TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THINKING
Martin Heidegger- What Is Called Thinking………………………………………………………….2
John Dewey- Democracy and Education………………………………………………..……………11
Bell Hooks- Critical Thinking…………………………………………………………..…………….12

II. MAKING
Joseph Beuys- I Am Seaching for Field Character……………………………………...…...……….16
Ludwig Borne- How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days………………….………………18
Roberto Matta- on Leonardo Da Vinci……………………………………………….……………...20
Donald Winnicott- Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self………………………….22

III. MAKING THINKING

Susan Sontag- Against Interpretation………………………………………………..……………….26
Arthur Danto- Philosophizing Art………………………………………………………..………….28
John Dewey- Art as Experience………………………………………………………...…………….32
Gilles Deleuze- Desert Islands………………………………………………………………….…….40
Thomas Hirschhorn- 24h Foucault………………………………………..…………...…………….41

IV. COMMUNITY
Allan Kaprow- Notes on the Elimination of the Audience………………..…………………………44
Martin Duberman- Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community ...…………………………….46
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LECTURE
I

. We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves

try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be "
ready to learn thinking. leel{" ~,,1'I\1~
.As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such

learning, we have admitted that we are not yet capable

of thiruoog.

Yet man is called the being who can think, and rightly

so. Man is the rational animal. Reason, ratio, evolves in

thinking. Being the rational animal, man must be capable

of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man

wants to think, but can't. Perhaps he wants too much when

he wants to think, and so can do too little. Man can think

irt.~e . ~en~e~at h~ poss~~~e--I>0ssibility to_ c1.9 so. Tllls

poss16ility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are

capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what

we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only

toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward

our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as

the keeper who holds us in our essential being. What keeps

us in our essential nature holds us only so long, however, as

we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we

keep h~ding on to it by not letting it out of our memory.

,:.M emory')is the gathering of thought. Thought of what?

:>

2
 4
WHAT IS CALLED THIN~ING?
Thought of what holds us, in that we give it thought pre­
cisely because It remains what must be thought about.
~~ht ~~ th~ gif~ ot:..t!tin..kj~ back, a gift given beca~e
we Incline toward it. Only when we are so inclined toward
~ what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capa­
ble of thinking.
In order to be capable of thinking; we need to learn it
first. What is learning? Man learns when he disposes every­
thing he does so that it answers to whatever essentials are
addressed to him at any given moment. We learn to think
by giving our mind to what there is to think about.
What is essential in a friend, for example, is what we call
"friendly." In the same sense we now call "thought-pro­
voking" what in itself is to be thought about. ~g
~o~t-Erovoking f[ives us to think. But it always gives
that gift just so far as the thought-provoking matter al­
ready is intrinsically what must be thought about. From
now on, we will call "most thought-provoking" what re­
. ent and soon boring.
mains to be thought about always, because it is at the begin­
ning, before all else. What is most thought-provoking?
How does it show itself in our thought-provoking time?
if- Most thought-provokinKis that ~ tJr~ Rill 'I1oLtbi.nJri.ng
-not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming
constantly more thought-provoking. True, this course of
events seems to demand rather that man should act, with­
out delay, instead of making speeches at conferences and
international conventions and never getting oeyond pro­
posing ideas on what ought to be, and how it ought to be
done. What is lacking, then, is action, not thought.
And ~ coUld be that prevailing man has for centuries
now acted too much and thou~ht too little. But how dare
anyone assert today that we are still not thinking, today
when there is everywhere a lively and constantly more
audible interest in philosophy, when almost everybody
claims to know what philosophy is all about! Philosophers
PAR.T I 5
are the thinkers par excellence. They are called thinkers
precisely because tbjnkjng properly takes place in phi­
losophy.
Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy _
today. But-is there anything at all left today in which ;:.:
man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he
understands "interest"?
Interest, interesse, means to be among and in the midst
of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with
ing. And interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be
regarded as indifferent the next moment, and be displaced
by something else, which then concerns us just as little as
what went before. Many people today take the view that
they are doing great honor to something by finding it inter­
esting. The truth is that such an opinion has already rele­
gated the interesting thing to the ranks of what is indiffer­
.
It is no evidence of any readiness to think that people
show an interest in philosophy. There is, of course, serious
preoccupation everywhere with philosophy and its prob­
lems. The learned world is expending commendable efforts
in the investigation of the history of philosophy. These are
useful and worthy tasks, and only the best talents are good
enough for them, especially when they present to us models
of great thinking. But even if we have devoted many years '\
to tbe intensive study of the treatises and writings of the
great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we our­
selves are thinking, or even are ready to learn thinking. On ,B;-0
...,., .I
the contrary-preoccupation with philosophy more than
anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we .,:t
are thinking just because 'we are incessantly "philoso­
phizing."
Even so, it remains strange, and seems presumptuous, to
assert that what is most thought-provoking in our thought­
3
 6
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
PART I 7
provoking time is that .we are still not thinking. Accord­
thinking is by no means only because man does not yet turn
ingly, we must prove the assertion. Even more advisable is
sufficiently toward that which, by origin and innately,
first to explain it. For it could be that the demand for a
wants to be thought about since in its essence its remains
proof collapses as soon as enough light is shed on what the
assertion says. It runs: what must be thought about. Rather, that we are still not
"k thinking stems from the fact that the thing itself that must
Most thought-provoking in our thought-provokinG timf!
is that we arf! still not thinking. be thought about turns away from UlI:lI:l, has turned, awa.y
long ago.
It has been suggested earlier how the term "thought­
We will want to know at once when that event took
provoking" is to be understood. Thought-provoking is what
place. Even before that, we will ask still more urgently how
gives us to think. Let us look at it closely, and from the start
we could possibly know of any such event. And fmally, the
allow each word its proper weight. Some things are food for
problems which here lie in wait come rushing at us when
thought in themselves, intrinsically, so to speak innately.
we add still further: that which really gives us food for
And some things make an appeal to us to give them
thought did not turn away from man at some time or other
thought, to turn toward them in thought: to think them.
. which can be fixed in history-no, what really must be
What is thought-provoking, what gives us to think, is
thought keeps itself turned away from man SInce the . be-
then not anything that we determine, not anything that r •

only we are instituting, only we are proposing. According ~g .

.On the other hand, in our era man has always thought
to our assertion, what of itself ~ves us most to think about,
in some way; in fact, man has thought the profoundest
what is most thought-provoking, is this-that we are still
not thinking. thoughts, and entrusted them to memory. By thinking in
that way he did and does remain related to what must be
. This now means: We have still not come face to face,
thought. And yet man is not capable of really thinking as
have not yet come under the sway of what intrinsically
long as that which must be thought about, withdraws.
desires to be thought about in an essential sense. Presum­
If we, as we are here and now, will not be taken in by
ably the reason is that we human beings do not yet suffi­
empty talk, we must retort that everything said so far is an
ciently reach out and turn toward what desires to be thought.
unbroken chain of hollow assertions, and state besides that
If so, the fact that we are still not thinking would merely be
what has been presented here has nothing to do with scien­
a slowness, a delay in thinking or, at most, a neglect on
tific knowledge.
man's part. Such human tardiness could then be cured in
It will be well to maintain as long as possible such a
human ways by the appropriate measures. Human neglect
defensive attitude toward what has been said: only in that
would give us food for thought-but only in passing. The
attitude do we keep the distance needed for a quick running
fact that we are still not thinking would be thought-provok_
dash by which one or the other of us may succeed in making
the leap into thinking. For it is true that what was said so
far, and the entire discussion that is to follow, have nothing
to do with scientific knowledge, especially not if the discus­
sion itself is to be a thinking. This situation is grounded in

4

8 WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? .
the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think
-which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance
of its own appointed course. Science does not think:. This is
a shockjng statement. Let the--statement be shocking, even
though we immediately add the supplementary statement
that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has
to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is genuine and
consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible
that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there un­
bridgeably. There is no bridge here--Qruy tho hmp. H(me~
there is nothing but mischief in all the makeshift ties and
asses' bridges by which men today would set up a com­
fortable commerce between thinking and the sciences.
Hence we, those of us who come from the sciences, must
endure what is shocking and strange about thinking­
assuming we are ready to learn thinking. To learn means to
make everything we do answer to whatever essen~d- '
dress themselves to us at the given moment. In .order to be
capable of doing so, we must get underway. It is important
above all that on the way on which we set out when we
learn to think, we do not deceive ourselves an_d rashly by­
pass the pressing questions; on the contrary, we must allow
ourselves to become involved in questions that seek what no
inventiveness can find. Especially we moderns can learn
only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the
matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically
unlearn what thinking has been traditionally. To do that,
we must at the same time come to know it.
We said: man still does not think, and this because what
must be thought about tunis away from him; by no means
only because man does not sufficiently reach out and turn
to what is to be thought.
What must be thought about, turns away from man. It
withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowl­
edge of something that withdraws from the beginning,
9
PART I
how can we even give it a name? Whatever withdraws,
refuses arrival. But-withdrawing is not nothing. With­
drawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even con-
cern and claim man more essentially than anything present
*
that strikes and touches him. Being struck by actuality is
what we like to regard as constitutive of the actuality of the
actual. However, in being struck by what is actuai, man may
be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him
-touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping
hiln by its withclr!l.wal. Tht! evertt of withdrawal could be
what is most present in all ouT present, and so infinitely
exceed the act:uality of everything actual.
What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very
withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immedi­
ately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we
are drawing toward what draws, attracts us by its with­
drawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing to­
ward what draws us, our essential nature already bears the
stamp of "drawing toward." As we are drawing toward
what withdraws, we ourselves are pointers pointing toward
it. We are who we ~re by pointing in that direction-not
like an incidental adjunct but as follows: this "drawing
toward" is in itself an essential and therefore constant
. pointing toward what withdraws. To say "drawing to­
ward" is to say "pointing toward what withdraws."
To the extent that man is drawing that way, he points
toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is
the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also
occasionally someone who points. No: drawn into what
withdraws, drawing toward it and thus pointing into the
withdrawal, man first is man. His essential nature lies in
being such a pointer. Something which in Itself, by Its es­
sential nature, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws to­
ward what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign
points toward what draws away, it points, not so much at
5
 10
WHAT 18 CALLED THINKING?
without interpretation.
In a draft to one of his hymns, Hoelderlin writes:
"We are a sign that is not read."
He continues with these two lines:
"We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands."
The several drafts of that hymn-besides bearing such
titles as "The Serpent," "The Sign," "The Nymph"-also
include the title "Mnemosyne." This Greek word may be
translated: Memory. And since the Greek word is femJ­
nine~ we Rfl!ai DO rult!§ if WE! translate Ujjame Memory."
For Hoelderlin uses the Greek word Mnemosyne as the
name of a Titaness. According to the myth, she is the
daughter of Heaven and Earth. Myth means the telling
word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appear
-both the appearance and that which has its essence in
the appearance, its epiphany. Mythos is what has its essence
in its telling-what is apparent in the unconcealedness of
its appeal. The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical
concern to all human beings which makes man think of what
appears, what is in being. Logos says the same; mythos and
loGOS are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim,
placed into opposition by philosophy as such; on the con­
trary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8)
are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same
sense. Mythos and logos become separated and opposed
only at the point where neither mythos nor logos can keep
to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has
already taken place. Historians and philolOgists, by virtue
of a prejudice which modern rationalism . adopted from
Platonism, imagine that mythos was destroyed by logos. But
nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed
only by the God's withdrawal.
PART I 11
Mnemosyne, daughter of Heaven and Earth, bride of
Zeus, in nine nights becomes the mother of the nine Muses.
Drama and music, dance and poetry are of the womb of
Mnemosyne, Dame Memory. It is plain that the word
means something else than merely the psychologically de­
monstrable ability to retain a mental representation, an idea,
of something which is past. Memory-from Latin memor,
mindful-has in mind something that is in the mind,
thought. But when it is the name of the Mother of the
Muses, "Memory" does not mean just any thought of any­
thing that can be thought. Memory is the gathering and
convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands
to be thoue;ht about first of all. Memory is ~p.e g~pter4t6
of recollection, thinking back. It safely keeps and keeps
concealed within it that to which at each given time thought
must be given before all else, in everything that essentially
is, everything that appeals to us as what has being and has
been in being. Memory, Mother of the Muses-the think­
ing back to what is to be thought is the source and ground
of poesy. This is why poesy is the water that at times flows
backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking
back, a recollection. Surely, as long as we take the view that
logic gives us any information about what thinking is, we
shall never be able to think how much all poesy rests upon
'thinking back, recollection. Poetry wells up only from de­
voted thought thinking back, recollecting.
Under the heading Mnemosyne, Hoe1derlin says:
"We are a sign that is not read . . ."
We? Who? We the men of today, of a "today" that has
lasted since long ago and will still last for a long time, so
long that no calendar in history can give its measure. In the
same hYJlU1, "Mnemosyne," it says: "Long is/The time"­
the time in which we are a sign, a sign that is not read. And
this, that we are a sign, a sign that is not read-does this
not give enough food for thought? What the poet says in
6
 12
Ir AT ts CALLED THINKING?
these words, and those that follow, may have a part in show­
ing us what is most thought-provoking: precisely what the
assertion about our thought-provoking time attempts to
think of. And that assertion, provided only we explain it
properly, may throw some little light for us upon the poet's
word; Hoelderlin's word, in turn, because it is a word of
poesy, may summon us with a larger appeal, and hence
greater allure, upon a way of thought that tracks in thought
what is most thought-provoking. Even so, it is as yet ob­
scure what purpose this reference to the words of Hoelder­
lin is supposed to serve. It is still questionable with what
right we, by way of an attempt to think, make mention of a
poet, this poet in particular. And it is also still unclear
Upon what gr?und, and within what limits, our reference
to the poetic must remain.
Summary and Transition
By way of this series of lectures, we are attempting to learn
thinking. The way is long. We dare take only a few steps.
If all goes well, they will take us to the foothills of thought.
But they will take us to places which we must explore to
reach the point where only the leap will help further. The
leap alone takes us into the neighborhood where thinking
resides. We therefore shall take a few practice leaps right
at the start, though we won't notice it at once, nor need to.
In contrast to a steady progress, where We move un­
awares from one thing to the next and everything remains
alike, the leap takes us abruptly to where everything is dif­
ferent, so different that it strikes us as strange. Abrupt
means the sudden sheer descent or rise that marks the
chasm's edge. Though we may not founder in such a leap,
what the leap takes us to will confound us.
It is quite in order, then, that we receive notice from the
very start of what will confound us. But all would not be
PART I 1~
well if the strangeness were due only to the fact that you,
the listeners, are not yet listening closely enough. If that
were the case, you would be bound to overlook completely
the strangeness which lies in the matter itself. The matter.
of thinking is always confounding-all the more in pro­
portion as we keep clear of prejudice. To keep clear of
prejudice, we must be teady and willing to listen. Such
readiness allows us to surmount the boundaries in which all
customary views are confined, and to reach a more open
territory. In order to encourage such readiness, I shall in­
sert here some transitional remarks, which will also apply
to all subsequent lectures.
In universities especially, the danger is still very great
that we misunderstand what we hear of thinking, particu­
larly if the immediate subject of the discussion is scientific.
Is there any place compelling us more forcibly to rack Our
brains than the research and training institutions pursuing
scientific labors? Now everyone admits unreservedly that
the arts and the sciences are totally different from each
other, though in official oratory they are still mentioned
jointly. But if a distinction is made between thinking and
~ the sciences, and the two are contrasted, that is immediately
considered a disparagement of science. There is the fear
even that thinking might open hostilities against the sci­
ences, and becloud the seriousness and spoil the joy of
scientific work.
But even if those fears were justified, which is emphati­
cally not the case, it would still be both tactless and tasteless
to take a stand against science upon the very rostrum that
serves scientific education. Tact alone ought to prevent all
polemics here. But there is another consideration as well.
Any kind of polemics fails from the outset to assume the
attitude of thinking. The opponent's role is not the thinking
role. Thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever
f
speaks for a subject. Everything said here defensively is
7
 14
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
PART I 15
always intended eXclusively to protect the subject. When
craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be
We speak of the sciences as we pursue our way, we shall be
. speaking not against but for them, for clarity concerning
anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will
be detennined exclusively by business concerns. Every
. their essential nature. This alone implies our conviction
pandicraft, all human dealings are constantly in that.
that the sciences are in themselves positively essential.
danger. The writing of poetry is no more exempt from it
However, their essence is frankly of a different 's ort from
than is thinking.
what 0lU" universities today still fondly imagine it to be. In
Whether or not a cabinetmaker's apprentice, while he is
any case, we still seem afraid of facing the exciting fact .
learning, will come to respond to wood and wooden things,
that today's sciences belong in the realm of the essence of
depends obviously on the presence of some teacher who can
modern technology, and nowhere else. Be it noted that I am
make the apprentice comprehend.
saying "in the realm ·of the essence of technology," and
. True. Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We ~
not simply "in technology." A fog still surrounds the es­
know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teach- ,
sence of modern science. That fog, however, is not pro­
ing more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher
duced by individual investigators and scholars in the sci­
ences. It is not produced by man at all. It arises from the must have a larger store of information, and have it always
region of what is most thought-provoking_thlit~a:re ready. Te~ching is m?re ~ifficult than learning because ~
me'who-speaks~to;;
..; still..not thinlring;-none of us, including
you, me first of all.
what teaching calls for IS tbIs: toJ.etJe.a.at. ,}:lRJ.-rual:teach~, 1
in-:fIct:;IeU--:ngthing else be learnechthan-leamm-g. His con­
duct, therefore, often produces the impression that we
This is why we are here attempting to learn thinking.
properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now
We are all on the way together, and are not reproving each
suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful in­
other. To learn means to make everything we do answer
to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given fonnation. The teacher is a.head of his apprentices in this
alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he
time. Depending on the kind of essentials, depending on
~em learn. The teacher must be capable (
the realm from which they address us, the answer and
with it the kind of learning differs. of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teach~r
is~J.ess assw:ed_of his ..ground than . those who learn are
A cabinetmaker's apprentice, someone who is learning
to build cabinets and the like, will serve ~s an example. His
of.theirs: If the relation between the teacher and the taught
is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the
learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of
authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the
tools. Nor does he merely gather kno.wledge about the
official. It still is an exalted matter, then, to become a
CUstomary forms of the things he is to build. If .he -is»-to
teacher---which is something else entirely than becoming a
become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself ansWer-and
famous professor. That nobody wants any longer to become
respond abov.e all to the different kinds of wood and to the
a teacher today, when all things are downgraded and
shapes slumbering within wood-to wood as it enters into
graded from below (for instance, from business), is pre­
man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In
sumably because the matter is exalted, because of its alti­
fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole
tude. And presumably this disinclination is linked to that

8
 16 WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
PART I 17
most thought-provoking matter which gives us to think.
est, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper
We must keep our eyes fixed firmly on the true relation
time.
between teacher and taught-if indeed learning is to arise
in the course of these lectures. We must learn thinking because our being able to think,
and even gifted for it, is still no guarantee that we are
We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too,
capable of thinking. To be capable, we must before all else ·
is just something like 'building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a
incline toward what addresses itself to thought-and that
craft, a "handicraft." "Craft" literally means the strength
is that which of itself gives food for thought. What gives us
and skill in our hands. The hand is a peculiar thing. In the
Common view J the AimQ is port of 6UI' bodily o;ganism.
this giftl the fjiH of WPAt mll§t prgperly b~ thoYght D99Ut,
is what we call most thought-provoking.
Rut the hand's essence can never be determined, or ex­ Our answer to the question what the most thought-pro­
plained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, , ..... Ii ,
have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands.
voking for our thought-provoking time is that we are still
The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs­
paws, claws, or fangs-different- ,by anabyss~of ~essence.
not thinking.
The reason is never exclusively or primarily that we men
Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands
do not sufficiently reach out and turn toward what properly
and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.
gives food for thought; the reason is that this most thought­
But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly
prflvoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since
,..I! imagme. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push
turned away from man.
and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and wel­
And what withdraws in such a manner, keeps and devel­
comes-and not just things : the hand extends itself, and
ops its own, incomparable nearness.
receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand
Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we
holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs,
are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and
presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one,
therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man
a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The
is properly drawing that way, he is thinking-even though
hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft. Everything
he may still be far away from what withdraws, even
is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and
,,~ ~ commonly we go no further. But the hand's gestures run
though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever. All
through his life and right mto his death, Socrates did
l")-t 1everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity
nothing else than place himself into this- draft, this cur­
precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when
rent, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the
man speaks, does he think-not the other way around, as
purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing.
metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every
For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness
one of its works carries itself through the element of think­
must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge
ing, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.
from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history
All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore,
still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after
thinking itself is man's simplest, and for that reason hard­
Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives.

