Notes

Notes

2

1  Introduction

31. Kenneth Kurtz, ‘‘Black Mountain College, Its Aims and Methods,’’ Black Mountain College Bulletin, no. 8 (1944): 3 [NC State Archives]. Reprinted from Haverford Review 3, no. 1 (Winter 1944).

4 2. It is important to note that Black Mountain College was founded very rapidly during a low point of the Great Depression. Rice was dismissed from Rollins in March 1933, and Theodore Dreier, who left Rollins in July, raised nearly $15,000 throughout the summer months. Black Mountain College was open to students by September 1933. The College’s institutional organization was peculiar and problematic. It was wholly owned by the faculty and students, with a governing Board of Fellows (headed by an elected rector) composed of eight faculty members and one student member culled from their respec-tive constituencies. Nonbinding recommendations were made by an external Advisory Board that met infrequently. A work program was required of all College members, although in practice students executed most of the duties. Admissions decisions were made by a committee composed of faculty and students. No grades were awarded, and graduation was effectuated by an examination performed by an outside scholar. A community council representing faculty, staff, and students considered problems and proposed solutions relating to the entire community. For more information about the founding of Black Mountain College, see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 2--7.

5 3. On the topic of European émigrés at Black Mountain, particularly those coming from the Bauhaus, please see Hal Foster, ‘‘The Bauhaus Idea in America,’’ in Albers and Mo-holy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (London: Tate, 2006), 92--102; Carl Goldstein, ‘‘Teaching Modernism: What Albers Learned in the Bauhaus and Taught to Rauschenberg, Noland, and Hesse,’’ Arts Magazine 54, no. 4 (December 1979): 108--16; Margret Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts 1919--1936 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Charles Darwent, ‘‘From Bauhaus to Black Mountain,’’ Modern Painters 14, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 48--49. For more information about intentional communities, see Martin Duberman’s Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), which charts the history of the College within a legacy of American communitarian experiments. He assesses individuals’ roles in generating and maintaining community structures in the highly charged atmosphere of an artistic experimental cooperative such as Brook Farm or Black Mountain College. (Brook Farm was an experimental agricultural community near Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1841, it was inspired by Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism and was associated with American transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller were visitors while Nathaniel Hawthorne and Amos Bronson Alcott were inhabitants of the relatively short-lived community.) For further information about Black Mountain and racial integration, see Camille Clark, ‘‘Black Mountain College: A Pioneer in Southern Racial Integration,’’ Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 51 (Spring 2006): 46--48; Duberman, Black Mountain, 175--85, 213--18; and Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 70--71. For an exploration of the role of Black Mountain College in a history of progressive education in the United States, see John Andrew Rice, I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942); and Katherine Chaddock Reynolds, Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). Martin Duberman’s and Mary Emma Harris’s books are good on this topic as well.

6 4. Anni Albers, ‘‘Work with Material,’’ Black Mountain College Bulletin, no. 5 (Novem-ber 1938), 3 [NC State Archives]. Reprinted in College Art Journal 3, no. 2 ( January 1944): 51--54.

7 5. From a selection of the literature from and on the College: ‘‘Black Mountain: An Experiment in Education’’; ‘‘Report from the Academy: The Experimental College’’; Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art; ‘‘Art as Experiment.’’ Louis Adamic’s essay ‘‘Black Mountain: An Experiment in Education’’ is from his book My America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 612--45. An earlier version of the essay was published in Harper’s as ‘‘Education on a Mountain: The Story of Black Mountain College’’ in April 1936, 516--30. College faculty member Eric Bentley’s article on the College, ‘‘Report from the Academy: The Experimental College,’’ is from Partisan Review 12, no. 3 (1945): 422--30. Vincent Katz’s exhibition catalog, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, was recently published (2003) by MIT Press. ‘‘Art as Experiment’’ is a chapter title from Harris’s Arts at Black Mountain College, 140.

8 6. As Zygmunt Bauman has written, words such as experiment may have denotative meanings, but ‘‘some words …also have a ‘feel.’ ’’ A feel-good word, in Bauman’s sense, partakes in a complex relation to desire and nostalgia, and evokes several meanings, ‘‘all of them promising pleasures, and more often than not the kinds of pleasures we would like to experience but seem to miss.’’ See Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 1. The often-invoked notion of experiment in today’s art world (and hardly a day goes by that it doesn’t grace a press release or a critical piece about contemporary art) is similarly subject to aspirations and retroactive appraisals stemming from its flurry of articulations in the pre- and immediate post--World War II period, and at Black Mountain specifically. Experiment embodies the longing for types of cultural and social production that are flexible and capable of change, that are responsive to the needs of individuals, including complex needs for cultural growth and social stability, and that satisfy ambitions for egalitarian interaction and artistic innovation.

9 7. For a further discussion, see my essay ‘‘Experiment, Expression, and the Paradox of Black Mountain College,’’ in the exhibition catalog Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College, 1933--1957, ed. Caroline Collier and Michael Harrison (Bristol, England: Arnolfini Gallery; Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Gallery, University of Cambridge, 2005): 39--61. 8. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 126.

10 9. Albers quoted in Eugene Gromringer, Josef Albers (New York: George Wittenborn, 1990), 171.

11 10. John Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music: Doctrine,’’ in Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 13.

12 11. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘I Figure’’ [1942], in The Buckminster Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books., 1972), 102.

13 12. Or what Fuller termed ‘‘experimentally unproveable myths.’’ Buckminster Fuller: An-thology for the New Millennium, ed. Thomas T. K. Zung (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 107, 120.

14 13. Technically the weaver Gunta Stölzl was the only female master appointed in the Bauhaus’s fourteen-year history, as her former student Anni Albers provisionally headed the workshop after Stölzl’s departure (the latter resigned when her interfaith marriage to a Jewish former Bauhaus student was protested by increasingly rabid anti-Semitic factions within and without the school).

15 14. Albers quoted himself saying this at his welcome ceremony at Black Mountain in Martin Duberman’s interview with Josef and Anni Albers on November 11, 1967, 13 (typescript) [NC State Archives].

16 15. Transcript of taped Josef Albers lecture (handwritten in Martin Duberman’s hand ‘‘At Yale; from Barry Cohen’’), n.d., probably late 1950s, 6 [NC State Archives]. 16. Albers stated that it was necessary to see ‘‘action as the aim of education.’’ ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ n.d., 10 [Yale Papers].

17 17. Albers, ‘‘Seeing Art,’’ n.d. [Yale Papers].

18 18. Dewey, a member of Black Mountain College’s advisory board, visited the College several times throughout the 1930s. After one of his visits, he wrote approvingly of the College, stating that it was ‘‘a living example of democracy in action,’’ and that ‘‘the College exists at the very ‘grass roots’ of a democratic way of life.’’ Letter from Dewey to Ted Dreier, dated July 18, 1940 [NC State Archives].

19 19. This is what Ray Johnson called, somewhat facetiously, a ‘‘galaxy of talent.’’ See John-son, ‘‘Norman Soloman’s Doberman Interviews Ray Johnson,’’ n.d. [ca. 1968] [NC State Archives]. Johnson’s often parodic text was sent to historian Martin Duberman in lieu of an interview when Duberman was conducting the research on Black Mountain College that resulted in his book Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community. 20. ‘‘Firsts’’ are always tricky historical constructions, however; as Cage himself de-murred when asked about the event, ‘‘Present histories for some reason give me credit for all sorts of things, and that of course could change in the future if someone creates another version.’’ Cage interviewed by Martin Duberman, April 26, 1969, 15 [NC State Archives]. My project in taking up how the chance-protocol experimental model cul-minated in the happening is not to perform the debunking Cage’s words invite. Geoffrey Hendricks, speaking from the later perspective of Fluxus and Happenings, terms Theater Piece No. 1 a ‘‘proto-happening.’’ See Hendricks, Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Per-

20 formance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University, 1958--1972 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2003), 129n23.

21 21. Cage interviewed by Duberman, 15.

22 22. Cage in Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 1987, 2003 [2nd ed.]), 231.

23 23. For more on this change, see RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001).

24 24. Fuller’s tactical failures were, generally, technical failures. Interestingly, his emphasis on strategy inverts the logic of Michel de Certeau’s now well-known ‘‘tactics’’ versus ‘‘strategies’’ formulation. As de Certeau writes of a strategy, ‘‘When a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’ . . . and thus serve as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clientèles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.’’ A tactic, on the other hand, ‘‘insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over entirely. …It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances.’’ To Fuller, in contrast, the fragmentary nature of tactical thinking was precisely the limitation of traditionally defined architecture, and artists pursuing larger strategic goals could help isolate a problem from its environment so it could be prototyped and tested. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1984), xix.

25 25. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work’’ [1955], in The Buckminster Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 56.

26 26. Fuller was vague on who would fill the ranks of comprehensive design. At one point, he understood the field as constituted by graduate students in universities. As he wrote of such students, ‘‘A science of comprehensive design can be developed through the initiative of those who are custodians of [the] cumulative intellectual and technical re-sources of man. These custodians are the universities. The task of developing graduate students in comprehensive design (as comprehenders of the principles permeating the plurality of sciences and arts and of the principles operative in the logistics of world resources processing) is superficially formidable, but clearly subject to solution.’’ Fuller, ‘‘Considerations for a Curriculum,’’ n.d., 3 (labeled ‘‘p. 16’’ in Fuller’s hand) [Fuller Papers].

27 27. Fuller often referred to ‘‘universal laws,’’ and in the late-career autobiographical book Guinea Pig B: The 56 Year Experiment (‘‘B’’ stands for Bucky) he summarized his many attempts to uncover them. See in particular the introduction to the volume, released by Critical Path, Clayton, California, 1983/2004. Fuller first coined the phrase ‘‘Space-ship Earth’’ in 1951, according to Claude Lichtenstein. See Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, eds., Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse (Baden, Switzer-land: Lars Muller, 2001), 279. The phrase later found its way onto the cover of Fuller’s book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963). 28. ‘‘Doing More with Less: Excerpts from an Interview with Buckminster Fuller,’’ 1978, 5 [Fuller Papers]. The identity of the interviewer is not mentioned in the typescript. 29. Fuller, ‘‘Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures,’’ in Structure in Art and in Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 66.

28 30. Fuller, ‘‘Bulletin of the Fuller Research Foundation: Exhibit 1—Airocean [sic] World Plan,’’ June 1955, 4 [Fuller Papers]. Fuller wrote that the march to what he

29 160 noTes To pages 7--9

30 termed ‘‘right-makes-right’’ is a ‘‘teleologic processing of experience-into-design,’’ that is to say, a process that proceeds toward an inevitable resolution; quoted in Buckmin-ster Fuller Reader (1970 ed.), 55.

31 31. Charles Olson as quoted by Jonathan Williams, in Duberman, Black Mountain, 406. 32. Olson, in ibid., 393.

32 33. Charles Olson’s ‘‘Projective Verse’’ as quoted in Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spon-taneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29.

33 34. The rooting first of Bauhaus and later of French modernist traditions in the United States is a central focus of this project, though such an emphasis must be seen contextu-ally with respect to the growing prominence of abstract expressionism at the College in the work of painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, as well as against the backdrop of a strong, US-based realist painting and muralist tradition important at Black Mountain in the 1930s and 1940s. In the latter case, painters such as Jean Charlot (a French-born, Mexico- and Colorado-based muralist who was formerly an assistant to Diego Rivera), Jean Varda (a Greek-born collagiste based in California), and New York--based realist painters such as Jacob Lawrence and Ben Shahn were in residence during this period, and the cofounder of the purist movement in France, painter Amédée Ozenfant, had embarked on an influential series of realist paintings about Black Mountain during his stay in 1944. Yet, as will be discussed in chapter 1, John Dewey’s ideas of experimentation as ‘‘learning by doing’’ sometimes traveled to Black Mountain by way of the Bauhaus, a seemingly improbable transatlantic move. Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Free Press, 1916), 184 [AMC06].

