Contemporary Authors

• The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2015

1. The experimenters : chance and design at Black Mountain College https://lccn.loc.gov/2013037749 Díaz, Eva, 1977- author. The experimenters : chance and design at Black Mountain College / Eva Díaz. Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, [2015] x, 215 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm NX405.B55 B553 2015 ISBN: 9780226068039 (hardcover : alkaline paper)9780226067988 (hardcover)

• Pratt - https://www.pratt.edu/faculty_and_staff/bio/?id=ediaz3

  Eva Díaz’s book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College has been released by the University of Chicago Press. The project examines how an interdisciplinary group of artists at Black Mountain proposed new models of art and focuses on three Black Mountain teachers in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. Professor Díaz’s writing appears in magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, Grey Room, October, and Tate Etc. and she is a regular contributor to Artforum. She was recently awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant to research for her book about Buckminster Fuller’s work, titled The Fuller Effect: The Critique of Total Design in Postwar Art.

• Hyperallergic - http://hyperallergic.com/author/eva-diaz/

  Eva Díaz is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was recently released by the University of Chicago Press. The project examines how an interdisciplinary group of artists proposed new models of art practice around the concept of experimentation, and focuses on three key Black Mountain teachers in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. Díaz's writing appears in magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, BOMB, Cabinet, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, October, and Tate Etc. She was recently awarded a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant to pursue research for her book about the legacy of Buckminster Fuller’s work, titled The Fuller Effect: The Critique of Total Design in Postwar Art.

QUOTED: "Diaz's interpretation of the written evidence seems on target with the evidence in ample supply in the notes. The extensive bibliography provides significant sources for readers to dig into the subject matter more deeply. Though the book includes a wide range of illustrations ... this reviewer found the treatment of the chosen images flattened by a lack of critical analysis."

The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain
College
Patrick Lee Lucas
Journal of Southern History.
82.3 (Aug. 2016): p730.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text: 
The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College. By Eva Diaz. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp.
x, 215. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-226-06798-8.)
Eva Diaz traces the founding and short life of Black Mountain College (1933-1957), which was situated in western North Carolina and was home
to a small group of faculty who were deeply influential in the evolution of art and design education in the twentieth century. With well-developed
prose and a good narrative, Diaz excels at providing context and content for an important story of experimentation on this campus and in
subsequent locations inspired or directly impacted by the Black Mountain College approach to education. By reminding readers how avant-garde
the pedagogy of the Black Mountain faculty was, Diaz ably situates the "complicated and contested concept defined by projects as varied as
geometric abstraction, serialized and mass production, dome architecture, chance-based musical composition, and explorations of monochromatic
painting" (pp. 3-4). Diaz introduces readers to three significant people--"artist Josef Albers, composer John Cage, and architect-designer R.
Buckminster Fuller"--singling them out among the faculty as the great innovators who fueled the Black Mountain experience (p. 1).
After an introduction that leads readers through the founding of the institution and the complex pedagogical and philosophical positions of its
faculty, Diaz unfolds a chapter each on Albers, Cage, and Fuller, the main bulk of the two-hundred-page work. In the chapter on Albers, Diaz
stresses how the artist focused on experience rather than outcomes and believed in "an experience in and of perception that facilitates complex
understandings of the visual world" (p. 52). In chapter 2 Diaz notes Cage's opposition to Albers's approach and explains the composer's
formulation of what he termed the "chance protocol," a process designed to accentuate "an exploration of uncertainty, not a careful examination
of variables" (pp. 103, 57). Careful to provide context for this evolution in the process, Diaz points to the presence of a more mature generation of
students and the decline and replacement of the original faculty as factors contributing to the shift. In chapter 3, Diaz analyzes Fuller's
interpretation of "total thinking" as his model of experimentation, one that "leveraged the creativity of the artist and the technological
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innovativeness of the scientist to completely rethink acts and objects of design" (pp. 103, 101). Significantly, Fuller's experimentation resulted in
the idea that anyone could be a designer and perhaps signaled the beginning of the end for Black Mountain College. Fuller's own
experimentation, Diaz reminds us, stemmed from the "scientificity in a spirit of American technological optimism and exceptionalism" that
placed design at the heart of social and technological processes of the mid-twentieth century (p. 147). In the closing chapter of her work, Diaz
speculates about the impact of Black Mountain on subsequent generations of educators, connecting the experiments that took place in western
North Carolina with prospective research projects to examine Albers's, Cage's, and Fuller's models for experimentation.
Diaz's interpretation of the written evidence seems on target with the evidence in ample supply in the notes. The extensive bibliography provides
significant sources for readers to dig into the subject matter more deeply. Though the book includes a wide range of illustrations in black-andwhite
and in color, this reviewer found the treatment of the chosen images flattened by a lack of critical analysis. Given the visual nature of the
fields the author investigates for the book, this oversight seems slightly troubling: how might each piece of visual evidence tell the reader more
about the theme of experimentation so central to the volume? While the images are interesting visually, it is not clear how their inclusion helps
tell the story, the chief shortcoming of this otherwise well-conceived publication.
PATRICK LEE LUCAS
University of Kentucky College of Design
Lucas, Patrick Lee
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lucas, Patrick Lee. "The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p.
730+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447817&it=r&asid=a02b1800f640f680f5614a08c8cd5b4e. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447817

