of this chapter will connect Albers’s pedagogy with his own work. With careful study of his sketches, studies, and paintings undertaken at Black Mountain (and a few from his subsequent decades in the United States), it will be possible to address how Albers developed methods of articulating form that highlighted its contingency and endless mutability.
10 The final section of this chapter will explore how Albers went further to find in form an ethics of perception, which he developed in theories of progressive pedagogy concerning experimentation and social change. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Albers presented the methodology of the experimental test as a forceful corrective against stagnant perceptual habits in the culture at large, bringing attention to the tremendous stake of progressive education in combating forces of social reproduction, that is, the tendency of dominant cultural values to be reproduced as the privileged traditions of a society. He maintained that learning to observe and design form made an essential contribution toward cultural transformation and growth. In brief, in Albers’s ethics of perception, careless habits—habits that inhibit self-actualization and social progress—can be overcome with the disciplined study of the constitution of forms, forms that themselves compose the ubiquitous, though often overlooked, material and appearance of our surroundings.
Perception Between Science and Intuition
11Elements of Josef Albers’s teachings have become so familiar and ingrained in current art curricula that it is difficult to recall how radically art education was altered by the widespread adoption of his methods. Developed at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s through 1933 and continued at Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1949 and at Yale from 1950 to 1958, Albers’s Preliminary Course consistently challenged conventional art teaching. Indeed, it is important to remember the great influence of Black Mountain’s teaching methods generally—especially during Albers’s nearly two decades at the College—in positioning invention and experiment as central elements of educational practice in the United States, and to bear in mind that in the years preceding its implementation elsewhere, ‘‘it was heresy,’’ according to Albers, ‘‘to consider art a central part of a college curriculum or a means of general education.’’8
12 Visual arts training in the early twentieth century, in Europe as in the United States, took place in specialized art academies modeled on classical Beaux-Arts instructional models or in technical institutes featuring drawing for industrial design, rather than in liberal arts colleges such as Black Mountain. In academies, distinctions among various media were reinforced, and the rendering from life, above all the study of the nude, was central. The emphasis was on repetition (in life studies) and duplication (in copying past works). Advancement was secured by a review process that paradoxically assessed a pupil’s fidelity to precursors and his (rarely her) departure from precedent in an ‘‘original’’ work—the academy study of the male nude. In its technical application, drawing accentuated the repeatability of objective nature by creating a strict geometry of form (and in this sense, to use M. Norton Wise’s phrase, ‘‘drawing is the language of engineering’’).9 This language of reproduced form, as Molly Nesbit contends, was routinized by drills in elementary and higher education toward ‘‘blueprints of production’’ in industrial product design.10 Even attempts to devise hybrid guild-workshop models of art education spawned by the Arts and Crafts movement, as Howard Singerman has noted, tended to attach more importance to craft traditions than to creative work in art and design.11 Whatever the model—academy, technical college, or workshop—visual art training beyond high school was not closely integrated with liberal arts concerns or with experimental or progressive approaches.
13 Albers bemoaned the persistence of such models in the United States:
1415I believe dominating education methods in this country are not at all typically American with their stereotyped requirements, standardized curricula and mechanized evaluation of achievements. Why do we still have the belief in academic standards while our living reveals variety, youth and freshness …? Why must exploration and inventiveness, two American virtues, too, play such a minor part in our schools?12
16He found particularly grating the assumption in standardized art education that talent and an aptitude for art were inherent gifts and prerequisites to creativity. Instead, he fostered a general training in the fundaments of art as ‘‘more democratic [and] …giving a chance to many more people,’’ not just to the exceptional or advanced student.13 In this sense, Albers was a good fit for Black Mountain; the centrality of art education was emphasized in the College’s 1933 inaugural publication shortly before his arrival: ‘‘Fine Arts, which often exist precariously on the fringes of the curriculum, are regarded as an integral part of the life of the College and of importance equal to that of the subjects that usually occupy the center of the curriculum.’’14 The goal was not to produce professional artists but to consider all individuals as possible creators and to offer training for what Albers termed a ‘‘flexible and productive mind that wants to do something with the world …we are on the way to the researcher, discoverer, to the inventor, in short to the worker who produces or understands revelations.’’15
17 Art practice offered the ideal site in culture from which to encourage broad-minded thinking, as training in experimentation steered a course toward ‘‘coordination, interpenetration …conclusions, new viewpoints …for developing a feeling or understanding for atmosphere and culture.’’16 The as yet unrealized prospect of education thus could consist of a richer understanding of ‘‘action or life,’’ not a stockpiling of mere information or knowledge.17 Developing an attuned visual sensibility involved testing, dynamism, and action, not the passivity and stasis of education based on study of precedent alone.18 Albers’s series of foundational courses promoted independent thinking and a close study of the mutable nature of form. On a visit to Black Mountain in 1944, Walter Gropius praised Albers’s innovation: ‘‘He has discarded the old procedure to hand over to the student a ready-made formulated system. He gives them instead objective tools that enable them to dig into the very stuff of life.
18 * * *
19 This ever-changing approach seems to me pregnant of life, present and future.’’19
21 Albers’s battery of courses constituted a broad foundation in the ‘‘stuff of life’’: a general education in the fundamental elements of visual perception, broken down into a sequence of three classes covering the ‘‘main provinces of form’’—drawing, color, and design.20 Yet ‘‘fundamental’’ and ‘‘foundational’’ should not be understood as merely elementary. Rather, through the observation of form’s shape, material (in its structure, surface, and appearance), and coloristic qualities, Albers offered a basic training in articulating form, and possibly in rearticulating it creatively. As Peter Galison has observed, this program of ‘‘building up from simple elements to all higher forms’’ was perhaps the central feature of Bauhaus pedagogy.21
22 Albers’s first course—Basic Drawing—concentrated on shape through the exact observation and transcription of form in space. Drawing was conceived as a ‘‘test of seeing’’ that graphically reported visual data honed by exercises in foreshortening, overlapping, distance, and nearness.22 Albers encouraged students to observe the disposition of line in various contexts; in one study (fig. 1.3), the depiction of repeated bent and scrolled planes tested the precise spatial translation of two dimensions into three. Such trained observation excluded what Albers termed ‘‘expressive drawing’’ as a beginning, that is, the depiction of conditions that could not be assessed with some objectivity; the length of each mark in figure 1.3 maps the real behavior of a line in space with respect to qualities of depth and movement.23 His teaching exercises employed uncomplicated geometric forms such as squares, triangles, and ellipses, as well as simple figures such as letters and numbers, to perform changes in perspective and to create anamorphic effects that demonstrated a mastery of spatial representation. He avoided studies of the nude or classical model, ‘‘because that’s the hardest thing to do and you come maybe only for the nudes and not for the drawing.’’24
24 Figure 1.4
25 Unknown artist, Matiere Study, n.d. Reproduced in J. Albers, Search Versus Re-Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 77. ľ Trinity College Trustees. Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
26 Basic Design (the key Werklehre—handicraft, or literally, the study of how to work—portion of the Preliminary Course) involved explorations of the material constitution of form. Albers divided the subject into two components, which he termed matière and material, and focused on exploration using commonly found materials and the fewest possible tools. Matière studies concerned the appearances of materials, distinguishing among structure, facture, and texture, and sought to characterize materials by their tactile or optical perception.25 For example, a trompe l’oeil representation of wood grain on paper gave the optical appearance of wood but the tactile experience of paper (fig. 1.4). Essentially, the practice of combining and confusing the superficial qualities of materials tested (mis)perceptions of the appearances of surfaces.26
27 Material studies concerned the immanent capacities of materials, evaluated structurally and analyzed according to features such as compression, elasticity, and firmness, tested through folding and bending. Here, Albers concentrated on the internal organization of forms and their relation to one another, encouraging dynamic relations rather than strictly symmetrical or mathematically predictable ones. An understanding of the dimensional, spatial, and volumetric qualities of form was accomplished through construction exercises, whose 22 chapter one parameters were defined through formal economy, that is, the ‘‘ratio of effort to effect.’’27
28 Albers believed the disciplined study of the material organization of form to be a necessary condition of art production. As he reasoned, ‘‘Every art work is based on a thinking out of the material.’’28 And in pre-Columbian sculpture he found the signal example of a sophisticated understanding of the technical potentials and limitations of medium. Once Albers relocated to the United States, he amassed an extensive collection of Mexican pre-Columbian pottery and figurines; he felt such work amplified the characteristic tendencies of its material, establishing a reflexive relation between an object’s structure and appearance. In contrast to many uses of clay in Western art, in which it is applied over a hidden armature, pre-Columbian art keeps ‘‘clay clay-like,’’ building ‘‘cake-like flat elements or little globular or sausage-like forms’’29 (fig. 1.5). Stonework commonly uses compact forms lacking delicate protrusions that can break. This construction is ‘‘proof that the artist has not overaimed and that the material has not been over-charged.’’30 Rather than simulating something else, the materiality of pre-Columbian art evokes the constructivist credo: it ‘‘teaches us [to] be truthful with materials.’’31 Though the appearance of any material can mimic another, its underlying structure and technical capacity can never be successfully imitated. The trompe l’oeil woodgrain drawing on paper, however naturalistic, cannot be mistaken for actual wood in its strength or durability (fig. 1.4).
