Black Mountain College Conference

 The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw plainly.  John Ruskin

The conference held in Asheville October 9-11 about Black Mountain College and its legacy was a stunning success.  A myriad of diverse presenters joined with performers, poets and artists to celebrate the influence of the college and the accomplishments of its alumni, both teachers and students.  A collaboration of  The Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and UNC-Asheville, the conference was a long-awaited gathering of energies from across the country and beyond, searching for the memory and meaning of Black Mountain College.

BMC existed just 24 years, from 1933 to 1957, but this conference made clear that its radical vision of education and incredible nexus of creative individuals resonates deeply in our arts and culture.  There were so many threads of research and inquiry presented, I can only speak of my own journey through the presentations.  Planning to focus on Ray Johnson, I found myself captured by powerful ideas about the basic philosophy and significance of BMC, and intrigued by new perspectives on the creative processes which emerged there.

Initially, students at BMC were required to take only 2 courses:  philosophy from John Andrew Rice and art from Josef Albers.  Rice’s philosophy, informed by John Dewey, created a new mode of education at BMC, one that featured the internal discipline generated by students doing as much as absorbing.  Michael Kelly’s presentation on Dewey in relation to BMC brought out the powerfully humanistic nature of liberal arts education as conducted at BMC.  With art central to his view of experience, Rice designed the curriculum  to elevate the quality of experience in students until they were prepared to be democratic citizens.  Seymour Simmons helped connect the educational philosophy to the artistic act with this wonderful description of the act: “an inventive response to genuine problems involving collaboration and conflict while engaging and integrating multiple human capacities.”  Josef Albers wanted for his students no more or less than a new mode of seeing, and his manifest genius was the nugget of magnetism that drew such stellar powers to the place.

 

The place!  Over and over the theme of place ran through the conference.  Black Mountain was a unique haven of sorts, and a bivouac as well for the sorties against New Criticism and the strictures of Modernism. It was literally a quiet spot in the harried life of urban artists and teachers who came.  Yet there were privations, great stress, and no assurance of the fame and influence we look back on today.  Two living Black Mountain figures, Dorothea Rockburne and Michael Rumaker, presented at the conference and helped establish the sense of the place.

                                      

I found the presence of two deceased BMC figures, M.C. Richards and Ray Johnson, to be very strong due to the passionate work being done on them by current young scholars.  M.C. Richards embodied the highest principles of the Dewey aesthetic in seeing and living the connnection between art and life.  Jenni Sorkin of Yale University described Richard’s costly rejection of a conventional academic career for the esoteric but rewarding concepts of  Rudolph Steiner and  Matthew Fox, the “Centering” of being required for art in clay,and the attempt to practice the apprenticeships of art to prepare for “the big art… our life.”  Kate Dempsey and Sebastian Matthews both offered invigorating interpretive perspectives on Ray Johnson, and convinced me once and for all that Ray is the epitome of Black Mountain students, and carried into the world a fundamental store of post-modern concepts gained at Black Mountain.

More than one speaker described the roots of post-modern thought to be discerned in the Black Mountain canon. Andrea Lui from NYC named three: 1) knowledge as contingent and partial, 2) photography as art, and 3) promiscious mixing of disciplines.  The relation between and hierarchy of the disciplines at BMC provided some interesting contention among the scholars.  Speaking of the interdisciplinary approach, Louly Peacock Konz offered perhaps the most purely entertaining talk of all with her description of the play “The Ruse of Medusa,” translated from Satie’s French by M.C. Richards, and performed by Buckminster Fuller as the baron and Merce Cunningham as the “costly mechanical monkey,” among others.  Black Mountain College established a perceived “school” of poetry, encompassing authors who never set foot on the campus.  Rachel Stella from Paris described the Black Mountain Review as the base for a “textual community” which helped transform the structure of literary publishing of the era.  Charles Olson’s massive literary influence came up again and again, with Jonas Williams of SUNY-Albany reminding us that Olson said: “art does not describe, but enacts.”  Forming, transforming, teaching by action, seeking the transcendent in the material: these were the forces that coursed through education at Black Mountain.  Over several near-future posts, I will recount some of the amazing insights shared at this conference, especially my greatly enlarged perspective on Ray J.  The central role of experience in learning and the intellectual freedom derived from Socratic and democratic principles were key elements in Black Mountain’s existence and lasting influence.  From this cauldron of intellectual striving and artistic practice emerged various and wonderful creative expressions with much to tell us today.  This conference did not dissect a historical movement, but uncovered living roots of a vital cultural force that sends wick green shoots upward as we speak.

We must carry in our souls a picture of creating little by little

 the vessel of our humanity.            M.C. Richards

A Raleigh Art Ramble

The Paper Plant presents an Open Studio Saturday, August 22 from 10 AM to 6 PM.  John and Cara will be demonstrating papermaking, marbling, printmaking and letterpress printing.  A retail display of notecards, blank books and paper, with opportunities for hands-on interactions.