34 35. For further discussion of politically motivated schisms at the College, see Duberman’s Black Mountain College, particularly pp. 172--211 and 281--331. 36. In a series of late essays from the 1980s, Louis Althusser addressed criticisms that his concept of determination overemphasized the reproduction of existing structures of domination, thereby diminishing the role of human agency in effecting structural change. In his reassessment of this necessitarian logic, Althusser introduced the idea of a ‘‘fact of contingency.’’ Expanding on the concept, he maintained that in each event there are singular uncertain and unforeseeable elements that result in a ‘‘void essential to any aleatory encounter.’’ That is to say that the order of the world is fraught with radical instability; that though there is a fact of order, that order is provisional, and only from a medley of various contingent possibilities comes the necessity of any one particular order. It is therefore important to ‘‘think the openness of the world to the event, [to] the as-yet-unimaginable.’’ Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, Later Writings, 1978--1987 (London: Verso Press, 2006), 170, 202, and 264.

35

2  Chapter One

361. From a speech by Josef Albers, given at the first general meeting of Black Mountain College (at the beginning of the new college year), September 22, 1941, 5 [Albers Foundation]. The full statement is ‘‘Experimentation means learning by experience, the most lasting way of learning.’’

37 2. This phrase is a frequent refrain in the Albers literature. He quoted himself saying this upon arriving at the College in his and Anni Albers’s interview with Martin Duberman, November 11, 1967, 13 (typescript) [NC State Archives].

38 3. For a discussion of the centrality of vision in Bauhaus theory, see Foster, ‘‘Bauhaus Idea in America.’’

39 4. Albers stated it was necessary to see ‘‘action as the aim of education.’’ ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ n.d., 10 [Yale Papers].

40 5. Albers, Search Versus Re-Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 49. 6. Ibid., 4.

41 7. Albers, ‘‘Truthfulness in Art’’ (in Albers’s writing: ‘‘Talk given at Harvard Graduate School of Design about 37--38’’), 1 [Yale Papers].

42 8. Albers, untitled handwritten manuscript with the heading ‘‘September 11, 1948 BMC,’’ 6 [Albers Foundation].

43 9. M. Norton Wise, ‘‘Making Visible,’’ Isis 97 (2006): 75--82.

44 10. Molly Nesbit, ‘‘Readymade Originals: The Duchamp Model,’’ October 37 (Summer 1986): 59.

45 11. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

46 12. Albers, ‘‘Address for the Black Mountain College Meeting at New York,’’ June 12, 1940, 3 [Albers Foundation]. At Black Mountain, in contrast, Albers believed art educa-tion was ‘‘at the center of all activity.’’ However, this was an issue of contention within the faculty (art training vs. a liberal arts education), leading to a schism in 1948--49 and the eventual resignation of the Alberses in 1949. Quote is from Duberman’s interview with Josef and Anni Albers, 8. See note 14 below for discussion of the schism. 13. Albers, ‘‘Address for the Black Mountain College Meeting at New York,’’ 3. 14. College founders John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier quoted in Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 16. The Alberses’ departure from the College was due in large part to disputes about its mission as it pertained to the importance of art education, although a complicated set of factors reduceable to the College’s financial difficulties also contributed. The schism of 1948--49 that led to the Alberses’ final break with the College was aggravated by a move on the part of certain faculty members to shift focus away from art instruction. Social sciences faculty member Bill T. Levi (then married to the College English professor M. C. Richards) angered Albers by declaring, in Albers’s words, ‘‘Economics are more important than art.’’ But, as Anni Albers pointed out, she and Josef left ‘‘because …of constant tension and the constant lack of privacy and constant lack of money and the constant friction with every faculty member in having the same voice that you had …that you didn’t have enough stability to—the members who had built it up, that every new one could topple it over, like Mr. Levi’s coming proved.’’ The precarity of the Alberses’ financial situation was a decisive factor in the final break (they lacked guaranteed retirement funds at Black Mountain); Josef was six-ty-two during the final crisis, and he and Anni had more seniority than nearly any other faculty member. Both quotes are from his interview with Martin Duberman (with Anni present), 43, 47. Josef went on to teach at the University of Mexico (summer 1949), Pratt Institute (spring 1950), and Harvard University (summer 1950), and by the fall of 1950 his appointment was finalized as chairman of the reorganized Department of Design in the School of Fine Arts at Yale.

47 15. Albers, ‘‘Speech at Black Mountain College luncheon at the Faculty Club,’’ Cam-bridge, Mass., April 29, 1938, 2 [Albers Foundation].

48 16. Ibid.

49 17. Albers, ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ 2. This in no way implies that art is thoughtless or completely intuitive. As Albers stated, ‘‘I believe that thinking is necessary in art as everywhere else and that a clear head is never in the way of genuine feelings.’’ This is a form, one could argue, of John Dewey’s ‘‘thinking in situations.’’ Al-bers, one-page typed note dated ‘‘ca ’50’’ which begins ‘‘The ratio of effort to effect’’ [Yale Papers]. Or, put another way, for Albers, ‘‘Life, not school, is the goal,’’ and ‘‘the best proofs are the results in later life.’’ Albers, ‘‘Speech at Black Mountain College luncheon at the Faculty Club,’’ 1, and Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ Black Mountain College Bulletin 2 (1934): 7.

50 18. Speech by Josef Albers, given at the first general meeting of Black Mountain College, September 22, 1941, 2.

51 19. Gropius, lecture on August 28, 1944, at Black Mountain College [Albers Foundation]. 20. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 6.

52 21. Peter Galison, ‘‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,’’ Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990), 710.

53 22. Albers often taught the courses simultaneously, but generally Basic Drawing pre-ceded Color and Painting, and Basic Design was taught before his Structural Sculpture course; see the ‘‘Black Mountain College Tentative Program for 1949--1950’’ [Albers Foundation]. ‘‘Test of seeing’’ is from Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 4. 23. To Albers, ‘‘Our drawing is the study of objective representation.’’ ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 5.

54 24. Albers interviewed by Duberman, 22.

55 25. In a telegrammed response to a request by Alfred H. Barr Jr., Albers explained: ‘‘I use 3 terms structure facture texture to describe surface appearances of materials as follows: firstly structure concerns the inherent character of raw material[,] that is how it grew or was formed[,] like the grain of wood or fiber of thread or crystalline structure of marble …secondly we speak of facture if the appearance is dominated by the effect of working the material[,] for example hammered metal[,] twisted yarn[,] or combed hair show the effect of treatment of the empression [sic] of tool used . . . thirdly we speak of texture if similar elements are combined in a constructive organ[;] these elements may show both structure and facture for instance woven[,] braided[,] or knitted material and masonry.’’ Dated November 26, 1938 [Yale Papers].

56 26. An example of altering surface appearance was, according to Albers, ‘‘how can we make something [that] look[s] like bread …[from] stone.’’ Interview with Duberman, 63.

57 27. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 6.

58 28. Albers, ‘‘Truthfulness in Art,’’ 7.

59 29. Ibid.

60 30. Ibid.

61 31. Ibid., 8.

62 32. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 6.

63 33. Albers, ‘‘Report on a Course in Basic Drawing, Design and Color Given at the Hoch-schule für Gestaltung in Ulm,’’ US Specialist Report submitted to Office of the High Commission for Germany, January 20, 1954, 5--6 [Yale Papers].

64 34. A brief prehistory of the break is necessary in order to understand its importance in Albers’s subsequent understandings of expressionism and subjectivity. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, under Walter Gropius’s vision of ‘‘a univer-sally great, enduring, spiritual-religious idea’’ of a Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘‘cathedral of the future.’’ Beginning in 1922, however, Gropius began to shift the school’s mission

65 noTes To pages 20--24 163

66 from its original articulation to the model of design production. The engineer was the preferred type, and work ‘‘led more and more to the production of single prototypes (which will serve as guides to the craftsman and industry).’’ Gropius criticized the ‘‘wild romanticism’’ of ‘‘individualized’’ expressionism, which many felt was a pointed attack on Johannes Itten. Itten, feeling the threat, departed with several students, and in 1923 Albers and László Moholy-Nagy replaced Itten as instructors of the Preliminary Course. (Albers taught part of the then one-semester-long course from 1923 to 1925. In 1925, he taught the entire first semester of the two-semester course [Moholy-Nagy was respon-sible for the second semester]. From 1928 to 1933, Albers taught both semesters alone.) Gropius, quoted in Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1991), 36, 74--75.

67 35. Comments by the artist taken from the press release of Sidney Janis Gallery’s Jan-uary 7--26, 1952, exhibition, ‘‘New Work by Josef Albers—‘Homage to the Square’ and ‘Transformation of a Scheme’ ’’ [Yale Papers].

68 36. Ibid.

69 37. Ibid.

70 38. All quotes John Locke, ‘‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,’’ in The Em-piricists: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, comp. Jean Austin (New York: Anchor Press, 1974), 32--33.

71 39. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 321.

72 40. Ibid., 317.

73 41. As James M. Curtis has argued, Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of habituation in art is most certainly indebted to Henri Bergson. See Curtis, ‘‘Bergson and Russian Formalism,’’

74 Comparative Literature 28, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 109--21.

75 42. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘‘Art as Technique,’’ in Art in Theory 1900--2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 279--80. 43. Ibid., 280.

76 44. Albers, draft poem, n.d.; begins ‘‘Every perceivable thing has form,’’ 1 [Yale Papers]. 45. The possibility for change was the necessary precondition in Albers’s understanding of design. If, as he wrote, ‘‘Life is continuous change,’’ therefore potentials exist for a better articulation. Albers, ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ 1. 46. As mentioned, for example, in student Harry Seidler’s notes from the color and design courses, dated Summer 1946, 8 [Albers Foundation].

77 47. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 2.

78 48. Albers’s language of form derives from the complex notion of ‘‘gestalt’’ in German. As Albers stated, ‘‘In Gestalt psychology the value of a form element is understandable only in relationship to the whole. …From the name Gestalt derives the verb ‘gestalten.’ ’’ Albers, draft poem, 4.

79 49. Ibid., 1.

80 50. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 2.

81 51. Albers, ‘‘Address by Josef Albers given at the Black Mountain College Meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 9, 1940,’’ 3 [Albers Foundation]. 52. As Albers stated, ‘‘No educator has the right to demand from others what he is not able or willing to do himself …education is first self-education.’’ Ibid. 53. Albers, ‘‘Speech given at the first general meeting of Black Mountain College in the beginning of the 7th College year,’’ September 12, 1939, 3 [Albers Foundation]. Albers,

82 164 noTes To pages 24--28

83 like Dewey, wanted to diminish arbitrary hierarchies, but not to destroy them in an anarchical flourish. As he wrote, he was opposed to the ‘‘undecided laissez-faire of many so-called progressive schools.’’ Speech by Josef Albers, Black Mountain College meeting at Mr. and Mrs. Wiener’s, New York, n.d. (probably 1941), 4 [Albers Foundation]. 54. Albers, ‘‘Address for the Black Mountain College Meeting at New York,’’ June 12, 1940, 4 [Albers Foundation].

84 55. Albers interviewed by Martin Duberman, 34.

85 56. Ibid., 49.

86 57. Albers continues: ‘‘I have always said in my saying or teaching, ‘Make the result of teaching a feeling of growing.’ That is the greatest incentive to continue developing your-self. The feeling of growing. And today a little bit more than it was yesterday. And a little bit more than it was last year. You see? That you feel, I’m getting wider and deeper and fuller.’’ Ibid., 57. To progressive educator Dewey, growth, too, was a central concept. As he stated, ‘‘The educative process can be identified with growth when that is understood in terms of the active participle, growing.’’ John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster, 1938/1997), 36.

87 58. Ilya Bolotowsky’s course listing for painting, Fall Semester 1947--48, Black Mountain College, 1 [NC State Archives].

88 59. Ilya Bolotowsky and Henry Geldzahler, ‘‘Adventures with Bolotowsky,’’ Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1982): 23--24.

89 60. Albers, ‘‘Truthfulness in Art.’’

