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27/1/2006

Starting at Zero

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Black Mountain College 1933-57

Black Mountain College was a utopian dream, born out of the Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe. Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57 is the first UK exhibition of one of the most exciting experiments in the arts, education and community of the 20th century.

Through paintings and sculpture, ceramics and weavings, photographs and film, musical scores and contemporary documents, the exhibition highlights some of the extraordinary coincidences and collaborations which happened at Black Mountain. It was the place where, in 1948, Buckminster Fuller first demonstrated his geodesic dome, helped by Elaine de Kooning and the young Ray Johnson. In the evenings they joined up with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in a production of Erik Satie's The Ruse of the Medusa, directed by Arthur Penn, with sets by Willem de Kooning. Four years later John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg joined forces to create the first happening'. The final years saw Charles Olson gathering together Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn and others who became celebrated as the Black Mountain poets.

Founded in North Carolina in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, a dissident Classical academic, it attracted a star-studded cast of teachers and students who forged a dramatic shift from a European art world to a distinctly American one. Rice invited Josef and Anni Albers to join the faculty after Hitler had closed the Bauhaus and Josef Albers became the College¹s guiding light for its first fifteen years. Albers and Rice encouraged education through experiment, the experience of doing, rather than simply absorbing information. Faculty members were asked to teach out of their own enthusiasms and students were encouraged to build their own syllabuses.

The Albers' insistence on starting at zero' struck a chord not only with abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, but also with Buckminster Fuller's visionary reinvention of architecture, John Cage's abandonment of musical harmony for simple duration and rhythm, and Robert Rauschenberg's first white and black paintings. For the Albers as for their successor, Charles Olson, it meant, in part, looking back from a modern world to Pre-Columbian Mexico. But while Albers saw simplicity as a social obligation, in post-war years Buckminster Fuller, with an equally strong social agenda, wanted to encompass everything I know', and Olson urged students to take on the whole of knowledge'.

Artists: Josef and Anni Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ben Shahn, Ray Johnson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

The exhibition, organised by Kettle's Yard and Arnolfini, Bristol is accompanied by a substantial catalogue including essays by Christopher Benfey, Eva Diaz, Mary Emma Harris, Jed Perl and Edmund de Waal, and extensive programmes of events.

Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57 is supported by Arts Council England and The Henry Moore Foundation. Its accompanying programme is supported by NESTA

Kettle's Yard
Castle Street - Cambridge

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