---
QUOTED: "What distinguishes this book is Diaz's lucid, comprehensive explanations of the ways in which Albers, Cage, and Fuller employed
experimentation."

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Diaz, Eva. The experimenters: chance and design at Black
Mountain College
J.H. Noonan
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.11 (July 2016): p1600.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text: 
Diaz, Eva. The experimenters: chance and design at Black Mountain College. Chicago, 2015. 215p bibl index afp ISBN 9780226067988 cloth,
$40.00
53-4651
NX405
CIP
Adding to the growing body of literature on Black Mountain College, Diaz (Pratt Institute) provides an insightful consideration of the role that
experiment played at this legendary institution. Focusing on the work of Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, the author explains
that from the college's foundation in 1933 until its closure in 1957 experimentation offered an alternative to the subjective, direct actions of the
contemporaneous abstract expressionists, but it also paralleled postwar practices of using science and technology to improve society. In the first
of the three case studies, Diaz offers a nuanced analysis of how Albers's disciplined investigation of form yielded an understanding of its
contingency. The chapter on Cage considers how chance in experimentation removed authorial control and thus bias, and the chapter on Fuller
details how "comprehensive design" tested inherited forms and incorporated failure to push toward new forms that improve living conditions.
What distinguishes this book is Diaz's lucid, comprehensive explanations of the ways in which Albers, Cage, and Fuller employed
experimentation, or chance, and even failure as agents to advance perception in art specifically and, more broadly, to improve society and the
body politic. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.--J. H. Noonan, Caldwell
College
Noonan, J.H.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Noonan, J.H. "Diaz, Eva. The experimenters: chance and design at Black Mountain College." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,
July 2016, p. 1600. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393231&it=r&asid=ae20146d47d9d89aeb9fd9e7f5f5bc64. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457393231

---
QUOTED: "engrossing study."

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The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain
College
Barbara Kiser
Nature.
518.7537 (Feb. 5, 2015): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
Full Text: 
The experimenters: chance and design at black mountain college
Eva Diaz University of Chicago Press (2015)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What links systems theorist and architect R. Buckminster Fuller with artistic innovators such as Josef Albers and John Cage? The answer is Black
Mountain College, North Carolina. From 1933 to 1957, in this unaccredited institution in Appalachia, they and other "artist-scientists" created an
iconic lab for experimental research in the arts. As art historian Eva Diaz reveals in this engrossing study, their explorations in materials, form,
chance and indeterminacy were never less than electrifying. Her sympathetic portrait of Fuller as a utopian saving the world through geodesic
geometry is particularly assured.
Kiser, Barbara
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kiser, Barbara. "The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College." Nature, vol. 518, no. 7537, 2015, p. 33. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA400530214&it=r&asid=d31e8d1e219480b136063f34a7799389. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A400530214

Lucas, Patrick Lee. "The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 730+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447817&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Noonan, J.H. "Diaz, Eva. The experimenters: chance and design at Black Mountain College." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1600. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393231&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Kiser, Barbara. "The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College." Nature, vol. 518, no. 7537, 2015, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA400530214&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.

• Make Mag
  http://makemag.com/review-the-experimenters/
  Word count: 2015

  QUOTED: "What comes through in this book, reinforced by the clear prose and systematic style of argument, is a thesis on experimentation being neither free-wheeling nor a self-gratifying luxury but instead rigorous, difficult, and all the more positive and liberating for it. Díaz is eminently quotable for students and scholars alike owing to a clarity of phrasing no doubt honed by the long gestation of this book as described in her (admittedly lengthy) acknowledgements."
  "Yet The Experimenters will likely prove highly enjoyable and even inspirational for anyone interested in art practice or simply the power of challenging accepted ways of thinking. One of the greatest accolades that Díaz can be paid is that readers will wish they could take the classes she describes. Like Nigel Llewellyn’s recent The London Art Schools (2015), this account of the work at Black Mountain reminds us that the restless spirit of experimentation is often best fostered in environments that expose the rules governing life and art before pushing us, in a collective effort, to break them."