9
 18
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
Thinking has entered into literature; and literature has
decided the fate of Western science which, by way of the
doctrina of the Middle Ages, became the scientia of modern
times. In this form all the sciences have leapt from the
womb of philosophy, in a twofold manner. The sciences
come out of philosophy, because they have to part with her.
And now that they are so apart they can never again, by
Itheir own power as sciences, make the leap back into the
source from whence they have spnmg. Henceforth they
are remanded to a realm of being where only ,thinking can
find them, provided thinking is capable of doing what is its
own to do.
W}l@i1 m im IS drawing into What withdraws, he points
l._I' into what withdraws. As we are drawing that way we are a
"If :sign, a pointer. But we are pointing then at something
, which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language
of our speech. We are a sign that is not read.
In his draft for the hymn "Mnemosyne" (Memory),
Hoelderlin says:
"We are a sign that is not read,
We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands."
And so, on our way toward thinking, we hear a word of
poesy. But the question to what end and with what right,
upon what ground and within what limits, our attempt to
think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poesy,
let alone with the poetry of this poet-this question, which
is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have
taken the pa ~h of thinking.
LECTURE
II
How shall we ever be able to think about the oft-named re­
lation between thought and poesy, so long as we do not
know what is called thinking and what calls for thinking,
and therefore cannot think about what poesy is? We mod­
ern men presumably have pot the slightest notion how
thoughtfully the Greeks experienced their lofty poetry,
their works of art-no, not experienced, but let them stand
there in the presence of their radiant appearance.
Yet this much might be clear to us right now: we are
not dragging Hoelderlin's words into our lecture merely
as a quotation from the realm of the poetic statement which
will enliven and beautify the dry progress of thinking. To
do s'o would be to debase the poetic word. Its statement rests
on its own truth. This truth is called beauty. Beauty is a
fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means
the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful
is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift
of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally
non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radi­
antly apparent appearance. We are compelled to let the
poetic word stand in its truth, in beauty. And that does not
exclude but on the contrary includes that we think the
poetic word.
19
10
 \
OtMUCRACY AND EDUJATION
5f)~", D~~~j - \)~O<-P_CJ <t EJ.v,("\-h'~V\
humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any
amoun t of theory (or intellectual content), bu t a theory apart
from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory.
It tends to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords,
used to render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and
impossible. Because of our education we use words, thinking
they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality
simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing
any longer the difficulty.
2.
All our experiences have a phase of 'cut and try' in them-what
psychologists call the method of trial and error. We simply do
something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on
trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt
that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent proce­
dure. Some experiences have very little else in them than this hit
and miss or succeed process. We see that a certain way of acting
and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not see how
they are. We do not see the details of the connection; the links are
missing. Our discernment is very gross. In other cases we push our
observation farther. We analyze to see just what lies between so as
to bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence. This
extension of our insight makes foresight more accurate and com­
prehensive. The action which rests simply upon the trial and error
method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change so that
the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected to.
But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look
to see whether the required conditions are there. The method
extends our practical control. For if some of the conditions are
missing, we may, if we know what the needed antecedents for an
158
EXPERIENCE AND THiNl<ING
effect are, set to work to supply them; or, if they are such as to
produce undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
superfluous causes and economize effort.
In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and
what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try
experience is made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its'
proportionate value is very different. Hence the quality of the
experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call
this type of experience reflective-that is, reflective par excellence.
The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes
thinking as a distinctive experience. Thinking, in other words,
is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections
between something which we do and the consequences which
result, so that the two become continuous. Their isolation, and
consequently their purely arbitrary going together, is cancelled;
a unified developing situation takes its place. The occurrence is
now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we say, that
the thing should happen as it does.
Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the
intelligent element in our experience. It makes it possible to act
witl\an end in view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon
as al infant begins to expect he begins to use something which is
now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in however
simple a fashion, judging. For he takes one thing as evidence of
something else, and so recognizes a relationship. Any future
!
development, however elaborate it may be, is only an extending
,and a refining of this simple act of inference. All that the wisest
s . :,~an can do is to observe what is going on more widely and more
.11'
ininutely and then select more carefully from what is noted just
those factors which point to something to happen . The opposites,
once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior.
The fOll;1l1er accepts what has been customary as a full measure of
possibHity and omits to take into account the connections of the
particular things done . Tl,le latter makes the momentary act a
measure of value, and ignores the connections of our personal
/' ! " . c.
\1
, , ",
159
11
 Teaching I

B~ II tf-vt>ts .- Critical Thinking

On the cover of my memoir Bone Black there is a snapshot of me

taken when I was three or four. I am holding a toy made in vaca­
tion Bible school, a book shaped like a dove. I often joke that
this picture could be called "a portrait of the intellectual as a
young girl"-my version of The Thinker. The girl in the snapshot
is looking intensely at the object in her hands; her brow a study
in intense concentration. Staring at this picture, I can see her
thinking. I can see her mind at work.
Thinking is an action . For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts
are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find
answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come
together. The heartbeat of critical thinking is the longing to
know-to understand how life works. Children are organically
predisposed to be critical thinkers. Across the boundaries of
race, class, gender, and circumstance, children come into ~
world of wonder and language consumed with a desire for
---- ~

12
 ···· 0 _ . . _. __ . . . . . . .. ....
knowledge. Sometimes they are so eager for knowledge that
they become relentless interrogators----<:lemanding to know the
who, what, when, where, and why of life. Searching for answers,
they learn almost instinctively how to think.
Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they
encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity
and obedience only. Most children are taught early on that
thinking is dangerous. Sadly, these children stop enjoying the
process of thinking and start fearing the thinking mind. Wheth­
er in homes with parents who teach via a model of discipline
and punish that it is better to choose obedience over self-aware­
ness and self-determination, or in schools where independent
thinking is not acceptable behavior, most children in our na­
tion learn to suppress the memory of thinking as a passionate,
pleasurable activity.
By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have
come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread think­
ing often come to classes assuming that thinking will not be nec­
essary, that all they will need to do is consume information and
regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. In tradition'll hi~ller
education settings, students find themselves yet again in a world
where independent thinking is not encouraged. Fortunately,
there
. -
are some classrooms in.which individual professors aim
educate as the practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking,
to
---:.
and most especially critical thinking, is what matters.
Students do not become critical thinkers overnight. First,
they must learn to embrace the joy and power of thinking itself.
Engaged pedagogy is a teaching strategy that aims to restore
students' will to think, and their will to be fully self-actualized.
The central focus of~edagQ@is to enable students to
think critically. In his essay "C ·tical Thinkin : Wh Is It So Hard
~ Teach?" Daniel Willingham says critical thinking consists
of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new
evidence that disconfirms young ideas, reasoning
·b
LrltiCal I nlnKlng 'f
dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by
evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from
available facts, solvin!) problems, anq so forr.n !
In simpler terms, critical thinking involves first discovering
the who, what, when, where, and how of things-finding the
answers to those eternal questions of the inquisitive child-and
then utilizing that knowledge in a manner that enables you to
determine what matters most. Educator Dennis Rader, author
of Teaching Redefined, considers the capacity to determine "what
is significant" central to the process of critical thinking. In their
book The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools,
Richard Paul and Linda Elder define critical thinking as "the
art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improv­
ing it." They further define critical thinking as "self-directed,
self-disciplined, self-monitored and self corrective." Thinking
about thinking, or mindful thinking about ideas, is a necessary
component of critical thinking. Paul and Elder remind us:
Critical thinkers are clear as to the purpose at hand
conclusions and point of view. They strive to be clear,
accurate, precise, and relevant. They seek to think beneath
the surface, to be logical and fair. They apply these skills to
their reading and writing as well as to their speaking and
listening.
Critical thinking is an interactive process, one that demands
participation on the part of teacher and students alike.
. All of these definitions encompass the understanding that
critical thinking requires discernment. It is a way of approach­
ing ideas that aims to understand core, underlying truths, not
simply that superficial truth that may be most obviously visible.
One of the reasons deconstruction became such a rage in aca­
demic circles is that it urged people to think long, hard, and
13
 (",aCllIng ~rll:lcal I mnKlng
Critical Thinking II

critically; to unpack; to move beneath the s face; to wor~"",-~
knowledgeJVVhile many critica m ers may find mtellectual
or academic fulfillment doing this work, that does not mean
-#- that students have universally and unequivocally embraced
Je:il'lih1g' to think ttilitall ..
In fact, most students resist the critical thinking process;
they are more comfortable with learning that allows them t~
~ remain passive. Critical thinking requires all participants in the
classroom process to be engaged. Professors who work diligent­
ly to teach critical thinking often become discouraged when
L ~
The most exciting aspect of critical thinking in the class­
room is that it calls for initiative from everyone, actively inviting
all students to think passionately and to share ideas in a passion­
ate, open manner. VVhen everyone in the classroom, teacher
and students, recognizes that they are responsible for creating
a learning community together, learning is at its most meaning­
ful and useful. In such a community of learning there is no fail­
ure. Everyone is articipating and sharing whatever resource is
needed at a given moment m tIme 0 ensure t at we leave the
classroom knowing that critical thinking empowers us.

students resist. Yet when the student does learn the skill of criti­
cal thinking (and it is usually the few and not the many who do
learn) it is a truly rewarding experience for both parties. When
I teach students to be critical thinkers, I hope to share by my
example the pleasure of working with ideas, of thinking as an

-
action.
~

Keeping an open mind is an essential requirement of critical

thinking. I often talk about radical openness because it became
clear to me, after years in academic settings, that it was far too
easy to become attached to and protective of one's viewpoint,
and to rule out other perspectives. So much academic training
encourages teachers to assume that they must be "right" at all
times. Instead, I propose that teachers must be open at all times,
and we must be willing to acknowledge what we do not know. A
radical commitment to openness maintains the integrity of the
critical thinking process and its central role in education. This
commitment requires much courage and imagination. In From
Critical Thinking to Argument authors Sylvan Barnet and Hugo
Bedau emphasize that, "Critical thinking requires us to use our
imagination, seeing things from perspectives other than our
own and envisioning the likely consequences of our position."
Therefore, critical thinking does not simply place demands
on students, it also requires teachers to show by example that
learning in action means that not all of us can be right all the
time , and that the shape of knowledge is constantly changing.

14
15
 time. For example, I have the office here; it is a copy of my office in Dusseldorf,
which gives onto the street. This is so that people can come in right off the street. Joseph Beuys
It looks exactly like our office, exactly. And there anyone can come in. I have I Am Searching for Field Character//1973
thought about which is more effective: if I remain in Dusseldorf or if I climb onto
this platform and reach men here. I came very simply to the conclusion that it is
vacation time now in Dusseldorf; there we would have perhaps one visitor a day,
Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and
and here we can reach more people. Here I can reach people from all over the
activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary­
world. Here I can establish international contacts. This is very important.
revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of
a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle
Question Do you see yourself as an individualist and do you see your office here
in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.
as an isolated department?
This most modem art discipline - Social Sculpture/Social Architecture - will
8euys No, in no way. I do not see myself as being isolated here. I have all kinds
only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or
of possibilities here. I can speak freely with everyone. No one has prevented me
architect of the social organism. Only then would the insistence on participation
yet Whether someone will try to in the future, that we will find out (Laughing)
of the action art of Fluxus and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democ­
Yes, that we will find out, won't we?
racy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can
rum Into J pollrleJlly pfBfluerive rOfE~, E8Uf§lng EHFaUgk @aEJl ~fson an~
have set up ~our offi ce hete at the fifth Documenta, and with it
QUl!Jlion VcJU shaping history,
you pursue not only political intentions but also artistic ones ...
But all this. and much that is as yet unexplored. has first to form part of our
8euys Because real future political intentions must be artistic. This means that
consciousness: insight is needed into objective connections. We must probe
they must originate from human creatiVity, from the individual freedom of man.
(theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive
For this reason here I deal mostly with the problem of education, with the
potency (creativity). We then reach the threshold where the human being
pedagogical aspect. This is a model of freedom, a revolutionary model of
experiences himself primarily as a spiritual being, where his supreme
'reedom. It begins with human thought and with the education of man in this
achievements (work of art), his active thinking, his active feeling. his active will,
lrea of freedom. And there must also be free press, free television, and so on,
and their higher forms. can be apprehended as sculptural generative means,
ndependent of state influence. Just as there must be an educational system
corresponding to the exploded concepts of sculpture divided into its elements ­
ndependent of state influence. From this I attempt to develop a revolutionary
indefinite - movement - definite (see theory of sculpture), and are then
node) which formulates the basic democratic order as people would like it,
recognized as flowing in the direction that is shaping the content of the world
!ccording to the will of the people, for we want a democracy. It is part of the
right through into the future.
undamental law: all state power comes from the people.
This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the
The area of freedom - not a free area -I want to emphasize this, because they
revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism,
re always being interchanged; people say Beuys wants a free area. I do not want
positivism). but also of religious activity.
free area, an extra area, but I want an area of freedom that will become known
EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who - from his state of freedom - the
>the place where revolution originates, changed by stepping through the basic
position of freedom that he experiences at first hand - learns to determine the
emocratic structure and then restructuring the economy in such a way that it
other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FlffiJRE SOCIAL ORDER. Self­
'ould serve the needs of man and not merely the needs of a minority for their
determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in the struc­
Nn profit. That is the connection. And that I understand as art.
turing of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self­
administration and decentralization (threefold structure) occurs: FREE
;eph Beuys/Dirk Schwarze, report on a day's proceedings at the InformiitionsbQros der
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.
'gilnisacion fOr direkte Demokriltie durch Volksilbstimmung, Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972):
nslated in Adriani Giltz. et al..joseph Beuys: UJe and Work (New York: Barron·s. 1979) 244-9.
THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL is born

~/~'~GS
16
 Communication Qmm in r~'iprgcity; it must n~V!!f b@ J ORe-WAy ft6W ftom the
teacher to the taught. The teacher takes equally from the taught. So oscillates _
Collective Actions
at all times and everywhere, in any conceivable internal and external Ten Appearances/ /1981
circumstance, between all degrees of ability, in the work place, institutions, the
street, work circles, research groups, schools - the master/pupil,
transmitter/receiver, relationship. The ways of achieving this are manifold,
The five-person Collective Actions group. working in Moscow from the mid-1970s to
corresponding to the varying gifts of individuals and groups. THE the mid-1980s, represent a particularly poetic and cerebral approach to
ORGANIZATION FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY THROUGH REFERENDUM is one such partidpation. Ten Appearances is typical of their work in taking place in fields
group. It seeks to launch many similar work groups or information centres, and outside the dty, with a small number of partidpants who took an active part in the
strives towards worldwide cooperation.
action and then contributed to its analysis. These gestures differ from Western
equivalents of this period in being preoccupied with art's internal reception and
Joseph Beuys. '1 am Searching for Field Character' (1973). in Carin Kuoni. ed.. Energy Plan for the
drculation, rather than in its relationship to sodal institutions.
Western Man: Joseph 8euys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. 1990) 21-3.

Ten spools on vertical nails were affIXed to a board (60 x 90 cm) which was
laid upon the snow. Each of the spools was wound with two to three hundred
metres of strong. white thread. Each of the partid~ant~ WqS re~4in~g t9 til~e the
end of a thread from one of the spools and. unravelling the thread from the
spool. move in a straight line into the forest surrounding the field. Thus the ten
participants were to have dispersed from the centre of the field in the following
directions:

I. Pivovarova
N. Kozlov
A. Zhigalov
V. Skersisi

Y. Albert • ~ .. L. Talochkin

O. Vasiliev
V.NekIasov
I. Kabakov

The participants were instructed to move in a straight line as far as the forest and
then. entering the forest, to continue on into the depths of the forest for about
another fifty to one hundred metres, or to the point where the field could no

~/ / ARTISTS' WRmNGS
CoUective Act1ons//Ten Appearances//127
17
LUDWIG BORNE
TRANSLATED BY LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE

How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days

There can be found today men and works which offer instnlction in how
to learn such things as Latin, Greek, and French in a mere three days, and
such things as accounting in a mere three hours. How one might become in
three days a truly original writer has, however, yet to be indicated. And yet
it is such a simple thing! To do it there is nothing one needs to learn, only
much one needs to unlearn. There is nothing new one need to experience,
only much that one need forget.
In today's world, the minds and works of the learned might be compared
to ancient manuscripts where one must scrape away the boring disputes
of would-be Church Fathers and the ranting of inflamed monks to catch a
glimpse of the Roman classic lying beneath. With the birth of every new
mind comes the birth of beautiful new thoughts. With every individual, the
world is reborn. And yet, somehow, the unnecessary and distracting scrawl
of life and teaching conceals and obscures these original texts.
One can arrive at a fairly precise view of this state of affairs if one thinks
of the following. We recognize an animal, a piece of fruit, a flower, and things
of this sort as what they are. Could one, however, say that someone who
knew partridges, raspberry bushes, or roses only by means of partridge
pie, raspberry juice, or rose oil had a full and accurate understanding of
these things? And yet, this is how the arts and sciences-and indeed all
realms in which we first approach things through thought rather than the
senses-proceed. These things are laid before us prepared and transformed
and, in truth, in such fashion that we never come to know them in their raw
and naked form. Opinion is the kitchen in which all truths are slaughtered,
plucked, minced, stewed, and spiced. We are in need of nothing so much
as books without reason-books, namely, that present to us actual things and
not mere opinions.

The question is: how can one arrive at solitude? One might flee his fellow
man-bu t then one finds oneself in the noisy market of books. One can throw

63

18
 one's books away, but how does one free oneself from all the conventional
knowledge that schooling has stuffed in one's head? In the true art of self­
education, what is most needed and most beautiful, but also rarest and often
poorly accomplished, is the art of making oneself ignorant. Just as in a million
men only a thousand are thinkers, in a thousand thinkers only one truly
thinks for himself. A people is like a porridge which receives its unity only
from the pot in which it is found: the pithy and firm will only be found at
the bottom, in the lowermost layer of a people: porridge remains porridge,
and the golden spoon that takes from it a mouthful does not eliminate the
principle of relation by separating the related from one another.
True striving in the cause of learning is not a voyage of discovery like
that of Columbus, but a journey of adventure like that of Ulysses. Man is
born abroad: to live means to search for one's homeland. And to think means
to live. The fatherland of thought is the heart: at this well he who wishes
to drink that which is fresh must himself create that freshness. Mind is but
a stream. Thousands have set up camp along it and dirty its water with
washing, bathing, and the like. Mind is the arm; will is the heart. One can
acquire strength: one can make the strength grow.
But what good is strength without the courage to use it? A shameful
and cowardly fear of thinking holds everyone of us back. More repressive
than any governmental censorship is the censorship which public opinion
exercises over the works of our intellect. To become better than they are,
most writers would not require more intelligence but more character. And
this is a weakness that stems simply from vanity. The artist and the writer
want to outstrip, want to tower above their comrades. But to tower above
them they must stand next to them; to overtake them they must follow the
same path. In doing so, good writers are very much like bad writers in that
in the good writer can one find the bad writer entire. The good writer is
simply something more: the good writer follows the same path as the bad
writer, only he follows that path somewhat farther.
He who listens to his irmer voice instead of the cries and clamor of the mar­
ket, he who has the courage to teach to others what his heart has taught him,
will always be original. Sincerity as regards oneself is the well of all brilliance
and mankind would be more brilliant if it were simply more moral.
And now, here is the practical application I promised you: Take a stack
of paper and write. Write everything that goes through your mind for three
consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what
you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the
war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe, of Fonk's trial, of the Last
Judgment, of your superiors. At the end of the three days you will scarce be
able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you. And that,
my friends, is how to become an original writer in just three days!