90 61. Bauhaus student Hannes Beckmann quoting Albers in Frank Whitford, ed., The Bau-haus: Masters and Students by Themselves (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993), 224. 62. Albers, ‘‘Truthfulness in Art,’’ 1.

91 63. From student Harry Seidler’s notes on Albers’s Basic Design course, 24. 64. Student Hannes Beckmann quoted in Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000), 181.

92 65. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 2.

93 66. Ibid., 3.

94 67. Albers, untitled list of work titles and descriptions, dated ‘‘ca. 50’’ (in Albers’s hand: ‘‘Compiled for Leslie Cheek, Richmond, Va.’’), 7 [Yale Papers].

95 68. Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 20.

96 69. Ibid., 21.

97 70. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), xxi, writ-ing on P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 71. Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 21. Earlier, Albers had proposed ‘‘presentative art’’ as opposed to ‘‘non-representational’’ or ‘‘abstract’’ art, arguing that his art fostered ‘‘an immediate perception of all cognitive realities …meaning directly apprehending or apprehended by the mind.’’ Albers, ‘‘Abstract—Presentational,’’ in American Abstract Artists (New York: Ram Press, 1946), 2 [Yale Papers].

98 72. Albers, untitled list of work titles and descriptions. Second quote is from Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 21.

99 73. Albers, ‘‘Abstract Art,’’ speech made in Asheville, NC, 1935, 4 [Yale Papers]. 74. Albers, Interaction of Color [1963] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 74. 75. Albers interview with Duberman, 26. He continues, ‘‘So that form, whether we call it a line or a surface or a color, demands endless performances, endless. Using

100 noTes To pages 28--36 165

101 it again and again and again, so now I therefore make a thousand squares. You see? There is no end. I do not mean the square, I mean the color that is served in that dish—square.’’

102 76. Albers, ‘‘On my work,’’ n.d., single page (probably 1940s), begins ‘‘When I paint and construct . . .’’ [Yale Papers].

103 77. Albers, Interaction of Color, 69.

104 78. Ibid., 71.

105 79. Albers, ‘‘Statements,’’ in Albers at the Cincinnati Art Museum, an exhibition catalog (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1949), 2 [Yale Papers].

106 80. It is difficult to attribute exact dates to the Variants series. This Variant is reproduced from a 2003 PaceWildenstein catalog and is dated 1947--55, and for consistency’s sake I have preserved the broad date range. Yet Albers was showing Homage to the Square, as well as working on his Structural Constellations series, by 1952. A better attribution for the Variants series is 1947--50.

107 81. Svetlana Alpers, ‘‘The Studio, the Laboratory, and the Vexations of Art,’’ in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 409.

108 82. Albers, draft poem, 4. See also note 48 above.

109 83. Reinhold Martin, in a parallel study of Albers’s contemporary Gyorgy Kepes, has argued that positioning form as a process emphasizes the high stakes of organizing the visual field: Martin claims that Kepes, like Marshall McLuhan, believed that the ‘‘image is not the carrier of a message; it is the message.’’ Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 62. See my discussion of Kepes in chapter 3, section 2 of this book.

110 84. Donald Judd, ‘‘Josef Albers,’’ in the exhibition catalog Josef Albers (Marfa, TX: Chi-nati Foundation, 1991). Essay is reproduced in Chinati Foundation Newsletter 11 (2006): 60--69, quotation is from p. 69.

111 85. Galison, ‘‘Aufbau/Bauhaus,’’ 713.

112 86. Rudolf Carnap, annotations to Bertrand Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World as Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 1914), 97; quot-ed in Galison, ‘‘Aufbau/Bauhaus,’’ 733.

113 87. In their modularity, Albers’s language forms differed from his Bauhaus colleague Herbert Bayer’s ‘‘universal’’ typography, in which Bayer designed a lowercase font based on circles and right angles. See Ellen Lupton, ‘‘Herbert Bayer: Designs for ‘Universal’ Lettering, 1925 and 1927,’’ in Bauhaus 1919--1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 200--203. 88. For one example among many, in his 1961 essay ‘‘Modernist Painting,’’ Greenberg argued for a strictly optical/visual reception of painting: ‘‘That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to any-thing given in any other order of experience, is a notion whose only justification lies in scientific consistency’’; Greenberg, ‘‘Modernist Painting’’ [1961], in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4:91. As Caroline Jones has argued, ‘‘Purity, abstraction and the exclusion of unnecessary illusions’’ were the defining characteristics of Greenberg’s formulation of modernism. See Caroline A Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), in particular chapter 4, which focuses on Georgia O’Keefe and Hans Hofmann. 89. Albers, ‘‘Art as Experience,’’ Progressive Education, October 1935, first page.

114 166 noTes To pages 36--41

115 90. Ibid., second page.

116 91. Albers, ‘‘Address by Josef Albers given at the Black Mountain College Meeting at the Museum of Modern Art,’’ 2.

117 92. Albers, ‘‘Speech at Black Mountain College luncheon, Cosmopolitan Club, New York City,’’ December 9, 1938, 6 [Albers Foundation].

118 93. Ibid., 5.

119 94. Albers, untitled handwritten manuscript with the heading ‘‘September 11, 1948 BMC,’’ 4.

120 95. Albers, ‘‘The Educational Value of Manual Work and Handicraft in Relation to Ar-chitecture,’’ in New Architecture and City Planning, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philo-sophical Society, n.d. [probably 1944]), 690.

121 96. Quoted from an untitled fragment that begins, ‘‘To me (so far) art is to present,’’ n.d. [Yale Papers].

122 97. As Albers defined visual articulation, ‘‘To direct eyes in observation—know what you are seeing and know why you are seeing it.’’ Interview with Duberman, 19. In the schema of observation informing articulation, articulation is both directed and purposeful: ‘‘I see that art essentially is purpose and seeing.’’ Albers, ‘‘On my work,’’ n.d. 98. Albers, ‘‘The Meaning of Art,’’ lecture delivered at Black Mountain College, May 6, 1940, 1 [NC State Archives].

123 99. Preceding two quotes are from the speech by Josef Albers, given at the first general meeting of Black Mountain College, September 22, 1941, 4--5.

124 100. Albers, ‘‘Art as Experience,’’ second page. Again, he linked the organization of society through education to well-ordered art: ‘‘Education just as art means order and therefore is [an] opposition to chaos. So against mess and dirt as well as against confu-sion.’’ Albers, untitled handwritten manuscript dated September 11, 1948, 6. 101. Transcript of taped Josef Albers lecture (handwritten in Duberman’s hand ‘‘At Yale; from Barry Cohen’’), n.d., probably late 1950s, 1 [NC State Archives]. 102. ‘‘In Gestalt psychology the value of a form element is understandable only in rela-tion to the whole.’’ Albers, draft poem, 4.

125 103. Transcript of taped Albers lecture, 5.

126 104. Albers, ‘‘Statements,’’ 1.

127 105. Ibid.

128 106. Transcript of taped Albers lecture, 3--6.

129 107. Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 20.

130 108. Albers, ‘‘Statements,’’ 1.

131 109. Albers, untitled typewritten note dated January 1949, 2 [Yale Papers]. 110. Albers, ‘‘Statements,’’ 1.

132 111. Albers in Eugene Gromringer, Josef Albers (New York: George Wittenborn, 1990), 171.

133 112. From student Harry Seidler’s notes on Albers’s Basic Design course, 5. 113. Albers quoted in Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, 182. Emphasis in original. 114. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 37.

134 115. Ibid.

135 116. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Perennial Fashion—Jazz,’’ in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 123.

136 117. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 37.

137 118. Ibid., 37--38, 24.

138 noTes To pages 42--45 167

139 119. Albers interview with Martin Duberman, 71.

140 120. Though an excellent and superbly written compendium about Albers’s teaching, the publication by Frederick Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006), does not explore this central feature of his pedagogy. 121. Speech by Josef Albers, meeting at Mr. and Mrs. Wiener’s, New York, 2. 122. The reform movement had a two-pronged agenda, although strictly speaking it never was cohesive. On the one hand, of crucial importance were the attainment of uni-versal primary school education and the extension of mass education to higher grades. In particular, Georg Kerschensteiner’s transatlantic dialogue with John Dewey and the notion of primary education as a work school were immensely important. On the other hand, of key influence was the establishment of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907, an industrial design movement that attempted to accommodate the changes on handicraft wrought by the advent of industrial production. Walter Gropius was associated with the Werkbund in the mid-1910s (his mentor Peter Behrens was a founding member). The precursor to the Bauhaus, the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, was established by another Werkbund affiliate, Henry van de Velde. For more on the reform movement, see Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). For a study of the Werkbund’s influence on the Bauhaus, see Forgács, Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics. 123. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 294; a discussion of ‘‘learning by doing’’ can be found on page 184.

141 124. Albers, ‘‘Historical or Contemporary’’ (1924), quoted in Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, 173.

142 125. Ibid.

143 126. Ibid., 174.

144 127. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ [1940], in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.

145 128. Albers, ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ 2. 129. Ibid.

146 130. Though Albers counterposed the tendency of most education to concentrate on the past to progressive education’s emphasis on changing the present for the sake of the future, he understood that any notion of a better future is dialectically informed by past experience and historical understanding. As he stated in 1941, ‘‘In education, any sensible historical contemplation is related to the future.’’ Speech by Josef Albers, given at the first general meeting of Black Mountain College, September 22, 1941, 2. Yet he qualified this, noting that the goal was to produce a student ‘‘who knows that the present is only partly a result of the past.’’ Albers, ‘‘Speech at Black Mountain College luncheon at the Faculty Club,’’ 6.

147 131. Albers continued, ‘‘Contemporary art, today as yesterday and ever before, con-fronts us with a continual struggle for articulation of our sensations and emotions; in other words, it demands visual demonstrations of our changing ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling.’ ’’ Albers, ‘‘Tradition and Experiment in Contemporary Art,’’ 4. In an interview with George Heard Hamilton in 1957, Albers explained that ‘‘art exists because there is something which cannot be said in words.’’ ‘‘The Teaching of Art II, Training in Visual Experience,’’ broadcast on radio program Yale Reports no. 54, Sunday, January 20, 1957, transcript p. 3 [Yale Papers].

148 132. See note 18 of the introduction for more information about Dewey’s involvement at the College.

149 168 noTes To pages 45--47

150 133. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 276.

151 134. Raymond Williams, ‘‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,’’ in Prob-lems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso Press, 1974), 39. 135. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘Cultural Reproduction as Social Reproduction,’’ in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1977), 487.

152 136. Ibid., 494.

153 137. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural transmission rarely addresses the conditions of pro-gressive education, concentrating instead on structured inequalities that reinforce exist-ing class positions, generally due to the uneven coverage and outcomes of mass public versus exclusive private education. In fact, Bourdieu’s notion of ‘‘the educational system’’ tendsto elide education writ large with ‘‘dominant culture transmission.’’ 138. Albers advocated for weakened divisions among disciplines and between art and craft, but not for eliminating them entirely. To him, the unity of purpose of all knowl-edge—observation in the interest of rearticulation—diminished distinctions between fine and applied arts, and between all fields of creative practice. Such a unity would occur in an educational environment in which art, that is to say active doing, was central and exchange between disciplines was encouraged: ‘‘A nearer connection, or better, an interpenetration, of all the art disciplines and artistic purposes in school life …showed that their problems are very much the same.’’ The similar function of education in each discipline engendered close studies of form and created artists who have ‘‘the task of selecting the forms and of showing them in their highest quality, their greatest inten-sity.’’ Albers noted that though a general training in vision was beneficial for everyone, in any given cohort ‘‘only two or three of these [students] want[ed] to become practicing artists.’’ He also stated, ‘‘My greatest pride is that my students are not Albers.’’ Quotes, in order, are from Albers, ‘‘Art as Experience,’’ second page; Albers, ‘‘A Note on the Arts in Education,’’ American Magazine of Art 29, no. 4 (April 1936): 233; Albers, ‘‘Speech at Black Mountain College luncheon at the Faculty Club,’’ 3; and interview with Martin Duberman, 66.

154 139. Dewey, Experience and Education, 23.

