The Experimenters

Chance and Design at Black Mountain College

By Eva Díaz

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06798-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION. Black Mountain College between Chance and Design,
CHAPTER 1. Josef Albers and the Ethics of Perception,
CHAPTER 2. John Cage's Chance Protocols,
CHAPTER 3. R. Buckminster Fuller's Design Revolution,
EPILOGUE. Legacies of Black Mountain College,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,

CHAPTER 1

Josef Albers and The Ethics of Perception

Experimentation means learning by experience. Josef Albers, 1941

A 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.

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." 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. 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.

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. 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 nondominant 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."

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. 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. 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.

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

Elements 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...