30 Figure 1.5
31Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Albers with Pre-Columbian Figurines, 1968. Gelatin silver photograph. Courtesy Magnum Photos. 23
32 Color study was conceived as the foundational technique of painting, each brushstroke or application of the palette knife the bearer of a dab of colored paint. Albers’s color course encouraged students to tackle the process of painting with clear intentions and proper execution—‘‘to prepare for a disciplined use of color and to prevent accident, brush, or paint-box from taking authorship.’’32 Again, as in his other courses, Albers emphasized active ‘‘laboratory study’’ over the theoretical study of color systems, since ‘‘the ability to see color and color relationship is more important than ‘to know about’ color.’’33
33 Despite the renown Albers later won through his influential 1963 manual Interaction of Color, the study of color was relatively undeveloped in his repertoire upon his arrival in the United States. At the Bauhaus, he had radically shifted the Preliminary Course away from explorations of expression and gestural improvisation to rigorous material studies. The increasingly unpopular fixation with the subjective and emotional potential of color demonstrated by Johannes Itten, his predecessor, hastened his departure (triggering perhaps the most productive schism in Bauhaus ideology, one concerning the role of expression as opposed to design in art).34 Though diverging from Itten’s methods, Albers well understood the subjective dimension of color perception. When presented with irrefutable physical evidence—for example, the demonstration of a particular red shade—‘‘all group members will have the same visual perception. But still the individual associations and emotional reactions will differ vastly.’’35 Color is always relational; its perception is influenced not only by neighboring colors but by the surrounding light and atmospheric conditions. In addition, ‘‘visual memory is amazingly poor’’ as compared with, say, auditory memory, and suggests that ‘‘color is deceiving us all the time’’; these influences on vision have the effect of converting ‘‘the optical (physio-physiological) susception [‘stimuli’] into a psychological effect (perception).’’36 Because optical impressions and reactions are highly susceptible to manipulation or error, our understanding of and reflection on visual data—that is, the way we ‘‘image’’ or represent the world in the process of perception—must be carefully trained. This education in vision works to prevent the ease and apparent lack of mediation of optical vision to stand in for a more robust process of challenging meanings commonly assigned to forms. The fallibility of perception, its reliance on deceptive optical registrations, indicates the mutability of cognitive (that is, abstract/conceptual) comprehension, built as it is on those self-same illusions. ‘‘Color is the most relative medium in art,’’ Albers asserted, and this relativity puts into question how cognitive understandings of the world are founded, maintained, and possibly altered.37
34 Deliberate evaluation of the data of perception marks habits of cognition as such, denaturalizing them and making them receptive to change. In the long history of aesthetic discourse, theorizing perception as indebted to habit was early proposed by British empiricists. John Locke was forcefully skeptical about the ‘‘naturalness’’ of perception; he contended that reactions to the testimony of the senses organize knowledge and experience in ways that become ingrained.
35 Casual relations to such sensory stimuli generate ‘‘habitual customs’’ that reformulate new visual appearances into familiar cognitive patterns: ‘‘We are further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it.’’ Previous experiences of events—traditions and precedents—model subsequent experiences in their image; therefore, it is important ‘‘to consider how much [one] may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions.’’38
36 Locke’s recognition that perception is ‘‘beholden to experience’’ and susceptible to routinization became a touchstone of late nineteenth-century philosophical debates about the nature of attention under conditions of growing industrialization and mechanization. Positivists such as Hermann von Helmholtz problematized the ‘‘apparentness’’ and immediacy of visual comprehension with tests of the enervation of visual attention in situations of optical fatigue, citing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s experiments with the vulnerability of visual evidence in the phenomenon of afterimages. Nonetheless, von Helmholtz was prey to the conceit, according to Jonathan Crary, that ‘‘habitual repetition was part of what maintained an orderly social world and affirmed the validity and durability of existing relations.’’39 For Crary, Henri Bergson’s arguments about the close connection between habit, repetition, and automation in modernity (as against forms of personal memory) best corrected von Helmholtz’s tendency toward functionalism. Crary detected in Bergson’s work that ‘‘the more ‘determined,’ that is, the more habitual and repetitive one’s perceptual response to one’s environment is, the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual existence.’’40
37 Citing Bergson’s work, Russian formalists developed theories of vision that focused on remaking perceptual experience.41 Significantly, Viktor Shklovsky’s exploration of ‘‘habituation’’ as a process of rendering perception automatic and unconscious brought to the fore the key role of art in catalyzing new forms of awareness:
3839The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘‘unfamiliar,’’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.42
40 To Shklovsky, the ‘‘purpose [of an image] is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object—it creates a ‘vision’ of the object instead of serving as a means of knowing it.’’43
41 It can be argued that Shklovsky’s type of formalism, by privileging the ‘‘special perception’’ of art over knowledge, elevated art to a category of direct experience surpassing epistemology, and even attempted to negate the ‘‘ends’’ of meaning production in favor of an ‘‘ends’’ of ‘‘means’’: the process of sensation. In contrast, Albers’s troubling of habituation was undertaken not merely as ‘‘an aesthetic end.’’ Rather, he contended that the entire structure of perception was related to the growth and transformation of cognitively assigned meanings in art and in the world at large. Albers saw art as an epistemological project, as a form of knowledge; to him, the better ‘‘vision’’ that attentive perception provokes can in fact increase awareness about routinely assigned meanings, and thus can encourage people to transform their customary patterns of comprehension. To Albers, ‘‘Every perceivable thing has form …and every form has meaning.’’44 But through routine the richness of the visual and material world is frequently overlooked. The diverse forms of modernity are themselves always changing, yet habit-driven behaviors reinforce accustomed understandings of forms and their existing, known relations to one another.45 Maintaining an alert attention to the appearance and constitution of form short-circuits assumptions that corroborate preexisting categories.
42 In short, Albers wanted to connect visual to social habits. If, for example, one can recognize how a work of art maintains a dynamic construction through careful imbalances of color and form—if a particular color to which one might automatically assign the name ‘‘black’’ is brought out of its familiarity and shown to be perhaps a little purple in one light and a little gray in another—the routine cognitive associations of ‘‘blackness’’ (dirt, gloom, death, and so on) can be made similarly unstable. The potential of color study to uncouple sterile associations he dubbed its ‘‘psychological effect.’’46 In his color exercises (note the comparative study from Interaction of Color, adapted from his Black Mountain-era exercises of making the same color appear different depending on its background [plate 1]), Albers tested the mutability of perception, demonstrating how the reception of color shifts dramatically and is deeply situational. Though the two central forms in each study are identical in shape and color, the gray rectangle on a warm yellow field appears brown and static as compared with its more dynamic, though lower-contrast counterpart on a cool blue ground. The illusion, even in close proximity, is persuasive; as the eye compares, it remains difficult to reconcile the fundamental semblance of the two forms. The ambiguity of the gray shade—lively in one instance, dull in another, and therefore utterly dependent on its immediate context for definition—reveals the extraordinary attention and subtlety every visual experience demands of viewers.
43 Careful study of the discrepancy between optical trickery (they appear as two different colors) and material reality (they actually are the same) can activate a fresh awareness of the constructedness of all habits of meaning in the world, as well as trigger an ambition to redesign them conscientiously.