155 140. Albers, ‘‘Address for the Black Mountain College Meeting at New York,’’ June 12, 1940, 1.

156 141. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso Press, 1993), 69. 142. Albers, untitled handwritten manuscript with the heading ‘‘September 11, 1948 BMC,’’ 5.

157 143. Ibid.

158 144. Albers, draft poem, 1.

159 145. Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers’’ [1949], in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:286. 146. Robert Rauschenberg quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 199. 147. In the same interview, Anni Albers continued: ‘‘We were at a party …and Rau- schenberg was there and he came to me when we were leaving and maybe he had several drinks or something, but anyway he came and said, ‘Tell Albers that I love him and I still think he’s the greatest teacher.’ And I said, ‘You know it doesn’t help if a wife tells him, write him a note,’ but he never did.’’ Albers (with Anni Albers) interview with Duberman, 62--63.

160 noTes To pages 47--51 169

161 148. Albers, Interaction of Color, 70.

162 149. Albers, ‘‘Seeing Art,’’ n.d. [Yale Papers].

163 150. Please see my essay, ‘‘Experiment, Expression, and the Paradox of Black Mountain College.’’

164 151. Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music,’’ 13.

165

3  Chapter Two

1661. Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music,’’ 12.

167 2. The faculty of the 1946 Summer Art Institute joining Anni and Josef Albers included painters Jacob Lawrence and Jean Varda, sculptor Leo Amino, architect Bertrand Gold-berg, formerly of the Bauhaus (invited to teach when Walter Griopius could only visit that summer for a lecture), and photography historian Beaumont Newhall, recently of the Museum of Modern Art. As an addition to a film series Albers organized that summer with Newhall, filmmaker Maya Deren was asked to teach for the summer, though she could not attend. Students present that summer who would go on to future art careers included Ruth Asawa, Joseph Fiore, and Ray Johnson. The April 1946 issue of Design magazine was devoted to Black Mountain College and greatly increased interest in and enrollment at the College, particularly for the Summer Art Institute—over sixty students enrolled in it that year.

168 3. Elaine de Kooning, ‘‘De Kooning Memories: Starting Out in the 1940s,’’ in Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds; An Anthology of Personal Accounts, ed. Mervin Lane (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 251--52. Originally published in Vogue, December 1983.

169 4. It would be interesting to trace the development of artistic ‘‘freedom’’ as a form of lib-ertarian anarchism in Ab Ex, developing as it did out of a particular and quixotic reading of surrealist painting in the 1940s, and sharing some of that movement’s Dada-inspired radical attack on the institution of art and its institutions of pedagogy. Please see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Contrast de Kooning’s antipathy to school to Albers’s appeal as a teacher to a later generation; for example, Donald Judd’s reconsideration of the centrality of art pedagogy and Albers’s model in particular: ‘‘I underestimated the usefulness for others, not [of ] Albers, [but] of his color theory. First, something that might be useful and relevant must be taught, which is certainly the color theory. Second, real thought about recent and past art is always relevant. Third, mainly, since attitudes and generalizations are part of the nature and the level of quality of art, it’s absolutely necessary that beginning artists, who are not really students, be taught by first-rate artists, who like what they do and like their activity as a whole and assume that art is meant to be first-rate. The students of Albers were smart to have chosen him and lucky he was there.’’ Judd, ‘‘Josef Albers,’’ 11. 5. Mary Emma Harris, interview with Clement Greenberg, quoted in her book Arts at Black Mountain College, 214.

170 6. Please see Howard Singerman’s discussion of abstract expressionism, education, and self-expression in Art Subjects, 149--54. In particular, Singerman argues that Ab Ex was preeminently concerned with talking about art—‘‘a university style’’—as opposed to formal or technical studies like those undertaken in an art school such as Black Moun-tain College. Interestingly, the model of the informal artist’s group was not subject to

171 170 noTes To pages 52--56

172 such criticisms, and many Ab Ex artists, including de Kooning, were associated with the Artists’ Club, founded in 1949. For examples of recent debates on the topic of ped-agogy versus practice, see Singerman’s ‘‘A History of the Whitney Independent Study Program—In Theory and Practice,’’ Artforum 42, no. 6 (February 2004): 112--17, 170--71. 7. Cage saw his work at the time—his Sonatas and Interludes composed from February 1946 to March 1948—as characterized by a ‘‘marriage of form and content. …Those were my views at the time that I went to Black Mountain. And they were fairly Germanic. …And this kind of thinking was just perfect from Albers’s point of view.’’ Cage, quoted in Martin Duberman, ‘‘Phone Interview with John Cage,’’ April 26, 1969, 5--6 [NC State Archives].

173 8. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 231.

174 9. For more on Bauhaus theater’s current of interdisciplinarity, see Juliet Koss’s ‘‘Bau-haus Theater of Human Dolls,’’ Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 724--45. See also Susanne Lahusen, ‘‘Oskar Schlemmer: Mechanical Ballets?’’ Dance Research 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1986): 65--77.

175 10. Interestingly, Brecht’s concept of Verfremdungseffekt is a translation of Viktor Shk-lovsky’s ostranerie, ‘‘estrangement’’ or ‘‘defamiliarization.’’ For a discussion of Shklovsky’s concept with respect to Josef Albers, see chapter 1 of this book. For more information on Verfremdungseffekt, see Eric Bentley’s translation of Brecht’s ‘‘The Alienation Effect’’ in Theater Arts 33, no. 1 ( January 1949): 38--40. For a discussion of the reception of Brecht in the United States, please see Philip Glahn, ‘‘Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and American Art, 1967--79’’ (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2007), and his article ‘‘The ‘Brecht Effect’: Politics and American Postwar Art,’’ Afterimage 24, no. 3 (November--December 2006): 29--32.

176 11. One could say that Bauhaus theater found its greatest public expression in the band New Order’s True Faith music video (1987), produced by French choreographer Philippe Decouflé, which was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Marianne Hasting restaged Triadic Ballet in 1970, and Debra McCall began recreating Schlemmer’s dances, including Triadic Ballet, in the early 1980s. See McCall’s essay ‘‘Reconstructing Schlem-mer’s Bauhaus Dances: A Personal Narrative,’’ in Oskar Schlemmer (Baltimore: Balti-more Museum of Art, 1986), 150. Sound artist Laurie Anderson also credited Schlemmer as an influence (she’d seen restagings of his work in 1984). As she said in an interview, ‘‘Steve Martin once said, ‘Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’ But you can do that. Recently, I saw an Oskar Schlemmer revival of some Bauhaus dance work, and you actually can dance about architecture—volume, space, and construction.’’ From ‘‘Laurie Anderson Interview with Charles Amirkhanian’’ [1984], in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 420.

177 12. See Branden Joseph’s article ‘‘White on White,’’ Critical Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 90--121, for an argument about Cage’s relationship to Henri Bergson. Joseph notes that Cage’s fluency in reading French connected him to many primary sources of the French prewar avant-garde.

178 13. In 1947, Cage named one of his compositions ‘‘Music for Marcel Duchamp.’’ 14. Cage, ‘‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,’’ in Silence, 100. 15. Ibid., 106.

179 16. Ibid., 100.

180 17. Though Cage studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles in the 1930s for two years, he developed a lifelong antipathy to the Germanic musical legacy Schoenberg’s

181 noTes To pages 56--61 171

182 work represented. For example, when Schoenberg criticized Cage’s lack of feeling for harmony, he replied, ‘‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’’ Cage, ‘‘Indeterminacy,’’ in Silence, 261.

183 18. Cage quoted by Duberman in his book Black Mountain College, 288. According to Du-berman, ‘‘Cage can’t recall if BMC ever replied to his letters, but ‘if they did, it was neg-ative.’ ’’ Ibid., 512n18. Cage had been working for years to establish such a music center. When he met László Moholy-Nagy while working as Merce Cunningham’s accompanist at Mills College in Oakland, Moholy-Nagy was enthusiastic about bringing the center to the interdisciplinary Institute of Design he had founded in Chicago (known as ID, and later the New Bauhaus), and in 1941--42 he invited Cage to teach there. Unfortunately, ID had little money and few assets. Cage later reflected on the disappointing experience: ‘‘I spent two years trying to establish a Center for Experimental Music, in a college or university or with corporate sponsorship. Though I found interest in my work I found no one willing to support it financially.’’ See ‘‘Oral History with John Cage,’’ May 2, 1974; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-john-cage-12442. 19. Cage, interview with Duberman, 10. Cage had taught music performance at various schools, including Mills College and the Institute of Design in Chicago. His attempt to teach a course titled ‘‘Sound Experiments’’ at ID in 1941--42 was aborted when he realized that all classes were being held in a common room.

184 20. As Cage recalled, ‘‘The school was largely German-minded. So the fact that I was …devoting the whole summer not to modern music in general but to Erik Satie in particular, was somewhat irritating. And Albers, in order to lessen the irritation, and to make the thing seem reasonable, required me to give talks before each concert. …These went fairly well until the central point, in the middle of the Summer Session, where I—to express the views of Satie (which were anti-Beethoven)—gave a talk, a rather long talk relative to the other talks, in which I denounced Beethoven. …This lecture produced a kind of—it was like a bomb falling in the place.’’ Cage, interview with Duberman, 3--4. 21. Willem de Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield et al., De Kooning: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 61.

185 22. Erik Satie, The Ruse of Medusa, translated as Medusa’s Snare, in A Mammal’s Note-book: Collected Writings of Erik Satie, ed. Ornella Volta (London: Atlas Press, 1996), 77. 23. Ibid., 75--76.

186 24. Cage, ‘‘Erik Satie,’’ in Silence, 79.

187 25. Ibid., 78.

188 26. Ibid., 82.

189 27. Ibid., 79, 76.

190 28. Ibid., 81.

191 29. Despite its relative simplicity, Vexations was notated in unusual enharmonic spell-ings—when notes, intervals, or keys are designated by different letter names in spite of their similar pitches—that are difficult to read immediately. Cage organized a perfor-mance of Vexations at the Pocket Theater in Manhattan on September 9, 1963, that lasted over eighteen hours.

192 30. Cage, ‘‘Erik Satie,’’ in Silence, 82.

193 31. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘‘Man and Art Figure,’’ in The Theater of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 18.

194 32. This dance was also known as ‘‘Man and Mask.’’ Quote is from Oskar Schlemmer,

195 172 noTes To pages 61--67

196 ‘‘Abstraction in Dance and Costume’’ [1928], in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, by Hans Wingler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 472. 33. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘‘Stage’’ [1927], in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 474. 34. Schlemmer, ‘‘Man and Art Figure,’’ 17.

197 35. Ibid., 21.

198 36. Under director Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus, Xanti Schawinsky had actually led the Stage Design course in 1928, taking over from Schlemmer, who eventually left in 1929. Schlemmer had insisted on remaining in Germany under conditions of increasing deprivation until his death in 1943. In 1933, the Nazis dismissed him from his position at the Vereinigte Staatschulen in Berlin, and in 1937 his work was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.

199 37. Among Schawinsky’s other pursuits: he developed an architectural practice, col-laborating on projects with Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and later turned to painting. 38. Margret Kentgens-Craig points out that Hans Dreier, the head of Paramount Pic-tures’ art department in Hollywood, was influenced by Bauhaus ideas, though he was never a student of Schlemmer’s. See her book Bauhaus and America, 46. Though he was known mainly for his photography, some of Lux Feininger’s visual record of his studies with Schlemmer traveled with him to the United States when he emigrated in 1936, though many of his negatives remained in Germany, where they subsequently disappeared.

200 Schawinsky’s publications on Black Mountain include ‘‘Spectodrama: Contemporary Studies,’’ Leonardo 2, no. 3 ( July 1969): 283--86; ‘‘From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain,’’ Drama Review: TDR 15, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 30--44; and ‘‘My 2 Years at Black Mountain College, N.C.,’’ 1973 [North Carolina Museum of Art, BMC Research Project, NC State Archives].

201 39. Schawinsky, ‘‘Spectodrama: Contemporary Studies,’’ 286.