64 Harvard Review 31

19

selves. The same methods of automatism lead each of us to this rich and
unique personal complex, but that to which we are led "differ[sJ for
everyone, to the exact degree that each person differs from another."21
And he observes, in confirmation, not only how different each of the ab-
stract expressionists who resorted to automatism are from one
other-just as the sun'ealists who resorted to it differ each from each-but
also how practitioners of the two movements differed generally from
one another: "How different, in ultimate thrust, are each of these two
movements." Motherwell, in personal conversation as well as in the in-
terviews he granted, loved to describe the experiences that were peculiar
to him, and that explained this or that feature of his paintings.
The first time we met, after having exchanged several letters, he took
me to a restaurant he liked in Banksville, New York, where we spent some
hours talking, not about philosophy or about art, but about our lives,
about women, marriage, money, and children. He was immensely re-
lieved, he told me. afterward; he h.ad had a kind of nightmare the night
before about meetmg me, and I thmk he must have feared that I was go-
ing to hold his feet to the fire of unremitting abstract discussion. Moth-
erwell had reached a stage in his life whe~e he was not anxious to talk ab-
stractly about abstract Ideas, havl~g attamed, as it were, to a philosophy
of painting that served him admirably, as an artist of course, but also as
someone who found himself increasingly called upon to talk about his art
and the history in which he had played a role. There was little reason for
him to go back, so to speak, to the philosophical drawing board. Our
conversations were always personal and delicious, about what both of us,
given our francophilia, would designate ies cboses de ia vie. The difference
was that in talking about himself he was talking about his art, for his art
really was himself: "As for my lifelong interest in blue, it should be re­
membered that invariably I spend summers beside the sea."?' "In some
ways all an artist's past years remain intact, but particularly, as everybody
knows, childhood impressions. [Dore Ashton] is the only one who has
ever remarked how crucial was the fact that I grew up in pre-war Cali­
fornia ... . (The hills of California are ochre half the year)."13
..... j 's' II '" I '- I \. U " ........ " 1", t-' I ....
Motherwell was singularly conscious of the coments of his precon­
scious. And his preconscious seems more to have been the scene of hills
and oceans than that dank forest of surrealist monsters and irrational
fears, though he had plenty of his own private demons to deal with as
well. It is the psychic compost of the daily experiences that forms our
characters and our work, and what automatism yields is continuous with
our most common experiences. Matta evidently found this puzzling. In
an essay for an exhibition of Matta's work at the Rose Art Museum at
Brandeis University, Nancy K. Miller wrote that "the Americans Matta
was intimate with . .. had never been completely comfortable with an
art of images containing metaphorical ramifications."24 The emphasis
here should be on the word images. For Matta's method was evidently
close to a kind of game, consisting in making marks and then seeing wh at
sort of image one could find in the mark, rather in the manner Leonardo
describes in a famous and influential passage regarding the use of a mot­
RD~Mafftt tIed wall as an aid to inve~tjon. Matta is characteristically impish in de-
scribing what Leonardo dId :
D1"1 LeD t-..tu-Jo
V /'hc:, ;
DtA­ Leonardo da Vinci, as against the academic stillness that disturbed
him in the work of Raphael and the classics, invented a new ap­
proach. He said that it was very boring to start with a white piece of
paper and put a line on it, because all you are doing is putting what
you know in the paper. He said you should start from a spOt on the
waH, humidity. If you look at a spot for a while, he said, something
wiH start appearing by a funny process called haHucination. He
would see whatever came in the hallucination, like we may see a
horse in clouds. He said foHow that image. "When it comes to seeing
things in the spot on the wall , you will be doing things you don't
know-you will be discovering and inventing things. And you'll have
more fun. That is my technique . If I see in the spot on the wall some­
thing I know, I erase it and wait until something else comes along.
And then I see something which to me is fascina ting because I don't
know what it is.. .. I get amused. I get surprised. That's what I told
the School of New York-I said "start like that and be very amusing."
20
 ... , '6'''~' .... , .... u .. , .....
Being bored and having fun are hardly motivations we dare ascribe to
Leonardo. Nor can we ,dtogether imagine the serious young Americans
as in the least driven by the desire to be amusing. Matta continued:
They made spots themselves-Pollock's spots, Motherwell's spots,
etc. But then I told them to go the next step which is to get into the
hallucination. I asked them to see things in the spot, because what
) they would see comes from our being, our social and emotional be­
ing. But they stopped there and didn't go into the next step.!5
"Matta," Miller writes, "attributes the direction of Americans away
from the poetic and philosophical toward an emphasis on the process of
making pictures to American pragmatism." As though it were practical
considerations and concerns alone that made the Americans stop short
with abstraction and not go on into "hallucination." But in fact this
refusal was the entire crux of the "original creative principle." Mother­
well, Miller goes on to say, "took his separate course in 1944 with a re­
placement definition for 'psychic automatism.' .. . He stated, 'Plastic
automatism, as employed by modern masters like Masson, Mira, and Pi­
casso, is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much
more a plastic weapon with which· to invent new forms.' "26 But as we
have seen, "new forms" was less the issue than not repeating, manneris­
tically, old ways of being modern, was less an issue than enabling Ameri­
can artists to be modern, without being sham Europeans. The new forms
could come from whatever formed their spirits.
Abstraction was in some way internally connected with this. But ab­
straction, too, was something one could acquire, as an artist, and still be
a mannerist. There was something infectious in Joan Mira, for exam­
ple, and although Mira adamantly refused the label of abstract painter, the
biomorphic blobs floating in thin space like amoebas under a cover glass
lent themselves to abstract painting in America, as much so as did circles
and triangles and squares. The "doodle" was neutral within what one
might call the vocabulary of accepted abstract forms, but what was im­
portant about it, it seems to me, was the fact that it could be-perhaps
I " " .... ' .... ' C
had to be-done without being controlled by conscious mental process.
But to have an identity of any kind, as a representation, would require
conscious direction of the pen or brush. It would perhaps be unthink­
able that someone could produce, say, the Ghent Altarpiece by doo­
dling.27 Even to draw the human torso requires some degree of con­
scious attention. So one has to disengage from the hand and let it find
its way across the surface.
In recollecting the meetings that took place between himself and the
scarcely younger Americans-Pollock, Peter Busa, William Baziotes,
Gerome Kamrowski, and Motherwell-Matta reported that he felt it im­
portant, if it was to be a group, that its members agree on a direction, find
a vocabulary: "I remember that some of the first things we used to do were
things like that-images of man. I felt we had to keep a degree of refer­
ence to reality. It couldn't be all explosion, you know." And Matta spoke of
going through a phase of "explosion," of "chaotic circles of drippings,"
which was "an expression of my anger in terms of the war," and then, af­
terward, his return to "anthropomorphic things," which "created a very
definite divorce with the Americans, and especially with Motherwell.
When he came to visit me, he would say, you are coming back to the fig­
ure." And Busa, in that same interview, added that Motherwell "had an ab­
horrence of the figure as I remember. As soon as we painted the figure it
was as though it wasn't art."28 It was as though the return to the figure
meant a falling away from the universal creative principle. Memories
differ. "Around 1943," Motherwell remembered in his letter to Edward
Henning, "Matta abandoned us, as is his wont."29 "I became sort of the
fellow who wasn't accepted," Matta remembered in his conversation with
Sidney Simon: "They were happy as long as my work expressed cosmic
violence and whirlpools. I think it was a pity we didn't see more of each
other. Because action is not necessarily the bands." But doodling, in Mother­
well's sense, really was what the hands did , acting on their own. "It was a
fratricidal situation in many ways," Busa recalled. lo
Motherwell gave every evidence of believing himself to have discov­
ered what he set out to find, and in the retrospective mood more or less
21
 W i "'nico+t­
72·, PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF
uses the concept of the potential space between the m other and
the baby. In the development of various individuals, it has to be
recognized that the third area of potential space between m other
and baby is extremely valuable according to the experiences of
the child or adult who is being considered. I have referred to
these ideas again in Chapter 5, where I draw attention to the fact
that a description of the emotional development of the indi­
vidual cannot be made entirely in terms of the individual, but
that in certain areas, and this is one of them, perhaps the mam
one, the behaviour of the environment is part of the individual's
own personal development and must therefore be included. As a
psychoanalyst I find that these ideas affect what I do as an analyst
without, as I believe, altering my adherence to the important
features of psychoanalysis that we teach our students and that
provide a common factor in the teaching of psychoanalysis as we
believe it to be derived from the work of Freud.
I am not involved by deliberate intention in the comparison of
psychotherapy with psychoanalysis or indeed in any attempt to
define these two processes in such a way that would show up a
clear line of demarcation between the two. The general principle
seems to me to be valid that psychotherapy is done in the overlap of the two
play areas, rhat of the patient and that of the therapist. If the therapist
cannot play, then he is not suitable for the work. If the patient
cannot play, then something needs to be done to enable the
patient to become able to play, after which psychotherapy may
begin. The reason why playing is essential is that it is in playing
that the patient is being creative.
THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF
In this chapter I am concerned with the search for the self and
the restatement of the fact that certain conditions are necessary if
success is to be achieved in this search. These conditions are
associated with what is usually called creatiVity. It is in playing
P ~A YIN Si : b R~ ATIY TIVITY fll'ig TH ( HU CI=l fO~ nlE H l 7}
~ionly in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be
creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being
crea11ve that the individual discovers the self.
-(Bound up with this is the fact that only in playing is com­
munication possible; except direct communication, which
belongs to psychopathology or to an extreme of immaturity.
It is a frequent experience in clinical work to meet with per­
sons who want help and who are searching for the self and who
are trying to find themselves in the products of their creative
experiences. But to help these patients we must know about
creativity itself. It is as if we are looking at a baby in the early
stages and jumping forward to the child who takes faeces or
some substance with the texture of faeces and tries to make
something out of the substance. This kind of creativity is valid
and well understood, but a separate study is needed of creativity
as a feature of life and total living. I am suggesting that the search
(or the self in terms of what can be done with waste products
is a search that is doomed to be never-ending and essentially
unsuccessful.
In a search for the self the person concerned may have pro­
duced something valuable in terms of art, but a successful artist
may be universally acclaimed and yet have failed to find the self
that he or she is looking for. The self is not really to be found in
what is made out of products of body or mind, however valuable
these constructs may be in terms of beauty, skill, and impact. If
the artist (in whatever medium) is searching for the self, then it
can be said that in all probability there is already some failure for
that artist in the field of general creative living. The finished
creation never heals the underlying lack of sense o(seif.
- Before developing this idea further I must state a second
theme, one that is related to the first but needs separate treat­
ment. This second theme is that the person we are trying to help
might expect to feel cured when we explain . The person might
say : 'I see what you mean; I am myself when I feel creative and
22
 74 PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF
when I make a creative gesture, and now the search is ended.' In
after work but not able to achieve the resting state out of which a creative
practice this does not seem (0 be a description of what happens.
reaching-out can take place. According to this theory, free association
In this kind of work we know that even the right explanation is
that reveals a coherent theme is already affected by anxiety, and
ineffectual. The person we are trying to help needs a new
rh.e col1esiolj of !qee~ !S e defen!=~ Qrg iln~l:iUign; Ptrhap§ it i§ to
, experience in a specialized setting. The experience is one of a
be accepted that there are patients who at times need the ther­
non-purposive state, as one might say a sort of ticking over of
the unintegrated personality. I referred to this as formlessness in
~f the case description (Chapter 2) .
Account has (0 be taken of the reliability or unreliability of the
setting in which the individual is operating. We are brought up
against a need for a differentiation between purposive activity
and the alternative of non-purposive being. This relates to Balint's
(1968) formulation of benign and malignant regression (see
also Khan, 1969).
I am trying to refer to the essentials that make relaxation
possible. In terms of free association this means that the patient
on the couch or the child patient among the toys on the floor
must be allowed to communicate a succession of ideas,
thoughts, impulses, sensations that are not linked except in some
way that is neurological or physiological and perhaps beyond
detection. That is to say: it is where there is purpose or where
there is anxiety or where there is lack of trust based on the need
for defence that the analyst will be able to recognize and to point
out the connection (m several ~onne~tions) between the various
components of free association material.
In the relaxation that belongs to trust and to acceptance of the
profeSSional reliability of the therape_~~~~~tting (be it analytic,
psychotherapeutic, social work, architectural, etc.), there is
room for the idea of unrelated thought sequences which the
analyst will do well to accept as such, not assuming the existence
pp. 148-163)
The contrast between these two related conditions can
perhaps be illustrated if one thinks of a patient who is able to rest
PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF 7S
apist (0 note the nonsense that belongs to the mental state of
the individual at rest without the need even for the patient to
communicate this nonsense, that is to say, without the need
for the patient to organize nonsense. Organized nonsense is
already a defence, just as organized chaos is a denial of chaos.
The therapist who cannot take this communication becomes
engaged in a futile attempt to find some organization in the
nonsense, as a result of which the patient leaves the nonsense
area because of hopelessness about communicating nonsense.
An opportunity for rest has been missed because of the thera­
pist's need to find sense where nonsense is. The patient has been
unable to rest because of a failure of the environmental provi­
sion, which undid the sense of trust. The therapist has, without
knowing it, abandoned the professional role, and has done so
by bending over backwards to be a clever analyst. and to see
order in chaos.
It may be that these matters are reflected in the two kinds of
sleep, sometimes denoted REM and NREM (rapid eye movements
and no rapid eye movements) .
In developing what I have to say I shall need the sequence:
(a) relaxation in conditions of trust based on experience;
(b) creative, phYSical, and mental activity manifested in play;
(c) the summation of these experiences forming the basis for a
sense of self.
Summation or reverberation depends on there being a certain
quantity of reflecting back to the individual on the part of
the trusted therapist (or friend) who has taken the (indirect)
23 (
76 PLAYING : CREATI V E ACTI V ITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF
communication. In these highly specialized conditions the indi­
vidual can come together and exist as a unit, not as a defence
against anxiety but as an expression of I AM, I am alive, I am
myself (Winnicott, 196 2) . From this position everything is
creative.
CASE IN ILLUSTRATION
I wish to us e mil~eriill from rh~ r~~grd of it WOIDill1 who is having
treatment with me and who, as it happens , comes once a week.
She had had a long treatment on a five-times-a-week basis for six
years before coming to me, but found she needed a session of
indefinite length, and this I could manage only once a week. We
soon settled down to a session of three hours, later reduced to
two hours.
If I can give a correct description of a session the reader will
notice that over long periods I withhold interpretations , and
often make no sound at all . This strict disCipline has paid divi­
dends. I have taken notes, because this helps me in a case seen
only once a week, and I found that note-taking did not disrupt
the wurk in this case. Also I often relieve my mind by writing
down interpretations that I actually withhold . My reward for
Withholding interpretations comes when the patient makes the
interpretation herself, perhaps an hour or two later.
My description amounts to a plea to every therapist to allow
for the patient's capaCity to play, that is, to be creative in the
analytiC work. The patient's creativity can be only too easily
stolen by a therapist who knows too much . It does not really
matter, of course, how much the therapist knows provided he
can hide this knowledge , or refrain from advertising what he
knows.
Let me try to convey the feeling of what it is like to do work
with this patient. But I must ask the reader to exert patience,
much as I needed to be patient when engaged in this work.
PLAY I NG: CREATI V E ACTI V ITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF 77
An example of a session
First, some life details, and arrangements of a practical nature ­
about sleep, spoilt when she gets het-up, books for sleep­
making, a good one and a horrifying one; tired but het-up , so
restless; rapid heart-beats, as now. Then, some difficulty about
food : 'I want to be able to eat when I feel hungry.' (Food and books
seem somehow equated in the substance of thi s desultor y
talkin~. )
'When you rang up, you knew, I hope, that I was too high'
(elated) .
I said: 'Yes, I suppose I did .'
Description of a phase of somewhat false improvement.
'But I knew I wasn't right .'
'It all seems so hopeful till I'm aware of it ... '
'Depression and murderous feelings, that's me, and also it's
me when I'm cheerful. '
(Half-hour gone. The patient has been sitting in a low chair,
or on the floor, or walking about.)
Long and slow description of positive and negative features of
a walk she had taken.
'I don't seem able quite to BE - not me really looking - a
screen - looking through glasses - imaginative looking isn't
there. Is that just doctrine about the baby imagining the breast 7
In the previous treatment that I had there was an aeroplane
overhead when I was on the way home from a session . I told the
analyst next day that I suddenly imagined myself being the aeroplane,
fiying high. Then it crashed to the ground. The therapist said : "That's
what happens to you when you project yourself into things and
it makes an internal crash ." 'I
I I have no means of checking up on the accuracy o f this report of the previous
analyst's interpretati on.
24
25
.3 "\5 a. II\. ,-- A~'" \".st ~ f\re~-hlM.
So~~j
12 • Against Interpretation
part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to
the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies;
in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as
opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with
minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in
the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the
cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of fonns--the ex­
plicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements;
cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of
a film.
8 without mucking about in it.
What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable
today? For I atn not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they
cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is
how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of
art, not usurp its place? ~ ~s _ mu~~ "V'I \~4 ? 1 ness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the
What is needed, first, is more attention to rorm in art. If exces­
sive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation,
more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would si­
lence. What is needed is a vocabulary-a descriptive, rather than
prescriptive, vocabulary-for fonns. * The best criticism, and it is
uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content
into those of fonn . On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can
think of Erwin Panofsky's essay, "Style and Medium in the Mo­
tion Pictures," Northrop Frye'S essay "A Conspectus of Dr<UDatic
Genres," Pierre Francastel's essay "The Destruction of a 'Plastic
Space." Roland Barthes' book On Racine and his two essays on
Robbe-Grillet are examples of fonnal analysis applied to the work
of a single author. (The b~t essays in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis,
• One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek meta·
phors for form are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a
more ready vocabulary of forms for the spatial than (or the temporal arts. The
exception among the temporal arts, of course, is the drama; perhaps this is
becaule the dlllma is a narllltive (i~temporal) form that extends itself visually
and pictorially, upon a stage .. . ,-What we don't have yet is a poetics of the
~
Dovel' any clear notion of the forms of narration. Perhaps film criticism will be
1t" the occasion of a breakthrouRh here, since films are primarily a visual form, yet
they arc also a subdivision of1iteratureJ
Against Interpretation • 13
like "The Scar of Odysseus," are also of this type.) An example of
formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Wal­
ter Benjamin's essay, "The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works
of Nicolai Leskov."
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a
really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a
work of art. This seems even harder to do than fonnal analysis.
Some of Manny Farber's film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent's es­
say "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers'," Randall Jar­
rell's essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what
I ,mean. These are essays which reveal the sensuouS surface of art
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in
criticism-today. Transparence means experiencing the luminous­
greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson and Ozu and Re­
noir's The Rules of the Game. .
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolu­
tionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might
be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the
principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modem
life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it mus~
have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of
art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need nOw is further
to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.
Interpretation takes the senso ex erience of the work of art for
~nte , an proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for
granted, nOw~ Think of the sheer mUltiplication of works of art
1*"
available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes
and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our
lenses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the
result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the
conditions of modem life-its material plenitude, its sheer crowd­
edness-conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light
26
 1~ • A g a I " I tin te r p r. t a tI 0 "

of the condition of our senses, Our capacities (rather than those of

another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

- What is important now is to recover Our senses. We must learn

to see more, to hear more, to feel more.lg~_ Vt4c.J. ~crt-<P"'~
Our task is not to find the maximum ~~rA' of content in a
work of art. much less to squeeze more content out of the work
than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can
see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works
of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than
less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it
is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it
means.

10

In place of ahermeneuHes we need an erotlcs 01 art.

On
style
[1964J

I TW OUL D be hard to find any

reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defend­
ing as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this
issue a pious consensus prevails. Everyone is quick to avow th~t
style and content are indissoluble, that the strongly individual style
of each important writer is an organic aspect of his work and never vi'
something merely "decorative."