44 Albers saw experimentation as the preeminent method by which the new and changing experiences of modernity could be expressed and its ‘‘modern problems’’ addressed (first and foremost, how to develop a student’s ‘‘independence, critical ability, and discipline’’), and he envisioned its practice as a disciplined testing process encouraging innovative visual articulations.47 Art itself was the experimental arm of culture, investigating the ‘‘better forms’’ that are the prerequisite of cultural production and progress.48 As he wrote:
4546To understand the meaning of form is the indispensable preliminary condition for culture. Culture is the ability to select or to distinguish the better, that is, the more meaningful form, the better appearance, the better behavior. There- fore culture is a concern with quality. Culture can be manifested in two ways: through recognition of better form and through producing of better form. The latter direction is the way of art. Art as the acting part of culture and therefore its proof and measurement.49
47 Art was more broadly both an ‘‘intuitive search for and discovery of form’’ and ‘‘the knowledge and application of the fundamental laws of form.’’50 Experimental processes constellate these interreliant features of artistic production: intuition and intellect. To Albers, this dialectic had profound social effects. In one respect, practices of teaching and learning were mutually informing and interdependent; in an egalitarian educational climate it was possible to ‘‘break through the boundary between those teaching and those being taught, because then everybody will be teacher and student at the same time.’’51 The problems posed in the classroom setting and as homework assignments should be stimulating to all—novice and expert, instructor and pupil.52 In breaking down hierarchies of expertise, Albers by no means advocated the dissolution of all categories of pedagogical distinction. Rather, he required of himself consummate skill; students would then ‘‘estimate as more competent …the one with more experience and insight.’’53 The goal was discovery, not demonstration: to shift from ‘‘giving information to giving experience.’’54 Experimentation, the testing operation that characterizes creative processes, builds skills of evaluation and assessment: ‘‘This one is better than that one and this shows more your expectations and your aims and all your efforts, then you are on the way to build up yourself.’’55 The procedure of the test joins comparison and what Albers termed competition; it is both self-driven and motivated externally by variations in performance among members of a group:
4849Because this comparing includes of course competition—nothing is big, or nothing is small, when we do not see it in [the] neighborhood of something bigger or smaller. …That’s the relativity of all evaluation, and if I want to evaluate myself by comparing my work with other work …that is comparison and is also competition.56
50 Competition—not antagonism—impelled personal growth and progress within a group by encouraging careful evaluations of subtle changes in performance.57
51 In this explicit focus on competition, Albers differed from other geometric abstractionists at the College, notably Ilya Bolotowsky, Albers’s replacement when he went on sabbatical in 1946--47. In Bolotowsky’s classes, students were urged to produce ‘‘mature’’ work regardless of whether it emulated the styles of other artists, resulting in some conflict at the College as he effectively repealed Albers’s group exercise techniques. Bolotowsky’s courses at Black Mountain propounded a ‘‘universal plastic language with sufficient room for individual difference’’ in which ‘‘originality is encouraged.’’58 He was Albers’s junior by twenty years, and he and other abstract painters based in New York City such as Fritz Glarner had been highly receptive to Piet Mondrian and neoplasticism in the 1930s. Bolotowsky took it on faith that abstraction, not ‘‘nature,’’ was the preeminent modern practice because it captured the essence, not the appearance, of form. Though he and Albers were founding members of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in 1936, Bolotowsky’s emphasis on universal characteristics of representation precluded any comparative or experimental testing framework. As he explained in language indebted to Mondrian’s more Neoplatonic moments, ‘‘The majority [in AAA] felt that all worthwhile art has to begin somewhere in nature and then become the essence of it, but a few of us would simply start abstractly and reject nature. …Abstract art is striving to depict an essence of harmony.’’59 Bolotowsky’s emphasis on the immanence of abstraction and the rejection of nature stood in direct opposition to Albers’s methodology, especially as the latter’s model of the test demanded careful observation of the order of existing appearances of ‘‘nature,’’ in the interest of rearticulating them.
52 Albers’s investigations of form, in contrast to Bolotowsky’s, were not undertaken in the interest of generating immediately viable, mature art practices. The goal of the courses was not necessarily to produce anything useful but rather to train observation. As Albers stated, ‘‘In designing there are besides technical and economical problems also problems of form which are independent of a purely functional approach.’’60 To help students avoid succumbing to tendencies of habit or to pressure them to supersede work of the past, Albers advocated ‘‘experiment without aiming to make a product.’’61 He identified intuitive elements in art production available to those with trained vision, recognizing that there are ‘‘many unknown and incalculable X’s which makes it impossible to find every solution by figuring, reckoning and calculating.’’62 He counseled students to devise exceptional situations in which his ‘‘worst enemies’’—symmetry and predictability—were most effectively supplanted by dynamism and discovery.63 The unlabored exercise frequently succeeded; one student recounted how Albers’s first assignment in Basic Design supplied only a few newspapers with the task to ‘‘try to make something out of them that is more than you have now.’’ Dismissing the resulting cut and pasted boats, animals, airplanes, little figurines, and masks as ‘‘kindergarten studies which could have been made better in other materials,’’ Albers alighted on a study of great simplicity in which a young architect folded the newspaper lengthwise and stood it up to resemble a standing screen. ‘‘Albers explained to us how well the material was understood and utilized—how the folding process was natural to paper …now that the paper was standing up, both sides had become visually active. The paper had lost its tired look—its lazy appearance. After a while we caught on to his way of seeing and thinking.’’64
53 An expanded notion of art as mediating between material and culture led
54 Albers to maintain, ‘‘Art is a province in which one finds all the problems of life
55 reflected—not only the problems of form (e.g. proportion and balance)’’ but
56 also what he termed ‘‘spiritual problems,’’ problems of ‘‘philosophy, of religion,
57 of sociology, of economy.’’65 In broadening the definition of art to include visual
58 and material explorations of all sorts, Albers’s pedagogy posited the role of
59 creativity in society as a consciousness to the breadth of aesthetic experience,
60 beyond those observed in the ‘‘laboratory’’ of the classroom. Attentiveness to
61 details of form meant, to Albers, an alertness to the ways in which the indi-
62 vidual was sited in the larger field of social relations. Everything in the world has form; training the eye in the composition of form was a precondition for
63 understanding and possibly transforming the material appearance and imma-
64 terial relations in the world. Albers believed that above all, ‘‘our art instruction
65 attempts first to teach the student to see in the widest sense: to open his eyes
66 to the phenomena about him and, most important of all, to open to his own
67 living, being, and doing.’’66
68 thErE arE no mastErpIEcEs: sErIalIty anD VarIatIon
69 The practice of the experiment, seen in the light of Albers’s body of writings on
70 the test in art and in art education, helps unpack his own body of work in vari-
71 ous media undertaken during his years in the United States. His production at
72 Black Mountain in particular was tremendously catholic; though he had begun
73 his career at the Bauhaus as a glass artist, there and at the College he produced
74 photographs, photomontages, furniture, lithographs, woodand linoleum cuts,
75 pen-and-ink drawings, and oil paintings. In spite of this diversity, Albers’s work
76 from Black Mountain can be divided into roughly two long-term projects: the
77 black-and-white Graphic Tectonics lithographs (1942--48) and the oil-on-Ma-
78 sonite Variants (1947--53), which were inspired by adobe architecture he’d seen
79 in Mexico. Leaving Black Mountain to teach at Yale, he continued to develop
80 the concerns about color perception, initiated in the Variants series, in the later
81Homage to the Square series (1950 until his death in 1976), as well as those of
82 dimensional perception from the Graphic Tectonics in his subsequent Structural
83 Constellations (1949--58).
84 Albers’s work reflected a deliberate experimentation with the constitutive
85 elements of form, centering on the coloristic and geometric relations organizing the appearance of forms on a two-dimensional surface. The scheme of each
86 construction produces internal frictions and instabilities and must be provisionally extricated from multiple and contradictory dimensional readings. For
87 instance, in Albers’s linoleum cut Fenced (1944), interlocking irregular trapezoidal and triangular forms are demarcated in a regular pattern of vertical
88 lines in two contrasting widths (fig. 1.6). As one follows the diagonals to find
89 the outline of a half-perceived three-dimensional object, the impossibility of
90 extracting such an illogical dimensional form from the matrix of surrounding
91 verticals summons once again an overall flatness to the image. The contingent
92 structure of the jigsawed composition in Fenced—is it more two dimensional
93 than three dimensional? is it a unified shape or several intersecting or even
94 disparate, overlapping forms?—generates optical challenges (though Albers
96 Figure 1.6
97 Josef Albers, Fenced, 1944. Linoleum cut, Biltmore Press, Asheville,
98 10 Œ 12. Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni
99 Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
100 disdained association with the later op art moniker) and exposes the rudimentary representational conditions necessary to construct spatially ambiguous
101 images. As Albers observed of a similar work, ‘‘No matter where you start to
102 read, you will never find a logical conclusion. And this, despite the fact that
103 there is no arbitrary point or line, every part is mathematically derived from
104 the underlying square.’’67
105 The distinction between the optical and the conditions under which opticality is understood cognitively was vital in Albers’s work. To him, ‘‘In all
106 visual perception, the initial reaction is optical’’—that is, there is a physical fact
107 of seeing that results in what he termed a ‘‘retinal projection.’’68 Yet the effects
108 of optical stimuli elicit varied perceptual responses that go beyond mere opticality; they are ‘‘post-retinal’’ and occur as the mind synthesizes the visual data
