faith in the arts
by Douglas Messerli
Helen
Molesworth and Ruth Erickson (curators) Leap
Before You Look: Black Mountain College: 1933-1957 / Los Angeles, Hammer Museum,
February 21-May 15, 2016, I saw the show, with Thérèse Bachand on February 26,
2016
If there was
ever a grand imaginative moment in American education it was the creation of
Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933. Founded by four faculty
members who had been dismissed from Rollins College—John Andrew Rice, Theodore
Dreier, Frederick Georgia, and Ralph Lounsbury—the school based its philosophy
of learning on the ideas of American philosopher John Dewey, who argued for an
emphasis on inquiry, discussion, and experimentation that featured the arts,
instead of offering them as secondary elements in a liberal arts education.
There were no required courses, and
students were encouraged to work collaboratively and to develop
cross-disciplinary and independent areas of study. Members of the community,
moreover, were made responsible for its day-to-day upkeep, including building
maintenance, farm work, and cooking, which surely helped them to identify the
institution as their own.
The most remarkable thing about this
grand experiment, however, was not just its radical positioning of the arts,
but the faculty it quickly began to gather around its core founders. In its
Lake Eden campus, from 1941 to its closure in 1957, the school drew on a faculty that included
Josef and Anni Albers, Eric Bentley, Ilya Bolotowsky, Josef Breitenbach, John Cage, Harry Callahan, Mary Callery, Fritz Cohen,
Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Edward Dahlberg, Max Dehn, Willem de Kooning,
Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Trude Guermonprez, Lou Harrison, Wesley Huss, Alfred Kazin, Franz Kline, Tony
Landreau Jacob Lawrence, Richard Lippold, Alvin Lustig, Beaumont Newhall,
Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, Albert William Levi, Alexander Schawinsky, Ben
Shahn, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, Robert
Motherwell, Peter
Voulkos, Emerson Woelffer, Stefan Wolpe and others, while
inviting figures such as Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, Bernard Rudofsky,
Richard Lippold and William Carlos Williams to lecture. 
Among its notable alumni were Hazel
Larson Archer, Ruth Asawa, James Bishop, John Chamberlain, Fielding Dawson, Elaine de Kooning, Ed Dorn, Joseph
Fiore, James Leo Herlihy, Ray Johnson, Karen Karnes, Basil Ling, Gwendolyn
Knight, Jane Mayhall, Robert De Niro, Sr., Kenneth Noland, Josel Oppenheimer,
Arthur Penn, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Michael Rumaker, Kenneth
Snelson, Deborah Sussman, Cy Twombly, Cora Kelley Ward, Susan Weil, John
Wieners, and Jonathan Williams.
Not only did the college offer standard
visual arts and literature courses, but included the applied arts such as
weaving, pottery, jewelry making, as well as architecture, music, film,
theater, and dance.
Much has been written about this
remarkable gathering of creators, including Martin Duberman’s important Black Mountain: An Exploration of Community and
books by Vincent Katz, Eva Diaz, Christopher Benfey, Mary Emma Harris, and Anne
Chesky Smith. And a museum devoted to the institution exists in nearby Asheville,
North Carolina.
Now, in what claims to be the first
“comprehensive museum exhibition in the US,” Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson
have curated Leap Before You Look: Black
Mountain College 1933-1957. The show at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum brings together
a large sampling of art, artifacts, and photographs, all beautifully grouped,
as well as numerous performances and lectures centered around the actual
productions and products that the school’s faculty and students produced, which
is such a glorious sampling that one simply feels overwhelmed by the creativity
of the place.
Although Molesworth and Erickson have
attempted to give some equal due to all the arts, obviously painting and
sculpture tend to dominate, while poetry, dance, music, and film are,
understandably, given lesser space. Without a thorough understanding of the
artists themselves, moreover, it is often difficult to perceive the multitudes
of inter-connections that obviously occurred among faculty members and
students. Presumably the quite expensive catalogue ($75) brings some of these
relationships into focus, but the very quantity and the high percentage of now recognized artists the show contains helps to
make the exibit more of an anthology than an illustrative representation of
what this kind of educative experimentation actually generated.
Yet one can observe some of the abstract
forms and colors weave their way from Albers through early works by
Rauschenberg, Bolotovsky, Ossip Zadkine, Robert Motherwell, Elaine de Kooning
and others. Photographers such as the young and talented Hazel Larson Archer
used the bodies of dancer Merce Cunningham and others as subjects for her art;
and the young poet Jonathan Williams beautifully captured photographic images
of fellow writers such as Dan Rice, Robert Creeley, and musician Lou Harrison.
Perhaps more than anything else, one
perceives in viewing this show the overwhelming power of the creativity Black
Mountain had by intentional accident brought together; and, as you wander through
its several rooms, you feel as though you have been invited to a wonderful
party where everyone has absolutely amazing things to express.
My
museum-going companion of the day, Thérèse Bachand sighed, “Oh how I wish I
might have been able to attend such a school!” But perceiving that most of artists
we were viewing—several of whom I had personally known—are no longer living, I
wanted to answer, “but then you probably wouldn’t be here to see this show.”
What is most sad is that, despite a few
other such Utopian-like institutions (CalArts was and imagines it is still such
a place), there have been few other attempts in US history to make such a grand
gesture as to “leap before looking,” to have such faith in the arts as to
imagine that something miraculous might happen just by bringing those who
created and those who might want to create together into an isolated spot where
they might explore wherever their imaginations took them.
Los Angeles,
February 28, 2016
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