27

goal of the arts. Puritanism and modernism really did go together.
Greenberg had that right. But with the end of modernism, art could be
as impure or non-pure as artists cared for it to be. It was only when this
was perceived, primarily by artists themselves, that an adequate philoso­
phy of art could properly begin. And I shall take the license this intro­
duction offers to explain why this is so.
The chief mark of contemporary art-contemporary not simply in the
sense of the art being made at the present moment but in the further
sense that "contemporary" names an overall style, which the characteris­
tic art of our times exemplifies-is its extreme and total diversity and
o~ess. It is a style unlike that of any previous period in that no crite­
ria can be offered for it, and hence no way of telling whether something
is "contemporary" through recognitional capacities of the kind called
upon by such stylistic terms as "baroque" or "classical" or "mannerist."
This is because it is open to contemporary artists to use historical styles
to whatever ends they may have, making those styles the subject of their
art. So a contemporary work could look quite like something done cen­
turies ago and in another cuI ture. In no previous period of the history of
art can this have been true, and only under this total disjunctiveness
~ould it have been entertained as a serious possi'6iIlty that
anything can
be an artwork, which became a not infrequent claim in the 1970s.
Since we are aware that some things are not works of art, the philo­
sophical problem for contemporary aesthetics is to explain what makes
the difference. This problem becomes acute when we consider works of
art that resemble, in all relevant particulars, some object that is not a
work of art, such as Warhol's Brillo Box. In this case it would be unrea­
sonable to argue that such material differences as may exist between the
artwork and the soap-pad packaging suffice to explain why the one is a
work of art while its utilitarian look-alikes are not.
When the diversity in art first came to general awareness, there was
an understandable tendency to say that objects are works of art when the
artworld decrees them to be. This is the gist of the so-called institutional
theory of art. But in view of the philosophical problem of why one of an
I I l l l VUULl.UIJ
indiscernible pair of things is art while the other is not, the act of con­
~thur ferring the status of art on one and not the other must seem as arbitrary
\)cl&.'\.+O
tion of moral theory that equals must be treated as equals; in this sense,
f h 1\ os fh Q i4 two persons or actions cannot be said to differ merely in that one is good
fL _ ..J and the other is not (the way in which one thing can be red and some­
11 Y' t thing else not, even if the two should be alike in every other way) . The
Calvinist God cannot, consistently with his omnipotence, be thought of
as limited in this way, which means that of two individuals, alike in every
relevant particular, one may receive grace and not the other. It would
hardly be suitable to view the artworld , as a status-conferring institution,
in these inscrutable terms. So, as in moral judgment, the designation of
something as art must be justified, through a discourse of reasons, and
cannot, without becoming unacceptably arbitrary, consist simply in dec­
larations. Even the most powerful critics are not, after all, gods.
~he upshot is that th ~diversity of contemporary art is not equivalent
to the idea that anything goes. That assertion must at first appear incon­
sistent, so it is a next task for the philosophy of art to dissolve this impres­
sion . The diversity is due to the fact that there are no a priori limits on
what can be a work of art. Down the centuries there have always been
such limits-whether photography was art was a border controversy from
the moment of its invention until well into the twentieth century. These
internal boundaries have disappeared from the concept, however, le<lV­
ing only the boundary that divides art from everything else-a fact hid­
den from aestheticians throughout the previous history of art. It is this
lack of internal boundaries that opens the concept up for works of art of
radically different sorts. The concept of art is not like the concept, say,
of cat, where the class of cats do pretty largely resemble one another, and
can be recognized as cats by more or less the same criteria. In precon­
temporary periods, the class of artworks was much like the class of cats.
But with modernism it became less and less easy to identify something
as art, simply because of the discrepancy between modernist and pre­
modernist works, which is why, in part, responses to the former so often,
28
 ' " LI UU U '-- LI UII
and so characteristically, held that some outrageous canvas was not art at
all, but a hoax or a symptom of madness. The great modernist critics had
to evolve a theory of art that would accommodate these unaccommo­
dating objects, without at the same time disqualifying what had previ­
ously been acknowledged as art. They did this, often, by defining art in
formalist terms, which applied indifferently to a still life by Cezanne or
a crucifixion by Giotto. But a work such as Bnilo Box cannot obviously
be distinguished, on formalist grounds, from the ordinary object it
resembles: a photograph of Warhol among his boxes looks just like a
photograph of a stock hoy among the cartons in the stockroom. A pile
of felt scraps by Robert Morris need look no different from a pile of felt
scraps in some mill or workshop, where no claim whatever is made to the
status of art. If there is to be a definition of art that fits contemporary art
as well as all previous art, it has to be consistent not only with the fact
that there are no limits on what can be art but also with the possibility
that artworks and mere objects can resemble one another to any degree
whatever. For better or worse, that helps show that the concept of art is
different from the concept of moral goodness , where such a possibility
carmot arise. And it helps show how the concept of art differs in its
logic from the concept of cats-or-of any so-called "natural kind."
These considerations demonstrate that we cannot define art in terms
of how things look. But they in no sense entail that we cannot define art.
We can, but we must do so in full recognition of the problems gener­
ated by contemporary art. In my 1995 Mellon Lectures, published as After
tbe E11d ofArt: Contemporary Art find tbe Pale of Hist01Y (1997), I argued
for two criteria:. an art\''iork must have cQ!l tent, that is, it mus~ess
--- --
aboutness; and it must embody that content. So what Brilla-BOx is about is
-' -­
; n important first question to ask, and whatever answer one comes up
with, it will have to differ from what Brillo cartons are about-in case we
recognize that the shipping carton is, after all, a piece of commercial art.
The design of the box proclaims the virtues of its literal contents, namely
soap pads. But one may be certain that this is not what B1'illo Box is about.
Similar questions arise for piles of felt scraps, whether presented as art
In[roauctlon 'I
or merely left over after the sheets of felt are shaped in the cutting room.
These issues belong in what I term the "discourse of justification," and
while the definition will doubtless need to be carried further, these two
conditions explain how two things may look alike but one of them not
be art. To be art is to be internally connected with an interpretation,
~hich means precisely identifying content and mode of presentation .
These are first steps in art criticism as well, whatever further needs to be
said. However, it is one thing to connect the definition of art with the
practice of art criticism, another to define art in terms of what critics
happen to say. Critics, after all, are often locked up in earlier moments
of art history, with formalism, for example, which applies with such dif­
ficulty to contemporary art. It is this difficulty, indeed, which makes con­
temporary art itself seem, well, difficult.
The two criteria, however primitive, help validate the idea of a paral­
lel philosophical structure between ' persons and artworks . Persons
embody representational states, as artworks embody their contents.
There is more to the two categories than this, but the overlap between
the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of art at the very least con­
nects this volume of essays with its companion volume, Th e Bodyl Body
Problem . It justifies, I hope, my own philosophical agenda of developing
the philosophy of these two domains in parallel ways . The main thought,
so far as the present volume is concerned, is that ~I2QDl~ts
the philosophy of art halfway, so that one can speak of the art itself phi­
l~ophi;ng. This is especially perspicuous in the work ofWarhol, whom
I treat here as if a philosopher in "The Philosopher as Andy Warhol." It
is interesting to contrast that essay with the one on Robert Motherwell,
who, for all his generosity of spirit, found very little good to say about
Warhol. My assertion at one point that Warhol was closest to a philo­
sophical genius of any twentieth-century artist very nearly COSt me
Robert's friendship, and he pointed out to me that Warhol rarely said
more in front of a painting than "Wow." But that of course is JUSt my
point: the philos2 Phy was in and through the work, and not in what was
said in front of the ~ork. There is in my view a great deal in Hegel's
29
 10 I Introduction
belief that art and philosophy are deeply affined-that they are, in his
heavy idiom, two moments of Absolute Spirit. The wonder of Warhol is
that he did philosophy as art, in the sense that he defined false bound­
aries by crossing them. Since no philosopher of art in 1964 recognized
the kinds of problems Warhol raised, he could not have had a philo­
sophicallanguage in which to explain it. So, perhaps, "Wow."
Motherwell, however, had worked toward an advanced degree in phi­
great school of painting to which he belonged (and which he named the
"New York School"). His writings have a philosophical richness we
would not expect to find equaled in Warhol's verbal remnants. But his
work nonetheless philosophizes, in that there were internal philosophi­
cal reasons he could find for why the paintings came out as they did. So
the volume begins with his philosophical search, his effort to understand
his practice. And one might join to the essays on Warhol and Mother­
well the one on illustrating a philosophical text (the formulation is Mel
Bochner's), which means to find images equivalent to philosophical the­
ses and then use these to illustrate the text which asserts them. It was fas­
cinating to work through the ways in which Bochner's drawings for
Wittgenstein's text On Certainty seek to make the kind of point Wittgen­
stein himself makes, graphically rather than verbally. In some sense,
Louis Kahn's architectural creations can be seen as illustrations of a
philosophical text-or a group of such texts-very close to Platonism.
I
His own writing expresses the philosophy his buildings illustrate, and
explains why the buildings went one way rather than another. Which
came first is difficult to say, but Kahn dearly had the philosophy he needed
when he entered the period of his greatness with the art museum he
designed for Yale University.
The expression "philosophizing art" is deliberately ambiguous as to
whether the art does the philosophizing or is the object of philosophiz­
ing, and the essays here can be loOSelY partitioned along such lines.
"Moving Pictures" attempts to elicit at least a fragment of the medium's
philosophy by proceeding as Warhol did , imagining films which he
InrroQucr/on II
showed to be possible but which, for perhaps obvious reasons, never
were made . The .erinciple of imagi n :!.tio!!?ho~ever, i$jIl-e~j~ nce
that of conceptual discovery, and my sense of the philosophy of film is
S;;:iouslydifferent fr~hat is accepted as film theory in the academy
today. Something like this is true also for the curious essay "Gettysburg,"
which considers ways in which one can think of battlefields as works of
art, for which Civil War memorial statuary holds the key. The essay on
chairs brings to consciousness what must be true for pieces of furniture
to be works of art, and does so by considering chairs in art as a guide to
how to think of chairs as art. Each of the essays "philosophizes art" from
somewhat different angles. My great hope is that by conjoining discus­
sions of works with a relevant piece of philosophy, the art in question is
opened up for critical analysis, precisely in the terms specified above.
One looks for the content, and then the mode of presentation. And then
one sees where one is.
The essays gathered here are from very diverse and often quite
obscure sources, read by quite different audiences, very few of whom
could be counted on to know the other venues in which my essays
appeared . Unlike the critical essays that appear with some regularity in
the Nation, of which I publish collections from time to time, these would
languish in the back files of such publications as the Print Collecto1"~
Newsletter or the Quarterly Review of Film Studies or Grand St1'eet, or 3S
catalog essays for certain exhibitions, such as the inaugural exhibition of
the Andy Warhol Museum or a wonderful exhibition of Motherwell's
works on paper, organiz.ed by David Rosand for the Wall ach Art Gallery
at Columbia University in early 1997. In these essays, the relationships
between philosophy and art are made more explicit, and carried further
over a wider array, than I have been able to achieve in any other place,
and this justifies bringing them together. My great hope is that their
readers will get a more vivid sense of philosophizing criticism than my
regular critical pieces make possible.
One last word . I have sometimes been interpreted as saying that the
history of art ends when art turns into philosophy. That is not my view.
30
The history of art ends when it becomes possible to think philosophi­
cally about art without having one's philosophy held hostage to the
future. Art ends when one is positioned to ask, as could not have been
done at earlier moments, the proper philosophical questions about it.
Only in rare cases, Warhol's being exemplary, is the art itself philosophy,
doing what philosophers do but in the medium of art.
Very little of contemporary art is especially philosophical in this way.
Still, it was through the deep pluralism of contemporary art that an ade­
quate philosophy of art-a philosophy of art compatible with everything
everywhere that is art-became possible. So there is after all a connec­
tion between contemporary art and the philosophy of art, which leaves
it open to art to philosophize or not. That is the realm of freedom the
artworld exhibits, even if pressures to do or not to do certain things
remain. We are human beings, after all.
[J]
The "Original Creative Principle"
Motherwell and Psychic Automatism
THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF HAVING had advanced training in philos­
ophy before going on to become a painter, and indeed a great painter, is
almost certainly unique to Robert Motherwell. But he carried his philo­
sophical knowledge so casually that other than in the autobiographical
mode that came easily to him in later years, when he was the subject of
frequent interviews, or in the occasional title of a painting like 171 Pinto's
Cave-which in any case is so commonplace a cultural allusion that no
inference from its use by someone to any special degree of philosophi­
cal education would be licit-one might have had no sense of him as ever
having had a philosophical background or any great interest in the sub­
ject. In our numerous conversations, from 1985, when we met, until the
year of his death, philosophy rarely came up in a way that made me feel
that he brought with him from his graduate years any special grasp of the
world that an exposure to philosophical discipline might explain. He
loved talking about the surrealists and their circle, and in the two public
conversations we had nothing seemed of greater interest to him than the
memory of that extraordinary group of artistic intellectuals whom it fell
Reprinted from Robel1 MOlberwell 011 Pape-I; exhibition c,n,dog, ed . D,]Vid Ros<lIld
(New York: Harry N. Abr~ms, 1997),39-58.
13
31
 38 Art as Experience ~ :>\...11. Da...r~ __ Avt . oJ'
...) Q" J
e'K. pec {evt ~
time there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. A river, as
distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and in­
terest to its successive portions greater than exist in the homoge­
nous ponions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from something
to something. As one part leads into another and as one pan car­
ries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The en­
during whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases
of its varied colors.
Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, mechani­
cal junctions, and dead centers when we have an experience. There
ity of movement. They sum up what has been undergone and pre­
ComimlOd ncc~ltlrnrion i
vent its dissipation and idle cVl:lporlltinn.
breathless and prevents pans from gaining distinction. In a work
of an, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into
unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as
they do so-just as in a genial conversation there is a continuous
interchange and blending,and yet each speaker not only retains
his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his wont.
An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal,
that storm, that rupture of friendship . The existence of this unity
is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experi­
ence in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is
neither emotional, practical, nor intel1ectual, for these terms name
distinctions that reflection can make within it. In discourse about
an experience, we must make use of these adjectives of interpreta­
tion. In going over an experience in mind after its occurrence, we
may find that one property rather than another was sufficiently
dominant so that it characterizes the experience as a whole. There
are absorbing inquiries and speculations which a scientific man
and philosopher will recall as "experiences" in the emphatic sense.
In final impon they are intellectual. But in their actual occurrence
they were emotional as well; they were purposive and volitional.
Yet the experience was not a sum of these different characters;
they were lost in it as distinctive traits. No thinker can ply his oc­
cupation save as he is lured and rewarded by total integral experi­
ences that are intrinsically worthwhile. Without them he would
Having an Experience 39
never know what it is really to think and would be completely at a
loss in distinguishing real thought from the spurious article.
Thinking goes on in trains of ideas, but the ideas form a train only
because they are much more than what an analytic psychology
calls ideas. They are phases, emotionally and practically distin­
guished, of a developing underlying quality; they are its moving
variations, not separate and independent like Locke's and Hume's
so-called ideas and impressions, but are subtle shadings of a per­
Vllding and ' developing hue.
We say of an experience of thinking that we reach or draw a
conclusion. Theoretical formulation of the process is often made
in such terms as to conceal effectually the similarity of "conclu­
81tm ll fa {fie e6ngUhUthidBg phase of every developIng lntegral ex­
perience. These formulations apparently take their cue from the
separate propositions that are premisses and the proposition that
is the conclusion as they appear on the printed page. The impres­
sion is derived that there are first two independent and ready-made
entities that are then manipulated so as to give rise to a third. In
fact, in an experience of thinking, premisses emerge only as a con­
clusion becomes manifest. The experience, like that of watching a
Storm reach its height and gradually subside, is one of continuous
movement of subject-matters. Like the ocean in the storm, there
are a series of waves; suggestions reaching out and being broken
in a clash, or being carried onwards by a cooperative wave. If a
conclusion is reached, it is that of a movement of anticipation and
cumulation, one that finally comes to completion. A "conclusion"
is no separate and independent thing; it is the consummation of a
movement.
Hence an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality.
It differs from those experiences that are acknowledged to be es­
thetic, but only in its materials. The material of the fine arts con­
sists of qualities; that of experience having intellectual conclusion
are signs or symbols having no intrinsic quality of their own, but
standing for things that may in another experience be qualitatively
experienced. The difference is enormous. It is one reason why the
strictly intellectual an will never be popular as music is popular.
Nevertheless, the experience itself has a satisfying emotional qual­
32
40 Art as Experience
ity because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment
reached through ordered and organized movement. This artistic
structure may be immediately felt. In so far, it is esthetic. What is
even more important is that not only is this quality a significant
motive in undertaking intellectual inquiry and in keeping it hon­
est, but that no intellectual activity is an integral event (is an expe­
rience), unless it is rounded out with this quality. Without it,
thinking is inconclusive. In short, esthetic cannot be sharply
marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear
an esthetic stamp to be itself complete.
The same statement holds good of a course of action that is
dominantly practical, that is, one that consists of overt doings. It
is possible to be efficient in action and yet not have a conscious
experience. The activity is too automatic to permit of a sense of
what it is about and where it is going. It comes to an end but not
to a close or consummation in consciousness. Obstacles are over­
come by shrewd skill, bur rhey do not feed experience. There are
also those who are wavering in action, uncertain, and inconclu­
sive like the shades in classic literature. Between the poles of aim­
lessness and mechanical efficiency, there lie those courses of
action in which through successive deeds there runs a sense of
growing meaning conserved and accumulating toward an end that
is felt as accomplishment of a process. Successful politicians and
generals who turn statesmen like Caesar and Napoleon have
something of the showman about them. This of itself is not art,
but it is, I think, a sign that interest is not exclusively, perhaps not
mainly, held by the result taken by itself (as it is in the case of
mere efficiency), but by it as the outcome of a process. There is in­
terest in completing an experience. The experience may be one
that is harmful to the world and its consummation undesirable.
But it has esthetic quality.
The Greek identification of good conduct with conduct hav­
ing proportion, grace, and harmony, the kalon-agathon, is a more
obvious example of distinctive esthetic quality in moral action.
One great defect in what passes as morality is its anesthetic qual­
ity. Instead of exemplifying wholehearted action, it takes the form
of grudging piecemeal concessions to the demands of duty. But il-
Having an Experience 41
lustrations may only obscure the fact that any practical activity
will, provided that it is integrated and moves by its own urge to
fulfillment, have esthetic quality.
1 A generalized illustration may be had if we imagine a stone,
~hich is rolling down hill, to have an experience. The activity is
surely sufficiently "practical." The stone starts from somewhere,
and , moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward a place
and state where it will be at rest-toward an end. Let us add, by
imagination, to these external facts, the ideas that it looks forward
with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it
meets on its way, conditions that accelerate and retard its move­
ment with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels
toward them according to the hindering or helping function it at­
tributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all
that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement.
Then the stone would have an experience, and one with esthetic
quality.
If we turn from this imaginary case to our own experience, we
shall find much of it is nearer to what happens to the actual stone
than it is to anything that fulfills the conditions fancy just laid
d()Wn. For in much of our experience we are not concerned with
the connection of one incident with what went before and what
comes after. There is no interest that controls attentive rejection or
selection of what shall be organized into the developing experi­
ence. Things happen, but they are neither definitely included nor
decisively excluded; we drift. We yield according to external pres­
sure, or evade and compromise. There are beginnings and cessa­
tions, but no genuine initiations and concludings. One thing
replaces another, but does not absorb it and carry it on. There is
experience, but so slack and discursive that it is not an experience.
Needless to say, such experiences are anesthetic.
Thus the non-esthetic lies within two limits. At one pole is the
loose succession that does not begin at any particular place and
that ends-in the sense of ceasing-at no particular place. At the
other pole is arrest, constriction, proceeding from parts having
only a mechanical connection with one another. There exists so
much of one and the other of these two kinds of experience that
33
 42 Art as Experience
ul1con~eibl1Yly they ~Oh1t! ltl be tctken a~
fltlf1ii§ of 1:111 ~x~@Pleat".
Then, when the esthetic appears, it so sharply contrasts with the
picture that has been formed of experience, that it is impossible to
combine its special qualities with the features of the picture and
the esthetic is given an outside place and status. The account that
has been given of experience dominantly intellectual and practical
is intended to show that there is no such contrast involved in hav­
ing an experience; that, on the contrary, no experience of whatever
sort is a unity unless it has esthetic quality.
The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the in­
tellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submis­
sion to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid
abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipa­
\
tion, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are devia­
tions in opposite directions from the unity of an experience. Some
such considerations perhaps induced Aristotle to invoke the
~'mean proportional" as the proper designation of what is distinc­
tive of both virtue and the esthetic. He was formally correct.
"Mean" and "proportion" are, however, not self-explanatory, nor
to be taken over in a prior mathematical sense, but are properties
belonging to an experience that has a developing movement to­
ward its own consummation.
. I have emphasized the fact that every integral experience
moves toward a close, an ending, since it ceases only when the en­
ergies active in it have done their proper work. This closure of a
circuit of energy is the opposite of arrest, 6f stasis. Maturation
and fixation are polar opposites. Struggle and conflict may be
themselves enjoyed, although they are painful, when they are ex­
perienced as means of developing an experience; members in that
they carry it forward, not just because they are there. There is, as
will appear later, an element of undergoing, of suffering in its
large sense, in every experience. Otherwise there would be no tak­
ing in of what preceded. For "taking in" in any vital experience is
something more than placing something on the top of conscious­
ness over what was previously known. It involves reconstruction
which may be painful. Whether the necessary undergoing phase is
by itself pleasurable or painful is a matter of particular conditions.
Having an Experience 43
It Is lndiffetent tb th~ total esthetic quallEy, sa~e fRat th~re ar~ lew
intense esthetic experiences that are wholly gleeful. They are cer­
tainly not to be characterized as amusing, and as they bear down
upon us they involve a suffering that is none the less consistent
with, indeed a part of, the complete perception that is enjoyed.
I have spoken of the esthetic quality that rounds out an expe­
rience into completeness and unity as emotional. The reference
may cause difficulty. We are given to thinking of emotions as
things as simple and compact as are the words by which we name
them. Joy, sorrow, hope, fear, anger, curiosity, are treated as if
each in itself were a sort of entity that enters full-made upon the
scene, an entity that may last a long time or a short time, but
whose duration, whose growth and career, is irrelevant to its na­
ture. In fact emotions are qualities, when they are significant, of a
complex experience that moves and changes. I say, when they are
significant, for otherwise they are but the outbreaks and eruptions
of a disturbed infant. All emotions are qualifications of a drama
and they change as the drama develops. Persons are sometimes
.said to fall in love at first sight. But what they fall into is not a
thing of that instant. What would love be were it compressed into
a moment in which there is no room for cherishing and for solici­
tude? The intimate nature of emotion is manifested in the experi­
ence of one watching a play on the stage or reading a novel. It
attends the development of a plot; and a plot requires a stage, a
space, wherein to develop and time in which to unfold. Experience
is emotional but there are no separate things called emotions in it.
By the same token, emotions are attached to events and ob­
jects in their movement. They are not, save in pathological in­
stances, private. And even an "objectless" emotion demands
something beyond itself to which to attach itself, and thus it soon
generates a delusion in lack of something real. Emotion belongs of
a certainty to the self. But it belongs to the self that is concerned in
the movement of events toward an issue that is desired or disliked.
We jump instantaneously when we are scared, as we blush on the
instant when we are ashamed . But fright and shamed modesty are
not in this case emotional states. Of themselves they are but auto­
matic reflexes. In order to become emotional they must become
34
 76 Art as Experience
forth of juice from the wine press. New ideas come leisurely yet
promptly to consciousness only when work has previously been
done in forming the right doors by which they may gain entrance.
Subconscious maturation precedes creative production in every
line of human endeavor. The dire' t effort of "wit nnd will" of it·
self never gave birth to anything that is not mechanical; their func­
tion is necessary, but it is to let loose allies that exist outside their
scope. At different times we brood over different things; we enter­
tain purposes that, as far as consciousness is concerned, are inde­
pendent, being each appropriate to its own occasion; we perform
different acts, each with its own particular result. Yet as they all
proceed from one living creature they are somehow bound to­
gether below the level of intention. They work together, and fi­
nally something is born almost in spite of conscious personality,
and certainly not because of its deliberate will. When patience has
done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the ap­
propriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates.
Persons who are conventionally set off from artists,
anything like the extent popularly supposed. They, too, press for­
ward toward some end dimly and imprecisely prefigured, groping
their way as they are lured on by the identity of an aura in which
their observations and reflections swim. Only the psychology that
has separated things which in reality belong together holds that
scientists and philosophers think while poets and painters follow
their feelings. In both, and to the same extent in the degree in
) . which they are of comparable rank, there is emotionalized think­
I ing, and there are feelings whose substance consists of appreciated
meanings or ideas. As I have already said, the only significant dis­
tinction concerns the kind of material to which emotionalized
imagination adheres. Those who are called artists have for their
subject-matter the qualities of things of direct experience; "intel­
, lectual" inquirers deal with these qualities at one remove, through
( vas; words must be put together. It is not so generally recognized
the medium of symbols that stand for qualities but are not signifi­
cant in their immediate presence. The ultimate difference is enor­
mous as far as the technique of thought and emotion are
concerned. But there is no difference as far as dependence on emo-
The Act of Expression 77
tionalized ideas and subconscious maturing are concerned. Think­
ing directly in terms of colors, tones, images, is a different opera­
tion technically from thinking in words. But only superstition will
hold that, because the meaning of paintings and symphonies can­
fiot be transla.ted into words, or that ot poetry into prose, there­
fore thought is monopolized by the latter. If all meanings could be
adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music
would not exist. There are values and meanings that can be ex- (
pressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to
ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into l
words is to deny their distinctive existence.
Different persons differ in the relative amount of participation
of conscious wit and will which go into their acts of expression.
Edgar Allan Poe left an account of the process of expression as it
is engaged in by those of the more deliberate cast of mind. He is
telling about what went on when he wrote "The Raven," and says:
"The public is rarely permitted to take a peep behind the scenes at
the vacillating crudities, of the true purpose seized at the last mo­
ment, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene shifting, the
step ladders and demon traps, the red paint and black patches,
which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the prop­
erties of the literary histrio."
It is not necessary to take the numerical ration stated by Poe
too seriously. But the substance of what he says is a picturesque
presentation of a sober fact. The primitive and raw material of ex­
perience needs to be reworked in order to secure artistic expres­
sion. Oftentimes, this need is greater in cases of "inspiration" than
in other cases. In this process the emotion called out by the origi­
nal material is modified as it comes to be attached to the new ma­
terial. This fact gives us the clue to the nature of esthetic emotion.
With respect to the physical materials that enter into the for­
mation of a work of art, everyone knows that they must undergo '
change. Marble must be chipped; pigments must be laid on can­
that a similar transformation takes place on the side of "inner"
materials, images, observations, memories and emotions. They are
also progressively re-formed; they, too, must be administered.
35
 124 Art as Experience
qual~t~tively ~nd immediately experienced. Were it true that ont;
quahtles commg to us through sense-organs in isolation are
recdy experienced, then, of course, all relational material would
be superadded by an association that is extraneous-or, accordin
to some theorists, by a "synthetic" action of thought. From this'
p,oint of view the stricdy esthetic value of say a painting consis
simply of certain relations and orders of relation that colors SUI­
tain to one another apart from relation to objects. The expressive
ness they gain by being present as colors of water rocks cloud ,
etc., i~ due to art. <?n, this basis, there is always a g'ap ben:..een the
esthetic and the artistic. They are of two radically different kinds.
The psyc~ol,ogy underlying this bifurcation was exploded in
advance by Wilham James when he pointed out that there are eli..
:ect fe~li~g~ of" such relations as "if," "then," "and," "but,"
from, With. For he showed that there is no relation so como>
prehensive that it may not become a matter of immediate experi­
ence. E:ery work of art that ever existed had indeed already , a pure spectrum of colors. A ray of li~ht pr~uce~ under scientific
contradicted the theory in question. It is quite true that certain'
things, namely ideas, exercise a mediating function. But only a '
n:isted ,and aborted logic can hold that because something is
dlated" It cannot, therefore, be immediately experienced. The re-
vers~ I,S the case. We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of : ,: quahtles. ~? shad~w cast ?y even the thinnest li,ne is ever homoge­
mediatIOn, we cannot possess it in its full force, until we have felt '
and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.
Those who are especially addicted to thinking as an occupa­
tion, are aware ~h~n they o~serve the processes of thought, in- '
~tead ?f determmmg by dialectic what they must be, that
unmedlate feeling is not limited in its scope. Different ideas have
their different "feels," their immediate qualitative aspects, just as
much ,as anything else. One who is thinking his way through a
comphcated problem finds direction on his way by means of this
property of ideas. Their qualities stop him when he enters the
wrong path and send him ahead when he hits the right one. They
are signs of an intellectual "Stop and Go." If a thinker had to
~ork out the meaning of each idea discursively, he would be lost
10 a labyrinth that had no end and no center, Whenever an idea
loses its immediate felt quality, it ceases to be an idea and be­
Substance and Form 125
• ' ,es, li~e an algebraic symbol, a mere stimulus to execute an op­
m. :.
etatlon without the need of thinking. For this reason certain trains "
~of ideas leading to their appropriate consummation (or conclu­
'on) are beautiful or elegant. They have esthetic character. In re­ "
~ection it is often necessary to make a distinction between matters
.of sense and matters ?f thought. But the distinction does not exist
'in all modes of experience, When there is genuine artistry in scien­ ,
;emc inquiry and philosophic speculation, a thinker proceeds nei­
mer by rule nor yet blindly, but by means of meanings that exist
.nnmediat~~y as feelings having qualitative color.'" ,
. Quahtles of sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight
;and .heari~g, have e~thetic q~ality. ~ut they hav~ it not in isolation
ut 10 their connectIOns; as mteractmg, not as simple and separate
, ~tities. Nor are con~ections limited to their ow~ kind, colors
With colors, sounds With sounds. Even the utmost 10 the way of
. lCientific control never succeeds in getting either a "pure" color or
control does not end sharply and With uruforffi1ty. It has vague
edges and so internal complexity. Moreover, it is projected on a
me­'hackgro,und and only thus does it enter perception. And the back­
'~ grOU~? IS not merely one of other hues and shades. It has its own
neous. It IS Impossible to Isolate a color from light so that no re­
fraction occurs. Even under the most uniform laboratory conditions,
a "simple" color will be complex to the extent of having a bluish
edge. And th~ colors used in ~aintings are no~ pure spec~al col­
ors but are pigments, not projected on the VOid but apphed on a
' canvas.
These elementary observations are made with reference to at­
~empts to c,arry over alleged scientific findings about, sen~e material
mto esthetiCS. They show that even on so-called sCientific ground
there are no experiences of "pure" or "simple" qualities, nor of
'In connection with this matter, which bears not only on this particular topic, but on
all questions connected with the intelligence that is characteristic of any artist, I refer
to the essay on Qualitative Thought, contained in the volume Philosophy and Civi·
lization,
36
the values to which you give voice. This presupposes a radically new conception of
thought and language, because sense and value, signification and evaluation,
bring into play mechanisms of the unconscious. It thus goes without saying that
Nietzsche leads philosophy and thought in general into a new element. What is
more, \his element implies not only new waI s of thinking and "judging," but
\
also new ways of writing, and maybe acting.
- --- - -­
­ about "sense": original sense, t'o , gotten sense, erased sense, veiled sense, reem­
In thi's respect, modern ·philos;phy has been and is clearly Nietzschean,
because it never tires of discussing sense and value. Of course, other very different
and no less ~s~ntial influences must be added here: the Marxist conception of
value, the Frcud~ conception ofsense-they mrned everything upside down. Bur
the fact that moder.p philosophy has found the source of its renewal in the Niet­
zsche-Marx-Freud trtnity is indeed rather ambiguous and equivocal. Because it can
\
be .interpreted posit~vel\ as well as negatively. F~r example, after the war, philoso­
phies of value were In v0&'le. Everyone was talking about values, and they wanted
"axiology" to replace both ontology and the theory of knowledge ... But it wasn't the
least bit Nietzschean or M'kist in inspiration. On the contrary, no one talked
about Nietzsche or Marx at alh.. no one knew them, and they didn't want to know
them. What they made of "V~~\ was a place to resurrect the most traditional,
abstract spiritualism imaginable: t~y called on values in order to inspire a new
conformity ~ they believed was ~tter suited to the modern world, you know,
the respect for values, etc. For Nietzsch~\as well as for Marx, the notion of value is
strictly inseparable 1) from a radical an3- tOtal critique of society and the world
(look at the theme of the "fetish" in Marx, or the theme of "idols" in Nietzsche),
and 2) from a creation no less radical: Nietzsche's trans-valuation, and Marx's rev­
olutionary action. So, in the post-war context, ; veryone was all for using a concept
of value, but they had completely neutralized it; they had subtracted all critical or
creative sense from it. What they made of it was an i-nstrument of established val­
ues. It was pure anti-Nietzsche--even worse, it was Nietzsche hijacked,
annihilated, suppressed, it was NietZSche _~t back to Sunday mass.
But such misappropriations cannot last for long, since there is something in
the Nietzschean notion of value to explode all recognized, established values,
something to create, in a state of permanent creation, new things that escape all
recognition and every establishment. There you have a positive getting back to
Nietzsche, how to philosophi~e with a hammer: never what is known, but a great
qesrructiof! "'Or the- known, For the c reation of the unknown.
--- - .----­
Jean-Noel Vuacnet: If I follow you, you're saying that the notions of sense and
value come to us from Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, though they are always in
danger of being hijacked by serving the rebirth of a spiritualism that they were
supposed to destroy-and that they are once again finding their way back, com­
ing into their own today by energizing works that are both critical and creative.
So much for the notion of value, can the same thing be said of sense?
136
Gilles Deleuze: Absolutely, even more so. The notion of sense can also be the
refuge of a renascent spiritualism: what is sometimes called "hermeneutics" (\
(interpretation) has taken up the slack of what was called "axiology" (evalua- ~
tion) after the war. Th"2'~etzschean or, in this case, Freudian notion of sense
is just as much in danger of.~eing misappropriated. You hear everyone talking
ployed sense, etc. All the old mir'ages are just rebap..tized under the category of
sense; Essence is being revived, with'\~ its sacr~~hmd religious values. In Niet- (
zsche and Freud, it's the exact opposite,\the n6rion of sense is an instrument of (
!lb~olute co nt~m.rion, :l.bsolur~ eririque, !lISO spl!eifie erl!!1ritm! ~~IH~ i~ nor ­
a reservoir, not a principle or an ori . , n t even an end, it's an "effect," an
effect produced, whose laws of produ tion mu \ be uncovered. Look at the pref­
ace which J.- P. Osier just did fOJ/rhe book by"f,euerbach he translated: 3 Osier
indeed distinguishes betWeen -these twO concep ~ ipns of sense and has a real
boundary, from the point 0-[ view of philosophy, pass between them. This is
one of structuralism's essential ideas, unifying autho\ as different as Levi­
Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser: th.ej.Q~a of sense ~ an effect produced
2.y a specific machinery, a physical, optic, sonorous effect, etc. (And this is not
'the same thmgas an appearance.) Well! ;l!l aphorism by is a sense­
prod~cin&-!!!.achine, in that order specific to thoughr.Of course, there are
other orders, other machineries-for example, those which Freud discovered,
and others still that are political or practical in nature. But we must become
machinists, "operators." Grile f !)e/elA-te-- Oe ~e-yrf J;s la kJ.. S
Jean-Noel Vuamet: How would you define the problems of contempor.uy philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze: Perhaps in the way I just described it, using the notions of sense
and value. Many things are happening in philosophy right now, it's a confused
and rich period. No one believes any more in the I, the Self, in characters or
persons. This is quite clear in literature. But it goes even deeper: what I mean
is, many people have spontaneously stopped thinking in terms of I and Self.
For a long time philosophy offered you a particular alternative: God or man­
or in philosophical jargon: infinite substance or the finite subject. None of that
is very important any more: the death of God, the possibility of replacing God
with humanity, all the God-Human permutations, etc. It's li~e Foucault said,
---
we are no more huma,o. than God, the one dies with the other. - t'f~r;;;n we
- -- - -- -- -- - -- ---- - - - - -- -
remain satisfleawith the opposition between a pure universal and particularities
enclosed within persons, individuals, or Selves. We can't let ourselves be satisfied
with that, especially if the twO terms are to be reconciled, or completed by one
another. What we're uncovering right now, in my opinion, is a world packed
with impersonaL individuations, or even pre-individuaL singularities (that's what
Nietzsche means when he says: "neither God nor man," it's anarchy triumphant).
137 37