110 Figure 1.7
111 Josef Albers, Studies for Abstract Paintings, ca. 1937. Pencil and
112 red pencil on wove paper, ruled in pencil, 9ij Œ 13¿. Photograph
113 by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation /
114 Artists Rights Society, New York.
115 of a retinal projection. As Albers was fond of repeating, ‘‘Only there [in the
116 mind] occur such important changes (reactions, results) as, for instance, that
117 gentlemen prefer blondes.’’69
118 Perceptual responses in turn condition cognitive understandings of the
119 world and one’s ability to formulate and change the comprehension of objects
120 and events. (Here, Yve-Alain Bois’s paraphrase of the Russian formalist conception of representation—‘‘form is always ideological’’—is worth bearing in
121 mind when considering Albers’s circuit of testing perception against cognitive
122 meanings.)70 Perception mediates the physical fact of seeing and the social-
123 ly and psychologically determined effects of vision. This zone of perception,
124 as opposed to optics, is where Albers couched his artistic practice, tagging it
125 ‘‘perceptual art.’’71 And in this zone, he emphasized above all ‘‘perceptual ambiguity’’ as opposed to mere ‘‘optical deceptions,’’ which occur in all representation but fail to educate the viewer in more attentive observation.72 Revealing
126 the mechanisms of perception could be accomplished with very limited visual
127 data, hence his predilection toward abstraction. As Albers asserted, ‘‘The how
128 is more important than the what.’’73
129 Albers’s sketches and studies reveal the systematic trial-and-error process
130 that each work underwent before completion, showing how ‘‘finished’’ works
131 are composed of systematic variations and are produced in series. In a pencil
132 study from about 1937, for example, careful calculations of surface area determine alterations in the size and placement of each form, and a series of measurements analyzes the spacing of the central forms as separated from the edges
134 Figure 1.8
135 Josef Albers, sketch for Variant D(2), n.d. 8¡ Œ 11. ľ The Josef and
136 Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
137 of the future work (fig. 1.7). Minute adjustments and transpositions of certain
138 elements of the repeated forms are worked out in subsequent iterations of the
139 innermost form. For the late 1940s Variants, Albers filled dozens of graph-pa-
140 per sheets with precisely drawn sketches surrounded by detailed calculations
141 of distances, area, and proportions (fig. 1.8). The ‘‘windows,’’ as he termed the
142 central squares of the Variants, are indicated in different positions in relation to
144 Figure 1.9
145 Josef Albers, Variants, 1942. Drypoint, edition 20, printed at Swan Press, Chicago, 6 Œ 878. Photograph by Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
146 the surrounding ‘‘frames.’’ Various figures drawn in colored pencil are carefully
147 marked off by the number of graphed squares they occupy. In Albers’s close
148 script, meticulous reactions to the tested schemas are noted. One page contains
149 the following registration of different placements of a single window:
150 Have tried to relate center of figure (vertically) with center of margin (vertical-
151 ly) and with the center of frame (vertically) …compared with organization of
152 page 1 center of figure moved one unit to left, frame of figure moved one unit to
153 right …moving again the figure one unit to the right, all centers almost vertical
154 with each other …this movement to the right must be balanced by the grays
155 on top, 3 more to the left, and at bottom 1 more to the left.
156 This systematic testing and factoring of each altered variable governed the
157 subsequent iterations of the work’s structure.
158 Similarly, his drypoint engraving Variants (1942) represents a series of
159 virtually identical forms subjected to a methodical procedure of modification
160 and recombination on the basis of a test figure’s orientation (figs. 1.9, 1.10).
161 Alternating segments of each individual form-group are shaded in different
163 Figure 1.10
164 Josef Albers, Variants, 1942, detail. Photograph by Eva Díaz
165 ľ The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society,
166 New York.
167 arrangements; in the lower-right shape, the orientation is transposed. In his
168 sketchbooks, Albers would carefully draw figures and then invert them, us-
169 ing heavily marked areas as reference points in the reversals in order to test
170 the changing perception of dimensionality in each. Under a shaded version of
171 one sequence is written in pencil: ‘‘The right angles—the square—around the
172 figure do not remain—frontal!’’ Albers’s attempts to adapt the figure test the
173 visual effect of the interlocking forms in various orientations, charting variation
174 among the forms subject to doubling and reversals. This can be seen in a sketch
175 of nine related figures where Albers maintained as a constant a double series of
176Xs in each figure, varying the angles slightly as he embedded cubes within their
177 armature. As the figure is rotated in space, the Xs are seen torqued, transposed,
178 and eventually resolved, as with the upper-right figure, when a new set of angles
179 has in turn become the control factor.
180 Describing these controls, Albers distinguished between the casual approach he termed ‘‘variety’’ and the experimental rigor of ‘‘variance’’:
181 The word variety, although recently a favored design term, has become discredited because of increased abuse. It has become a pretentious recommendation for designs of questionable merit. It is applied to protect hurried changes,
182 to excuse poor alterations, or to defend any accidental and meaningless whim.
183 . . . Thus the excuse ‘‘for variety’s sake’’ remains a warning signal.
184 To replace this negative criterion, we are in favor of a related word of better
185 reputation, the design term ‘‘variant.’’ As variety usually concerns changes of
186 details, variant means a more thorough re-doing of a whole or of a part within
187 a given scheme. Although variant may remind us slightly of imitative plagiarism, normally it results from a thorough study. Because of a more comprehensive comparison forth and back, it usually aims at a new presentation. On the
189 Figure 1.11
190Josef Albers, Spring 39 (Josef Albers Painting at Black Mountain
191College), 1939. Photocollage of 21 images, 8 Π9. Photograph by
192 Tim Nighswander ľ The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists
193 Rights Society, New York.
194 whole, variants demonstrate, besides a sincere attitude, a healthy belief that
195 there is no final solution in form; thus form demands unending performance
196 and invites constant consideration—visually as well as verbally.74
197 As he later reformulated this idea, ‘‘The final ending, the end quality of all form
198 will not be—cannot be—decided upon.’’75 What Albers advocated was not simply following a set of rules, but rather reworking continually, being a perpetual student of the complex organization of forms in the world. The notion of
199 competition as elaborated in his teaching method undergirded this interest in
200 testing—each iteration a test of the qualities of the material and of the ability of
201 the artist to discern growth and change. He explained, ‘‘In my own work I am
202 content to compete with myself …so I dare further variants.’’76
203 In his many studies for the Variants paintings, Albers devised tools and
204 techniques to facilitate his tests of possible color arrangements and orientations in the series. Detailed preparation studies functioned as ‘‘experimental
205 tryouts’’ for paintings that were themselves intelligible only within a schema of
206 experiments in formal possibilities, rather than discrete and final entities.77 In
207 a sequence of templates (for example in figure 1.12 and plate 2), Albers paint-
208 ed concentric borders in alternating colors on
210 several different cardboard mats. He then over-
211 laid these ‘‘frames’’ around different central
212 arrangements, testing the possibilities of color
213 and scale organization of the work by changing
214 the different panels. Varying the interrelated
215 borders by alternating the order of the panels,
216 Albers used the visual ‘‘data’’ to assess more
217 appropriate contrasts and to create the most
218 dynamic compositions. In other studies for the
219Variants, he often tried out several color combi-
220 nations, painstakingly labeling the constitutive
221 elements by application technique and manu-
222 facturer. As the orientation of the embedded
223 elements was altered, he would calculate the
224 relations of the various surface areas, weighing
225 the components by their color and volumetric
226 intensity. Each of the penciled recipes noted the
227 precise constitution of the study and permitted
228 Albers to adjust specific factors until a desir-
229 able result was obtained; his paintings include
230 these protoconceptualist instructions on their
231 reverse sides as well (plate 4, fig. 1.13). Because
232 of the serial quality of the Variants, however,
233 Albers believed that ‘‘new and different cases
234 [would] be discovered time and time again.’’78
235 The criteria that substantiated the suc-
236 cessful completion of a particular work were
237 intelligible only within a context of continual
238 variation. Using the principle of dynamism—
239 palpable when a composition refused simple
240 harmony and remained asymmetrical, imbal-
241 anced, and syncopated—Albers attempted to
242 maximize the contrast between elements in
243 a given composition. With the potential for
244 countless renditions, each work completes an Fig. 1.12
245 intricate process of testing, and also demands Josef Albers, templates for a Variant study, n.d. 12 Œ 19. Photographs by Eva Díaz ľ The Josef and Anni Albers
246 evaluation and comparison between completed Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York.
247 works. There are no ‘‘masterpieces’’ in Albers’s
249 Figure 1.13
250 Josef Albers, Variant:
251 Southern Climate,
252 1948--53. Oil on
253 Masonite, 12ij Œ
254 22¡, reverse side.
255 Photograph by Tim
256 Nighswander ľ
257 The Josef and Anni
258 Albers Foundation
259 / Artists Rights
260 Society, New York.
261 career; each work emerges from the success of its forerunner and initiates the
262 explorations of its successor.
