Learn By Painting
By Louis Menand
One
thing to keep in mind if you visit (and, if you are in Boston, you
should visit) the Institute of Contemporary Art’s huge exhibition “Leap
Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957”—more than two
hundred and sixty works by almost a hundred artists, curated by Helen
Molesworth, the biggest show the I.C.A. has ever mounted—is that Black
Mountain College was not an artists’ community or a writers’ colony, or
even an art school. It was a college.
A
very small college. Black Mountain was launched in the Depression, and
for twenty-four years it led a hand-to-mouth existence in the foothills
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, outside Asheville, North Carolina. In a
good year, enrollment was sixty. When at last the money dried up, the
college shut its doors. But to the extent that finances permitted, and
depending on who was available to teach, it offered a full liberal
education. Students could take courses in science, mathematics, history,
economics, languages, and literature.
What
made Black Mountain different from other colleges was that the center
of the curriculum was art-making. Students studied pretty much whatever
they wanted, but everyone was supposed to take a class in some kind of
artistic practice—painting, weaving, sculpture, pottery, poetry,
architecture, design, dance, music, photography. The goal was not to
produce painters, poets, and architects. It was to produce citizens.
Black
Mountain was founded by a renegade classics professor named John Andrew
Rice, who had been kicked out of Rollins College, in Florida. Rice
believed that making something is a different learning experience from
remembering something. A lot of education is reception. You listen to an
expert explain a subject to you, and then you repeat back what you
heard to show that you learned it. Teachers push students to engage
actively with the material, but it’s easy to be passive, to absorb the
information and check off the box.
Rice
thought that this made for bad social habits. Democracy is about making
choices, and people need to take ownership of their choices. We don’t
want to vote the way someone else tells us to. We want to vote based on
beliefs we have chosen for ourselves. Making art is making choices.
Art-making is practice democracy.
Rice
did not think of art-making as therapy or self-expression. He thought
of it as mental training. As anyone who has tried to write a poem knows,
the discipline in art-making is exercised from within rather than
without. You quickly realize that it’s your own laziness, ignorance, and
sloppiness, not somebody else’s bad advice, that are getting in your
way. No one can write your poem for you. You have to figure out a way to
write it yourself. You have to make a something where there was a
nothing.
A lot of Rice’s ideas
came from the educational philosophy of John Dewey (although the idea
that true learning has to come from within goes back to Plato), and Rice
was lucky to find an art teacher who had read Dewey and who thought the
same way. This was Josef Albers. Albers had not been so lucky. He was
an original member of the Bauhaus school, but when Hitler came to power,
in 1933, the Bauhaus closed down rather than accept Nazi professors.
Albers’s wife, Anni, was from a prominent Jewish family, and they were
understandably anxious to get out of Germany. Rice heard about them from
the architect Philip Johnson, and he sent a telegram to Albers inviting
him and his wife to come teach at Black Mountain. The reply read: “I
speak not one word English.” (Albers had read his Dewey in translation.)
Rice told him to come anyway. Albers eventually did learn English, and
he and Anni, an accomplished and creative weaver, established the mode
of art instruction at Black Mountain. Everything would be hands-on,
collaborative, materials-based, and experimental.
Bauhaus
was all about abolishing distinctions between craft, or design, and
fine art, and Black Mountain was one of the places where this aesthetic
entered the world of American art. (Another was the Carnegie Institute
of Technology, in Pittsburgh, where Andy Warhol went to college.)
Albers’s most famous (although probably not his favorite) student at
Black Mountain was Robert Rauschenberg, and Rauschenberg is the
presiding spirit at the I.C.A. exhibition. Although goofier than most
Black Mountain art—there is an earnestness about a lot of the work; this
was schoolwork, after all—putting an automobile tire around a stuffed
goat is the essence of Black Mountain practice.
Black
Mountain College was a holistic learning environment. Teachers and
students worked together; people who came to teach (and who stayed—not
everyone found the work conditions to their liking) sat in on one
another’s classes and ended up learning as much as the students. When a
new building needed to be constructed, students and teachers built it
themselves, just as, at the old Dewey School, at the University of
Chicago, the children grew their own food and cooked their own meals.
It
seems as though half the midcentury American avant-garde came through
Black Mountain in one capacity or the other. The I.C.A. exhibition
includes works by (besides Rauschenberg and the Alberses) Ruth Asawa,
John Cage, John Chamberlain, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Elaine
and Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Hamada,
Lou Harrison, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Robert
Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Charles Olson, Ben Shahn, David Tudor, and
Cy Twombly. Black Mountain produced art of almost every kind.
Did
it also produce good citizens? That’s an educational outcome everyone
embraces but that’s hard to measure. In the case of Black Mountain, the
sample size is miniscule, and most students left before graduating.
There is also the self-selection issue. People who choose to attend
progressive colleges are already progressive-minded, just as people who
want a liberal education are usually already liberal (meaning interested
in knowledge for its own sake), and people who prefer vocational or
pre-professional education are already headed down those roads. College
choice tends to confirm prior effects of socialization. But why keep
those things separate? Knowing and doing are two sides of the same
activity, which is adapting to our environment. That was Dewey’s point.
People
who teach in the traditional liberal-arts fields today are sometimes
aghast at the avidity with which undergraduates flock to courses in tech
fields, like computer science. Maybe those students see dollar signs in
coding. Why shouldn’t they? Right now, tech is where value is being
created, as they say. But maybe students are also excited to take
courses in which knowing and making are part of the same learning
process. Those tech courses are hands-on, collaborative, materials-based
(well, virtual materials), and experimental—a digital Black Mountain
curriculum. The other liberal-arts fields might take notice. Arts
practice should be part of everyone’s education, not just in preschool.