  The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
  by Eva Diaz
  Reviewed by Alex Belsey

  Published: September 30, 2016
  1

  Published by University Of Chicago Press, 2014 | 256 pages

  What does it mean for artists to experiment? What does truly experimental art look like? When such questions are asked the immediate images that come to mind may involve nude models, soaked from head to toe in Yves Klein blue, hurling themselves at a canvas. Some may think of the provocative and risky performance pieces of the 1960s, of Yoko Ono knelt on a stage inviting audience members to gradually cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. The notion of artistic experimentation is for many inextricably linked to the pursuit of sexual liberation, to prodigious levels of substance abuse, to violent protest against social and political taboo. A recent BBC television documentary devoted to the salacious question of what precisely happened to Van Gogh’s ear is indicative of widely held assumptions that art-making must happen at the outer limits of reason, safety, even sanity.

  It was all seen rather differently by the likes of Josef Albers. He was teaching at Black Mountain College, an unaccredited art school ensconced in rural Appalachia that opened in the same year, 1933, as the Bauhaus closed. On his Basic Design course Albers supplied his students with only a few newspapers and asked them to “try to make something out of them that is more than you have now.” Disregarding such predictable results as cut and glued aeroplanes and animals, he was drawn instead to the efforts of a young architect who had simply folded his newspaper and stood it up as if it were a standing screen. Albers effused to the rest of the class that this particular student had truly understood the nature of the material whilst completely transforming its use; this, his students would quickly learn, was what it meant to see the world in a new way.

  Albers was just one tutor amongst a number at Black Mountain who were seeking to reshape how art practice was taught in America and beyond. Across three decades in the mid-twentieth century the College was home to evolving ideas of experimentation in art with their basis in testing and variation, repurposing and refining, chance and design. Teachers and students alike were encouraged to think of their efforts as contributing to a larger altruistic effort to remake a troubled world. This was art-making that challenged accepted social and political realities by interrogating the nature of perception, performance, and productivity. Despite the astounding roster of significant names associated with the College – including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne and Cy Twombly amongst others – its legacy of influence is still somewhat underestimated. In her new book The Experimenters, art historian Eva Díaz focusses on Black Mountain and the innovative pedagogic practices developed there in order to not only redress this, but to also approach the big questions as to what constitutes experimentation in art practice and how differing ideas and interpretations of the ‘experimental’ can make different arguments for the role of art in the modern world.

  The experimenters at Black Mountain were conducting their studies and teaching in opposition to prevailing attitudes, particularly in England and America, that art should be the realm of individual expression and intensely subjective, emotional response. In the earlier decades of the twentieth-century, such influential tastemakers as the English critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry had helped cultivate art history as the study of troubled genius with their enthusiastic writings on Paul Cézanne, dwelling on the personality of the artist and on the life journey that could be read in his works. In America, Clement Greenberg was a champion of what would be termed abstract expressionism; in his 1944 essay ‘Abstract Art’ he called for painting to communicate ‘only what goes on inside the self’. Greenberg actually taught briefly at Black Mountain in 1950 but was reputedly underwhelmed by what he encountered there, presumably finding much of its culture at odds with his preference for direct subjective expression detached from social concerns. Yet within the College itself there would be continual friction between the systematic experimenters and those who favoured the antithetical immediacy of expressionism. The College’s final rector, Charles Olson, was a passionate advocate for the Jackson Pollock way of working, believing that velocity and intuition produced art that was more truthful and essential. Against such forces, from within and without, the experimenters aimed to remove the scales of subjective bias from the eyes of their students.

  Given that much art history and criticism to this day remains in thrall to privileging the personal and attempting to discern the mysterious inner life of the artist, it is refreshing that Díaz in The Experimenters celebrates instead those who worked systematically to specific ends. Crucially, this is a book about methods in pedagogy and practice and therefore not another group biography. Yet the three key figures whose periods of prominence at Black Mountain give this book its triptych structure – Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller – provide the ideal blend of similarity and difference of approach to keep Díaz’s account of teaching at the College lively and surprising. She certainly succeeds in clearly defining those differences in intention and practice amongst her three protagonists: Albers, in traditional media such as drawing and painting, taught methods of meticulous formal variation as he tested and challenged conditioned perceptual understandings; Cage, in music and performance, created the conditions for the unexpected to occur in pursuit of unknown outcomes; and Buckminster Fuller, in architecturally-informed practice, advocated a holistic system of thinking and design with the aim of discovering empirical truths in an otherwise inefficient society. Accompanying this analysis, Díaz delineates the distinctions between their practices and those of other influential schools of thought such as constructivism and surrealism. In a typical instance, she skilfully contrasts Albers’s focus on experimentation as constant re-/assessment with that of Ilya Bolotowsky, his replacement during sabbatical, who harboured more didactic – and, it is implied, arrogant – convictions about the ‘universal characteristics of representation’ as influenced by the New York City-based abstract painters of his day.