263 He maintained other ‘‘control’’ factors that made possible a judicious anal-
264 ysis of the element under inspection, be it orientation, surface area, color, or
265 dimensional ambiguity. When painting the Variants, Albers used the same basic
266 ‘‘checkerboard-like structure …which provides a definite relationship of all the
267 parts’’ to one another.79 This allowed modulations in color and orientation to
268 remain measurable when compared with one another. Unmixed colors were
269 spread with a palette knife straight from the tube onto Masonite panels (rose
270 and pink were exceptions, as they are unavailable without mixing), and were
271 applied in one coat without underpainting; striking textural differences often
272 resulted from the distinct consistencies of different paint brands (see the purple
273 section of Variant [plate 3], for example). The always unshaded surfaces of the
274 various sections create flat expanses of color that are tightly abutted by their
275 neighboring hues. Yet for all the precision of the sketches, marked as they are
276 on graph paper in scrupulous ruled lines, in the painted Variant Albers relished
277 a rapid application of color with the knife. The resulting edges, seemingly flaw-
278 less from afar, are in fact loose and sometimes inexact, with visible facture and
279 the pilled texture of the Masonite evident in certain sections, as in the detail of
280Variant: Southern Climate (1948--53) (plate 4). The performance was so stringently rehearsed in preparatory studies that the paintings themselves profited from Albers’s facility with the knife; he painted the hard edges with penciled-in
281 guidelines but with no masked-off tracing edges.
282 In his yellow, green, white, and gray Variant from the late 1940s, the ap-
283 pearance of depth is illusionistically suggested in certain areas but refused in
284 others80 (plate 6). Here, Albers was interested in the perception of proximate or
285 adjacent areas of darker or lighter color as either transparent overlays or areas
286 of opacity. Through a meticulous and methodical process of color and compo-
287 sitional studies, as in Study for a Variant (III), C (1947), Albers applied bands of
288 color to contiguous sections of the concentric rectangles, confusing the optical
289 impression that the various forms are either embedded in or superimposed on
290 one another (plate 7). Areas of translucency and overlap and, hence, impressions of spatial recession—for example, the appearance of the gray horizontal band in Variant—are contradicted by colored zones that project over and
291 around the ostensibly covered-over section, such as the bright elevation of the
292 area of white (plate 6).
293 Each of Albers’s techniques of illusion implicates viewers, inviting them to
294 become students of the processes of visual perception at play in his work, just
295 as he was in the work’s creation. What Svetlana Alpers has termed ‘‘pictori-
296 al equivocation’’ is very much in operation for Albers: ‘‘The possibility of the
297 painter representing the perception of a thing, and representing it for viewers,
298 in such a way as to encourage the mind to dwell on perceiving it as a process:
299 the painter’s experience of an object as coming into its own, distinguishing itself
300 from others, taking shape.’’81 The sense of perception as a process—the ‘‘how’’
301 and not the ‘‘what’’—is derived from Albers’s conception of ‘‘gestalt,’’ or form,
302 as an active procedure: ‘‘If I had to determine the task of a designer, an artist, or
303 of any kind of creative worker I would use the German verb ‘gestalten.’ ’’82 (As
304 Albers was aware, gestalten constitutes a vast subject in German thought; in his
305 writings he connected it to Gestalt psychology’s evaluation of a form element
306 in relation to a whole.) Gestalten can be defined a variety of ways: to arrange,
307 to create, to design, to frame, to fashion, to organize, or to form; form in Al-
308 bers’s rhetoric was therefore positioned as a practice and procedure, not as the
309 artifact of a process, as demonstrated in Variant: Southern Climate.83 Here, two
310 sand-colored central windows appear to project over the surrounding bright
311 and muted orange frames, yet are simultaneously pulled back toward the top
312 sand-toned horizontal plane that deceptively appears to be the overall ground.
313 The oscillation between foreground and background emphasizes the inherent
314 temporality of the process of perception, and brings home the fundamental am-
315 biguity of seeking any final, stable resolution to the pictorial problems Albers
316 explores. The viewer vacillates between two roles that Albers himself occupies
317 as creator: acting as subject of the experiment in vision, and as organizer of
318 the mutable effects transpiring in the visual field as the image’s components
319 are scanned. Experiencing the basic acts of perception, his audience is invited
320 to work through sections of the picture plane, to weigh imbalances and test
321 dynamic relations. Donald Judd, commenting on an Albers work he owned
322 (plate 8), observed of this process, ‘‘The painting is one single whole and is as
323 complex as a metope. The scheme of squares and the corresponding change of
324 color provides changes in proportion …as in a Mobius strip.’’84 The appearance
325 of squares as either embedded or superimposed in the Variants is contradicted
326 by the visible adjacency of the paint application seen in the thin strips where
327 they meet and the narrow windows revealing stripes of background. In the
328 seemingly elementary demonstration of concentric squares and rectangles, the
329 complicated language of vision is built up so that illusions of representation are
330 confronted by the materiality and inherent flatness of paint.
331 Concentrating on the elements of perception, Albers participated in a
332 shared German-Austrian modernist project of the 1920s and early 1930s in
333 which, according to Peter Galison, ‘‘all knowledge …would be built up from
334 logical strings of basic experiential propositions.’’85 Not coincidentally, there
335 existed a close association of Bauhaus ideology with Vienna Circle logical pos-
336 itivist philosophy, which grew out of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and was
337 expounded in the lectures of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap at the Dessau
338 Bauhaus in the late 1920s. According to Carnap, the organization of knowledge
339 from a repertoire of fundamental perceptual experiences unified all modernist
340 endeavors, whether visual or linguistic. In explaining his ‘‘constructional pro-
341 gram,’’ he noted, ‘‘It attempts a step-by-step derivation or ‘construction’ of all
342 concepts from certain fundamental concepts …all concepts can in this way be
343 derived from a few fundamental concepts.’’86 Concerned with how basic units of
344 perception organize knowledge, Neurath postulated that one could backtrack,
345 too, from gestalt to basic compositional units. That is, if forms in combina-
346 tion could be seen as gestalt wholes, what was to stop their constituent parts
347 from being reduced to gestalts themselves in an endless recursion toward an
348 immanent and universal ur-structure of communication? However, Neurath’s
349 quest for common codes of perception—namely his attempt to invent a visu-
350 ally transparent international pictographic language (fig. 1.14)—departed from
351 Albers’s interest in applying the knowledge of fundamental forms toward fur-
352 ther complexity, contingency, variation, and visual ambiguity. Albers’s own at-
353 tempt at representing language was a font (a version of which is used through-
354 out this book) composed of variations on modular forms, in which a series
355 of ten basic components could be recombined to form sans-serif lowercase
356 letters and numbers87 (plate 9). (Though one could argue that both attempts
357 suffer from a surfeit of visual information; each of Albers’s letters needs to be
359 Figure 1.14
360 Otto Neurath, Economic Scheme; Isotype (International System of Typographic
361 Picture Education) designed by Gerd Arntz. From Modern Man in the Making,
362 1939. ľ 2012 Artists Rights Society, New York/Beeldrecht, Amsterdam.
363 painstakingly assembled from many constituent parts, and Neurath’s ostensi-
364 bly universally recognizable isotype icons are both culturally particular and
365 excessively descriptive—note how many symbols are necessary to convey that
366 a coal worker uses mechanized mining in Neurath’s schema, or how many com-
367 ponents are necessary to make a single x in Albers’s typeset.)
368 Indeed, Albers’s audience is invited to extend this concern with destabi-
369 lizing vision to other aspects of how the world is perceived, represented, and
370 understood. Albers’s mode of geometric abstraction is far from the detachment
371 of art from social conditions advocated by contemporary American formalist
372 critics such as Clement Greenberg.88 Rather, Albers’s goal was to impel us to
373 discover ‘‘which of certain art problems are related to our own life.’’89 (One
374 could make similar claims for the work of Kasimir Malevich, Mondrian, and
375 others who viewed geometric abstraction as an exploration of perception in
376 which art was part of a larger project telescoping outward to environmental
377 design and possibly to social transformation.) The task was to test the relevance
378 of certain rules that result from inherited experience and to devise parallels
379 between problems common to life and art, recognizing that in ‘‘the problems
380 of balance or proportion—that they are tasks of our daily life too.’’90 Or, to put it
381 another way, the objective was to demonstrate ‘‘that a fundamental art problem
382 is a fundamental problem of life and therefore also of education.’’91
383 Nonetheless, the reflexive relation between better art production and a bet-
384 ter performance in life could never reach a point of conclusion. As in his cours-
385 es, the goal of repeatable exercises was to enforce that ‘‘every evaluation is rela-
386 tive and changing,’’ that even in the same exercise different solutions emerge.92
387 Rather than impulsive self-expression, conscientious experimentation set forth
388 criteria that could be used to compare different artists and individual works
389 and encouraged ‘‘discovery of the varied perceptions of others.’’93 Realizing the
390 contingency of all evaluation therefore underscored the profoundly social rela-
391 tion of art. In developing a common set of explorations, art was intelligible only
392 within a community of understanding—‘‘recognizing oneself and developing
393 oneself in relationship to others.’’94
394 Self-expression was to be avoided for another reason that carried tremen-
395 dously high stakes. For Albers, the stress on personal expression had come to
396 justify all forms of trivial explorations, novel effects, and differences for the
397 sake of difference. As he argued, ‘‘To produce something better [would] be
398 more convincing than to do something merely different.’’95 He found the im-
399 portance of art in personal and social growth immense, but growth was always
400 qualitatively assessed, not measured by specious indicators of artistic original-
401 ity. Albers thought of originality as nothing more than ‘‘forced individualism.’’
