What do you think?
Rate this book
The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
In the years immediately following World War II, Black Mountain College, an unaccredited school in rural Appalachia, became a vital hub of cultural innovation. Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly―the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists’ time at the College as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With The Experimenters , Eva Díaz reveals the importance of Black Mountain College―and especially of three key teachers, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller―to be much greater than that.
Díaz’s focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. These methodologies represented incipient directions for postwar art practice, elements of which would be sampled, and often wholly adopted, by Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners. The resulting works, which interrelate art and life in a way that imbues these projects with crucial relevance, not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design―they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.
Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative figures of modern times, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.
Díaz’s focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. These methodologies represented incipient directions for postwar art practice, elements of which would be sampled, and often wholly adopted, by Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners. The resulting works, which interrelate art and life in a way that imbues these projects with crucial relevance, not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design―they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.
Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative figures of modern times, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2014
7 people are currently reading
122 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 29, 2020
“[W]hat do we mean when we talk about experimentation in art? And why is it important?” (Diaz, 2015, p. 1).
Like others have stated, this is not an easy read. This book is clearly meant for people who have more technical knowledge and interest in art, a group which I do not belong to; however, I did find it interesting that Diaz was able to explain the three "waves" of pedagogy through the college that seemed to more to restrictive (and possibly tyrannical?) by the time it ended.
Here was what stood out amidst lengthy discussions of technical art terms:
The founders of BMC “hoped to loosen or altogether abolish the types of separations between student and faculty, and faculty and administration” (Diaz, 2015, p. 3). Did not one suspect that though a utopian idea, this could be problematic with adult men living with barely legal students? Diaz did not include information about the affairs or the impropriety of the living structures, but it would have been appropriate to do so with statements like this.
I liked the exploration of what it means to experiment: Experiment is also “invoked (both in art and in science) in trials of new or different experience in which results are not forecast beforehand” (Diaz, 2015, p. 4). So often, people think of experiment solely under the lens of the scientific method.
I liked Albers the best: “Experimentation means learning by experience”-Josef Albers (Diaz, 2015, p. 15).
I was confused that self-expression was to be avoided in art (Diaz, 2015, p. 42), which seems to take away from the essence of being an artist. I did agree that traditional education limits creativity though (Diaz, 2015, p. 46).
I see why BMC ended if Cage had so much power. He sounded pretty unhinged, constantly forcing students to make domes, getting mad when students wouldn't sign up for classes to do laborious tasks for his own art and cancelling all of his classes because of it, etc. (Diaz, 2015, p. 95). It's a great idea not to have traditional order in education until things like this happen!
Like others have stated, this is not an easy read. This book is clearly meant for people who have more technical knowledge and interest in art, a group which I do not belong to; however, I did find it interesting that Diaz was able to explain the three "waves" of pedagogy through the college that seemed to more to restrictive (and possibly tyrannical?) by the time it ended.
Here was what stood out amidst lengthy discussions of technical art terms:
The founders of BMC “hoped to loosen or altogether abolish the types of separations between student and faculty, and faculty and administration” (Diaz, 2015, p. 3). Did not one suspect that though a utopian idea, this could be problematic with adult men living with barely legal students? Diaz did not include information about the affairs or the impropriety of the living structures, but it would have been appropriate to do so with statements like this.
I liked the exploration of what it means to experiment: Experiment is also “invoked (both in art and in science) in trials of new or different experience in which results are not forecast beforehand” (Diaz, 2015, p. 4). So often, people think of experiment solely under the lens of the scientific method.
I liked Albers the best: “Experimentation means learning by experience”-Josef Albers (Diaz, 2015, p. 15).
I was confused that self-expression was to be avoided in art (Diaz, 2015, p. 42), which seems to take away from the essence of being an artist. I did agree that traditional education limits creativity though (Diaz, 2015, p. 46).
I see why BMC ended if Cage had so much power. He sounded pretty unhinged, constantly forcing students to make domes, getting mad when students wouldn't sign up for classes to do laborious tasks for his own art and cancelling all of his classes because of it, etc. (Diaz, 2015, p. 95). It's a great idea not to have traditional order in education until things like this happen!
November 23, 2019
It's not an 'easy read'! I found the book interesting though not what I was expecting; I wanted a book from which I could find out more about the history of Black Mountain College and as this was the only book I could find I went for it. It's actually a fairly dense book about how the attitudes of Albers, Cage and Fuller to 'experimentation' differed and how these affected their time at Black Mountain (though I found her stretching it a bit with Fuller as a lot seemed to not be about Black Mountain). All fascinating stuff, which made me think, and I learned a lot from it. But if you're looking for a easy read about Black Mountain, then this isn't it
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews