Epilogue
Legacies of Black Mountain College
1The category of the experimental in art is a porous one. Experimentation can encompass practices that are incongruous, even fundamentally irreconcilable, and its very porosity has often elided competing visions about spontaneity and rationality, improvisation and discipline, order and chaos, or the relationship of art and life that charged mid-century discussions about it.
2 At Black Mountain College in the immediate post--World War II period, experimentation was adopted by some faculty and students who rejected the drift toward expressionism.1 One could even call experimentation, in its diversity, the Black Mountain College idea, marking an important, yet relatively overlooked episode in the history of mid-century American art practices, pedagogy, and modernism more generally. What emerged from this episode was not a single alternative to expressionism. The models of experiment Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller proposed—in Albers’s case, the methodical testing of the various appearances and constructions of forms in the interest of designing new aesthetic experiences; in Cage’s example, an exploration of how aleatory processes can be organized in order to anarchically generate indeterminate outcomes; and in Fuller’s paradigm, a type of ‘‘comprehensive, anticipatory design science’’ that tests traditional artistic and architectural forms in order to teleologically progress toward a utopia of efficiently managed resources—represent a set of disparate directions for postwar art, music, and architecture.
3 Though it would be beyond the purview of this project to trace the consid-
4 erable repercussions of Albers’s, Cage’s, and Fuller’s models of experimentation
5 into the present, it is worthwhile to sketch some directions for future research.
6 Despite their different definitions of experimentation, the intensity of these
7 men’s Black Mountain dialogues and the intersection of their various efforts
8 at an arts education institution consequently mapped Black Mountain--era de-
9 bates onto later artistic practices. This emphasis on pedagogy lent a designer
10 like Fuller and a composer like Cage tremendous influence in art practices and
11 discourses of the 1950s and 1960s: Neo-Dada, Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater,
12 the Independent Group, Experiments in Art and Technology, and Land Art,
13 as well as art ventures associated with the Whole Earth Catalog and the jour-
14 nal Radical Software such as Ant Farm and Drop City, can be traced to their
15 inspiration or direct participation. Yet practices of experimentation at Black
16 Mountain in the late 1940s and early 1950s should themselves always be situated
17 within the larger historical context of artistic experiment or laboratory-based
18 production—of the Bauhaus in Albers’s case, or Francophone Dada in Cage’s,
19 or interdisciplinary applications of scientistic methods in Fuller’s.
20 Albers’s influence at Black Mountain College and Yale University on
21 students such as Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva
22 Hesse, and Richard Serra has been broached in recent scholarship, but would
23 profit from further analysis.2 In particular, how and why does Albers’s rhet-
24 oric of experiment and contingency, in the vocabulary of Hesse’s and Serra’s
25 work, increasingly become a phenomenological argument about the condi-
26 tions under which art objects are tested and made contingent by forces such
27 as gravity, and put in a relational field with other objects and bodies? Also,
