Cambridge. The small town of Black Mountain, situated well away from the large cities in the East Coast state of North Carolina, was, for a short period in the 20th century, a hub of artistic and literary development, after several frustrated academics set up a new college there. With great idealism, its founders, without any start-up capital or state funding, threw themselves behind a doctrine in which the arts and experimentation had a central role, and learning and life became the focal point – in contrast with normal academic convention.
Shortly after the college opened in 1933, Anni and Josef Albers arrived on the scene from the Bauhaus. They were to have a major influence over the next 15 years. Their teaching methods and the unconventional organisational structures at Black Mountain College soon attracted nation-wide attention. Here, more was taught than just facts: there was an endeavour to cultivate a holistic form of life in which teachers and students carried out farming and community work in addition to their studies. This work helped support and maintain the college. In a brochure displayed in a showcase at the exhibition »Starting At Zero« that describes the seminars on offer, building is mentioned alongside fine arts subjects, and the description of the seminars emphasises necessary construction work at the college. Idealism and necessity apparently went hand in hand.
But despite its strong leaning towards artistic subjects, Black Mountain College was not a college of the arts or an American Bauhaus. Quite on the contrary, at the end of the forties the staff quarrelled when founding member Theodore Dreier wanted to reduce the school curriculum to artistic subjects alone. Joseph Albers finally left in 1949 amidst a dispute with the poet Charles Olson, who subsequently headed the college. The college went through a series of financially lean periods, which finally brought about its downfall. The institution was wound up in 1957 owing to a lack of students.
This exhibition tries to give a picture of life at the college, and shows works by students and teachers from the period of their teaching and learning activities. The influence of the Albers can be clearly seen in a selection of abstract paintings by Josef and experimental weavings and jewellery (paper clips and hair clips as jewel elements) by Anni. They represent the experimental formalism taught by the couple. For Josef Albers, art was a new beginning based on the understanding of visual phenomena that could be researched analytically. But the experiments carried out during the summer academies attracted greater notice than the usual yearly curriculum. Merce Cunningham came to teach dance, John Cage performed his first happening in Black Mountain, Buckminster Fuller had the students tinker away at geodesic domes, while Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Jacob Lawrence sowed the seeds of neo-expressionist painting. Black Mountain College seems to have been a place where experimental procedures could obtain an identity.
This may also be because several of the students raved about the profound influence the teaching there had on their lives, and in their turn developed a strong presence in post-war painting: for example, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly. As well as several small pictures by these famous students, this phase is mostly represented by photographs, printed material and videos that aim to capture the atmosphere and life at the college: Hazel Archer Larsen’s photos of Merce Cunningham leaping through the air; Bucky Fuller as an actor in a Satie performance organised by John Cage; Rauschenberg’s photographic portraits of Twombly and Cunningham; the shell of a new faculty building; newspaper articles and college brochures.
But the experimental impetus of the time seems to be most vividly reflected in the video »Thoughts Out of Season« with soundless film material by Nicholas Cernovic (ca. 1951), showing close-ups of the dancer Katherine Litz. The whole figure can never been seen, with the result that the sequence of images shows forms, colours and motion as abstractions. This video already stems from the third phase, which was marked by the literary circle surrounding Charles Olson. This circle is represented here primarily by publications produced at the college: with the »Black Mountain Review«, Robert Creeley published an identity-defining journal on poetics. In keeping with the artistic preference of the time, the titles of the books tend to be illustrated with expressive, gestural forms.
The exhibition presents the diversity of experimental forms of the period. Embedded within it is a look back at a past form of educational idealism that, in the present PISA-generated climate of rigid »learning and teaching formalties«, seems positively stimulating.
Translated by Timothy Jones