  The focus on method gives this book its distinctiveness, but while Díaz admirably avoids an excess of individual characterisation there are some compelling details that further our appreciation of her three key figures. The understated treatment of Albers’s emigré narrative is the most quietly touching, with Díaz’s reading of a newsprint photograph in which he and his wife are ‘posed tensely’, having just arrived in the country after departing fascist Germany, proving concise and evocative. She emphasizes the crucial point that Albers believed America to be the place to teach a radical new way of seeing the world. He once stated, “I want to open eyes”, and Díaz emphasizes how he worked to import and adapt the teaching practices and curricula of the recently-closed Bauhaus to this end. He cleverly made his aims a patriotic appeal to his new home, naming ‘exploration and inventiveness’ as ‘two American virtues’ and urging action against a staid and ‘standardized’ programme of education. While Albers is portrayed as a measured and calculating figure, Buckminster Fuller comes across as more of a roguish charmer. This may be attributable to the endearing implied disparity between the official line from Díaz – that he was participating in ‘a mid-century cultural lexicon emphasizing scientificity in a spirit of American technological optimism and exceptionalism’ – and what transpires to be his somewhat utopian and woolly approximation of design’s role in the near future. His eye for arrangement and his style of visual presentation, illustrated in some of this book’s well-chosen colour plates, seems to have arisen from a belief that producing diagrams and manifests is in itself a societally progressive activity. Perhaps inevitably, Cage remains the most opaque of the three key figures. As there is already a wealth of material on his life and work, from David Revill’s highly personal The Roaring Silence (1993) to David Grubbs’s Records Ruin the Landscape (2014), Díaz instead isolates the distinct aims and parameters of Cage’s practice during his comparatively brief period at the College, which she argues had a lasting impact on his subsequent, better-known work. When introducing his (somewhat paradoxical) desire to devise frameworks that encouraged random activity, she also coins an excellent term, the ‘chance protocol’, for use in future Cage studies.

  Further colour is added by brief detours into broader contexts of philosophical or pedagogic thought that are often kept to swift and seamlessly integrated single paragraphs. We are reminded of the lasting influence of John Locke on the widely held belief that the habitual quality of perception helps, benignly, to maintain the social order, Díaz impressing upon the reader the extent of the entrenched attitudes Albers was pushing against. An explication of the Vienna Circle, with a focus on Otto Neurath, sets up an implicit critique of that group’s search for constituent units of knowledge as being reductive when compared to Albers’s drive towards complexity. Most helpfully, considering that Cage’s intentions can so often defy attempts at explication in prose, a neat history of Bauhaus performers’ interests in form, spaciality, and placement of performers and audience, including those which alumnus Xanti Schawinsky had then brought to Black Mountain, precedes an engaging analysis of how Cage used language and notational instructions to foster ambiguity and thus encourage boundless opportunities for performers’ interpretation of his instructions.

  In the present cultural moment, in which almost all art practice calls attention to itself as being experimental in origin and execution, it is important to recognise the efforts of those who sought through widely varying means to fundamentally change the way that art is made and perceived. What comes through in this book, reinforced by the clear prose and systematic style of argument, is a thesis on experimentation being neither free-wheeling nor a self-gratifying luxury but instead rigorous, difficult, and all the more positive and liberating for it. Díaz is eminently quotable for students and scholars alike owing to a clarity of phrasing no doubt honed by the long gestation of this book as described in her (admittedly lengthy) acknowledgements. Yet The Experimenters will likely prove highly enjoyable and even inspirational for anyone interested in art practice or simply the power of challenging accepted ways of thinking. One of the greatest accolades that Díaz can be paid is that readers will wish they could take the classes she describes. Like Nigel Llewellyn’s recent The London Art Schools (2015), this account of the work at Black Mountain reminds us that the restless spirit of experimentation is often best fostered in environments that expose the rules governing life and art before pushing us, in a collective effort, to break them.

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