28 Albers’s emphasis on process led some of his students to perceive art objects
29 as artifacts of rehearsed performances, but in ways that pushed the logic of
30 variation toward a concern with the serialized mark—Robert Rauschenberg’s
31Factum I and Factum II of 1957 are perhaps the best examples of this, but Ray
32 Johnson’s painting-collage Moticos also repeated motifs increasingly divorced
33 from their source material, as in his 1957--58 series using images of James
34 Dean3 (plates 18--20).
35 The secondary reception of Albers in the mid-1960s by those who were
36 not his students is also relatively underanalyzed. The recovery by minimalists
37 of early twentieth-century formalisms foregrounded the relativity of percep-
38 tion at the level of color and proportion, and heightened concern about the
39 contextualization of works by situating their seriality in relation to the envi-
40 ronments in which they were displayed.4 Albers’s model of experimentation
41 was revisited, by artist-critic Donald Judd, artist Sol LeWitt, and particularly
42 by critic John Coplans, as a progenitor to serial practices as they shifted from
43 explorations of sequentiality (works on consistent subjects, themes, or forms)
44 to works based on systems.5
45 Albers did not cultivate disciples, and it would be too simple to see his in-
46 fluence merely in works that refer to his idea of the relativity of color, such as
47 those presented in the 2008 contemporary art exhibition at the Museum of
48Modern Art, Color Chart: Reinventing Color from 1950 to Today, or to register
49 the effect of his work on painters that continue practices of geometric abstrac-
50 tion.6 Like Albers, many artists today deploy a language of experimental testing
51 and variation toward understanding how the visual appearance and material
52 constitution of form represent the foundational elements of artistic practice,
53 in large part because Albers’s students trained further generations by adopting
54 his teaching methods as faculty at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the
55 Cooper Union, in particular.7
56 In moving from a mid-century modernist project to the present, it is worth
57 probing the relevance today of the Albersian notion of art as attentiveness to
58 form, as a strategy of carefully attending to, and possibly altering, habits of per-
59 ception.8 To Albers, the better ‘‘vision’’ of art that attentive perception would
60 trigger is an awareness of the ways in which the individual is sited in the larger
61 field of social relations. Everything in the world has form, he claimed; training
62 the eye in the composition of form was a precondition for understanding and
63 possibly transforming the world. Today, this idea of the function of art as open-
64 ing eyes wide to the phenomena of the world might offer a criterion by which to
65 distinguish artistic practices from other types of visual or sensory experiences.
66 The Albers pedagogical tradition, with its emphasis on illuminating viewers
67 about the fundamental (and often overlooked) elements of form by demanding
68 a close attention to their own perceptual stimuli, is rich with potential for both
69 artists and art historians today.
70 Albers’s strenuous emphasis on order and disciplined work was frequently
71 cast as dogmatic and single-minded at the College and elsewhere, but it must
72 be remembered that his vision of a diverse art curriculum was the impetus
73 behind his invitations to Cage and Fuller to join the Black Mountain faculty. In
74 contrast to this rigorous emphasis on pedagogy, experimentation for Cage and
75 Fuller was less rooted in a codified teaching practice in their years at the Col-
76 lege, which in some ways explains the different reception their ideas received in
77 subsequent years. The thoroughness of Albers’s model was sometimes chafing
78 for more advanced students; for others, the parameters for contingency were
79 too narrowly conceived as painstaking trial-and-error experimentation. In con-
80 trast, Cage’s emphasis on indeterminate outcomes, and Fuller’s acceptance of
81 failure, often allowed for more risky and complex ventures that brought artistic
82 practices into a more immediate relationship to their audiences.
83 Legacies of BLack Mountain coLLege 151
84 Although figures such as Cage and Fuller were in residence for relative-
85 ly brief periods, the events they initiated at the College colored their future
86 work and the reception of their careers. It is no coincidence that Cage staged
87 the chance-derived happening and several of his other early groundbreaking
88 experimental performances at the same Black Mountain that was home to
89 Albers’s pioneering tests of perception in design. Cage’s work was a crucial
90 new element taking its place among various tendencies of performance al-
91 ready present at the College that charted a spectrum of possibilities about
92 order, chance, and design. In the case of performance-specific events, these
93 new explorations focused on the body—its relation and perception in space,
94 its interactions with objects and audiences, its movement in time, its intelligi-
95 bility (or not) within narrative structures, and its role in fabricating illusions
96 or, conversely, stressing quotidian gestures—in ways that reemerged in Cage’s
97 influential Experimental Composition courses taught at the New School in
98 New York from 1957 to 1959. There, Cage introduced future Fluxus-bound stu-
99 dents Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick
100 Higgins to the possibility of contingency in scoring and performance, which
101 they expanded and reworked.
102 Of course, even a quick summary of Cage-inspired art would far exceed
103 the scope of this discussion, yet it is worth noting that tracing and comparing
104 the shifting reception of his work by his students—first at Black Mountain by
105 Rauschenberg, Johnson, and Cy Twombly, and later by those that took his New
106 School courses—would be fertile ground for research.9 For example, at least
107 three directions were taken up by his students in response to the provocation
108 of Cage’s experimental model developed at Black Mountain: explorations of
109 the minimal denotation of form and monochromatic painting stemming from
110 his arguments about Zen, silence, and void-like experiences; the scripting of
111 simultaneously occurring events in the form of happenings; and the notion that
112 quotidian events could be fodder for artistic practices in the development of
113 the ‘‘event score.’’10
114 Cage’s institution of a chance protocol fundamentally altered the landscape
115 of possibilities for performance art in postwar America, as is particularly ev-
116 ident in its adoption by Fluxus and Judson Dance Theater performers in the
117 early 1960s. But, as we have seen, certain precedents were overshadowed in its
118 preeminence. In particular, the mapping of the body in terms of its architec-
119 tonic relations championed by Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Gropius, and László
120 Moholy-Nagy offers underrecognized though vital precedents for thinking
121 gesture: the body’s effects in specific environments and its determinations by
122 preexisting conditions in those environments. It is worth rethinking the bene-
123 fits of the disorienting sensory overload that Cage (through Antonin Artaud)
124152 EpiloguE
125 evoked, and questioning how he plotted the dissolution of art into life through
126 indeterminate events.