528 N. Person Street, 919-618-6883

Starting with the shameless self-promotion above, here is my current outlook on Raleigh creative endeavors.  I dearly hope our open studio will attract (as it did last year) some of my Bain friends, new and old.  Critter, a Bain documentor, has favored me with some mail art this summer and I’m dying to show him the new Ray Johnson material I picked up recently at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center.  Ray’s mail art show in 1976 was seminal for me: my Bain experience was galvanizing in just as big a way, here in my old age.  I hope our open studio can stimulate: we will be marbling, printing and making sheets, and at 6 PM we will toast the day with all who have gathered.  Please come!

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Lovejoy Pottery, August 1st, 9-4

Dan and Nancy Lovejoy are having an open studio this coming weekend at Lovejoy Pottery in Wendell.  I posted about their show last summer in the first weeks of this blog’s existence, and it’s always great to see them and the other artists, who include Edge Barnes, John Garland & Mary Paul, Alan Leland,  Julie Olson, Susan Myers, and Nancy & Kathleen Redman.  As described in the earlier post, Dan Lovejoy was a founding member of Raleigh Artists Community in the seventies, and the Lovejoy Pottery show is well worth the drive to 6117 Watkins Road off Rolesville Highway. (919)266-6053.

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David Beaver, media theorist

I had the best chat with David Beaver the other day at Borders. David earned eternal endearment in the Raleigh art community by acting as jovial scorekeeper for the Poetry Slams at Forum+Function in the late nineties.  He is my emblem for a 21st century shaman, being a magician, virtual reality enterprenuer, and now key member of the emerging Overview movement, which posits that seeing Earth from space is so life-changing, common space-flights could fundamentally change humanity’s perspective on the planet.  Though David is working on transforming the world, he is still affable and charming as ever, and he’s got my mental cogs churning about several of his fascinating ideas.

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photo by David Simonton

NandO featured David Simonton recently and turned me on to a fantastic blog – Prison Photography, now featured on my blogroll.  Their post about David’s photographs of Polk Youth Center before it was razed for the art museum shows powerful work; a stark portrait of neglect and abandonment.  David’s earlier photographic work reflects “his calling as a poet of the ignored or the ruined place, the lost or forgotten landscape,” as described in this Indy profile.

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by Susan Soper

Below is a sending from Susan Soper, printmaker.

 

     Susan Soper   —   Lithographs

 Clayton Center Gallery

  111 East Second  Street

Clayton, NC 27520

August 1-30 2009

Gallery Hours M-F, 9-5

 Public opening reception Thursday August 6^th, 6–7:30 pm

Sponsored by Clayton Visual Arts

susansoperlithographs.com

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Carter Hubbard, a papermaking contact from way back, touched base recently about an interesting project.  She and partner Sara Botwick are putting together an art exhibition in the  downtown warehouse where Bill and Otho created “antiques” for Niemann-Marcus and employed several dear friends in the process.  The MUSA website is a bit inscrutable, but the show will offer an “interpretive visual perspective … on what it means to be ‘made in the USA.’”  I’ll get back to this project soon.

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Poppy Bear on Porch by Walter Stanford

Joel Haas just held a signing for his new book, Poppy Bear, illustrated by Walter Stanford.   Joel’s book is his own writing, based on the “most enduring character” of his late father, the prolific novelist Ben Haas, who entertained his three boys with endless “Poppy Bear” tales but never wrote them down.  Joel wrote up a prototype “Poppy Bear” story and then hooked up with Walter.  The book is available from either of their websites.

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Thanks for your kind attention.  As always, this is just a smattering of the wonderful Raleigh culture that has come my way.  Back at ya’ soon!

Jeffery Beam helps us mourn Jonathan Williams

  he done

what he could

when he got round

to it

Jeffery Beam is a wonderful literary character who works at UNC-CH and lives in Hillsborough.  He has a book out of collected poems and has many interesting publications to his credit.

He is always alerting me to wonderful things, such as his readings for Groundhog Day, or a friend’s musical setting for a soldier’s last letter home, or the blooming of the Dove tree in the UNC Arboretum.  Recently he gave me the news that Jonathan Williams had died.  He knew the man and understood his importance as few do.

Here is the beginning of Jeffery’s obituary:

                      Poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, founder of The Jargon Society press, one of the most renowned small presses of the last half of the twentieth century, and champion and publisher of some of the most important mid and late century poets in the United States and England, died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. Williams, 79, began his avant-garde press while a student at the Chicago Institute of Design, naming it “Jargon” not only for its meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear, “jargonelle” and the French “jargon,” meaning the twittering of birds.

Jeffery writes of his personal work, the incredibly important work of The Jargon Society press, but mostly he evokes for us the amazingly unique style and oulook of this man.

                       Williams’ interests and talents, revealed him as a Renaissance man – publisher; poet and satirist; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand.  Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, his incisive humor, and his confidently experimental and inventive poems and prose.  His interests, in his own words, raised, “the common to grace,” while paying “close attention to the earthy.” At the forefront of the avant-garde, and yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional, Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved, as he described it, “more and more away from the High Art of the city” settling “for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.”

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Just closed is a show whose prospectus gives some idea of the many dimensions of this man.  Thank you, Jeffery, as we try to find the proper way to remember and honor this unique individual.

Condolences may be sent to poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan’s partner and
collaborator for forty years:

Thomas Meyer
The Jargon Society
P O Drawer 10
Highlands, NC 28741