To Open Eyes

“We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.”

Josef Albers, Bauhaus Fundaments (Leap Before You Look p. 33)

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“[Josef Alber’s] thought of teaching art as analogous to teaching a language, hence the students had to begin with the building blocks of aesthetics; he called drawing a ‘graphic language’ that was both a ‘visual and manual act.’ “

“Alber’s color course… proved that the experience of color was ultimately fungible.”

For example: Cutting up and collating bits of paper to see how they change in relationship to each other.

Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 34)

“The relativity of our experience of color has philosophical and ethical implications, as well. If our experience of a piece of colored paper can change so demonstrably, then what side footing do we have when we appeal to ‘common-sense’ truths like color?”

“forms are subject to perception - what Albers calls experience.”

“The task of training students to see, "to open eyes," as Albers often said, was to facilitate their critical awareness of the made qualities of the world around them, to make them self-aware of their own experiences to better prepare them for the democratic work of making considered choices.”

“Rather Albers insisted on the relativity of color, the perceptual instability of human experience, and the need for a constant performance or testing of innumerable variables.”

Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 41)

To Know Is Not Enough

“What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

John Rice

“There were no letter grades at Black Mountain College, nor were there required courses, set curricula, standard examinations, or prescribed teaching methods.”

“When John Rice established Black Mountain College in 1933, he sought to create a school that dissolved distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, that conceived of education and life as deeply intertwined, and that placed the arts at the center rather than at the margins of learning.“

“For Rice, education was registered not by grades or other standard criteria but in a heightened desire to learn and to question, which would lead students to an expanded aptitude for solving a range of problems and to a richer sense of self.”

Leap Before You Look

A Progressive Education by Ruth Erikson

p. 77

Cross Pollination

“The summer sessions permitted an extraordinary form of cross-pollination.”

“Almost none of the summer faculty was paid a salary but received instead room and board and some relaxing time in the country.”

Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)

“The summer sessions modeled a form of artistic community, one that de Kooning took with him to New York in 1950, when he helped to found the Artists' Club, a gathering dedicated to the presentation of avant-garde ideas.“

“Black Mountain helped to establish the idea that an art school is a place of competing and diverse ideas, where the task of the faculty is to commit to a sense of rigor instead of personal taste, and the job of the students is to navigate the complexity of the options, in the hope of finding their own paths through what John Cage called "the big question," namely, "What are you going to do with your time?"

Helen Molesworth (Leap Before You Look, p. 45)

“the relation is not so much of teacher to student as of one member of the community to another.”

Black Mountain College Catalogue, (Leap Before You Look, p. 80)

“In essence there exists the utmost freedom for people to be what they please. There is simply no pattern of behavior, no criteria to live up to. People study what they please, as long as they want to, idle if they want to, graduate whenever they are willing to stand on examination, even after only a month here, or a year, or whatever, or they can waive all examinations, and graduations. They can attend classes, or stay away. They can work entirely by themselves, or they need not work whatever. They can be male, female, or fairy, married, single, or live in illicit love.”

Jack Tworkov (Leap Before You Look, p. 42)

*John Cage question from interview with Richard Kostelanetz (1968) in John Cage: An Anthology (1991) on pg 28

John Rice

“…there is something of the artist in everyone and the development of this talent, however small, carrying with it a severe discipline of its own, results in the students becoming more sensitive to order in the world and within himself than he can ever be through intellectual effort alone.”

John Rice, Black Mountain College Bulliten, 1935

via Look Before You Leap (p. 34)

Leap Before You Look

When I started my deep dive on Black Mountain College I came across this book, Leap Before You Look by Helen Molesworth.

I haven’t bought a book that cost this much since university, but it is a beauty.

(If you’re interested in reading I’d suggest checking out an interlibrary loan or trying library at your nearest art museum.)

But compared to going back to school for a Ph.D., which I briefly considered this Spring, this book is basically a steal. 😉

Here are my notes from my first reading session.

There are a lot of threads to pull on here.

The first is a useful guidepost whilst considering the mission and direction of Neurokind.

“the aspirations of Black Mountain College: namely to inspire us in an expansive notion of the arts and creativity through close observation, physical engagement, service, and play…” Jill Medvedow

Keeping an expansive view of art and what it can do and be. It also feels important that creativity can both be of service and play which so often seem at odds with one another.

This quote took me back to my conversation with Morgan Harper Nichols and this idea that art is a form of communication.

It feels very relevant to Neurokind as platform to share experiences that may transcend or defy language.

Learning by Doing

And then I found this video which linked Dewey and Freire in the progressive education movement.

Which ties nicely to this short video about handwork vs brain work.

And another Black Mountain College documentary. This one is dated, but has an interview from an actual student (Jonathan Williams), “What appealed to me immediately was that everyone was available to each other and time seemed to be no problem. I had left Princeton because time was very much a problem. It seemed almost impossible to reach the faculty who were set up to do their one lecture or two lectures a week. And then suddenly they disappeared.”

Johnathan Williams founded Jargon Press which is “predicated on this idea that there are voices and poetry being ignored which deserve to be heard.”

On his process editing / curating, “You have to do the doing.” “Being self initiating. I don’t sit around waiting for these people to materialize. I mean I go out and find them.” He ties this to walking and hiking and Black Mountain College.

Spaceship Earth

I have a long history with Buckminster Fuller (“Bucky”) which I should probably write a blog post about. Learning that he taught at Black Mountain College has brought me full circle and I’ve started reading this book which I bought at a library sale. It’s been on my shelf for years.

Here are some favorite bits from the first chapter.

This is probably more true now than when he wrote this in 1969. We are stuck with so many outdated systems and the process of updating them seems painfully slow.

This first sentence:

My new project, the one this research is driving, is a bit “grand.” This felt like a mentor telling me I wasn’t dreaming too big. That the world is thinking to small (narrowly.)

I think he’s talking about Paulo Freire here who, “introduced the 'banking' concept of education whereby he equated teachers with bank clerks and saw them as 'depositing' information into students rather than drawing out knowledge from individual students or creating inquisitive beings with a thirst for knowledge”. (University of Bedfordshire)

I’ve done a lot of reading on educational theory and pedagogy and all the good stuff points here. (As a nerdy sidebar it’s also an approach that feels very Merlin, “Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.")

Everything comes back to kindling our own curiosity. Even as society wants to stamp it out.

The last part reminds me of submitting my piece about Asynchronous Friendship to an academic journal The editor told me I was neither “fish nor fowl” (solely academic or solely creative).

Why do we have to be one thing or another? Why can’t artists draw from academic studies? Why can’t academics include creative works?

In the end there was more flexibility considering my work a creative piece, but it shows a weakness in academia from my perspective. And I think both Bucky and Black Mountain College would agree.

Black Mountain College

This week I’ve been doing a deep dive into Black Mountain College. It’s definitely an instance of orbiting ideas as Black Mountain College and artists have caught my attention many times over the years.

This is my first deep dive and I’m fascinated that so many things I’ve been studied and been drawn to over the years (Buckminster Fuller’s visionary design, John Cage’s Happenings, John Dewey’s educational approach, Ruth Asawa’s interaction of life and art) all converged in these mountains.

I want to really go deep this time as I draw inspiration for a new project. I’ve ordered some books, but in the meantime I’ve been watching YouTube videos.

Here are 3 of my favorite quotes with the videos they are from below.

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I watched the third mini documentary this afternoon while Davy made LEGO art.

I’m struck by how the concept of hands on learning through art aligns with my own views about home education. It’s all very exciting.