127 As opposed to the rationalist and focused visual illusions of Albers and other
128 Bauhaus figures, Cage’s chance-derived phenomenological overload and un-
129 focused attention broadened the boundaries of perception by using control
130 and reason to arrive at unreason, flux, and disorder. Yet in this, it may come to
131 resemble entertainment, diversion, and a wash of confounding effects that im-
132 merse the subject. Cage proposed ‘‘letting sounds be themselves.’’11 This implies
133 that not only is the composer abdicating control over final results, but that the
134 spectator is asked to remain a relatively passive observer of a score’s ‘‘infinite
135 play of interpenetration.’’12 As Merce Cunningham Company dancer Carolyn
136 Brown has commented, such an approach may present a ‘‘philosophy …of
137 reluctance, even refusal, to let people be themselves.’’13 Cage’s chance protocol
138 was compelled by a much deeper philosophical critique of non-intention and
139 ‘‘carelessness’’ that posited experimentation beyond verbal intention, redefin-
140 ing it as attention scattered through a field of independently transacted and
141 seemingly unrelated events.14
142 In the case of Fuller’s work, many today are stimulated by his postwar dome
143 technologies to radically rethink architectural structures, both as a practical
144 solution to urban housing crises (proposing ad hoc, lightweight, portable,
145 and efficient shelters), and as a key historical trope of innovative ‘‘guerilla’’—
146 decentralized and possibly unauthorized—architecture. Fuller’s rambling,
147 sometimes haranguing exhortations can be distilled to a basic set of claims that
148 have subsequently proved immensely influential: he proposed that a radical
149 and equitable redistribution of global resources (including natural and existing
150 technological resources used to house, feed, and clothe the world’s population)
151 could be accomplished through an experimental study of dynamic patterns of
152 consumption. In turn, the universal application of pattern knowledge would
153 use the criterion of efficiency in design to allocate the sufficient resources of the
154 planet, ‘‘Spaceship Earth.’’ In these claims, Fuller was part of larger ‘‘post-scar-
155 city’’ technocratic arguments claiming that the tools for such a redistribution
156 were available, but simply needed to be applied more fairly.
157 Probing the influence of Fuller on art practice today and understanding
158 how his ideas of equitable resource management and holistic planning—what
159 he termed ‘‘comprehensive design’’—are received in the present will always
160 be mediated by his reception in the 1960s and 1970s. Of particular importance
161 in exploring, testing, and propagating Fuller’s ideas during that period were
162 the ‘‘access to tools’’ ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog and other DIY satellite
163 publications and organizations; the examples in practice of the network of
164 intentional communities such as Libre, Drop City, and Red Rockers profiled
165 Legacies of BLack Mountain coLLege 153
166 by the Whole Earth books that were constructing domes and deploying other
167 Fuller-inspired alternative technologies throughout this time; and finally, the
168 challenge of radical art and architectural collectives such as Ant Farm, bent
169 on politicizing the libertarian logic of Fuller’s theories often embraced by his
170 acolytes.
171 In Fuller’s case, his reception by artists has been pronounced from the 1960s
172 into the present, and many explicitly cite him in ways that very nearly consti-
173 tute a revival. A wide array of contemporary artists and collectives are today
174 reassessing the legacy of his work with mass shelter solutions and just resource
175 management.15 So many more are interested in or inspired by the Bucky Fuller--
176Whole Earth--Drop City--Ant Farm constellation that it would be impossible to
177 detail each invocation of Fuller, or every exploration of the geodesic dome or its
178 related alternative architectures, undertaken by contemporary artists. Instead,
179 the task would be to investigate how artists have inherited and reexamined
180 Fuller’s experimental model of total design, even though their interest is often
181 mediated by suspicions about teleological ‘‘anti-entropic’’ utopian forms—par-
182 ticularly as this critique was articulated by one of his most astute critics in the
183 1960s and early 1970s, Robert Smithson.16
184 Yet the articulation of ‘‘total thinking,’’ culminating in the invention of
185 the geodesic dome, was not the lasting consequence of Fuller’s time at Black
186 Mountain. It was his proposal of an experimentation model that accommodated
187 failure in the name of the larger holistic program that proved to be Fuller’s
188 greatest contribution to Black Mountain and beyond. Dropping the totalizing,
189 holistic, technocratic program, while picking up the practical demand to think
190 of experimentation as an often preposterously impractical or absurd prototyp-
191 ing, is a means by which artists today engage Fuller’s utopian imagination, just
192 as Cage did at the College.
193 In this vein, an in-depth study of the aftereffects of the Cage-Fuller friend-
194 ship nurtured at Black Mountain would be tremendously generative. Just as
195 Black Mountain found an important precursor in the Bauhaus, so did the mid-
196 1960s collaborative movement Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) look
197 to Black Mountain as a touchstone of its interdisciplinary approach to consider-
198 ing methodologies of experiment.17 This key offspring of the College, heavily in-
199 fluenced by Fuller’s argument about networks as comprehensive systems, was
200 composed of a broad array of ex--Black Mountain faculty and students such as
201 John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and pianist David Tudor, as well as scientists,
202 dancers, and artists such as Billy Klüver, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Whitman.
203 EAT sought to collapse the distinction between technology and everyday life
204 by using concepts of experimentation and laboratory testing that had earlier
205 been debated, and provisionally defined, at Black Mountain in the late 1940s
206154 EpiloguE
207 and early 1950s. Its legacy is crucial in understanding hotly contested notions of
208 experiment in science and aesthetics, then and today. Similarly, a study of the
209 impact on artistic practices of John Cage’s wholehearted embrace of Fuller’s
210 (and Marshall McLuhan’s) technopolitics by the 1960s would be a productive
211 avenue for approaching this research.
212 From the 1960s Cage-Fuller nexus arises a related question: why did Albers’s
213 methods, once so dominant at Black Mountain, lose out to the more enthusias-
214 tically received Cage and Fuller models? That Albers was a master teacher with
215 dedicated students is obvious. Yet his experimental methodology largely circu-
216 lated within a network characterized by degrees of personal connection; Cage
217 and Fuller are now, and have been for some time, about as close to household
218 names as twentieth-century cultural figures could ever be.18 Albers’s demand
219 for artistic discipline and his emphasis on the specific conditions of perceptual
220 awareness, which he held would generate situations of greater contingency,
221 were often considered rigid and lacking in spontaneity. Perhaps his modernist
222 model of order and design, birthed in the 1920s in Weimar, Germany, and nur-
223 tured in a small village in western North Carolina between the wars, isn’t what
224 people expected or even wanted from art by the 1960s. His example has none
225 of Fuller’s visionary, utopian romanticism; it lacks Cage’s sense of freewheeling
226 freedom and anarchy.19
227 Cage ‘‘won out’’ by inverting the Albersian formulation: design would
228 henceforth be subordinate to chance in the deployment of protocols toward
229 indeterminacy. Fuller, however outrageous his rhetoric, tried to connect
230 Bauhaus concerns about the appearance and structure of form to the prop-
231 osition that an efficient allocation of global resources could induce social
232 responsibility. Among Black Mountain’s explorations of chance and design lie
233 a great many possibilities for addressing how artistic experimentation might
234 be defined today.
235 As much as the concept of experimentation has been understood as a meth-
236 odological practice shared by artists and scientists, similar common ground can
237 be found between works of visual art, musical composition, and architectural
238 design by using the notion of experiment proposed here.20 That is to say, if
239 experiment can be understood as both a test of tradition and a search for inno-
240 vative outcomes more generally, we can begin to see the work of a composer, an
241 artist, and an architect as organized by a shared methodology, albeit with very
242 different results. Invoking the test as a primary procedure of modernist culture
243 and practice underscores the central role played by experimentation, which
244 alters the limits of representation to depict in form—whether visual, theatrical,
245 or architectural—conditions of process, change, and contingency.
246 Legacies of BLack Mountain coLLege 155