202 40. Ibid., 283.

203 41. László Moholy-Nagy, ‘‘Theater, Circus, Variety,’’ in Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnar, Theater of the Bauhaus, 60.

204 42. L. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculp-ture, and Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1938/2005), 13, 18. 43. Ibid., 138.

205 44. L. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925); English translation in Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917--1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 140. 45. L. Moholy-Nagy, ‘‘The Coming Theater—the Total Theater,’’ in Wingler, The Bau-haus, 132.

206 46. Ibid.

207 47. Schlemmer, ‘‘Abstraction in Dance and Costume,’’ 472, and L. Moholy-Nagy, ‘‘The Coming Theater—the Total Theater,’’ 132.

208 48. Walter Gropius, introduction to Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnar, Theater of the Bauhaus, 10.

209 49. Construction of the theater was undertaken in Berlin in 1926 but abandoned when the Nazis assumed power.

210 50. Gropius, introduction to Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnar, Theater of the Bauhaus, 12.

211 51. Ibid.

212 52. Ibid.

213 noTes To pages 67--72 173

214 53. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘‘Theater,’’ in Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnar, Theater of the Bauhaus, 95.

215 54. Ibid., 92, and Schlemmer, ‘‘Man and Art Figure,’’ 32.

216 55. Schlemmer, ‘‘Theater,’’ 82, 85.

217 56. Schawinsky, ‘‘From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain,’’ 44.

218 57. Schawinsky, ‘‘My 2 Years,’’ 7.

219 58. Ibid.

220 59. Xanti Schawinsky in Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 40. 60. Xanti Schawinsky, Description of Stage Studies Class, 1936--37 Course Catalogue, Black Mountain College [NC State Archives].

221 61. Schawinsky, ‘‘My 2 Years,’’ 4.

222 62. Schlemmer, ‘‘Theater,’’ 82, 94.

223 63. This implies no judgment about whether these concerns should be part of visual art, and I do not mean to say that Albers would have argued a kind of medium specificity designating these concerns as beyond art and instead properly theatrical. Nor does it mean that Cage was innovative strictly because he was attempting to blur the distinc-tions between vision, experience, and motion.

224 64. Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook, 79.

225 65. Ibid., 191.

226 66. Sandra Skurvida, e-mail exchange with the author, August 20, 2008. 67. Liz Kotz, ‘‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score,’’ October 95 (Winter 2001): 57.

227 68. Elaine de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller credited Arthur Penn, the student-di-rector of The Ruse of Medusa production, for loosening them up as performers. Fuller noted that Penn’s direction helped him develop as a public speaker. Fuller interviewed by Mary Emma Harris, October 3, 1971, 3 [NC State Archives].

228 69. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘‘An Interview with John Cage,’’ in Happen-ings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sandford (New York: Routledge, 1995), 56. 70. Cage quoted in Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 146.

229 71. Ibid.

230 72. Anarchy to Cage was envisioned as a social, not a political, program. As he wrote, ‘‘The chance operations of the I Ching …permitted the writing of a music which was not based on harmony, but it permitted harmonies to enter into such a nonharmonic music. How could you express that in political terms? It would permit that attitude expressed socially. It would permit institutions or organizations, groups of people, to join together in a world that was not nationally divided.’’ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 91.

231 73. Albers, ‘‘Statements,’’ in Albers at the Cincinnati Art Museum, an exhibition catalog (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1949), 1 [Yale Papers]. As Cage summarized, ‘‘Art in my opinion is not self-expression’’; quoted in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 284. 74. Cage, interview with Martin Duberman, 5.

232 75. Ibid., 6. Prior to the break in 1952, Cage explained, ‘‘Albers I think was responsive to my views. He was an amazing man. Because he combined the strictness of German thinking …and the ability to inspire people with the possibility of their own individual freedom.’’ Ibid., 4.

233 76. Pete Jennerjahn quoted in V. Katz and Brody, eds., Black Mountain College, 187. 77. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 17. See also Steve Marshall’s article, ‘‘John Cage’s

234 174 noTes To pages 72--79

235 I Ching Chance Operations: The Visual Art of John Cage,’’ n.d. www.biroco.com/yijing/ cage.htm (accessed September 12, 2013).

236 78. John Cage, ‘‘An Autobiographical Statement’’ [1990], Southwest Review 76 (Winter 1991): 59--76. Available on johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html (accessed September 30, 2013).

237 79. Cage, Duberman interview, 15.

238 80. M. C. Richards quoted in William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theater Pieces (New York: Routledge, 1996), 101.

239 81. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 109.

240 82. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 96, 125.

241 83. In an interview with Martin Duberman, David Weinrib said that Tudor played Water Music, though other accounts have him playing a prepared piano composition by Cage. See Duberman, Black Mountain College, 374. In his book John Cage’s Theater Pieces, William Fetterman writes that ‘‘David Tudor vaguely recalls playing Water Music in the untitled event’’ (97).

242 84. Francine du Plessix Gray (quoting Wolpe), David Weinrib, and Katherine Litz are quoted in Duberman, Black Mountain College, 373--76. ‘‘Quite boring’’ is composer Lou Harrison quoted in Fetterman, John Cage’s Theater Pieces, 104.

243 85. Cunningham quoted in Duberman, Black Mountain College, 377. 86. Because of disparate and contested accounts of the event, it is difficult to ascertain exactly to whom Cage gave this script. Both Cernovich and Rauschenberg later worked for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in whose archives this existing fragment was found. Cage, script for Theater Piece No. 1 (1952), provided to the author by David Vaughan [Merce Cunningham Archives].

244 87. The show was an American comedy game show called I’ve Got a Secret. 88. Slapping and knocking over the radios were last-minute adaptations when CBS union rules prevented the radios from being plugged into the wall. 89. All quotes are from the score for Water Walk (London: Edition Peters, 1959). 90. Fontana Mix score (London: Edition Peters, 1958).

245 91. Cage later (erroneously) claimed that ‘‘Water Music comes from 1952 …the same year as the Black Mountain show—and was my immediate reaction to that event.’’ Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 113.

246 92. Ibid.

247 93. The issue of a performer’s seriousness was a major one for Cage; he hated when performers hammed during his works.

248 94. 4′33″ premiered in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, at the aptly named Maverick Music Hall as a Benefit Artists’ Welfare Fund event. See Larry J. Solomon’s essay ‘‘The Sounds of Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ ’’ (1998) for a detailed history and analysis of Cage’s influences in composing this work; it is available at http://solomonsmusic. net/4min33se.htm.

249 95. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 14.

250 96. Ibid.

251 97. Ibid.

252 98. Cage, Silence, 8.

253 99. Ibid.

254 100. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 244--45. Emphasis in original.

255 noTes To pages 79--88 175

256 101. Ibid., 14. Cage was initially exposed to Buddhism in the 1930s after attending a lec-ture on Zen and Dada at the Cornish School in Seattle; it was given by Nancy Wilson Ross, a Bauhaus alumna and Buddhist scholar. He attributed his sharpening interest in Eastern philosophy during the 1940s as the pursuit of an alternative to psychoanalysis following his separation from his wife Xenia.

257 102. Suzuki was an early translator of the I Ching into English and a key popularizer of the texts and theologies of various Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic sects; his teachings introduced Cage to mystics such as the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart. Both Su-zuki and Eckhart would prove to be lifelong points of reference in Cage’s speeches and writings.

258 103. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 57.

259 104. Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang-Po: On the Transmission of Mind, with a preface by P’ei Hsiu (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 40.

260 105. Ibid., 34.

261 106. Ibid., 36.

262 107. Ibid., 72.

263 108. Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music,’’ 15. Emphasis in original.

264 109. David Patterson, ‘‘Celebrating a Life’’ [on David Tudor], Musicworks, no. 67 ( Jan-uary 1997): 57--58.

265 110. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 124.

266 111. Ibid. As historian Will Rockett has noted, ‘‘Artaud’s lesson is of the cruelty and tyran-ny of unpredictable, unfathomable forces that transcend the reasoned limits of reality as humanity understands them. The methods used to deliver this brutal lesson are based on a theory of generating a series of shocks, effected by the collision of images, sounds, and savage acts conveyed in a primarily non-verbal, synaesthetic language.’’ Will H. Rockett, Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 57ff.

267 112. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 126.

268 113. Cage, interview with Martin Duberman, 15.

269 114. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 92.

270 115. Ibid., 71.

271 116. Ibid., 73.

272 117. Ibid.

273 118. Ibid., 71.

274 119. Ibid., 56.

275 120. Schlemmer’s ‘‘research experiment’’ is found in ‘‘The Stage and the Bauhaus’’ [1926], in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 117. Artaud is from Theater and Its Double, 75. 121. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 86--87.

276 122. Ibid., 123.

277 123. John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 72.

278 124. Marcel Duchamp in a 1932 letter quoted by Octavio Paz, ‘‘The Ready-Made,’’ in Mar-cel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 88.

279 125. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 234.

280 126. It is claimed that in attempting to duplicate the 3 Standard Stoppages, Cage found that the twine bunched up each time, unlike the nearly meter-length results of Du-champ’s original trials. See Rhonda Roland and Stephen Jay Gould, ‘‘Hidden in Plain

281 176 noTes To pages 88--93

282 Sight: Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, More Truly a ‘Stoppage’ (An Invisible Mending) Than We Ever Realized,’’ Tout-fait, no. 1 (April 1999), http://www.toutfait.com/issues/ issue_1/News/stoppages.html.

283 127. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205.

284 128. This is Duchamp’s description of ‘‘the personal ‘art coefficient’ ’’ he devised. Quoted in Harriet Ann Watts, Chance: A Perspective on Dada (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), 40--41.

285 129. Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 79. 130. Duchamp quoted in Watts, Chance, 40.

286 131. The use of stochastic actions to produce indeterminacy has been misrecognized by some commentators as a liberatory gesture, as eliminating ‘‘all established perceptual patterns for experience and neutralizing [them] in one’s habitual mode of interpret-ing the world, [calling] upon chance as a new, totally unpredictable unit of measure.’’ Similarly, the motivation for introducing chance processes has been explained as an emancipation of art from the predictability and stultifying conformity of bourgeois rationalism: Robert Pincus-Witten has written in this vein, ‘‘Arbitrary and imaginative methods began to be adopted as a means of liberating a shackled idealism …the arbi-trary, the fortuitous—sheer chance itself—seemed a desirable means of realizing an art of free and pure spirit.’’ See Robert Pincus-Witten, ‘‘Against Order: Poetical Sources of Chance Art,’’ in Against Order: Chance and Art, an exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art and University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 5. Harriet Watts goes further in positioning chance as the liberator of fettered experience: ‘‘Chance is the force that can ultimately menace all ideas of order’’ (Watts, Chance, 49). These aggran-dizing portrayals depict the use of chance as a quest for types of artistic production and human agency untainted by instrumentalized reason and social determination. Chance is thus represented as successfully prying art from its embeddedness in the matrix of sociopolitical context, in a move toward personal and aesthetic autonomy. 132. Ian Pepper, ‘‘From the Aesthetics of Indifference to Negative Aesthetics: John Cage and Germany, 1958--1972,’’ October 82 (1997): 46.

287 133. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 17.

288 134. Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music,’’ 12.

289 135. In contrast, Albers’s Interaction of Color was not released as a paperback until 1971, when Albers was eighty-three (the 1963 volume was a limited edition). ‘‘Experimental’’ from 1937 is from Cage, ‘‘The Future of Music: Credo,’’ in Silence, 6. 136. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 221. For more on Cage’s anti-European views, see Caroline A. Jones, ‘‘Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expression-ist Ego,’’ Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 628--65.

290 137. Cage in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 52.

291 138. For more on this, see my discussion of Cage and Buckminster Fuller’s relationship in chapter 3 of this book. Quotes are from Cage, A Year from Monday, 2--4. 139. Ibid., 10.