402 An artist’s ‘‘expression, style and/or contemporaneousness is an unavoidable
403 by-product of personality’’ understood by the virtues of ‘‘honesty and modes-
404 ty,’’ not as the ‘‘result of stylization’’ that most often corroborates originality.96
405 The ambition was to design something better—not necessarily more useful,
406 individuated, or newer, but better in the sense of altering habits of perception
407 and therefore improving the sensitivity of individuals to the construction and
408 organization of the world. Only after detailed study and observation, and with
409 a clear knowledge of how to articulate the appearance and behavior of forms,
410 could one articulate form creatively.97
411 In erecting a foundation in visual analysis and active construction, Albers
412 provided tools for self-improvement through creative production. This, how-
413 ever, was in no way a normative standard for art making more generally. As he
414 claimed, ‘‘There is no objective interpretation of what is art. I do not believe
415 that there are any definite rules or systems by which to evaluate art, or, to dis-
416 tinguish between art and non-art.’’98 In fact, fulfilling the goal of ‘‘more initiative
417 and more imagination …means encouragement of experiments,’’ regardless
418 of the likelihood of failure. Summoning courage to try was the main thing: ‘‘To
419 me it is uneducational to be afraid of minor results. Everyone has to start as a beginner. And mistakes are not the worst media for progress if we develop at
420 the same time articulation and judgment.’’99
421 But mistakes must be recognized as such and not be exploited as an excuse
422 for carelessness or acceptance of accident. As Albers firmly held, ‘‘Every art
423 work is built (i.e. composed), [it] has order, consciously or unconsciously.’’100
424 Intellect must be applied, order demonstrated. Though a trained intuition
425 was essential, art was not the realm of unmitigated passions, the negative ex-
426 ample being ‘‘those painters in New York who can paint only when they get
427 mad and drunk.’’101 Albers demanded order not in the sense of symmetry or
428 harmony but rather as a dynamic consideration of a work’s components and
429 their organization with respect to the whole, to the gestalt form.102 ‘‘You tell
430 the brush and pencil where to go. Not you follow the brush.’’103 Spontaneity
431 and improvisation were to be discouraged as ends in and of themselves: ‘‘In
432 my paintings I adhere to what in other arts is considered a matter of course.
433 Namely, that performance is prepared by rehearsal, that exercises precede re-
434 cital, or plans, execution.’’104
435 As Albers lamented, ‘‘Without comparison and choice there is no value.
436 And why are we afraid that thinking and planning—necessary in all human ac-
437 tivities—will spoil the painting of a picture?’’105 To take such a question seriously
438 requires probing which methods of art production are sanctioned, and assess-
439 ing how these methods relate to conceptions of social order. Albers’s ethics of
440 perception maintains that the arrangement of a picture is a mirror to the way
441 one organizes life: ‘‘There is order …and in this sense this is [the order] of life.
442 In art we have to present an example in which we might live together, and not
443 shoot each other …that’s our collective little baby. …For me studying art is
444 to be on an ethical basis.’’106 Better design alters habits of perception and can
445 improve society—a nervy claim, perhaps, and yet a thoughtful argument for
446 artistic responsibility.
447 This ‘‘ethical basis’’ was possible only through commitment demonstrated
448 by competence. In progressing beyond mere observation to begin rearticu-
449 lating the forms of the world in a creative way, one could then incorporate
450 elements that came intuitively and somewhat spontaneously. This was only
451 achievable, though, when the mastery of techniques of formal articulation
452 became so ingrained—the mind controlling the hand and not the other way
453 around—that the artist could trust in his or her own innovation. In his 1969
454 book Search Versus Re-Search, Albers quoted scientist Louis Pasteur on the
455 topic: ‘‘In research, chance only helps those whose minds are well prepared
456 for it,’’ inserting his own comment: ‘‘Is that different from art?’’107 The radi-
457 cal repositioning of art practice as subject to unconscious desires advocated
458 by surrealism, for example, was anathema to Albers; it mistook what he ar-
459 gued as the incommunicability of the unconscious as an object of interest.
460 Pinpointing what he considered the fallacy of surrealist-derived automatic
461 drawing, in which an ostensibly unmediated relationship of the hand to the
462 unconscious could be tapped, he explained, ‘‘Automatism is a good point of
463 departure but rarely an end of lasting interest. Let us be clear that there is no
464 hand nor tool nor medium quick enough to follow adequately the speed of
465 the ‘stream of the unconscious.’ ’’ Continuing in this vein, he contended, ‘‘The
466 saying that the freshness of the first sketch cannot be repeated is admitting
467 impotence.’’108 To Albers, surrealists’ attempt to mediate art and the uncon-
468 scious muddled the prospect of art, which was not to mimic the structuring
469 principles, however disordered, of involuntary functions of the mind. Rather
470 than search for the repressed material of the unconscious, Albers sought to
471 convey the principles underlying the apperception of everyday life. Under-
472 standing and changing routines of visual perception was the goal of art. He
473 maintained, ‘‘There is no extraordinary without the ordinary, and the root
474 of both is order.’’109 Given Albers’s interest in expressing the contingency of
475 forms through repeated trials, this insistence on order may seem paradoxical,
476 but to him art, at its root, possessed a crucial strategy—design.
477 In 1949 Albers claimed, ‘‘Progress does not depend on accidents only. With-
478 out order and control we will drown or suffocate in chaos and decay.’’110 Design
479 was the force that held chaos at bay: ‘‘To design is to plan and organize, to or-
480 der, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means opposing disorder
481 and accident.’’111 The role of art was to articulate forms out of the flux of ‘‘mess,
482 chance, and confusion’’ that was too often symptomatic of poor execution and
483 lax thinking.112 The practice of being economical with materials demonstrated
484 the deliberation that went into production: ‘‘Nothing unused is permitted in
485 any form, otherwise the calculations will not work out. Because chance has
486 played a role. Chance has not been accounted for, and therefore it is thoughtless,
487 because it derives from habit.’’113 The imperative to design, in Albers’s schema,
488 epitomized the valued sign of cultural progress and change, not the chaotic
489 acceptance of circumstance.
