The idea of R. Buckminster Fuller playing the lead role in a surrealist play alongside Elaine de Kooning and Merce Cunningham (with set designs by Willem de Kooning and music performed by John Cage) may seem more like a fell-asleep-while-watching-late-night-PBS dream than reality, but this performance actually happened, and not, as one might expect, in an avant-garde, off-off-Broadway playhouse, but rather, on a hand-built stage in the mountains of North Carolina, at Black Mountain College.
This infamous performance, or “happening” as they were often called, of Erik Satie’s “The Ruse of Medusa” took place during the college’s 1948 Summer Institute and represents a sort of zenith in the arc of the Black Mountain College story, a time when the school had reached an apogee in creativity and credence. However, one could argue that tracing a hierarchical trajectory defeats the spirit of the place itself: The college may be better described as a series of remarkable happenings strung together in one of Fuller’s tensegrity models—each year building upon and bolstered by the last to create what was arguably the most remarkable, profligate, and insular educational institution in the history of the United States.
Founded in 1933 by a group of professors and 15 students from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, Black Mountain College (BMC) was—quite literally—an idea before it was a place. When John Andrew Rice and his rebel group of knowledge seekers set out to revolutionize American education, they had no funds and no place to go. After securing the Blue Ridge assembly buildings (rented from the Southern YMCA) and cobbling together limited funds, supplies, and a few extra students, BMC opened its first semester with an odd 9:19 student-to- teacher ratio.
In the spirit of John Dewey, Rice set about structuring a nonstructured, experience-based learning environment where the institutions of higher education were deinstitutionalized: There were no deans, presidents, treasurers, or trustees to interfere with the method or manner in which the faculty taught (there was, however, one typist). The faculty, with the total involvement of the student body, did all governing, administrative, and manual work. Rid of rote, the students were encouraged, first and foremost, to foster their inner artist; in fact, music, theater, and fine art encompassed the “required” core curriculum at BMC. As Rice said in an interview with Louis Adamic in the April 1936 issue of Harper’s Monthly, “Nearly every man is a bit of an artist, at least potentially a person of imagination, which can be developed; and, so far as I know at this moment, there is but one way to train and develop him—the way discovered, not by me but by Black Mountain College as a whole.”
But the truth is Black Mountain College was John Rice, and when Josef and Anni Albers emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933 to head up the visual arts department (ironically, at the recommendation of Philip Johnson, American architecture’s repentant Nazi sympathizer), BMC became the brainchild of Rice and Josef Albers: their classes—Plato and drawing—their respective pedagogical analogues. Albers’s teaching career at the Bauhaus informed much of his BMC curriculum, namely the emphasis on experimentation and the combining of high and low arts, which rejected the hierarchy between fine art and craft. As Albers wrote, “To experiment is at first more valuable than to produce; free play in the beginning develops courage.”
In many ways, Rice and Albers were ideological bedfellows, and perhaps it was their similarities that caused conflict. Despite their strong progressive and experimental temperaments, both were given to pedantry: Rice could be unyielding and incendiary in the face of politics and implacable in his stewardship of the college; Albers was critical and dogmatic, often reducing students to tears and correcting technical weaknesses through practice and pedagogy. As Robert Rauschenberg once said of Albers, “[He] was a beautiful teacher and impossible person.” Rice was asked to resign by the faculty in 1940; it was his third dismissal from an academic post. Albers carried on the torch for the next nine years, before he, too, would decamp due to dissention amongst the ranks.
Teaching and living at Black Mountain College wasn’t always easy, and this led to conflict. As Adamic reported in Harper’s Monthly, “The college nearly collapsed twice [between 1933 and 1936] for lack of money, and was saved by the joint resourcefulness and self-denial of both the faculty and the students.” The founding faculty worked for free, drawing out of the treasury only what they needed, which averaged $7.27 per month, per person. Adamic adds that the college’s impecunious underpinnings were, for some, preferable to the alternative: “Some are fearful of what money might do to the place, and are almost rabid about not wanting a dollar from anyone who may wish to dictate to them how to ‘run’ the college, or make any demands upon them other than of politeness and of detailed accounts of expenditures. So BMC barely manages to exist from term to term. And they are in constant danger that the YMCA will sell the place to someone who will not want them to be there.”
This fear was obviated when, in 1941, Black Mountain College moved to its Lake Eden campus. The original design for the campus was commissioned to Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer but was scrapped due to funding issues and impending war. The college opted for a thriftier program designed by A. Lawrence Kocher, and despite much of the labor being done by students and faculty, even it wasn’t fully realized: The lone Studies Building stood out like an awkward teen who has overshot his peers. Indeed, the war years were a sort of adolescent age for the college: It was too small to qualify for funding from the wartime programs that other institutions enjoyed, and its resources and autonomy were stretched thin. The college population was winnowed down to older Americans, European émigrés, and women. Work camps were established in the summer, and the college farm expanded to maximize yields and donate food; they also mined mica, which was then a valuable wartime material.
This hands on, by-the-skin-of-our-teeth spirit added a degree of romanticism and nobility to Black Mountain College, and never did it shine more than during the Summer Institutes, established in 1944. What the college lacked in monetary resources it made up for in cultural capital. The school had long enjoyed a fertile relationship with the MoMA and prestigious New York galleries such as Charles Egan. The Summer Institutes became a sort of revolving door for the great artists and thinkers of the day. Albers, too, called upon his connections for resources and was integral to the invitation process. In
a 1943 letter to alumni and friends, Albers implores: “Our new course, ‘Seeing Art,’ has an unusual enrollment: two thirds of the student body participates. It is for this course in particular that we need books and reproductions and slides. We have no color reproductions and no slides at all.…It may interest you to know that most of the members of the faculty receive no cash salary, only room and board. Therefore we dare to ask our friends to look over the books in their libraries for books which might be particularly useful here.”
Sculptor Richard Lippold was a visiting artist the summer of 1948. In a letter to Albers that summer, Lippold embodies the bohemian, familial spirit of the place: “I have bought an old hearse which I hope will get us to Black Mountain whenever you wish us to come.…I have arranged our old car for sleeping, and in discussing the summer with John [Cage] and Merce [Cunningham] last night, including plans for the collaboration on an opera for the coming year, we agreed that they might lend us their plumbing at Black Mountain while we [his wife and kids] sleep in the car.” Clement Greenberg, a guest lecturer at the Summer Institutes, taught a visual criticism course without visual aids, as the artists he was lecturing about—including American abstract expressionists Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock—had few reproductions of their work, and the press had yet to catch on. For visiting artists, many of whom were just starting to gain recognition, Black Mountain was a sort of utopian summer camp where they could live for free and spend their time dedicated solely to the creative process.
It’s hard to imagine such ease, frugality, and spontaneity today, perhaps because our concept of an avant-garde art collaboration requires the commandeering of a Japanese whaling ship and multimillion-dollar budgets. Black Mountain managed to accomplish a great deal throughout the ’40s and into the ’50s on very little, and ushered through its doors some of the most accomplished artists and thinkers of the century, including Max Dehn, Lou Harrison, Jacob Lawrence, M. C. Richards, Ben Shahn, Jack Tworkov, and Robert Motherwell. And importantly, it was done for the betterment of a holistic creative community. It isn’t any wonder that many of the school’s alumni went on to enjoy successful careers of their own. Notable alumni include Ruth Asawa, Fielding Dawson, Robert De Niro, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, Oli Sihvonen, Joel Oppenheimer, and Kenneth Snelson.
With the resignation of Josef Albers and Ted Dreier (another founding member of the college) in 1949, the school experienced a gradual decline both financially and structurally. However, with poet Charles Olson at the helm, it also saw a shift in focus from visual arts to literature. Although Olson carried on the intellectual-bender and renegade-style methods of his predecessors, he didn’t have the same reverence for its delicate nonstructure. When the poet Robert Creeley was hired in 1954, there were no science courses being taught at the school, and Olson asked him to teach biology. Creeley recalls saying: “That’s the one thing I never took. I never had it in high school. I never took anything remotely involved with biology in college.” To which Olson replied, “Terrific, you can learn something.”
This dissolution seems distant to the scene six years prior when the inventor (thinker, architect, poet) R. Buckminster Fuller was attempting to raise a 48-foot-diameter hemispheric geodesic dome constructed of Venetian blind strips with his students. Though there is something in the spirit and the method that is constant: As the story goes, the team had determined that in order to raise the dome, they’d have to double the strips throughout, but the school could only afford single strips. Fuller decided to raise the structure regardless, as he’d “intentionally designed this structure so that its delicate system gently collapsed as it neared completion.” By building something to a precise structural integrity, Fuller was able to build more expansively with less material. And while the structure did collapse, Fuller proved his point, and his students learned the lesson. It seems that Black Mountain College was much the same: An institution built with integrity of purpose that allowed its teachers and students to think expansively and build outwardly so that when it collapsed, they’d all seen and experienced the possibility, and were better for it.