292 140. In fact, Cage made his affiliation with these precursors, and an eclectic canon of modernist renegades such as Henry David Thoreau, James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller (as well as more historically distant sources such as Meister Eckhart and Po), into a very public pantheon of citation and intertextual commentary throughout his life. Parsing his process of ‘‘working through’’ these sources will help

293 noTes To pages 93--96 177

294 reveal the theoretical and practical touchstones to which he constantly returned when he defined experimentation.

295 141. Cage, ‘‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,’’ 102. It has been claimed by some, quite persuasively, that their passivity was a defensive posture in the face of postwar homophobia. See Jonathan Katz, ‘‘John Cage’s Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 2 (April 1999): 231--52 (reprinted in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001]), 41--61, as well as Jones, ‘‘Finishing School.’’

296 142. Cage, ‘‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,’’ 102. 143. Ibid., 100.

297 144. Cage, A Year from Monday, 19.

298 145. Joseph, ‘‘White on White,’’ 115.

299 146. Cage quoted in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 27.

300 147. Yvonne Rainer, ‘‘Looking Myself in the Mouth,’’ October 17 (Summer 1981): 73. 148. Ibid., 73--74.

301 149. John Cage, I--VI, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1988--89 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 6.

302 150. See Judith Rodenbeck’s discussion of happenings’ treatment of their audiences in Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 164.

303 151. Happenings can be interpreted as issuing commands or directives to participants, in contrast to Fluxus event scores that allow more ambiguity in their performances. 152. Cage, A Year from Monday, 19.

304 153. Althusser undertook these late-career essays in large part to address criticisms of his work as overly deterministic. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, xli; though the phrase is Althusser’s reworking of concepts first articulated in Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital [1965] (London, Verso Press, 1998), 279 [AB70]. 154. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 170, 202, 264.

305

4  Chapter Three

3061. Quote is from Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 201. According to student Albert Lanier, Fuller said this after the failure of his first dome assembly at the College in 1948; Lanier quoted in an interview with Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 151.

307 2. For more on the Alberses’ final year at Black Mountain and the schism that led to their departure, see note 14 in chapter 1 of this book.

308 3. Fuller outlined his methodology of ‘‘comprehensive design’’ in a version of the course of the same name that he taught at the College in the summer of 1948 and later that year at the Institute of Design, Chicago. Please see ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Synopsis of course to be conducted by Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Design, Chicago, Ill. Oct. 4, ’48-Jan. 29, ’49,’’ pp. 1--1h, Spring 1948 [Fuller Papers]. His course description was later adapted and turned into the essay ‘‘Comprehensive Designing,’’ published in his book Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 173--82. That essay is reproduced in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 69--76.

309 4. ‘‘Total thinking’’ became a touchstone phrase in Fuller’s rhetorical repertoire, and

310 178 noTes To pages 97--103

311 was used earlier in his career in the essay ‘‘I Figure,’’ written in 1942. See Fuller, ‘‘I Fig-ure,’’ 102; and Fuller, ‘‘Total Thinking’’ [1949], in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 310--28. He brought his secretary from the Institute of Design to Black Mountain in 1949 to transcribe the ‘‘Total Thinking’’ essay. See Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 158. 5. A 2006 conference in Illinois took as its theme the unlikely compatibility between Fuller’s and Cage’s ideas: ‘‘Geodesic Mathematics and Random Chaos: John Cage and Buckminster Fuller,’’ September 16, 2006, Northern Illinois University. A description of the program is available at h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-A rtHist&month=0608&week=c&msg=ctBzqhF%2BHa59invU90/dTw&user=&pw= (accessed September 12, 2013).

312 6. Fuller, ‘‘2-Way TV & Geoscopes,’’ from Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 38--46 (quotation is from p. 38); republished as ‘‘Education’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 54. 7. It could be argued, however, that Fuller’s holistic program of deductive comprehensive design is in fact diametrically opposed to a cybernetic vision of adaptive, and one could say inductive, technologies. Fuller said he hadn’t read Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1948) when he wrote ‘‘Total Thinking’’ in 1949, though he claimed his own ideas provided ‘‘a broad view of computer-pro-gramming conceptions and experimental strategies which embrace potentially powerful forecasting capabilities.’’ Fuller, introduction to ‘‘Total Thinking,’’ 310. 8. Fuller, ‘‘Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures,’’ 66.

313 9. Lindy Roy, ‘‘Geometry as a Nervous System,’’ ANY, no. 17 (1997): 27. Emphasis in original.

314 10. Fuller was using the term anti-entropic as early as 1927, according to James Meller. See Fuller’s ‘‘Universal Requirements for a Dwelling Advantage’’ [1927/1949], in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 261.

315 11. Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), xxxviii. 12. Fuller, ‘‘Emergent Humanity: Its Environment and Education,’’ in R. Buckminster Fuller on Education [1965], edited by Peter H. Wagschal and Robert D. Kahn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 86--113; republished in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 101--21; quotation is from p. 119.

316 13. In 1929, Fuller estimated the cost of the 4-D House at three thousand dollars. See ‘‘The Dymaxion House,’’ Architecture (Chicago), June 1929; reproduced in Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 137. Adjusting for inflation, I generated a figure of approximately $39,900 using the Consumer Price Index relative value calculator at www.usinflationcalculator.com.

317 14. Isamu Noguchi designed various models of the car, and wind-tunnel tests honed the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance.

318 15. For further information about the car, see Michael John Gorman, ‘‘Dymaxion Time-line,’’ accessed September 12, 2013, hotgates.stanford.edu/bucky/dymaxion/timeline. htm.

319 16. Fuller writes that the each dot on the World Energy Map is an ‘‘energy slave’’ that can be redistributed: ‘‘1% of World’s harnessed energy slave population (inanimate power serving man) in terms of human equivalents.’’ Text from Fuller, World Energy Map, reproduced as plate 16.

320 17. Fuller’s Wichita House was featured in an article in the April 1946 issue of Fortune. An article on Fuller and his inventions also appeared in Architectural Forum. Often, pro-files emphasized his failings—for example, the Saturday Evening Post, October 18, 1944:

321 noTes To pages 103--108 179

322 ‘‘Some people say the inventor of the 3-wheel automobile and the ‘dwelling machine’ is an authentic 18-carat genius. Others just laugh and laugh.’’ Quoted in Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 14.

323 18. ‘‘What Became of the Fuller House,’’ Fortune 37 (May 1948): 168. It was Fritz Hansgirg who had proposed buying a couple of the structures for the campus. See Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 146.

324 19. Edward Hutchings Jr. quoted in Beaumont Newhall’s letter to John R. Whiting, edi-tor of Science Illustrated, August 11, 1948 [Fuller Papers].

325 20. See the final sections of Robert W. Marks, ‘‘Man of Science: Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion World,’’ Science Illustrated, November 1948, 30--31.

326 21. Fuller obtained patents for twenty-five inventions in his lifetime, and enforced them doggedly. Certifying his students as ‘‘Dymaxion designers’’ allowed them to produce no more than one geodesic dome after graduation before paying licensing fees—see, for example, his ‘‘Dymaxion License’’ inscribed to an Institute of Design student dat-ed May 27, 1949 [Fuller Papers]. He chased down unauthorized dome assemblies on college campuses, underscoring his copyright. (A form letter to ‘‘Mr. X’’ of ‘‘X School of Art’’ dated February 11, 1955, describes the royalties Fuller requested to avoid filing a lawsuit if more than one dome had been assembled on the offending campus [Fuller Papers].) One could attribute such tight proprietary control over his patents to greed or overmonitoring, as licensing his ideas as inventions is hardly commensurate with a comprehensive designer’s ostensibly altruistic impetus. Years later, Fuller realized that enforcing his patents appeared ungenerous, and he seemed contrite when he stated, ‘‘I did not take out the patents to make money but only to document and demonstrate what the inventive little individual can accomplish, and to prove documentably [sic] the socio-economic existence of such unique industrialization lags. . . . Now that I have proven that an individual can be world-effective while eschewing either money or political advan-tage-making, I do my best to discourage others from taking patents, which almost never ‘pay-off ’ to the inventor. My patent taking was to effect a ‘bridgehead’ accreditation to more effective employment of humanity’s potentials.’’ From Fuller, Critical Path, 149. 22. Fuller, ‘‘Preview of Building,’’ April 1, 1949, 3 [Fuller Papers]. 23. Fuller, ‘‘Total Thinking,’’ 310.

327 24. This is what Fuller termed ‘‘experimentally unproveable myths.’’ Fuller, ‘‘Emergent Humanity,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 107, 120.

328 25. Fuller, letter to Deborah Allen, associate editor, Interiors, May 8, 1949, 1 [Fuller Papers].

329 26. As Fuller claimed, it was necessary to take ‘‘the phenomena [of] life as we are given it as an experiment, exploring it thoroughly and fulfilling the given problem.’’ Fuller, lecture, n.d. (immediately follows lecture dated December 2, 1948, part 2. It begins ‘‘I’m anxious at the point to eliminate . . .’’), likely presented at the Institute of Design, Chicago, 2 [Fuller Papers].

330 27. Fuller, ‘‘Bulletin of the Fuller Research Foundation,’’ June 1955, Exhibit 1, 3 [Fuller Papers].

331 28. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 43.

332 29. Fuller, ‘‘Design Definition,’’ typed and handwritten note by B. F. appended to T. S. Jones’s memo to Aspen Design Conferences of 1951 and 1952, subject ‘‘Design Definition’’ [Fuller Papers]. See also a similar formulation in his ‘‘Considerations for a Curriculum,’’ n.d. [Fuller Papers].

333 180 noTes To pages 108--110

334 30. Fuller, ‘‘Designing a New Industry’’ [1945--46], in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 185.

335 31. Fuller, lecture dated Saturday, November 6, 1948, likely presented at the Institute of Design, Chicago, 2 [Fuller Papers]. To Fuller, a proper emphasis on facts was too often overlooked: ‘‘So-called practical man …has lost all contact with actual facts.’’ Ibid., 11. 32. Fuller, ‘‘Designing a New Industry,’’ 185.

336 33. Fuller, ‘‘Emergent Humanity,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 120, 118. 34. Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Designing,’’ in ibid., 75, 71.

337 35. Fuller, ‘‘Emergent Humanity,’’ 114--15.

338 36. Fuller, ‘‘Yale Collaborative,’’ n.d., 7 [Fuller Papers].

339 37. ‘‘Doing More with Less: Excerpts from an Interview with Buckminster Fuller,’’ 1978, 5 [Fuller Papers]. The identity of the interviewer is not mentioned in the typescript. 38. Fuller, letter to Henry Luce of Time, Inc., October 20, 1949, 1 [Fuller Papers]. 39. Ibid.

340 40. Leigh White, ‘‘Buck Fuller and the Dymaxion World,’’ Saturday Evening Post, Octo-ber 14, 1944; republished in Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 132.

341 41. The full statement by Fuller is: ‘‘People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.’’ Quoted in Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival (New York: W. Morrow, 1976), 108. 42. His great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, had been a member of the transcendentalist circle with Emerson and Thoreau, and an influential women’s rights activist. Fuller, proud of her historical influence, wrote, ‘‘She predicted the public’s ripening ability to ap-preciate its responsibility to the regenerative functioning of the individual artists.’’ See Fuller, ‘‘Margaret Fuller’s Prophecy’’ [1932], in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 40. Perhaps the family resemblance extended to their reputations for loquaciousness; as he remarked, ‘‘Her genius was as a rule revealed only in conversation.’’ Letter from Fuller to his sister Rosamund Fuller, n.d., in Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 69. 43. Fuller interviewed by Martin Duberman, June 26, 1969, 13 [NC State Archives]. 44. Ibid.

342 45. Mark Wigley similarly sees links between cartographic projection using polyhe-drons and Fuller’s invention of the geodesic dome. See page 21 of Wigley’s ‘‘Planetary Homeboy,’’ ANY, 16--23.

343 46. Ibid., 18.

344 47. According to sculpture student Kenneth Snelson, ‘‘Professor Fuller arrived for the summer session as a substitute for an architecture professor who withdrew at the last minute. It was Fuller’s first teaching job.’’ http://www.kennethsnelson.net/faqs/faq. htm, accessed September 12, 2013.

345 48. As Elaine de Kooning later reflected, ‘‘Bucky’s eyes …had us all mesmerized. They were, to us [his students at Black Mountain in the summer of 1948], the eyes of a vision-ary, a saint, all-comprehending, all-forgiving. We loved him and hung on every word.’’ See de Kooning, ‘‘De Kooning Memories,’’ 247.

346 49. Elaine de Kooning quoting Fuller, ibid.

347 50. For example, Fuller later propagated a large-scale version of his Dymaxion Map as a pedagogical tool in what he termed the ‘‘World Game’’ in the 1960s. The World Game was a participatory geographical model of the earth to assist college students in rethinking global resource management. See ‘‘Emergent Humanity,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 117.

348 noTes To pages 110--115 181

349 51. As Fuller said, ‘‘I called it the Supine Dome.’’ Fuller interview with Duberman, 14. 52. Ibid., 15, 16.

350 53. Fuller, letter to Jake Butts, January 11, 1948, 1 [Fuller Papers]. 54. From a form letter Fuller wrote to ‘‘Mr. X’’ at ‘‘X School of Art,’’ February 11, 1955, 4 [Fuller Papers].

351 55. Fuller, letter to Seymour Goldstein, May 22, 1950, 5 [Fuller Papers]. 56. In a letter Fuller wrote to Kenneth Snelson dated December 22, 1949, he gave credit to his student’s innovation: ‘‘In all my public lectures I tell of your original demonstration of discontinuous-pressure (com-pressure) and continuous tension structural advantage …that you were excited by the later E. G. [Energetic Geometry]. …The name Kenneth Snelson will come to be known as a true pioneer’’ [Fuller Papers].

352 57. The second dome, according to Fuller, was a ‘‘small geodesic structure of four-teen-foot diameter erected in [the] garden of [the] Pentagon Building in Washington, D.C. March 13, 1949.’’ Letter to Dean Wells Bennett, School of Architecture and Design, University of Michigan, May 14, 1949 [Fuller Papers].

353 58. See Jacques Monod’s book Chance and Necessity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).

354 59. First two quotes are Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 46, 48; third is Fuller, ‘‘Emer-gent Humanity,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology, 120.

355 60. For more on how Fuller’s conception of the ‘‘Establishment’’ developed in the 1960s, see ‘‘Thoughts of Buckminster Fuller,’’ Whole Earth Catalog, Winter 1968, 3.

356 61. Cage commended Fuller’s stance in the following terms: ‘‘It seems to me that Fuller’s solutions are not political in any sense but are based upon utility, a utility to individuals, a utility to the society, and a utility to nature. . . . I like to think of them as being utilitarian.’’ Cage’s remarks were from a recording of the TV film Birdcage on April 7, 1972. Quoted in ‘‘Reconsidering John Cage, Part Two,’’ special issue, October 82 (Fall 1997): 81--82.

357 62. Fuller interviewed by Mary Emma Harris, October 3, 1971, 34 [NC State Archives].

358 63. Speaking fondly of Albers, Fuller credited him with ‘‘removing . . . an insurmountable mystery of universities, and he was removing the unnecessary mysteries of it, that you can’t do it, and make it possible that you can do that much. And this is what I certainly tried to do. I found that there is an enormous obscurationism [sic] in people who know the tricks, and they try to make it seem difficult. …But I try to make it go exactly the other way, to make it really seem easy to do things, so the individual can really accom-plish and get to some real mysteries and not just a nonsense mystery. …I felt Albers to be akin to that way of thinking and doing. He was what I call an ‘experientialist.’ . . . That you really didn’t just talk about it theoretically.’’ Fuller interview with Harris, 28.

359 64. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 43.

360 65. Fuller, ‘‘Designing a New Industry,’’ 163.

361 66. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 62.

362 67. Ibid., 64.

363 68. De Kooning, ‘‘De Kooning Memories,’’ 248.

364 69. Kenneth Snelson interviewed by Mary Emma Harris, March 25, 1972, 10 [NC State Archives].

365 70. Recently reconsidered projects by Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer can also be seen as attempting to understand spaces as total systems. Meyer for years fell outside the canon of the Bauhaus as historicized by émigrés such as Walter Gropius, particularly in the MoMA’s 1938 catalog for the exhibition Bauhaus 1919--1928. That project, organized by Gropius in collaboration with Herbert Bayer and Isa Gropius, had excised the con-tradictions of the post-Gropius years, during which directors Meyer and later Mies van

366 182 noTes To pages 118--126

367 der Rohe each took the school in radically different directions. In particular, see Detlef Mertins’s discussion of Meyer’s holistic, ‘‘total’’ design for the German Trade Unions School in Bernau, ‘‘Hannes Meyer: German Trade Unions School, Bernau, 1928--30,’’ in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, eds., Bauhaus 1919--1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 256--61.

368 71. Albers, ‘‘Concerning Art Instruction,’’ 6.

369 72. Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Course synopsis’’ (version 2, n.d., likely 1948), 3, emphasis in original [Fuller Papers].

370 73. For a discussion of the split between the two men’s concepts of Bauhaus education, see Achim Borchardt-Hume’s essay ‘‘Two Bauhaus Histories’’ in Albers and Moho-ly-Nagy, in particular pages 70--71 and footnote 21.

371 74. L. Moholy-Nagy, New Vision, 10.

372 75. Ibid., 16--17.

373 76. Ibid., 13.

374 77. Ibid., 113.

375 78. Ibid., 132.

376 79. Ibid., 115.

377 80. This image is fig. 220 in the 2005 reprint of the 1938 edition of L. Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision, 203.

378 81. Ibid.

379 82. Ibid., 20.

380 83. Wigley, ‘‘Planetary Homeboy,’’ 19. See also Wigley’s ‘‘Network Fever,’’ Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 82--122.

381 84. In contrast to Fuller, Moholy-Nagy held that ‘‘technical progress should never be the goal, only the means’’ to release workers from exploitation of their labor. L. Moho-ly-Nagy, New Vision, 13.

382 85. Martin, Organizational Complex, 53.

383 86. Gyorgy Kepes, introduction to his Structure in Art and in Science, ii. 87. Fuller’s typically dense prose in the essay reads: ‘‘Artists who …tried to follow the scientists into ‘nonconceptuality’ with their ‘non-representational’ quasi-abstractions are now proven to have been intuitively sound in their conviction that they could really follow or even lead science in the game of intuitive probing.’’ Fuller, ‘‘Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures,’’ 66, 80--81.

384 88. Kepes, Structure in Art and in Science, v.

385 89. Fuller, letter to Serge Chermayeff, May 26, 1948, 1 [Fuller Papers]. Emphasis in original.

386 90. Ibid., 2. Emphasis in original.

387 91. Fuller, letter to Carl Koch, May 25, 1949, 1 [Fuller Papers].

388 92. Fuller, ‘‘Design for Survival—Plus,’’ talk given before the Illinois Institute of Tech-nology, January 26, 1949, 9 [Fuller Papers]. Emphasis in original. 93. The original, prolix quote: ‘‘The integration of a complex of series of failures rep-resents the only means of attaining from nature the original data essential to realization of evolutionary tactical events.’’ Ibid., 3. Emphasis in original.

389 94. Fullerenes are molecules composed entirely of carbon, and form hollow spheres, tubes, or ellipsoids. The spherical Buckminsterfullerene (formula C60) exists in shapes resembling soccer balls, which are known as ‘‘buckyballs.’’

390 95. John Cage interview with P3 (Takashi Serizawa, Rumiko Kanesaka, Michiko Tak-agishi), January 9, 1989, 1; provided to the author by Shoji Sadao.

391 noTes To pages 127--133 183

392 96. He often referred to himself as ‘‘Guinea Pig B.’’ See, for example, Fuller, ‘‘The R.I.B.A. [Royal Institute of British Architects] Discourse, 1958: Experimental Probing of Archi-tectural Initiative,’’ reprint from the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, October 1958, 6 [Fuller Papers].

393 97. Cage, interview with Duberman, 5--6.

394 98. Ibid., 23--24.

395 99. Cage interview with P3, 4.

396 100. See Branden Joseph, ‘‘Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport: The Spatial Politics of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller,’’ ANY, no. 17 (1997): 43--44.

397 101. See my discussion of Albers and Shklovsky in chapter 1 of this book. Shklovsky, ‘‘Art as Technique.’’

398 102. ‘‘Talk by B. F. to the Institute of Design, Feb. 1948 (with [Serge] Chermayeff ’s reworkings),’’ 15 [Fuller Papers].

399 103. Fuller interview with Duberman, 5.

400 104. Ibid., 37.

401 105. Ibid., 6.

402 106. For example, take this fairly typical obfuscation: ‘‘Democracy is in great trouble today. …The Communists and dictatorships scoff at democracy—saying it doesn’t work. I am sure that democracy is inherently more powerful and capable and appro-priate to man’s needs than any other form of government, but it needs proper updated implementation to a one-to-one velocity correspondence in respect to each and every stimulation-and-response, and then democracy can work—magnificently.’’ Fuller, ‘‘2-Way TV & Geoscopes,’’ reprinted as ‘‘Education,’’ 53--54.

403 107. Alexander Graham Bell was the actual inventor of the octet truss, but Fuller claimed to have tested it independently. See ‘‘Interview with R. Buckminster Fuller’’ in the pref-ace of Dorothy Harley Eber’s Genius at Work: Images of Alexander Graham Bell (New York: Viking Press. 1982). The interview can also be found online at http://www.grunch. net/synergistics/docs/bellnote.html (accessed September 17, 2013).

404 108. Coincidentally, architect Lawrence Kocher, who designed Black Mountain’s second Lake Eden campus and helped erect it in 1940, collaborated with fellow architect Albert Frey on several influential prefab homes—1931’s Aluminaire most famously, in addition to publishing a series of texts on prefabrication in Architectural Record. See also Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen, eds., Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008).

405 109. Fuller, letter to Virginia Thorndike, J. Walter Thompson Co., July 17, 1944, 2 [Fuller Papers].

406 110. Fuller, ‘‘Designing a New Industry,’’ 178.

407 111. Antoine Picon, ‘‘Fuller’s Promised Land,’’ ANY, no. 17 (1997): 29. 112. Fuller, letter to Thorndike, 3.

408 113. Fuller, letter dated August 14, 1944, no addressee indicated [Fuller Papers]. 114. Fuller, letter to Otis Winn, Architect Consultant, UAW Housing Department, Detroit, Michigan, March 3, 1947, 1 [Fuller Papers].

409 115. Joseph, ‘‘Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport,’’ 41. 116. For a discussion of dome constructions following Fuller’s precedent such as Drop City, Red Rockers, and Libre in Colorado, see Felicity Scott’s ‘‘Acid Visions,’’ Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 22--39, and the discussion of the influence of Fuller in the 1960s and into the present in my ‘‘Dome Culture in the Twenty-First Century,’’ Grey Room 42

410 184 noTes To pages 133--139

411 (Winter 2011): 80--105.

412 117. See, for example, the Whole Earth Catalog ‘‘shelter’’ editor Lloyd Kahn’s influential compendium Shelter (Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications, 1973/2000) and his Domebook series: Domebook One (Bolinas, CA: Pacific Domes, 1970) and Domebook Two (Bolinas, CA: Pacific Domes, 1971), as well as his repudiation of dome construction in Refried Domes (Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications, 1990).

413 118. Wigley, ‘‘Planetary Homeboy,’’ 22.

414 119. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 58.

415 120. See Joseph, ‘‘Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport,’’ 43. 121. Giving lip service to the concept, Fuller wrote that ‘‘democracy alone can authorize experiment,’’ though it should not interfere in its protocols. Fuller, ‘‘How to Make De-mocracy Work,’’ April 29, 1948, 2 [Fuller Papers].

416 122. Fuller, ‘‘Earth, Inc.’’ [1947], in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 246. 123. See, for example, Fuller’s ‘‘The Designers and the Politicians’’ [1962], in Ideas and Integrities, 302--8. Reprinted in Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972 ed.), 370--76. 124. Fuller, ‘‘The R.I.B.A. [Royal Institute of British Architects] Discourse, 1958,’’ 7 [Fuller Papers].

417 125. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 56.

418 126. Fuller, ‘‘The Next Two Billion Customers,’’ February 7, 1952, 5 [Fuller Papers].

419 127. ‘‘Doing More with Less: Excerpts from an Interview with Buckminster Fuller,’’ 1978, 5 [Fuller Papers].

420 128. Ibid.

421 129. Fuller interview with Harris, 26.

422 130. Fuller, ‘‘The Next Two Billion Customers,’’ 6.

423 131. Fuller, letter to Thorndike, 1.

424 132. Fuller, letter to Butts, 2.

425 133. Fuller, letter to Albert Gotlieb, Council on Atomic Implications, University of Southern California, March 15, 1948 [Fuller Papers].

426 134. Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Synopsis of course,’’ 2 (document numeration p. 1a) [Fuller Papers].

427 135. Reyner Banham opens his essay with clever praise of Fuller: ‘‘Buckminster Fuller needs no introduction—at last! It comes as a real relief to us foundation members of the Dymaxion Fan Club.’’ From Banham’s ‘‘The Dymaxicrat,’’ in A Critic Writes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 91--95; reprinted from Arts Magazine 38 (October 1963): 66--69.

428 136. Ibid., 93.

429 137. Ibid., 94.

430 138. As Fuller proclaimed in 1949, ‘‘It is now possible that the artist is abandoning his hope that politicians can legislate and subsidize society . . . the artist above all men can see that the generation of new wealth of advantage for man …constitutes the only effective transition from a curative to an anticipatory social pathology.’’ Letter to Henry Luce, 2.

431 139. See note 26 in the introduction for a discussion of who could be a comprehensive designer.

432 140. The full quote: ‘‘Net earnings in standard of living will accrue if and when dem-ocratic body politic is given the controlling voice over its industrially organized and mechanically implemented commonwealth.’’ Fuller, ‘‘I Figure,’’ 112.

433 noTes To pages 139--142 185

434 141. Ibid., 119--20.

435 142. Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Synopsis of course,’’ 4 (document numeration p. 1c) [Fuller Papers].

436 143. Fuller, ‘‘I Figure,’’ 125.

437 144. Reinhold Martin, ‘‘Forget Fuller?,’’ ANY, no. 17 (1997): 15.

438 145. Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 45.

439 146. One could include his Dymaxion Deployment Unit, a portable, corrugated-steel bunker he designed for the US Army during World War II. As Fuller stated, ‘‘War pro-motes major technical advances of civilization.’’ Fuller, ‘‘Earth, Inc.,’’ 245. Though he believed that the advances of his ‘‘design science’’ would make war itself obsolete: ‘‘Ergo [the] Design revolution will constitute [an] alternative to [the] next phase of open world warring.’’ Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Course synopsis’’ (version 2, n.d., likely 1948), 5 [Fuller Papers].

440 147. As he noted, ‘‘Industrialization does constitute the direct evolution of man.’’ Fuller, lecture dated Saturday, November 13, 1948, part 2, likely before the Institute of Design, Chicago, 5 (of second section) [Fuller Papers].

441 148. Meyer Schapiro was incensed that Fuller had rejected one of his essays for publica-tion in Shelter, a magazine Fuller was then publishing and editing, while simultaneously printing an attack on the very essay that was declined.

442 149. In this case, Meyer Schapiro was writing under the pseudonym John Kwait. Scha-piro, ‘‘Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,’’ ed. Felicity Scott; compiled in Grey Room 6 (Winter 2002): 71. 150. Ibid., 73.

443 151. Fuller, ‘‘Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage,’’ 1949, 4 [Fuller Papers].

444 152. Fuller, ‘‘The Next Two Billion Customers,’’ February 7, 1952, 4 [Fuller Papers].

445 153. Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Design: Synopsis of course,’’ 2 (document numeration p. 1a) [Fuller Papers].

446 154. Fuller, ‘‘Preview of Building,’’ April 1, 1949, 2 [Fuller Papers]. He continues by claiming that ‘‘instrumented science’’ is the ‘‘progressive augmentation of the faculties of the highest order,’’ 3.

447 155. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1947), 4. 156. Fuller, letter to Otis Winn, 1.

448 157. Ibid.

449 158. Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1971) perhaps best encapsulates the argument, popular in the period, that the liberatory potential of recent technological advances would soon allow all goods to be free and readily available.

450 159. Fuller’s anxiety is perhaps understandable given the climate of fear in late-1940s America generated by the possibility that the Soviet Union would obtain the atom bomb, which it eventually detonated on its soil in August 1949. Quote is from ‘‘Group Project, Architecture 7, R. Buckminster Fuller, Instructor, Institute of Design, Chicago,’’ spring semester 1949, 2 [Fuller Papers]. See also his mention of catastrophic decentralization in ‘‘Preview of Building,’’ 10.

451 160. Though nuclear war hovers as the obvious spur to such a design, Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s dome over Manhattan ostensibly provided a controlled climate to economize on snow-removal costs.

452 161. Fuller, ‘‘Earth, Inc.,’’ 239.

453 186 noTes To pages 142--148

454

5  Epilogue

4551. For a discussion of this topic, see my essay ‘‘Experiment, Expression, and the Paradox of Black Mountain College.’’

456 2. Serra arrived after Albers retired, and assisted Albers on the preparation of Interaction with Color. For more about Albers’s legacy at Yale, see Jeffrey Saletnik, ‘‘Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching,’’ Tate Papers, Spring 2007 (available at www. tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/07spring/saletnik.htm), and Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers. For a general treatment of Albers’s pedagogy on selected students, see Goldstein, ‘‘Teaching Modernism.’’

457 3. This interest in performance should be distinguished from the manner that Jack-son Pollock’s work in particular, and gestural abstraction more generally, were being reinterpreted in the late 1950s by Allan Kaprow in his important essay ‘‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,’’ collected in Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1--9. Regarding Ray Johnson’s Moticos, artist Nayland Blake describes their process: ‘‘Early on, in works he dubbed ‘moticos,’ Johnson worked directly, cutting and pasting images from magazines and newspapers. As time went on, however, each gesture became more considered and distanced from the source material. He would draw a squiggle and then photocopy the drawing, paste the result onto board, and sand the image until it nearly disappeared. This procedure would be repeated over and over until the gesture and the chronology of the piece became impossible to disentangle. Johnson would work and rework his collages, which ultimately left many of them airless in their intricacy.’’ Quote is from Blake’s review of the exhibition Ray Johnson: Correspondences at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Artforum, March 1999, 107--8.

458 4. For example, speaking about an Albers work he owned (discussed on p. 18), Donald Judd claimed, ‘‘The change of color provides changes in proportion, which is unusual in recent art, and which I am interested in my own work.’’ Judd, ‘‘Josef Albers,’’ 10.

459 5. See John Coplans, ‘‘Serial Imagery,’’ Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 34--43. For a discussion of the import of this essay today, see Brian O’Doherty, ‘‘Critically Literate; Provocations: Writings by John Coplans,’’ Artforum, February 1998, 11--12. For further reading on discussions of seriality in the 1960s, see Lawrence Alloway, introduction to Systemic Painting, an exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foun-dation, 1966), 11--21; and Mel Bochner, ‘‘Systemic,’’ Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 40; ‘‘Serial Art, Systems: Solipsism,’’ Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967): 39--43; and ‘‘The Serial Attitude,’’ Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 73--77. 6. Organized by curator Ann Temkin, Color Chart ran from March 2 to May 12, 2008. In-terestingly, Temkin’s exhibition toggled between treating color as a readymade—empha-sizing the artist’s use of unmixed paint and paint chips (in this vein Frank Stella’s quip, ‘‘I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can,’’ was mentioned in the show’s press release and subsequently quoted in the New York Times review of the exhibition)—and Albers’s notion of the relativity and relationality of color perception. Karen Rosenberg, ‘‘Primary Season at the Modern,’’ New York Times, March 4, 2008. 7. For example, Albers’s student William Bailey went on to teach painting and sculpture at Yale and served as the dean of the School of Art there. Richard Lytle, Albers’s student at Yale, taught painting there from 1960 until very recently, and continued to teach from

460 noTes To pages 149--151 187

461 Albers’s Interaction of Color. Another of Albers’s students at Yale, Neil Welliver, taught painting there (1955--65) and at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art (1966--89). Robert Slutzky also studied with Albers at Yale and went on have a great influence as a teacher at the Cooper Union from 1968 to 1990. Julian Stanczak, associated with Op Art, studied under Albers at Yale and taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1957 to 1964, and was a professor of painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1964 to 1995. For a discussion of the legacy of Albers’s teaching, see page 95 of Fred Horowitz’s essay ‘‘Albers the Teacher,’’ in Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers, 72--97. Horowitz was himself a student of Albers’s at Yale.

462 8. The notion of creative experimentation as the primary legacy of the Bauhaus was embraced by artists such as Asger Jorn, who criticized functionalist design practices associated with the School of Design in Ulm founded by Bauhaus alum Max Bill. For a discussion of Jorn and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, see Jörn Etzold’s essay ‘‘Honoring the Dead Father? The Situationists as Heirs to the Bauhaus,’’ in Bauhaus Conflicts, 1919--2009: Controversies and Counterparts, ed. Philipp Oswalt (Ost-fildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 152--70; and McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Streets (London: Verso, 2011).

463 9. Some of this work has begun: see, for example, Branden Joseph’s Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

464 10. For more on the event score, please see Liz Kotz, ‘‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score’’; and Julia Robinson, ‘‘The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus,’’ Performance Research (UK) 7, no. 3 (September 2002): 111--23.

465 11. Cage, ‘‘Experimental Music,’’ 10.

466 12. Cage, ‘‘Composition,’’ in Silence, 59.

467 13. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 239.

468 14. Kirby and Schechner, ‘‘An Interview with John Cage,’’ 56.

469 15. Some of these include Caitlin Berrigan, Matt Bua, Molly Corey, Fritz Haeg and the Sundown School, Dave Hardy, Heather and Ivan Morison, N55, Nils Norman, Sarah Op-penheimer, Nosey Parker, Plastique Fantastique, Marjetica Potrc, Raumlabor, Michael Rakowitz, Tomas Saraceno, Oscar Tuazon, and Holly Ward. See also Marta Herford and Markus Richter, eds., We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller Reflected in Contemporary Art (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2011).

470 16. See chapter 3, page 124, for more discussion about anti-entropy. For more informa-tion about Robert Smithson’s view of Fuller, see his interview with Alison Sky, ‘‘Entropy Made Visible’’ [1973], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 301--9; and Dana Miller, ‘‘Thought Patterns: Buck-minster Fuller the Artist/Scientist,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, ed. Dana Miller and Michael Hays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 21--43.

471 17. A dissertation by Michelle Kuo is currently in progress at Harvard University on this topic, and is titled ‘‘ ‘To Avoid the Waste of a Cultural Revolution’: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966--1979.’’

472 18. This argument is not about degrees of fame and notoriety but about those of influence—always more difficult to discuss.

473 19. Although, as Carolyn Brown has written, ‘‘The by-products of anarchy made [Cage] extremely uncomfortable.’’ His anarchy could appear hypocritical given his demand that performers interpret his work soberly. The quote is from page 264 of her memoir Chance

474 188 noTes To pages 151--155

475 and Circumstance; see also the passages on pages 198--99, 239, 264--67, and 334 for more discussion of the topic.

476 20. On thinking about experimentation as a process of research shared by art and science, see my article ‘‘Futures: Experiment and the Tests of Tomorrow,’’ in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill (London: Open Editions, 2007), 92--99; Alpers, ‘‘The Stu-dio, the Laboratory, and the Vexations of Art’’; and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden, eds., Laboratorium, an exhibition catalog (Antwerp, Belgium: Provincial Museum of Photography, 1999).