The new novelists talk of nothing else: they give voice to these non-personal
individuations, these non-individual singularities.
But most importantly, all this corresponds to something happening in the
contemporary world. Individuation is no longer enclosed in a word. Singularity
is no longer enclosed in an individual. This is really important, especially politi­
cally; it's like the "fish dissolved in water"; it's the revolutionary Struggle, the
struggle for liberation ... And in our wealthy societies, the many and various
forms of non-integration, the different forms of refusal by young people today,
are perhaps manifestations of it. You see, the forces of repression always need a
I Self that can be assigned, they need determinate individuals on which to exercise
I their power. When we become the least bit fluid, when we slip away from the
assignable Self, when there is no longer any person on whom God can exercise
his power or by whom He can be replaced, the police lose it. This is not theory.
All the stuff going on as we speak is what matters. We can't dismiss the upheavals
troubling the younger generation just by saying: oh, they'll grow out of it. It's dif­
fi l;ult , of I; j "m~r, sQm'times worri~o m~, bur it'~ aJ§o r~ilily joyful; btiGl.u§~ tht:y'r(l
creating something, accompanied by the confusion and suffering that attends
any practical creation, I think.
Well then, philosophy;1!00, must create worlds of thought, a whole new con­
cepti\n of thought, of "what iimeans to think," and it must be adequarero ~at
is ~_g.ening aroqod us. It must adopt as it~ ~wn tru;s;;evo~­
where, in other domains, or those that are being prepared. Philosophy is
inseparable from "critique." Only, there are two ways of going about it. On the
one hand, you criticize "false applications": false morality, false knowledge, false
religions. etc. This is how Kant, for instance, thinks _of his famous "Critique":
ideal knowledge, true morality, and faith come out perfectly intacr. On the other
hand, you have this other family of philosophers who subject true morality, true
faith, and ideal knowledge to comprehensive criticism, in the pursuit of some­
thing else, as a function of a new image of thought. As long as we're contept with
criticizing the "false," we're not bothering anyone (tr!:!~_ critique is the criticism
of true forms, ~l~~Qm~ts. You don't criticize capit;ii~m or imperialism by
denouncing their "mistakes"). This other family of philosophers includes
Lucretius, Spinoza, Nierzsche-an incredible lineage in philosophy, a broken
line. explosive. totally volcanic.
Jean-Noel Vuarnet: You've written books on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson,
Proust, Masoch. Can you explain these successive choices. do they somehow con­
verge? And don't you have a particular interest in Nietzsche?
Gilles Deleuze: Oh yes, for reasons that I have been trying to explain: Nietzsche
is not at all the inventor of the famous phrase "God is dead." On the contrary,
he is the first to believe this phrase to have no importance whatsoever as long as
138
If_ ... ~7 l1v lf '-1 / I'\...-"""
the human occupies the place of God. Nietzsche was trying to uncover something
that was neither God nor Human, trying to give voice to these impersonal indi­
viduations and these pre-individual singularities .. . that's what he calls Dionysos,
or also the super-man. It is his panicular philosophical and literary genius to have
found the techniques to give them voice. Nietzsche says of the super-man: it's the
superior kind of everything that is, including animals-like Rimbaud says, "he is
loaded with humanity, even animals . .. . '" Consequently, Nietzsche reinvents that
total critique which is at the same time a creation, total positivity.
ERi£-EBaf liRa serutifilze.Ttm 1s no way to go about it. You have to work your waY'
back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to
that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that
still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired,
visited by the geniuses you denounce.
Jules Valles says that a revolutionary must first know how to admire and
respect: this is an extraordinary remark, practically speaking. Look at cinema,
for example. When Jerry Lewis or Tati "criticize" modern life, they don't have
the complacency, the vulgarity to show us ugly things. What they criticize, they
show as beautiful, as magnificent: they love what they criticize and give it a new
beauty. Their critique is only the more forceful. In every modernity and every
novelty, you find conformity and creativity; an insipid conformity, but also "a
little new music" ; something in conformity with the time , but also something
untimely-separating the one from the other is the task of those who know
how to love, the real destroyers and creators of our day. Good destruction
requires love.
Hume, Bergson, and Proust interest m~so!!l~ch _ ~ecause in their work can
be fo'und profouna-elements Tor- a-new _ilT!;g~ of thqught. There's -something
extraordinary in the w~y theitell u~:-thinking-means something else than what
you believe. We live with a particular i~age of thought, that is to say~efofe'\ve
begin- to think, we have a vague idea of what it means to think, its means and
ends. And then someone comes along and proposes another idea, a whole other
image. Proust, for example, has the idea that every thoughtjs an a~.!!ssion,
appearing under the constraint of a sign, and that w'e -rh~nk only when we are
forced and const_r,!!ned to think. From then-on, thought is n O-longercai-'riedon
by a volli'.iuary self, but by involuntary forces, the "effects" of machines... Scill,
you have to be able to love the insignificant, to love what goes beyond persons
139 38

Jean-Noel Vuarnet: Would this quote taken from your book on Proust sum up
your thinking here: "There is no wgos, there are only hieroglyphs"? Elsewhere, speak­
ing of Masoch, you said the artist was 'a symptomoLogist, "indicating that "etioLogy,
the scientific or experimentaL part of medicine, must make room for symptomoLogy,
which is the Literary or artistic part. "Is this the same problem in each case?
Gilles Deleuze: Ie's the same problem : hieroglyphs vs. the logos, symptoms vs .
essences (symptom here means events, drops, encounters, aggressions). The
artist is a symptomologist. In the sense that characters from Shakespeare say:
how goes it with the world? With all the psychological and political implications
suc~ a question entails. Nazism is a recent disease on this earth. And what the
Am1icans are doing in Vietnam is yet another disease. The world can be treat­
ed 'as a symptom and searched for signs of disease, signs of life, signs of a cure,
signs of health. And sometimes a violent reaction is a sign of a robust health
returning. Nietzsche thou,ght of theJ~~ian of civilization.
Henry Miller was an extraordinary diagnostician. The artis~ust
treat the world as a symptom, and build his work not like a therapeucic, but in
every case like a tlinic. The arrist is not ourslde the symptoms, but m.akes awbrk
of art from them, which sometimes serves to precipitate them, and sometimes
to transform them.
Jean-Noel Vuarnet: Here is something you wrote somewhere: "The physiowgist, the
physician is an interpreter, one who comidas phenomena as symptoms and speaks in
aphorisms. The artist evaLuates, both comidering and creating perspectives, and speaks
in poems. The phiwsopher ofthe foture is both artist andphysician-in a word, a leg­
islator . ... " It has always struck me that most of those philosophers inspired by
Nietzsche's thought, paradoxically, write in an almost traditional form. It seems to
me that the structure of some of your books (which one could perhaps qualify as a
mosaic structure) is moving toward inventing a new language for philosophy coday.
How should we interpret the clear interest you have in literature?
Gilles Deleuze: As you are no doubt aware, the problem of formal renewal can
be posed only when the content is new. Sometimes, even, the formal renewal
comes after. Ie is what one has to say, what one thinks one, has CO.§.i1Y, that impos­
es new forms>N'o~ philosophy, it's true, is nothing spectac~lar. Phifmophy has
I riot aCa~dergone similar revolutions or experiments as those produced in sci­
ence, painting, sculpture, music, or literature. Plato, Kant, and the rest-they
140
remain fundamental, and that's fine. I mean, non-Euclidean geometries don't
keep Euclid from being fundamental to geometry. Schoenberg doesn't nullify
Mozart. Similarly, the search for modes of expression (both a new image of
fh8\t~hf nml nt=lY f€fhni~~tsJ mH~.f PF !:~'~ Emifti fflf rhilp~RFh}'; ~t~~m's fSm­
plaint: "Ah, the old style!" takes on its full significance here. We get the feeling
that we can't go on writing philosophy books in the old style much longer; they
no longer interest the students, they don't even interest their authors. So, I think
everyone is on the look-out for something new. Nietzsche discovered extraordi­
nary methods, but you can't do it over again. You really have to be an impudent
bastard to write Fruits ofthe Earth after Thus Spoke Zarathustra. -~
- ' The novel discovered its own renewal. It matters little that some people
reproach the nouveau roman for being experimental or laboratory work. Those
"books written against something" have, never amountt:.d t9 [fluch (against 'the
~ouveau roman, againsrstructuralism, etc.). ~Ln..!.he~~~~~~ew creation
that you ~d then you .b!!Y.~ther t~i~ ~o think a~t~ake
an'~ple- from cinema:GOda;d' transfo~-;;;s' ~inema by ~Cn~~~ducing thought
into it. He didn't have thoughts on cinema, he doesn't puc more or less valid
thought into cinema; he starts cinema thinking, and for the first time, if I'm not
mistaken. Theoretically, Godard would be capable of fil~i,I1~)(ant's Critique Qr
Spinoza's Ethics, and it wouldn't be absr'ract cinema or a cinematographic appli­
cation. Godard knew how to find both a new means and a new "image"-whkh
necessarily presupposes a revolutionary content . So, in philosophy, we're all expe­
I'lendt1g thiS problem of forl11al renewal. M; ~erbilhly possible. It beglns with f'lul
little things. For example, using the history of philosophy as a "collage" (already \ ~
an old technique in painting) would not in the least diminish the great philoso­
phers of the past-making a collage at the heart of a properly philosophical
picture. That would be better than "selections," but it would require particular
techniques. You would need some!M'ax E~in philosophy .. . Also, the medi­
~m i~.2hilosophy is the concept (like sound for the musician or color for the
painter), thc:..£hilosopher creates concepts. He executes his creation in a concep­
tual "continuum" just like the musiciandoes in a sonorous continuum. What's
important here is this: where do concepts come from? What is the creation of
concepts? A concept exists no less than characters do. In my opinion, what we
need is a massive expenditure of concepts, an excess of concepts. You have to pre­
sent concepts in philosophy as though you were writing a good detective novel:
they must ba,ve a ZOl)e of presence, resolve a local situation, be in contact with
the~s2.and brin~c~rtain cruelty with them . They must exhibit a certain
c-ooer:ence but get it from somewhere else. Samuel Butler coined a fabulous word
to designate those stories that seem to come from elsewhere: EREWHON, it's
both 'no-where,' the nowhere of origins, and 'now-here,' the here and now
turned upside down, displaced, disguised. This is the genius of empiricism,
which is so poorly understood: the creation of concepts in the wild, speaking in
141 39
 the name of a coherence which is not their own, nor that of God, nor that of the oJ.,...')~1J
Self, but a coherence always on the way, always in disequilibrium with itself.
( !",-rr >( ... { ­
,;-..) , .. Lv-.. ~
What philosophy lacks is empiricism.
r. _ .- ' he - rJ' "'-J

Jean-Noel Vuarnet: They say you're now working on a book centered around 1 Y"'~f'. Ifl I"'j'-' {..... ,(\.,
~ !J \ ,..(,t.~'l" rt\. ~.:)
,."I.u n ­

the concept of repetition. How do~s thl~ tOI)t~Pt Ilffect the hum-a~ seiel\et!%, lit­ r(",<,,· 1
erature, or philosophy?