490 Albers’s stance on restraint and aesthetic intention found company with
491 Theodor Adorno, who likewise understood the dialectical relation of control to
492 expression as a defining element of experimentation: ‘‘The need to take risks is
493 actualized in the idea of the experimental, which—in opposition to the image of
494 the artist’s unconscious organic labor—simultaneously transfers from science to
495 art the conscious control over materials.’’114 Order, control, and design, or what
496 Adorno together termed ‘‘construction,’’ pose the greatest and most sustained
497 challenge to the culture industry’s processes of recuperating artistic practices
498 as novelty or entertainment. Art, activated with more objective processes of
499 control and design, is thus able to conceive outcomes that could never be possible in tactics of fun and play, which, though they seem to result in the unex-
500 pected, are after all predictable features of entertainment culture. ‘‘The concept
501 of construction …always implied the primacy of constructive methods over
502 subjective imagination. Construction necessitates solutions that the imaging
503 ear or eye does not immediately encompass or know in full detail.’’115
504 Improvisation for its own sake, for Adorno as well as for Albers, was gener-
505 ally rebellious posturing or, worse, merely the appearance of spontaneity. As
506 Adorno noted, most musical improvisation, for instance, is actually rehearsed
507 or habit-driven: ‘‘Improvisations conform largely to norms and recur constant-
508 ly.’’116 When control is forfeited, process (or means) is separated from socially
509 effective or intelligible ends. Experimentation, when it partakes in practices of
510 construction and design, results in ‘‘efforts filtered through critical conscious-
511 ness in opposition to the continuation of unreflected aesthetic practices.’’117
512 When artistic experimentation refuses control and reflection, when it stresses
513 chancy ‘‘contents that are not foreseeable in the process of production’’ and
514 that are arrived at by subjective criteria, what results is not greater contingency
515 (the unforeseen as an effect) but more likely a ‘‘subject [that] ratifies its self-ab-
516 dication.’’118
517 The clear evidence of the artist’s control in a process of creation consti-
518 tuted, to Albers and Adorno, a profound ethics of truth and integrity. For Al-
519 bers, ‘‘truth’’ was a reflexive test of the individual’s intention for the resulting
520 articulation of that intent. ‘‘Integrity’’ arose from a vision developed through
521 observation:
522 I have very carefully watched not to be a bandwagon guy. That’s my greatest
523 warning to all my students, ‘‘Please keep away from the bandwagon, from what
524 is fashion and seems now successful or profitable. Stick to your own bones,
525 speak with your own voice, and sit on your own behind.’’ That’s—and how can
526 we say that in ethical terms? Or in moral terms? [To] be honest, and modest,
527 are the greatest virtues of an artist.119
528 pEDagogy anD thE polItIcs oF ExpErImEntatIon
529 Albers was renowned for his teaching strategies and, of course, for his long and
530 prolific artistic production. Yet his contribution to highlighting how traditional
531 pedagogy serves to maintain the status quo, though frequently sidelined, was
532 equally important.120 The ‘‘honesty and modesty’’ of his ethics derived from a
533 project of community education that has been rarely matched since. In a speech
534 from the early 1940s he declared, ‘‘Education is the most decisive factor in peo-
535 ple’s lives.’’121 He saw education as an often underestimated but determining
536 factor in social reproduction. In his view, the effects of traditional education
537 tended to limit creative potential with rote exercises that in turn produced rote
538 individuals.
539 Albers was aware of the limitations of tradition as generally defined in edu-
540 cational processes. Entering the Bauhaus in 1920 as an undergraduate in his ear-
541 ly thirties, he had previously taught primary school and later art, coming into
542 contact with the flourishing education reform movement in Germany.122 He
543 followed John Dewey (whose Democracy and Education appeared in German
544 translation soon after its publication in 1916, and in an interesting transatlantic
545 cross-pollination, its call for ‘‘learning by doing’’ rallied progressive educators
546 throughout Europe) in describing traditional education as an operation of both
547 selective cultural transmission and social control. For Dewey, in transmitting
548 the ‘‘legacy’’ of the past, blind adherence to tradition obscured the reality that
549 ‘‘a great deal [of that] which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated
550 opinions of the past, much of it absurd and its correct portions not understood
551 when accepted on authority.’’123 In a scathing critique of traditional hierarchies
552 in education, Albers, drawing on Dewey, complained that the professor ‘‘passes
553 on so-called ‘established’ facts: knowledge, methods, rules, to enable historical
554 thinking. …The old school seeks, in addition to its main goal of popular edu-
555 cation, to pass on abilities but only a few essential ones.’’124
556 During his early years at the Bauhaus, Albers attempted to repeal traditional
557 models of art education by devaluing the role of tradition itself. At times, this
558 represented a wholesale abandonment of the concept of history as a reference
559 point for artistic production. With typically modernist zeal, he commented that
560 ‘‘today’s youth notes the wrong direction: that …historical knowledge hinders
561 production. …A lot of history leaves little room for work. The reverse—little
562 history and much work—is our task.’’125 Prior hierarchies of knowledge could
563 be sidestepped by substituting testing operations for the historical or scholarly
564 study of art: ‘‘Experimenting takes priority over studying.’’126
565 In these Bauhaus-era writings, Albers tended to conflate tradition with ret-
566 rograde, authoritarian models of education. After moving to the United States,
567 his vituperative language softened and was supplanted by a voice more attuned
568 to the merits of alternative traditions. He came to view tradition and history as
569 residual formations that, though demanding vigilant testing, must be frequently
570 resuscitated and never dispensed with entirely. The urgency of thinking histor-
571 ically in the present prevents the debasement of real struggles and gains in the
572 past. Like Albers, Walter Benjamin argued that a faithful articulation of history
573 must always contest the adulterations of contemporary novelty-based capitalist
574 culture. He believed it was necessary to
575 retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out
576 by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the
577 tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming
578 a tool of the ruling class. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest
579 tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.127
580 For Benjamin, revitalizing perceptions of traditions under threat of ever-en-
581 croaching revisionism could awaken alternatives obscured by the dominant
582 culture. Rather than annulling previous models, Albers, like Benjamin, lobbied
583 instead for their augmentation with experimental techniques. Since, for Albers,
584 tradition and experiment were dialectically related, ‘‘there is no art which is
585 only traditional or only experimental.’’128 The skewed preference in education
586 toward tradition had made it an end, yet tradition and experiment ‘‘are only a
587 means, namely towards art, or if you prefer, towards culture.’’129 With all the
588 attention given to the artifacts of the past, the process of creation had become
589 neglected.
590 To Albers, change was a privileged term, but only because most art ped-
591 agogy either neglected it entirely or blindly encouraged it wholeheartedly.
592 Teaching approaches that instead concentrated on design and experimentation
593 enhanced the understanding of the now, of modernity; too often, art practice
594 was initiated from a position of art historical survey. Albers saw this reliance
595 on history as promoting an attitude of retrospection that treated precursors as
596 hallowed and predetermining, stunting innovation and divorcing art from both
597 present conditions and future possibilities.130 The work of art was not histori-
598 cal study; rather, ‘‘its traditional task [was] to find again and again new visual
599 expression of our mentality which changes from generation to generation.’’131
600 Dewey believed that processes of experimentation such as those proposed
601 by Albers, and performed at Black Mountain more generally, provided tech-
602 niques toward progressive pedagogy, and he publicly lauded their ambitions
603 and successes.132 For Dewey, education enhanced an individual’s ability to
604 appreciate self-crafted experiences rather than legacies rationalized as truth.
605 Education thus becomes ‘‘an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts on
606 the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the results of concrete
607 experiences, or else were mere expressions of prejudice and institutionalized
608 class interest.’’133 This reproduction of circumscribed possibilities has been
609 termed the ‘‘selective tradition’’ by Raymond Williams: ‘‘the way in which from
610 a whole possible arena of past and present, certain meanings and practices are
611 chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and
612 excluded.’’134 The process of refining the objects of historical interest and cul-
613 tural transmission to a rehearsed and often static canon or tradition regulates
614 and diminishes the capacity for social and cultural change.
615 For sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, however, Dewey’s stress on individual ex-
616 periences and their curtailment by ‘‘mere’’ prejudice or institutional interest
617 gave too much importance to the role of the individual subject. To Bourdieu,
618 education functions as a central node in the transmission of dominant cultural
619 values in the name of individual experience or success; educational institutions
620 are possibly the most rearguard elements in the self-legitimating processes of
621 social reproduction. He believed that the central ‘‘contribution made by the
622 educational system to the reproduction of the structure of power relationships
623 and symbolic relations between classes, [is] by contributing to the reproduc-
624 tion of the structure of the distribution of cultural capital among these class-
625 es.’’135 Specifically, this system operates by enforcing hierarchies of preexisting
626 knowledge based on cultural ‘‘inheritance’’—the almost unconscious fluency
627 of those reared in dominant class backgrounds with the dominant class culture
628 that is privileged in traditional education. ‘‘By doing away with giving explicitly
629 to everyone, the educational system demands of everyone alike that they have
630 what it does not give.’’136 Educational structures implement dominant cultur-
631 al mores in subtle (and not-so-subtle) hierarchical methods such as testing,
632 tracking, and early specialization (generally legitimated in ideologies such as
633 equality of opportunity—as opposed to equality of outcomes—and the justifica-
634 tion of meritocratic selection).137 This makes education a political battleground,
635 disenfranchising alternative viewpoints that challenge the class power of the
636 privileged.
637 In order to avoid types of social reproduction that favor traditional values
638 (and here Bourdieu helps us see ‘‘traditional’’ as often no more than ‘‘domi-
639 nant-cultural’’), alternative pedagogical practices mount a two-pronged attack:
640 downplaying preexisting knowledge bases (high culture masquerading as tradi-
641 tion) and dedifferentiating specialized sectors (between disciplines or between
642 expert and layperson, for example).138 The task of experimentation in pedagogy
643 is doubly difficult: managing to revoke certain historical processes that have
644 contributed to the reproduction of existing structures of society while transmitting conceptions of history that can be marshaled toward a more forceful
645 remediation of present problems. Dewey, too, recognized this seeming paradox
646 of education: ‘‘We have the problem of ascertaining how acquaintance with the
647 past may be translated into a potent instrumentality for dealing effectively with
648 the future. We may reject knowledge of the past as the end of education and
649 thereby only emphasize its importance as a means.’’139
650 dents. The ethical dimension—the language of realization, responsibility, and
651 The means Albers envisioned were of individuals’ creative possibilities un-
652 leashed by their trained perception of the complex and ever-changing world.