Gilles Deleuze: Yes, I finished the book--on repetition and difference (they're Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy1
the same thing) as the actual categories of our thought. It's the problem of repe­
titions and constants, but also the problem of masks, disguises, displacements,
and variations in repetition. These themes must mean something to our time if
philosophers and novelists keep circling around them. People usually think about
these themes quite independently of one another. BU.t there's nothing quite so
festive as~-.p_<puLar tune, is there? It's also one of my themes, rather involuntari­
. ------- - - ..'

Iy, juSt something that preoccupies me. Without trying to, I've been looking for
Jeanette Colombe!: You just published twO books, Diffirence and Repetition and
it in all the writers I've loved. There are many recent excellent studies on the con­
Spinoza and the Problem ofExpression. And a still more recent work, The Logic of
~ts of difference and repetition. So why not join in? Why not like so many
Seme, will come out very soon . Who speaks in these books?
.others ask the question: What are we doing in philosop~y?~e'r~l~for

"vitality." Even psychoanalysis needs to address a certain "vitality~in the patient,

Iwhich the patient has lost, but which the analyst has lost, too. Philosophical

vitality is not far off, nor is political vitality. Many things, many decisive repeti­

tions and many changes are not far off.

sons who speak, and this ls qulre different: the person ;s defi iied as coextt!H~lv
with representation . These were new values in language and life. Spontaneity
today perhaps escapes the individual as much as the person, and not simply
because of anonymous powers . For a long time we were stuck with the alter­
native: either you are persons or individuals, or you sink back into an
undifferentiated sea of anonymity. Today, however, we are uncovering a world
of pre-individual, impersonal singularities. They are not reducible to individu­
als or persons, nor to a sea without difference. These singularities are mobile,
they break in, thieving and stealing away, alternating back and forth, like anar­
chy crowned, inhabiting a nomad space. There is a big difference between
partitioning a fixed space among sedentary individuals according to boundaries
or enclosures, and distributing singularities in an open space without enclo­
sures or properties. The poet Ferlinghetti talks about the f-ourth person
singular: it is that to which we try to give voice. ".

Jeanette Colombel: Is that how you see the philosophers you interpret, as sin­
gularities in an open space? To this day, I have always wanted to compare what
you do to what a stage director does when he illuminates the written dramatic

142 143 40
 Thomas Hirschhorn
ucaultlI~ OO
Unlike many artists who work col/aboratively in order to fuse art and sodal praxis,
Thomas Hirschhorn has always asserted the importance of art's autonomy. Projects
such as the Bataille Monument (2002) and Musee Precaire (2004) involved
collaborations with largely working-class and immigrant communities. 24h
Foucault transferred this collaborative approach to philosophers, poets and
musidans at the Palais de Tokyo.
24h Foucault is the avant-garde of the Foucault Art Work. The Foucault Art Work is
the project that I have developed following meetings with Daniel Defert and
Philippe Artieres on the invitation of Nicolas Bourriaud at the Palais de Tokyo in
October 2003. Foucault Art Work is a project (like other projects I have) that
remains to be realized in the years to come. It depends on me finding the time,
energy, places, partners and money to show the Foucault Art Work. This is my
objective and I don 't want to lose sight of it. This is why the 24h Foucault is
basically the same Foucault Art Work project condensed and speeded up. I want
the 24h Foucault to affirm and prove that it's necessary to work as an artist with
precision and with excess. I want this project to be precise and exaggerated I For
me , the Foucault Art Work will not change, only speed up. The 24h Foucault
comprises 1. an auditorium 2. a library/documentation centre 3. a sound library
4. a video library 5. an exhibition 6. the Merve Verlag archives 7. a Toolbox bar 8.
a souvenir shop 9. a newspaper 10. a Foucault studio. 24h Foucault is an
autonomous work made collectively. 24h Foucault is a work of art I
24h Foucault, the pre-project
!54/ /ARTISTS' WRITINGS
with works of art. I can seize their energy, their urgency, their necessity, their
density. Michel Foucault's work of art is charged. It's a battery. I can seize this
charged battery. I want to give form to this. In the Foucault Art Work project,
there is more than a vision : there is a singular commitment. There is the
commitment to make a work of art. There is the affirmation that the work of art
is philosophy, and that philosophy is a work of art. We must free ourselves from
exhibitions. I hate and never use the term show in English; I hate and I never use
the term piece. I never use and I hate the term installation. But I want to make a
work, a work of artl I want to become what I am. I want to become an artlstl I
want to appropriate what I am. This is my work as an artist.
Foucault Art Work is not documentation. Documentation, documentary films
have been overtaken by fiction and by reality of all types. Because documentation
wants to place itself in the middle. I don't want to place myself in the middle. I
want to overtake the document, the documentary. I want to make an experience.
An experience is something from which I emerge changed. An experience
transforms me. I want the public to be transformed by the experience of Foucault
Art Work. I want the public to appropriate Michel Foucault's work of art. I want
the public to be active, participate. Evidently the most important participation is
activity, the participation of retlexion, questioning, making your brain work. I
want the public of Foucault Art Work to seize the energy, the strength, the
necessity of Foucault's work. I want the public to confront what is important in
the work of Foucault; I want the public to seize the range and the power of
Foucault's philosophy. I don't want the public to understand. I want the public to
seize the power. The power of art, the power of philosophy I
Concre~1y:
The Foucault Art Work takes place from 14 October to 5 December (7 weeks ) at
the Palais de Tokyo. I want to make a sort of Bataille Monument, but on the inside,
in an institution. What have been the lessons from my experience of the Bataille
Monument! That this experience produces something: meetings, confrontation,
production, thought, more work, loss, discussions, friendship. To produce that, I
have understood that it's necessary for the artist to be present all the time and
not to be alone. This event must be very well prepared . You have to work uphill
on this project with contributors, participants, co-producers. Foucault Art Work
is going to be an event that must be produced elsewhere at least once (US, Japan
or elsewhere). I want the Palais de Tokyo to be only the first event. There must
be another. Another partner must be found. Foucault Art Work must be an event
with between 700 and 1000 square metres of space. The proposed alcove of the
Palais de Tokyo is too small. I need more space! It needs a minimum of 700
square metres. In the Foucault Art Work event, I want to work closely with my
41
Hirschhorn;/24h Foucault!/155
philosopher friend Marcus Steinweg from Berlin. He will be with me on site all
the time. during the event. He prepares. he proposes, and he accompanies this
work, Hei! DJrt of the work. l-te wlll amr'nt He will appropriate. He wil l act with
love, like me, but not with respect. With the love of philosophy. not with the
respect of a hom mage, Foucault Art Work will be made with love and without
respect. Every day there will be the intervention ofa philosopher, afriend, a writer
who will interpret the work of Foucault. There will be a Michel Foucault exhibition.
[ want the public to understand : the exhibition is only one part of the Foucault
Art Work. The exhibition with photos, personal books. original documents. press
cumings (international). Peter Gente of the Merve-Ver/ag Berlin made a beautiful
exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe. There will be a sound-. book- and media-library
with all the books (in all languages). all the videos and all audio material of
Foucault. I want there to be photocopiers. video material. sound material. on
site, simple and efficient. so that the public can take home photocopies or video
and audio copies. books. extracts of books or other documents. as they wish, I
want the Foucault Art Work not only to be a place of production, but also of
dissemination. It is important to diffuse and give diffusion to the work of Foucault
or to parts of Foucault's works. There will be a Michel Foucault shop. The shop isn't
a place to sell things. the shop is in fact another exhibition. It's an exhibition of
souvenirs made to look at. not to buy. As in the vitrines of a big football club.
where trophies are exhibited. photos of former players. the players' vests. the
club's differeru st3dlums. the ~elebrl ty visits. 'I'hese are important but not
decisive souvenirs. Decisive is what is made today. Today and tomorrow. There
will be a Foucault-Map. A work that I will do with Marcus Steinweg. Like I did the
Nietzsche -Map and the Hannah Arendt-Map. It's a very big plan of the
philosophical position of Foucault in the galaxy of philosophy. There will also be
documents and elements that put the Foucault Archives at your disposal. This can
be integrated in the Foucault Art Work project. However the archives must be
exposed in another (second) manifestation. Finally I want there to be a simple
and condensed auditorium for lectures. concerts. speeches. I want the public to
be inside a brain in action. There will be no narration. no discussion. no
illustration. There will be affirmation. There will be ideas. There will be
confrontation. When I say: there is no discussion, I mean: it's not to debate and
discuss philosophy and art. It's necessary to confront yourself. It's necessary to
forge a resistance. I want all the forms. all the contributions to be chosen
politically, philosophically. artistically. Because it's the same thing. No element is
chosen for any reason other than political. I want the Foucault Art Work project
to be a proposition that overtakes me. that makes my capacity for responsibility
explode. It's necessary to try and be responsible for something which I can take
responsibility for. There must also be a Foucault-Studio. A place of work with
l56//ARTlSTS ' WRmNGS
computers and space for working. Making sculpture. doing research. having
experiences that you don't usually have. Learning another langua~el for .
til La I.' I
example. I repeat: the Foucault-Studio, the FoucaUlt-Shop, the Auditorium. the
book-, sound- and media-library. the Foucault Exhibition. the contributors (every
other day). the Foucault-Map. the Foucault Archives. These eight elements will be
put alongside each other as in the human brain ; they disrupt each other. they
complete each other. they compete against each other. But they never contradict
each other - they demonstrate the complexity and the infinity of thought. There
will be chairs, lots of chairs. armchairs. lots of armchairs for sitting down and
reflecting, reading and exchanging. There will be lots of light. Foucault Art Work
will be very lit. In the Foucault Art Work there will be lots of computers.
photocopiers. audio-recorders. video and DVD recorders. 1V screens. but all these
objects will be integrated. mastered ; tools. arms. but never aesthetic effects with
which to intimidate the public. or to show them new technology. The
technologies serve art. they serve philosophy. They will be tools. but not
necessities. To kill them. it's not necessary to have a gun. To construct a house. it's
not necessary to have a hammer. You must always work firstly with your brain.
Foucault Art Work will not be a Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition. I will have
contributed to this project with others. I hope lots of others. Marcus Steinweg,
Manuel Joseph. Christophe Fiat. Peter Gente. not to mention those to whom I've
already spoken of the project. Hl is pro,ject will be maQ~ togethfr, multiply,with
multiple singularities, active. turned towards affirmation. the other. Turned to
the other with friendship. but without compromise. Neither visual. nor of
meaning, nor of space. nor of content.
Foucault Art Work is an ambitious project. It is itself an affirmation as much
as a work of art.
Thomas Hirschhorn. artist's proposal, 24h Foucau/rJoumal (Paris: Palais de Tokyo. 2-3 October 2004).
Translated by Claire Bishop, 2006.
42
HJn(;hhom//24h Foucault//157
43
Allan Kaprow
Notes on the Elimination of the Audience//1966
The emergence of Happenings in New York in the late 1950s was in part a response
to the gestural expressionism of JackSon Pollock's paintings. Allan Kaprow sought
from the Happenings a heightened experience of the everyday, in which viewers
were formally fused with the space-time of the performance and thereby lost their
identity as 'audience'.
Although thl! Assemblages' and ~J1v l ronments' free style was directly carried
into the Happenings, the use of standard performance conventions from the
very start tended to truncate the implications of the art. The Happenings were
presented to small, intimate gatherings of people in lofts, classrooms,
gymnasiums and some of the offbeat galleries, where a clearing was made for
the activities. The watchers sat very close to what took place, with the artists and
their friends acting along with assembled environmental constructions. The
audience occasionally changed seats as in a game of musical chairs, turned
around to see something behind it. or stood without seats in tight but informal
clusters. Sometimes, too, the event moved in and amongst the crowd, which
produced some movement on the latter's part. But, however flexible these
techniques were in practice, there was always an audience in one (usually static)
space and a show given in another.
This proved to be a serious drawback, in my opinion, to the plastic
morphology of the works, for reasons parallel to those which make galleries
inappropriate for Assemblages and Environments, But it was more dramatically
evident. The rooms enframed the events, and the immemorial history of cultural
expectations attached to theatrical productions crippled them. It was repeatedly
clear with each Happening that in spite of the unique imagery and vitality of its
impulse, the traditional staging, if it did not suggest a 'crude' version of the
avant-garde Theatre of the Absurd, at least smacked of night club acts, side
shows, cock fights and bunkhouse skits. Audiences seemed to catch these
probably unintended allusions and so took the Happenings for charming
diversions, but hardly for art or even purposive activity. Night club acts can of
course be more than merely diverting, but their structure of 'grammar' is
unusually hackneyed and, as such, is detrimental to experimentation and change.
Unfortunately, the fact that there was a tough nut to crack in the Happenings
seems to have struck very few of its practitioners. Even today, the majority
continues to popularize an art of 'acts' which often is well-done enough but
102//ARTISTS' WRITINGS
fulfils neither its implications nor strikes out in uncharted territory.
But for those who sensed what was at stake, the issues began to appear. It
would take a number of years to work them out by trial and error, for there is
sometimes, though not always, a great gap between theory and production. But
gradually a number of rules-of-thumb could be listed: I.. ·J
(F) It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely. All the elements ­
people, space, the particular materials and character of the environment, time ­
can in this way be integrated. And the last shred of theatrical convention
disappears. For anyone once involved in the painter's problem of unifying a field
of divergent phenom~n9 , ~ i rqyP pf ino\;tiv@ f}GOllle in thl! §PllC@of a HaDDimin~
is just dead space. It is no different from a dead area of red paint on a canvas.
Movements call up movements in response, whether on a canvas or in a
Happening. A Happening with only an empathic response on the part of a seated
audience is not a Happening but stage theatre.
Then, on a human plane, to assemble people unprepared for an event and say
that they are 'participating' if apples are thrown at them or they are herded
about is to ask very little of the whole notion of participation, Most of the time
the response of such an audience is half-hearted or even reluctant, and
sometimes the reaction is vicious and therefore destructive to the work (though
I suspect that in numerous instances of violent reaction to such treatment it was
caused by the latent sadism in the action, which they quite rightly resented).
After a few years, in any case, 'audience response' proves to be so predictably
pure cliche that anyone serious about the problem should not tolerate it, any
more than the painter should continue the use of dripped paint as a stamp of
modernity when it has been adopted by every lamps hade and Formica
I think that it is a mark of mutual respect that all persons involved in a
Happening be willing and committed participants who have a clear idea what
they are to do. This is simply accomplished by writing out the scenario or score
for all and discussing it thoroughly with them beforehand. In this respect it is
not different from the preparations for a parade, a football match, a wedding or
religious service. It is not even different from a play. The one big difference is
that while knowledge of the scheme is necessary, professional talent is not; the
situations in a Happening are lifelike or, if they are unusual, are so rudimentary
that professionalism is actually uncalled for. Actors are stage-trained and bring
over habits from their art that are hard to shake off; the same is true of any other
kind of showman or trained athlete. The best participants have been persons not
normally engaged in art or performance, but who are moved to take part in an
activity that is at once meaningful to them in its ideas yet natural in its methods.
44
Kaprow/ /Notes on the Elimination of the Audience//103
 There is an exception, however, to restricting the Happenings to participants
only. When a work is performed on a busy avenue, passers-by will ordinarily
stop and watch, just as they might watch the demolition of a building. These are
not theatre-goers and their attention is only temporarily caught in the course of
their normal affairs. They might stay, perhaps become involved in some
unexpected way, or they will more likely move on after a few minutes. Such
persons are authentic parts of the environment.
A variant of this is the person who is engaged unwittingly with a performer
in some planned action: a butcher will sell certain meats to a customer­
performer without realizing that he is a part of a piece having to do with
purchasing, cooking, and eating meat.
Finally, there is this additional exception to the rUle. A Happening may be
scored for just watchin~. Persons wiling nothing e/§e. Th~y will wateh thiligs,
each other, possibly actions not performed by themselves, such as a bus stopping
to pick up commuters. This would not take place in a theatre or arena, but
anywhere else. It could be an extremely meditative occupation when done
devotedly: just 'cute' when done indifferently. In a more physical mood, the idea
of called-for watching could be contrasted with periods of action. Both normal
tendencies to observe and act would now be engaged in a responsible way. At
those moments of relative quiet the observer would hardly be a passive member
of an audience: he would be closer to the role of a Greek chorus, without its
specific meaning necessarily, but with its required place in the overall scheme.
At other moments the active and observing roles would be exchanged, so that by
reciprocation the whole meaning of watching would be altered, away from
something like spoon-feeding, towards something purposive. possibly intense
[... J
"Ilan Kaprow. Assemblages. EnVironments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1966) 187-8:
195-8.
14//AR1iSTS' WRITINGS
Helio Oiticica
Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries)//1965-66
No account of collective production and reception in art is complete without
reference to the work and writings of the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. By the mid­
1960s. Oiticica was collaborating with participants from the samba schools ofthe Rio
favelas to produce disruptive events based around dancing in parangole capes (see
footnote below). The emphasis was on a Dionysian loss of self in social fusion.
Before anything else I need to clarify my interest in dance, in rhythm, which in
my particular case came from a vital necessity for disinteliectuaiization. Such
intellectual disinhibition, a necessary free expression, was required since I felt
threatened by an excessively intellectual expression. This was the definite step
towards the search for myth, for a reappraisal of this myth and a new foundation
in my art. Personally, it was therefore an experience of the greatest vitality ­
indispensable, particularly in the demolition of preconceived ideas and
stereotypification. etc. As we will see later, there was a convergence of this
experience with the form that my art took in the Parangole' and all that relates
to this (since the Parangole influenced and changed the trajectory of the Nuclei,
Penetrables and B6lides).' Moreover, it was the beginning of a definitive social
experience; I am still unaware of the direction which this will take.
Dance is par excellence the search for a direct expressive act; it is the
immanence of the act. Ballet dance, on the contrary. is excessively
intellectualized through the presence of choreography that searches to
transcend this act. However, the 'Dionysian' dance, which is born out of the
interior rhythm of the collective, exteriorizes itself as a characteristic of popular
groupings, nations, etc. In these, improvisation reigns, as opposed to organized
choreography; in fact the freer the improvisation the better. It is as if an
immersion into rhythm takes place. a flux where the intellect remains obscured
by an internal mythical force that operates at an individual and collective level
(in fact. in this instance one cannot establish a distinction between the collective
and the individual). The images are mobile. rapid, inapprehensible - they are the
opposite of the static icon that is characteristic of the so-called fine arts. In
reality, dance, rhythm, is the actual aesthetic act in its essential raw state ­
implied here is the direction towards the discovery of immanence. Such an act,
the immersion into rhythm, is a pure creative act, it is an art. It is the creation of
the actual act, of continuity, and also, like all acts of creative expression, it is a
producer of images. Actually, for me it provided a new discovery of the image, a
45
Ott1ctca//Dance in My Experience//I05
fY1 tt~ll1 Ov. SeC' Maf) ._ BLACK MOUNTAIN- ~ E~flu(~-h~(\ "..n
THE ROLLINS FRACAS 21
on the wall. There were three or four of them, taken out of old calendars.
( Of\A M 0/'l't'j
In the <
\ pring of j 933, "iconoclastic and oUL\poken" classics
One, called "Sincerity," was of a female head; another, of an Indian girl
proj essor, John Andrew Wce, was asked (0 resign by Rollins
sitting by a stream. Rice pinned them on the wall before class and as the
College president, Hamilton Holt.
students came in, he simply picked up where they had left off the previous
session, without referring to the pictures in any way. Finally a student
Holt argued that in Rice's three years at Rollins, his indiscretions of
asked what the pictures were doing there. "Why?" Rice responded. "Don't
speech and action had offended colleagues and had turned his class­
you like them?" Some said yes, some no. Rice asked both groups to justify
rooms into entertainments, with students alternately bullied and ridiculed,
their verdict : "If you like the pictures, why? If you don't like thf;m, why
taught to "do as they please," to "flout good manners" customs and rules,
not?" The discussion went on for weeks. The AAUP ex­
to "withdraw from social relations," to become "morbid and unnatural."

aminers, Lovejoy and Edwards, in summarizing their ten days of hearings

Rice was, in fine, a man "disruptive of peace and harmony ." 4

at Rollins , commented that " Of those members of the teaching staff whose
Rice appealed his dismissal to the AA UP (American Association (~r
opinions were communicated to the committee, approximately half disap­
University jJrofessor.\) and a lengthy series (~lhearingsfoll()wed.
proved of the dismissal, and most of these expressed warm esteem for Mr.
Rice had been hired, Holt complained, to teach Latin and Greek; in­
Rice's personal qualities and high admiration for his abilities and his ser­
stead he devoted class time to "irrelevant discussions" on sex, religion and
v ices to the college. . . ." 23
"unconventional living." The result, according to Holt, was that students
They also concluded that "a professor who had officially been given rea­
were encouraged to " put rights above duties," to "express themselves re­
son to suppose his tenure permanent was dismissed upon charges"­
gardless of wounds that may result," to "defy rules and conventions con­
themselves made public only under the pressure of the AAUP
flicting with personal interests and desires," to "magnify the part at the ex­
investigation-"which, in so far as they are substantiated, would in most
pense of the whole." J 0
American institutions of higher education not be regarded as grounds for
The majority of Rice's students didn't see it that way. Many worshipped
that action . . . ." Lovejoy and Edwards added that they believed Rice to
him-not only at Rollins, but wherever he taught; before his Rollins
have been "an unusually stimulating and effective teacher," one who, con­
stint, Rice had been at the University of Nebraska and during his stay, the
trary to Holt's charge of "destroying youthful ideals," sought "to bring
department enrollment went from forty students to over three hundred.
students to substitute, in place of assumptions accepted through tradition
Many who signed up for his courses did so despite the subject matter.
or convention, personal convictions reached through reflection; and that
They wanted to "take Rice," even if that meant taking Greek civilization
he did this chiefly, not by lecturing, but by a searching and skillful use of
(though the rumor was, it did not). And many of his students have singled
the Socratic dialogue. " 24
Rice out to me as "the most profound influence" on their lives. l l
Instead of feeling chastened by the AAUP's findings, Holt rece·ived
His classes would probably have been alive even had he followed pre­
them in the nature of a challenge. "It is war to the death," he wrote in a
scribed procedures. But he considered regulations the last refuge of medi­
private letter, " one side has either got to unconditionally surrender or be
ocrity; when a dean complained that Rice hadn't sent in absence reports as
wiped out." He curtly informed professors Georgia and Lounsbury, " ring­
required, he replied that that sort of thing was "high school stuff." Rice
leaders of the rebellion, " that their services would no longer be required,
believed in letting each class session find its immediate interest (often
and by mid-June, when Holt completed his purge, eight members of the
"guided" by him asking the "right" questions), and pursuing that interest
faculty had been dismissed, had had their resignations requested or had re­
wherever it ll<d and however long it took.
signed in protest. (Lounsbury, Holt privately reported, "acted as though he
was pretty hard hit," but Georgia " took it on the chin with head up.")
He believed in the freedom to learn in one's own way
Within three weeks of the departure of the AAUP investigators, Holt was
and according to one's own timetable-and that went for teachers, toO .13
able\ to announce-even his rhetoric reflecting a martial air-that "the
During the AAUP hearings, Rice freely admitted, in response to one of:
backbone of the rebellion . . . is probably broken." What Holt did not
Holt's affidavits, that his Greek class had spent two weeks or more dis­
know was that he had inadvertently given birth to yet another rebellion
cussing "What is Art'?" rather than sticking to prescribed subject matter.
whose repercussions would reach far beyond the confines of a Florida
That was the time, Rice added, when he put those "obscene" pictures
campus. 26
SMTDj
46

CHAPTER 2
Mountain College. Wunsch had been part of the Rice faction at Rollins,
A
Kentucky high school, pleading the necessity of supporting a mother
BEGINNING
that the college might set up headquarters in a collection of buildings
Black Mountain College was neither an immediate nor an inevitable off­
shoot of the Rollins fracas. In his role as gadfly, Rice had often talked
about what was wrong with education; but he claimed he had never really
wanted to start a school or lead one, for he felt far less clear about what it
should be than about what it should not. Besides, he knew himself in­
capable of performing the administrative and money-raising functions
associated with being a college head.!
Rice also doubted whether the Rollins dissidents were congenial enough
to make a common enterprise natural or promising. He had few doubts
about the students interested in starting a new school; " top flight," accord­
ing to Rice, "not a second-rater in the lot" -and indeed they included the
president of the student body and the editor of the undergraduate paper.
But the faculty dissidents, in Rice's view, were not nearly their match. 4
Despite his reservations, the feeling persisted in Rice that he should give
his views on education, unformed and incomplete though they were, a
practical test. Events soon helped to strengthen that feeling even while
diluting the doubts which had kept him from acting on it. Some of the
dissident faculty-especially Georgia-continued to press Rice to start
the college he had often theorized about. And a number of students made
it clear they were eager to join such an experiment. Rice felt special respon­
sibility for those students; at least one had been told by the Rollins treasurer
that because she had defended Rice, her scholarship money would no
longer be available. 7
Two major obstacles stood out against the maturing of plans: finding a
suitable site for a college and finding the money to support it. The first
difficulty was the more easily met. Rice's initial idea had simply been to
take a group of students to England for a year-a sort of peripatetic
academy. But apparently some students feared the loss of time and some
A BEGINNING 29
parents the expense; so that idea was quickly shelved. It was Bob Wunsch,
the Rollins drama coach, who finally suggested the site that became Black
but after the showdown had accepted a teaching job in a Louisville,
and sister. Still, he kept in touch with the dissidents and it was his idea
owned by the Blue Ridge Assembly of the Protestant Church near Black
Mountain, North Carolina . 9
A native of North Carolina (his roommate, briefly, at Chapel Hill had
been Thomas Wolfe), Wunsch remembered that nestled in the low hills
overlooking the town of Black Mountain, the Blue Ridge Assembly had
constructed a set of buildings, dominated by the huge, white-columned
Robert E. Lee Hall, which had an extraordinary view of the valley and the
surrounding mountain peaks . The church used the buildings during the
summer as a resort-conference area for its members ; the rest of the year,
the buildings stood vacant.
When Wunsch suggested the Blue Ridge site, Georgia, who had a sum­
mer home in nearby Highlands, was immediately enthused. He and Rice
got in a car and went to have a look. "Perfect, " was Rice's verdict: "Here
kets, sheets, dishes, flatware, enough for a dozen colleges . . . ." In his
earlier fantasies, Rice had dreamed up an ideal physical plant for a col­
lege. It would include a main building large enough for every student to
have a bedroom and a study to himself, and-since the opportunity for
solitude should ideally combine with opportunities for companionship­
spacious common rooms where everybody could meet together. 10
Lee Hall, with its huge lobby, its separate wings and its manifold
rooms, was Rice's dream come to life. And located in a small building
directly behind Lee Hall, was a separate dining room, its compactness
exemplifying his notion that mealtime should be a central occasion in
communal life. Still more appealing, the building complex was available
for the modest rental of $4,500 a year-though the Blue Ridge Assembly
stipulated that the grounds would have to be entirely cleared of college
equipment and personnel at the end of each spring term in order to make
way for the summer's Protestant conferees. 11
But if the rent was modest-astonishingly so, given the amplitude of
space and the magnificence of the natural setting-$4,500 was still a sub­
stantial sum to be gathered during a depression and by a group of men
who themselves (with the exception of Dreier) had no independent means.
SMT c 2
47
 32 BLACK MOUNTAIN
Rent, moreover, would only be the basic expense; additional costs would
come in providing for light, heat, power, food, equipment, books, office
expenses. 12
Rice, chauffeured by his son Frank, traveled through thirteen states that
summer of 1933 talking to students, cajoling parents, looking for staff,
trying to pin down promises of financial aid. He detested the role of fund
raiser, of having to see himself to any degree as supplicant or hypocrite,
and he tried to avoid making direct pleas for money. But he did go seeking
help to several foundations-to the Carnegie and Rockefeller monoliths,
and also to some of the smaller ones.
They asked for specific plans, charts, graphs-the conventional guaran­
tees, in other words, that a "responsible" project was about to be
launched. Rice resolutely refused to give them. When the foundation men
politely asked why (hinting that some modest pro forma acquiesence might
suffice) Rice, somewhat less politely, replied that the more carefully drawn
the plans of what was to be, the less it would be, since " above the level of
bricklaying" it was impossible, or at the least unwise, to codify human be­
havior. He added that he couldn 't honestly say that he fully knew what the
new college should try to be, and to the extent he did know, wasn't at all
sure it would work. If he started on the idea and saw halfway through that
it was no good , the only sensible thing to do would be to quit-but if he
had drawn up any sort of plan in advance, he might then feel obligated to
carry it through . The found ation men , still polite and some even sympa­
thetic, replied that they were sorry, but without specific plans as to the col­
lege's intentions and needs, they could not provide financial support. Rice
took comfort in the knowledge that he had been honest-and also in the
fact that his "presentation" so impressed two foundation secretaries that they
offered to resign their jobs and come down to Black Mountain to work with­
out salary.l:J
But comfort wasn't money. Others besides Rice took to the road dur­
ing the summer-including some of the Rollins students who hoped to be
part of the new school-but everywhere financial pickings were slim. As
summer ebbed, frantic telegrams arrived from potential students and staff
begging for some definite wOJ;:d. None was possible. A certain amount of
Imoney had come in, but not nearly enough to guarantee a September open­
iing. At this juncture, "Mac" Forbes, member of a wealthy New England
lfamily, offered to help.
Forbes had himself been on the Rollins faculty, but had left the year be­
fore the row when told he wasn't a good teacher and probably didn't be­
long in an academic community. Forbes thought Rice "told people off too
A BEGINNING 33
readily," was " too abrupt and arrogant." On his side, Rice worried a little
about the "Goodwin Watson stuff"-bad John Dewey, as he viewed it­
that he believed Forbes had absorbed at Teachers College, Columbia. But
despite their reservations, the two men were fond of each other, and
Forbes invited Rice to come to his family home and explain what he
was up to. They talked for a long while without Rice mentioning money
-indeed Rice claimed he had never thought of Forbes as a potential
backer. But toward the end of the visit, Forbes volunteered a gift of
$5,000, and then, as Rice was leaving, Mrs. Forbes said that she would like
to give an additional $5,000. With that to go on, Black Mountain College
became a certainty, and on August 24, 1933 a lease was signed with the
Blue Ridge Assembly for the rental of its buildings.14
Joe Martin first heard about Black Mountain from his sister, Mitzi, one
of the student dissidents at Rollins. He had graduated from Haverford in
1930, received a B.A. from Oxford in 1932 and put in a term toward the
Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia, where he had all but made up his
mind to return in the fall. But he felt dissatisfied with establishment educa­
tion and under his sister's prodding, finally decided that a year or two
among rebels might do him good. So he applied for a job at Black Moun­
tain teaching English, and after he and Rice met twice to talk over pros­
pects, was hired . He arrived at the Black Mountain railroad station on
September 23, 1933. 15
First impressions were a little unsettling. The gateway to the grounds
was ugly, the road up to the buildings rough and the lobby of'Lee Hall so
enormous and empty that Joe Martin decided the pictures he had seen of
"Black Mountain College" did it altogether too much justice. He had ad­
ditional misgivings about Rice, who met him at the station, regaled him
with "tour-conductor" remarks, and then quickly turned him over to Bill
Hinckley, the new psychology teacher. Hinckley heped Martin choose a
bedroom and round up some furniture for it, but seemed a surprisingly
formal man for a supposedly experimental setting. Martin's spirits improved
when Hinckley's wife, Meg, cigarette drooping out of her mouth, came
wandering down the vast hall to propose some tea, and then took him on
a drive to the town of Black Mountain, three miles away, in order to
pick u{t some butter for morning breakfast (Meg was college dietitian) .
The shopkeepers there were friendly and Joe Martin's spirits rose higher:
it seemed one feature of establishment education-hostility between town
and gown-would certainly be absent from Black Mountain. By eve­
ning he was beginning to feel that he'd come to the right place after al1. 1G
SMToJ
48
34 BLACK MOUNTAIN
The next few days-for Joe Martin and for everyone-went by in a
rush. There were no established procedures, no preexisting routine to pro­
vide the comfort-and dullness-of familiarity. Almost everyone knew at
least a few faces, for the faculty members had all been interviewed or had
known each other earlier, and many of the twenty-two students were
friends, fourteen of them being from Rollins. Only one student, Gary McGraw,
came from the surrounding area. As he later recalled, "by 'hook or crook,'
the college wanted to find a local person" so arrangements had been made
for him to attend as a day student. He remembers being "in a complete
state of bewilderment" during the first week-" there was the Rollins
group, and a few of us strangers wandering about trying to find out about
class." As another non-Rollinsite put it, "There were occasions when I felt
that Those Who Had Been at Rollins were being confused with the Elect
of God." 17
The excitement of the opening days had for some an alloy of fear : it
was going to be a small family, and though the spaces of Lee Hall and the
surrounding countryside were vast, this would not be a setting for those
who cherished anonymity or isolation. Everyone was to live in the main
building, Lee Hall, except for a few faculty families with small children,
like the Dreiers, who set up housekeeping in the adjoining cottages. The
ground ftoor of Lee Hall was reserved for various administrative offices,
and the second and third ftoors set aside as bedrooms for students and sin­
gle facuIty members; some married facuIty with older children (like the
Rices, with their teen-agers, Frank and Mary) had suites in one of the
building's two wings.
Joe Martin popped into the room next to his and discovered a fellow
facuIty member, John Evarts, " a nice chap" who needed a shave and who
frightened Martin by volunteering the fact that not only had he been music
critic the previous winter for the Brooklyn Eagle in New York City but
also had had some actual teaching experience. Evarts, on his side, was full
of self-doubt as to whether he would measure up in a classroom. Neither
of them-nor anyone else-knew what courses would be offered or
even what role a formal curriculum might play in the new college. Classes
couldn't begin until it first became clear how the community saw its pur­
poses and then decided what procedures would best implement them.Is
The process of clarification began immediately, since living, unlike
classes, couldn't wait. A variety of vague ideas were aftoat as to how an
ideal community should organize itself, and in the opening weeks these
were presented, argued about and voted on-though in fact votes were
few, since it was widely agreed that organization and structure should be
kept to a minimum lest Black Mountain go the way of most institutions,
35
achieving codification at the expense of aliveness. As Rice wrote to his
brother-in-law, Frank Aydelotte, they wanted "to maintain some order,
but at the same time, keep ftexibility, and once you get things too defi­
nitely on paper, that vanishes." Aydelotte agreed that some rules would be
necessary-and also that they should be few in number and made slowly.
"I have a deep-seated prejudice against constitutions, bylaws and all other
hampering restrictions on the freedom of creative effort," he wrote Rice,
"1 myself am always inclined to think that a government of men is better
than a government of laws if you can get the right men." That was the
crux . Rice himself had doubts as to whether they had gathered the right
men, and even the best might prove inept at charting an enterprise for
which they had such uncertain designs and such limited experience. 19
The skeleton organization of Black Mountain was completed in early
November at a special meeting of the Board of Fellows, consisting that
day of Rice, Dreier and Georgia. They unanimously elected as official
members of the faculty those who had for some four or five weeks already
been serving in that capacity: Evarts (music), Martin (English) and Hinck­
ley (psychology), plus Helen Boyden in economics, Hilda "Peggy" Loram
in English and dramatics, Emmy Zastrow in German and the recently ar­
rived John Keith in romance languages. The Board, in accordance with
power vested in it by the bylaws, also decided compensation: the seven in­
structors (like the three professors on the Board) were given free room and
board-but no salary. Black Mountain couldn't afford cash outlay at the
start-and very little thereafter (in J 935-36, the average salary was
$8.1 9). The guiding principle had to be modified Marx: from each accord­
in~ to his ability, to each according to his (bare) needs. 2fi Though students
from the start had a larger formal voice in decision-making than was
(or is) true at most colleges, they did not have an equal voice with the
facuIty-indeed some faculty members, namely those on the Board
of Fellows, were more equal than others. All that Rice ever claimed was
that in at least one sense Black Mountain came as near to a democracy
as possible : individual economic status had nothing to do with one's stand­
ing in the community. More than that wasn't possible, Rice argued, because
some people carried innate authority within their persons and others did
not, and in any kind of free society such as Black Mountain aimed to be,
"the differences show up . . . the test is made all day long and every day
as to who is the person to listen to." The real question, however-and one
that would be raised in the days ahead-was whether the governing struc­
ture of Black Mountain allowed a "natural aristocracy" to assert its claim
to leadership or whether it automatically endowed some few individuals­
preeminently, the Board of Fellows-with an amount of power not neces-
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 38 BLACK MOUNTAIN A BEGINNING 39
abilities. 28
sarily coefficient with their
This question wouldn't arise as long as the community felt an identity of
interests-as long as faculty and students felt their views genuinely repre­
sented by the governing board. The guiding ideal was the Quaker "sense of
the meeting" : the community achieving consensus on a given issue, and
the decision then implemented by its chosen representatives. In practice,
the search for consensus in meetings of the whole community could prove
a dccided trial, for the time and turmoil involved sometimes seemed wildly
out of proportion to the importance of the issue at stake. One of the more
prolonged and furious discussions during the early days, for example,
centered on the question of whether Sunday lunch could be skipped so that
the kitchen personnel might have some time off. That battle raged for
hours, with the entire college split into " two-mealer" and "three-mealer"
factions, both sides defending their position with the kind of passion usu­
ally reserved for religion and taxes. Throughout the discussion, Rice, like
any good therapist who sees a safe outlet for tension and anxiety, sat
quietly sucking on his pipe. A compromise was eventually worked out
whereby it was agreed that picnic supplies-bread, cold cuts, etc.­
would be made available for those who wanted to pick them up, but that
no lunch would be formally served. z9