653 Disciplined work freed subjects from unrecognized habits of behavior that
654 inhibited their autonomy and will. In a speech Albers gave in 1940 peppered
655 with references to the ongoing war against Fascism in Europe, he asserted,
656 ‘‘Freedom, if understood as being free from something, has no positive sense
657 at all. Only being free for something has [an] active and productive meaning.’’140
658 Though predating Isaiah Berlin’s influential 1958 essay ‘‘Two Concepts of Liber-
659 ty,’’ Albers’s weighing of ‘‘freedom for’’ above ‘‘freedom from’’ directly opposes
660 Berlin’s conservative critique of ‘‘positive freedom’’ (‘‘freedom for’’) as the cor-
661 rupting tendency of self-determining and collectively controlled social process-
662 es to lapse into authoritarian structures. Albers saw ‘‘freedom for’’ exploration
663 and experimentation as antithetical to the ‘‘negative freedom’’ (freedom from)
664 of ‘‘someone who is the passive recipient of specific rights,’’ a distinction polit-
665 ical theorist Chantal Mouffe has articulated.141 The role of the test in developing
666 self-mastery and expressing positive freedoms demonstrated how knowledge
667 of form could release individuals from habit. What Albers supplied, therefore,
668 was a ‘‘training in [the] ability to choose.’’142 To return to his 1944 print Fenced
669 (fig. 1.6), readings of the possible dimensional orientations of the work can
670 be substantiated only by close consideration. Each path of inspection leads
671 to manifold possibilities—forms project, recede, overlap, torque, and flatten.
672 The image allows for various choices about how it is received and shrugs off a
673 definitive reading. Albers offered a forum in which to both teach and perform
674 observation of forms that brought emancipation from simplistic visual assump-
675 tions. To be able to see as many complicated structures in the world, and to see
676 them particularly in conditions of deceptive simplicity, was a form of liberated
677 vision. This ‘‘freedom [was] competence’’—a seemingly paradoxical condition
678 in which lack of restriction was earned in the restraint of discipline.143
679 Empowering individuals with attentive perception laid the foundation for
680 an educated citizenry challenging regressive, outdated customs and sowing
681 greater freedom in the world, or so Dewey and Albers hoped. While affording
682 a means toward keen observation, any specific program with which to marshal
683 such knowledge or achieve concrete change remained ambiguous. It might in-
684 volve a more equitable distribution of resources, greater social or economic
685 equality, or collective self-determination; Albers’s calls for freedom and reform
686 did not detail the particular social ends of alert perceptual strategies, other than
687 broadly stated ‘‘betterment’’ or ‘‘improvement.’’ For him, providing tools for
688 the conscientious rearticulation of form sufficed; the outcomes of such explo-
689 rations were not elaborated. This was perhaps a liberating proposition for stu-
690 improvement—was stressed above an active political program or explicit goals.
691 Given the tenuous position the Alberses found themselves in as exiles—without citizenship they were constantly vulnerable to residency restrictions and possible deportation—Josef’s caution with respect to the political effects of his methods is somewhat understandable. Whether an educational program can coexist with a political program was always a contentious issue in insular environments such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain. The politicization of the Bauhaus program by Marxist Hannes Meyer (successor to Gropius as director of the Bauhaus in 1928) was tendentious and short-lived, as conflicts between radicalized students and local government sponsors quickly developed.
692 Likewise, Black Mountain was always fraught with the question of whether it was a community, with attendant political responsibilities, or an educational institution (which is not to say that the latter does not have a politics, that is, concerns about representation, fairness, and justice).
693 Albers consciously defined his role as that of an educator within institutions and avoided explicitly politicized or revolutionary rhetoric. Instead, he trained students in the basic understanding of how the world looks and the high stakes in re-presenting it innovatively. He railed against previous models of education, but in his own project he used a language of careful change, reform, and improvement. As a teacher he belonged to institutions, with their attendant concerns of sustaining state or private funding; he was not anti-institutional, though he lambasted the inattentive habits reproduced in institutions and in culture. Albers provided tools for educating artists and did not dictate the topics or approaches they might take when their formal education ended. Whether his avoidance of direct sociopolitical application of his method merely demonstrated an émigré’s conformism would be difficult to say. Indeed, the central argument of his method did not concern outcomes so much as sharpening perceptions that different practices could wield to various ends. In his art and pedagogy, the study of abstract elements of form was paramount, though Albers remained open to many different kinds of practice. Much to his credit, he was personally responsible for inviting diverse (and divergent) practitioners to join him as faculty at Black Mountain, including neoplasticist Ilya Bolotowsky, realists Jean Charlot and Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence, and expressionists Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, as well as various other fields’ future luminaries, such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles Olson, nurturing a community of practices that privileged no single teaching or artistic methodology.
694 ‘‘Art is visual documentation of human mentality through (visual) form,’’ Albers claimed.144 He looked not for ‘‘solutions,’’ political or otherwise, but instead posed questions about the nature and understanding of form. His technique of testing subtle distinctions in vision used basic forms as containers for variation, though this work of comparison was sometimes deemed too subtle and restrained. Greenberg in particular singled out Albers as a ‘‘sensuous, even original colorist,’’ while bestowing the faint commendation that his ‘‘strictly rectilinear art …adheres to the dogma of the straight line.’’145 This was not the first time Albers’s artistic method had been characterized as rigid and repetitive—or, for that matter, his teaching dismissed as doctrinaire. The testimony of his students often strikingly refuted such claims, however, for they recognized that as a pedagogue he trained them not to produce work that looked like his own but, with the help of his methodology of experiment, to represent the world liberated of sterile habit. Years after his studies at Black Mountain, Robert Rauschenberg praised Albers’s method:
695696I’m still learning what he taught me, because what he taught had to do with the entire visual world.
697 He didn’t teach you how to ‘‘do art.’’ The focus was always on your personal sense of looking. When he taught water color, for example, he taught the specific properties of water color—not how to make a good water-color picture. When he taught drawing, he taught the efficient functioning of line. Color was about the flexibilities and the complex relationships that colors have with one another. I consider Albers the most important teacher I’ve ever had, and I’m sure he considered me one of his poorest students.146 When asked about Rauschenberg’s comments in an interview, Albers responded:
698 We were not on great admiring terms. With each other. Rauschenberg. He was
699 a little stubborn and doing his own [thing]—but what he is doing now is much
700 more a part of my classes he participated in than he will ever recognize. We
701 have done quite a bit with, at Black Mountain—we have had the tendency—
702 dada was in the air, to do dada, you see? Surface correspondences, you know?
703 Dada—not as Itten did it, as just emphasizing that as different from that, you
704 see? No, we played a lot with combination of materials, ‘‘combination’’ was a
705 great word in our [vocabulary]—and changing surface qualities, …changing
706 of articulation, that was a very exciting study at Black Mountain. And I think
707 that is what lives on in his work now.147
708 That an artist changes the articulation of forms in the world and influences their
709 perception: that was high praise coming from Albers.
710 For him, a determined process of experimentation produced results whereby contingency—the carefully tested permutations of a form’s appearance that can continually be subjected to new variations—could be most clearly maintained. The understanding of contingency as ‘‘trial and error experimentation’’ with the endless possibilities of methodically tested differences was both a pedagogical practice and a methodology guiding his own work.148 This type of experimentation—Albers’s ethics of perception—served as an important impetus to perceptual and possibly cognitive change; indeed, he believed it ‘‘[could] lead to illusions, to new relationships, to different measurements, to other systems.’’ His is perhaps the most concise description of the importance of explorations of form in transforming understandings of the world.
711 Albers insisted that ‘‘art is not an object but an experience’’—an experience in and of perception that facilitates complex understandings of the visual world.149 With his rational exploration of subtle mutations and variations of form, he attempted to construct new modes of visual perception. With his process of experiment, he endeavored to influence patterns of transmission—transmissions of tradition and of social pattern—by introducing the model of the test. It is interesting to note that Black Mountain also fostered the ‘‘next generation’’ of Americans concerned with experiment, notably Cage and Rauschenberg, who sought to sever it from its empirical, deterministic connotations.150
712 As Cage argued in a 1955 essay, ‘‘The word ‘experimental’ is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.’’151 Here we come full circle, with Cage embracing the indeterminacy that Albers wanted to excise. Whether Cage’s invocation of experiment was similarly concerned with history and tradition is an interesting question, one that likely treads closer to experiment as the ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘innovative’’ than experiment as elaborated in careful variation.