The
community was so small and its intentions as yet so undefined, that opin­
ion could be sounded and accommodated with ease. And the enthusiasm
th~t comes with any new venture-especially if touched, as in Black
Moun'tain's case, with the peril and joy of shared poverty and isolation
-helped to overcome differences and to encourage generosity toward
fellow pioneers. "There is only one first year to any institution," Joe
Martin later wrote, "and it is doubtful any of us will ever quite recapture
the mood of that first autumn." They felt, in those early days, that they
were starting life anew, that in some uncertain way they were part of a
revolutionary vanguard-the difference Joe Martin has said, "between
handing on the torch and lighting it. " "We felt very important," a student
later remembered, " we had all the power we were aware of need ing." 32
And so within little more than a month, the Black Mountain community
had established rough guidelines for governance and some tentative begin­
nings of a life style. Few wanted more than that. Detailing, most agreed,
was best left to the future, after the community had had more chance to
formulate and test its purposes. Where and how community organization
might need modifying would depend on what needs developed; by keeping
structure to a minimum, values would have a chance to shape institutional
features rather than, as is more usually the case, the institution molding
the values.
This was felt with special force with regard to education-which was,
after all, central to Black Mountain 's founding and to its sense of common
purpose. The trouble with "progressive" educators, Rice felt , was that they
were doctrinaires: " They've got the thing laid out. This is the way to do it.
And by God if you don't do it that way you're not It." After a visit in
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40 BLACK MOUNTAIN
1934 to the Lincoln School, one of the bastions of progressive education,
Rice decided the place was all but lifeless, "running on something that
happened a good while back"; and "one of the appalling disclosures" of
his visit was that" 'progressive education' when it is stupid, is much more
stupid than the other kind." The certainty of the current crop of progres­
sive educators perverted, in Rice's view, the whole spirit of their alleged
master, John Dewey-a man Rice knew personally and admired enor­
mously (Dewey was to visit Black Mountain several times). Dewey under­
stood, Rice felt, that "to arrive at a conclusion was not to arrive at a con­
clusion, it was to arrive at a pause. And you would look at the pause, you
would look at the plateau, and then you would see another thing to climb."
Education, in this view, was never completed, and so it was nonsense to
talk, as Robert Hutchins did, of the "educated man." What a term!, Rice
scoffed: "educated" is "a perfect passive participle," perfect because it's
over with, passive because you had nothing to do with it. "The only thing
Robert Hutchins ever said that I agree with," Rice told me, "is that col­
leges should be in tents, and when they fold, they fold." 33
On the other hand, it was widely agreed at Black Mountain, that experi­
mentation in and of itself was not necessarily good; innovation involved
people, and people could be damaged. Therefore nothing should be tried
without (as Rice wrote in the first catalog) a "reasonable likelihood of
good results"-a dictum which, if followed to the letter, would have
meant that no genuinely pioneering work could be done, for where "good
results" are a precondition, nothing unknown, uncharted, will be ventured.
This spirit, more cautious (or, to put it in a better light, more "responsible")
than adventuresome, coexisted with, and inevitably compromised, the wish
to be new. "The College," Rice wrote in the foreword to the first catalog,
"is for the present content to place emphasis upon combining those experi­
ments and the results of those experiences which have already shown their
value in education institutions of the western world; but which are often
isolated and hampered from giving their full value because of their existence
side by side with thoughtless tradition." To some extent Rice may have been
muting his own Jacobin instincts for the sake of public consumption­
there was that phrase "for the present" -but at the same time he was
giving honest expression to the community's uncertainty as to what extent
it was, or wished to be, a genuinely innovative enterprise. Which is per­
haps what Joe Martin meant when he wrote, in retrospect, "we achieved
the releases and raptures of revolutionary enthusiasm without the discour­
agements and inconveniences of revolutionary struggle." 34
None of this is to imply, on the other hand, that at its inception Black
Mountain was devoid of ideas about education-only that the community
A BEGINNING 41
believed it wise to pay attention to past experience, and to keep all formula­
tions tentative.
The one idea most commonly agreed upon was that "living" and "learn­
ing" should be intertwined. Education should proceed everywhere, not only
in classroom settings-which in fact, at least as usually structured, are
among the worst learning environments imaginable. A favorite slogan at
Black Mountain was that "as much real education took place over the cof­
fee cups as in the classrooms." Faculty and students ate together-and
usually ate well (that is, as someone put it, "if you like the kind of Southern
cooking which cooks vegetables in grease.") The cook was Jack Lipsey,
assisted by his wife, Rubye, and two or three helpers in the kitchen. Every
table served itself, someone volunteering each time to bring out the table's
food on a large serving tray, and later to clean off (one of the few recognized
sports at Black Mountain was seeing how many coffee cups and saucers,
piled one on the other, you could carry through the cluttered dining room).
Jack and Rubye were black, and a considerable force in the community.
Ruby~ was a college graduate, cultivated and energetic, and many have re­
ported that she "probably did as much girls' counseling as anyone in the
college." Jack was an unusually intuitive man-and one with firm "stan­
dards." He wouldn't serve meals to anyone dirty or impolite, and when
Rice let it be known that at breakfast, which was served cafeteria style, he
could tell what Jack thought of somebody by the way he handed his plate
to him, several in the community thereafter picked up their plates in the
kitchen. 35
A central aim was to keep the community small enough so that members
could constantly interact in a wide variety of settings-not only at meals,
but on walks, in classes, at community meetings, work programs, dances,
performances, whatever. Individual life styles, in all their peculiar detail,
could thereby be observed, challenged, imitated, rejected-which is, after
all, how most learning proceeds, rather than through formal academic in­
struction. "You're seeing people under all circumstances daily," as Rice
put it, "and after a while you get to the point where you don't mind being
seen yourself, and that's a fine moment." 36
All aspects of community life were thought to have a bearing on an in­
dividual's education-that is, his growth, his becoming aware of who he
was and wanted to be. The usual distinctions between curricular and extra­
curricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done
outside it, were broken down. Helping to fight a forest fire side by side with
faculty members, participating in a community discussion on whether
the dining hall should serve two or three meals on Sundays, discovering
that a staff member was a homosexual or that married life included argu-
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42 BLACK MOUNTAIN
ments as welJ as (and sometimes during) intercourse, taking part in an im­
provisational evening of acting out grudges against other community mem­
bers-aIl these and a hundred more experiences, most of them the more
vivid for being unplanned, contributed at least as much to individual
awareness as traditional academic exercises.
This didn't mean that disparities of age, interest, knowledge and experi­
ence between, say, a twenty-year-old and a fifty-year-old weren't recog­
nized, or that it was thought either possible or desirable to merge all mem­
bers of the community into some false concord of "buddyhood." But it did
mean that many at Black Mountain believed that differences in age need
not preclude communication, that interests could be shared, that the
perspective of the young also had value. It meant, too, that while informa­
tion, analytical skills and reason were prized, they were considered aspects
rather than equivalents of personal development; they were not confused, in
other words-as they are in most educational institutions-with the whole
of life, the only elements of self worthy of development and praise.
It was hoped that a double sense of responsibility would emerge out of
the varied contacts and opportunities Black Mountain provided: that which
an individual owes to the group of which he is a member, and that which
he owes to himself-with neither submerging the other. From the begin ­
ning Black Mountain emphasized the social responsibilities that come from
being part of a community, yet tried to see to it that personal freedom
wouldn't be sacrificed to group needs. Rice, for one, liked to stress how
different each person was from every other and how expectations of
performance should vary accordingly. In trying to strike a balance between
the needs of an individual and those of the group, Rice's instinct was to
give preference to the individual.
Some in the community disagreed with this emphasis. One of the long­
standing disputes at Black Mountain focused on whether everyone should
be expected to share in the manual work that needed doing around the
colJege-tending the grounds, unloading coal , stoking furnaces , and the
like. A mystique early developed-Ted Dreier was one of its truest believ­
ers and Borsodi's Flight from the City one of its sacred texts-that being
close to the earth and working with one's hands, were essential ingredients
for individual growth. "Ted had this notion," Rice said to me years
later, "havi~g been born in Brooklyn Heights, and never having seen more
than a few blades of grass, that there was some kind of mystical experi­
ence in touching the soil." Rice had spent most of his own youth on scrab­
bly Southern farms, had seen his relatives-including the women-endure
the exhausting, cruel work of picking cotton, of hours bent under the hot
sun, of fingers streaked with blood, of bodies moving mechanically be-
A BEGINNING 43
tween the rows, back muscles so sore one could hardly stand straight at the
end of a day. "Untoiling poets," Rice wrote in his autobiography , "may
sing of the dignity of toil; others know there is degradation in obligatory
sweat." 37
In the middle of the first year, some students initiated the idea of a farm
to help provision the community and to provide new forms of experience.
Rice favored the idea, but warned that the farm would not lead to self­
sufficiency, as many hoped. And he insisted that although he himself some­
times enjoyed hoeing and weeding, he was against coercing anyone to do
likewise. "If you want to work . . . fine, that's fine. Go ahead. I like it.
But I don't want anybody else to do it if they don't want to . . . hell, if
I was a violinist, I wouldn't want to handle bricks . . . I wouldn't want
to imperil my hands. Certainly not." 38
Walking out on the front porch of Lee HalJ one day, Rice ran into a
group of students about to set off for the farm in a beat-up car one of
them owned, and he used the occasion to dramatize his point. He asked
them, with affected innocence, where they were going. "Down to the
farm ," one of them ~nswered . The pixie look came into Rice's eyes,
sure sign some devastating sarcasm was on the way. "Well," he said, un­
derplaying for maximum effect, "if you're going really to be farmers, you
know how you ought to get there? You oUght to walk. Because that's what
farmers do; they walk. " Then he pointed to the rubber tires on the car­
"from Malaya," he said, "contributions were made by the rest of the world
to this trip down to the farm , th'is flight from civilization." 39
Though the episode was trivial and the style sardonic, Rice felt strongly
about the issues at stake. For one thing, he distrusted easy talk about
"community spirit"; an honest aspiration could become cant. (Indeed did,
in his view. At a later period in Black Mountain's history, as Rice re­
counted it to me, his son Frank-then living in one of the cottages-was
admonished for having cleaned up his own yard instead of someone else's.)
Rice feared, too, that the watchword of "community spirit" could become
tyrannous. If you 're going to have liberty, he would say, then have it­
meaning for everyone, not just oneself. If someone likes to work with his
hands-fine, let him. But if someone else "would rather walk around the
. woods, or sit and listen to a record, or read a book or talk to somebody,
that's the thing to do, not something somebody else thinks you oUght to
do." The danger -less likely at Black Mountain than at most places, but
real there, too-was that the slogan "freedom " (like its offshoot, "free
enterprise") could come to mean the right to trample on somebody else.
In Rice's view, some of those who had joined the Black Mountain ex­
periment didn't even want freedom for themselves-though they were the
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- - ."
44 BLACK MOUNTAIN
last to know it. They had thought out the premises of freedom, knew what
conclusions followed, and were firmly convinced that they believed in
both. But it was all in the realm of logic and abstraction. When such a
person was actually placed in a climate of freedom, he discovered that he
couldn't function in it, that the intellectual structure he had built in de­
fense of freedom was quite at variance with his own emotional needs. Such
people came to Black Mountain, in Rice's words, thinking they wanted
"something new and different" but really wanting "the old things changed
enough to make them feel comfortable." They failed to understand that
"there is no comfort if you really believe in liberty. You're just not going
to have any comfort; you're going to have conflict." 41
As case in point, Rice referred to a young instructor on the original
staff who "was absolutely incapable of doing anything unless he could put
it in an intellectual framework." The young man was a Marxist, "a crypto­
Communist," Rice called him, "a fellow traveler." Rice claimed he had
nothing against having a Communist on the staff-so long as other points
of view were represented as well-but he was annoyed at having The
Daily Worker constantly thrown at him as the final arbiter for all disputes.
Rice had never seen a copy of the Worker, but felt confident it, too, was
fallible. "Let's settle this thing," he finally told the instructor one day, ''I'll
get the Herald Tribune and you get the Worker and I'll show you there are
more lies per page in the Worker than you'll find in two pages of the Trib­
une." The challenge was never taken up. "He must have gone back and
looked at the damn thing and saw what it was," Rice concluded. (Or, more
likely, he might simply have been intimidated by Rice's verbal pyrotech­
nics.) 42
Rice's distaste for "causes" and for those who publicly announced their
liberalism, was keen. On one occasion, when sitting in on an earnest class­
room discussion on the evils of the profit motive, Rice felt compelled to
point out that the class wouldn't be sitting around the table were it not for
the cash that rich benefactors had given Black Mountain; he sardonically
suggested the seminar be entitled "Improvement of the World Course."
Rice never seemed much troubled at the lack of rigor or consistency in his
arguments (it was quite possible, for example, to be aware that Black
Mountain owed its existence to wealthy patrons and still be against the
profit motive). He relied on the sheer force of personality for the power of
his opinion; he overwhelmed, he didn't persuade. He all at once denounced
the illogic of others, derided logic itself as a tool ("logic is the poorest
damn thing you can carry around with you if you're going to deal with
people"), and cherished the contradictions in his own value structure. Thus
he proudly advertised his vote for LaFollette as President in 1924, while
A BEGINNING 45
simultaneously insisting that the "revolt of the West" as embodied by Bryan
and later by the Nonpartisan League, was "nothing but opportunism." 43
In a similar way, Rice could be shrewd in recognizing the inability of
others to allow a climate of liberty to flourish at Black Mountain, while
being himself insensitive to the way he, too, set limits to that climate. He
liked to say that "inside of liberty you've got to have something else,"
some strength of character, some sense of purpose, and he frankly doubted
that most people had that "something else" -or even (at least beyond a
certain age) the capacity for developing it. He tended to be more scornful
of colleagues than of students; he thought them too set in their ways, unable
to bring their being into consonance with their rhetoric. 44
Nor, he felt, did some of them understand what he meant for Black
Mountain to be. "It's the trouble with all ideas," he later said. "X has an
idea. He explains it as best he can to B, and B listens very carefully but he
doesn't get it all. He gets some of it, and then he fits that into what he al­
ready is himself, and he passes it on to C. And by the time it gets way
down~ X is out of the picture. . . . I've seen this thing happen time and
again, that a man would have a brilliant idea, something marvelous, and by
the time it got into action it would be just-it would be nothing. It had to
filter through so many inferior minds. Or different minds." Yet, as Rice
admitted, he wasn't at ail certain himself, when he agreed to help start a
new college, that he had any clear, let alone brilliant ideas, on which the
school should be based. 45
Moreover, Rice's considerable contempt for most of the Black Mountain
staff involved more than a low opinion of their intelligence or originality.
He tended to dismiss them as people as well, and made only spasmodic ef­
forts to mute his disdain-despite the fact that he often spoke of the need
for manners, of how essential it was to maintain "strict inner discipline
about courtesy." Not everything could be permitted at Black Mountain,
Rice liked to say, if a "civilized society" was to survive the intimate,
abrasive contact inherent in an isolated community: "Rude language is
out. Discourtesy is out. Bullying is out." Rice wanted courtesy to prevail
because he believed manners provided needed distance between people,
allowed for privacy. 46
, . More than thirty years after Black Mountain's founding (perhaps his vi­
sion had been clearer at the time), Rice told me that "there was never a
word used that I heard at Black Mountain that couldn't be used in the best
society in the world. No short, dirty words, no blasts of anger. It was
the beginning, there was a fair amount of "discourteous," even brutal be­
havior at Black Mountain, and Rice himself was one of those who in-
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46 BLACK MOUNTAIN
dulged in it. He believed every society needs some authority to which it
can make appeal, and it's undoubtedly true that as the strongest personal ­
ity at Black Mountain, he had the role of authority thrust upon him. But
what's less true, Rice's claim to the contrary, is that he felt habitually un­
comfortable with being regarded as the final arbiter. 47
In fact, he chose a strict Freudian vocabulary in describing to me his
role at Black Mountain: none of the other significant males had "overcome
the Oedipus complex," and they therefore turned him into a substitute
father- " permissive, happy, believing in Liberty. " The trouble is, he went
on, after a while one begins to have the same feelings about a substitute
father that one did about the original (especially if one's feelings about the
original were troubled and unresolved)-and so all hell breaks loose.
Though Rice's Freudian terminology was doubtless too categorical to do
justice to the many nuances of his position at Black Mountain, likening
himself to a father was not mere fantasy, nor simply an invention designed
to magnify his own importance. Though few in the community would have
used a parent-child vocabulary in describing their relationship to Rice, al ­
most everyone regarded him as the one person indisputably invested with
authority , the individual who had most to do with establishing tone and
direction and who, in times of crisis, made the critical decisions. 48
Which isn 't tantamount to saying that Rice accepted authority reluc­
tantly or that he always exercised it benevolently. He was candid, at least
in retrospect, about his pleasure in wielding power and his occasional abuse
of it-though the candor itself sometimes seemed aimed at disguising the
full dimensions of the case. "I was a very tough cookie when I wanted to
be, " Rice admitted to me; but he didn't add that the toughness sometimes
had an edge of cruelty to it. "I made too many decisions on my own ," he
confessed. " I had a touch of the Messianic complex, which is a pretty dan­
gerous thing" ; but he didn't add that he sometimes recognized the Messian­
ism only belatedly, sometimes only when pointed out by others, and some­
times not at all. 49
A case in point-one provided, it should be said, by Rice himself­
involved a young man from New York who was hired to teach philosophy .
His father was a distinguished rabbi, and the son determined to match
him in reputation and accomplishment. In Rice's opinion he "didn't have
any of the qualities of his father," though he'd done well in the Harvard
Graduate School and "could remember all the things that all the philos­
ophers had said and when they lived and when they died." He had the
habit of interrupting a conversation to comment " I guess that's what Spi­
noza meant" -to which Rice once replied, "Well if that's what he said
I guess that's what he meant." 50
A BEGINNING 47
The philosophy courses the young man offered were so poorly attended
that he soon found himself with little to do, and in dismay he sought out
Rice for advice. He got more than he bargained for. "I'm going to telI you
something that you won't like at all," Rice said, "but I'm honest and seri­
ous about this. You have no business teaching. You have no real interest in
philosophy; you don't give a damn about philosophy. And you 're not in­
terested in teaching and you can't be if you don't give a damn about it.
Now do you want me to tell you what I think you really ought to do?" The
young man managed to nod yes. "You ought to be a golf pro," said Rice
-"And I mean it." 51
The young man stayed on at Black Mountain for several years , but car­
ried with him, not surprisingly, lifelong resentment against Rice for his
cavalier response, his insensitivity to the potential effect of his sharp,
clever words. "I didn't want anyone to leave with ill-feeling," Rice once
said, but he was willing to risk that rather than measure his language. The
young philosophy instructor, in the upshot, eventually went on to a full
profdsorship in a major university-which for Rice only confirmed his
low estimate of the man 's talent. 52
"I don't have a very affectionate nature," Rice told me, "I had to decide
whether to be a Christian or not, and I decided I wasn't going to try be­
cause I thought the command to love your neighbor was preposterous. . .
I floundered around for a long time, and then I finally hit upon the Greeks,
and I thought, ' well, this is it: I'll try to be just. That's the best I can do.' "
While these self-confessed limitations reveal Rice's honesty, they also re­
veal his tendency to regard his own personality failings as necessities of
nature-a form, in the ~nd, of self-indulgence. 53
Moreover, the very qualities that he accepted in himself he deplored in
others. His sharpest complaints against Black Mountain were that it lacked
enough affection (" it was a little bit too hard, a little bit too tough"), and
that "everybody was judging everybody else all the time" -which may only
prove that Rice, like many of us, was most intolerant of those qualities in
others which he most disliked in himself. At the same time-and this is
less true of many of us-he deeply appreciated those who did possess the
qualities of affection and easy acceptance which he himself lacked. " If I
were listing requirements for another Black Mountain," he wrote in his
autobiography , "first would be at least four couples held together by reso­
lute love, by love in which the conflicts were resolved into equality." 54
Only one couple, in Rice's opinion, met that test during Black Moun­
himself, Rice admired Walter Barnes's stillness-his "spirit of serenity
floated in the air the way honeysuckle does at night. " (Rice could also
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48 BLACK MOUNTAIN
appreciate that style in the classroom ; " there must be no inhibition," he
insisted, against the insight of the quiet student, for if the climate was
right " somebody who never said anything would suddenly say something
that was perfectly brilliant. ") Rice adored Mary Barnes for her compassion
-the same trait sometimes missing in his own approach to people. He
thought her "the most important woman in the place by far " ; she exempli­
fied the value older people-might, but in fact rarely did, have for the young:
a demonstration of "the ease of life, the fact that they 're no longer fighting
the world or fighting themselves. It's very nice. It's a kind of promise." 55
Just as Rice appreciated in others the serenity he himself lacked, so oth­
ers appreciated in him the outspokenness they feared. Most students and
colleagues came to value Rice's bluntness above the hurt it sometimes
caused them. One example: a student who asked to see Rice on an urgent
matter, began the conversation by chatting nervously about trivialities. Im­
patient, and feeling sure he knew why the student had come to talk with
him, Rice finally blurted out: " Well why the hell don't you marry Betty?"
The boy, stunned into equal honesty, said he didn't think he could-even
though they loved each other-because there was insanity in his family .
" For God's sake!" Rice said, "do you know of a family that hasn't got in­
sanity in it ? I've got it in my family . . . if you go back in our family you
find a lot of them . That 's the damnedest thing I ever heard of!" In the up ­
shot, the two students did marry. 56
Adults tended to bring out the peremptory side of Rice more than stu­
dents did . He showed greater patience with twenty-year-olds because he had
greater faith in their ability to change, and where growth was possible Rice
preferred to issue invitations rather than commands. He realized that many
young people had already given up on themselves by the time they reached
college. The wreckage could be terrible, the stupefaction total-and for
Rice it was always harder to be nice to the stupefied than to the merely
stupid, for the stupefied, as he put it, had " collaborated to a certain
ex ten t." 57
But he tried. He tried hard, because he deeply believed, despite his oc­
casional cynicism to the contrary, that almost every young person could be
salvaged. First create a climate of liberty, Rice would say-that is, remove
the usual lists of dos and don'ts-and then "surround the person with one
invitation after another," not only invitations to literature, art, music and
the like, but also " to be a good, pleasant, respectable person to have
around-and that's a very nice invitation ; it's not beyond most people." It
might take a long time before those who had grown up in a poverty­
stricken environment, who had been severely deprived or damaged , would
respond, and some few would never respond, but Rice (like his contempo-
A BEGINNING 49
rary A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill) firmly believed that in time
the large majority would. His faith was based on the premise that at birth
" we are all artists, everyone of us: we are free to create the kind of world
in which we choose to live, and we're equal in that freedom ." For the art­
ist in each person to develop, freedom from manipulation was a prerequi­
site; the student should be placed in competition with himself, not others. 58
In consonance with that philosophy, there were no fixed regulations at
Black Mountain -no required courses, no system of frequent examina­
tions, no formal grading. For the first ten days of classes, students were
encouraged to "shop around, " to sit in on classes, sample possibilities,
and then decide on a schedule. Responsibility, in other words, was
placed on the student himself for deciding what shape his education would
take-though the faculty made itself available for consultation. At two
points in the student's career he did have to face (as the first Black Moun ­
tain catalog put it) "comprehensive tests of his failure or success in meet­
ing responsibility." The curriculum of the college was divided into junior
and seni(}f divisions, and before moving from the one to the other, a stu­
dent had to pass the first of his two tests; and then , to graduate, the sec­
ond .59
How long a student stayed in the junior division was left entirely to
him, but was generally defined as the point at which he felt he had ex­
plored a variety of fields long enough to know what area of knowledge he
wanted to specialize in. When he felt that point had been reached - when
he wished, in other words , to pass into the senior division and begin work
on a concentrated field of inquiry-he prepared a statement of "accom­
plishment and knowledge" to indicate that he had an adequate foundation
for his proposed specialization. If the Committee on Admissions to the se­
nior division was satisfied with the statement, the student then took a set
of oral and written exams "devised to test capacity as well as knowledge."
(" In what way was The Canterbury Tales the Grand Hotel of the four­
teenth century?" " What is the most important international issue before
the world today ?" "What is good art?") The senior division program was
specially tailored to each person's needs. One student, for example, hoped
to become a writer, and so decided to study "trends in contemporary writ­
ing" ; then he decided he'd benefit from a knowledge of " the historical
background of the whole century," and so planned for himself an ambi­
tious program of reading on the history of Socialism, Fascism and Materi­
60
The other set of exams came when a student felt ready to graduate­
which wasn't often; the actual number of graduates from Black Mountain
was small , since most students either left after a few years or never felt
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55
50 BLACK MOUNTAIN
read y. After submitting a statement to the faculty of " what he has accom­
plished and what he knows," the student was required-if the faculty ac­
cepted his statement-to take a set of oral and written exams set by pro­
fessors from other colleges. These "outside examiners" came personally ·to
Black Mountain to conduct the exams, and their verdict was the principal
criterion of the student's fitness to graduate. One of the first graduates had
to take written exams lasting twenty-one hours and orals that lasted a
whole day-conducted by his outside examiner before anyone from the
college who wished to attend, a shifting audience which stayed at about a
dozen throughout the day. 61
From the time of his arrival at the college, each student chose a faculty
adviser, and the two together tailored a program to fit the student's needs.
This could prove an embarrassment to both, for many students, at least in­
itially, were stunned at the novel idea of pursuing their own rather than
somebody else's interests, and the adviser, aware of Black Mountain's
small staff and limited facilities, was often hard pressed to find the re­
sources needed to implement a program. The library in the early years
consisted almost entirely of the pooled collections of students and faculty
and there was a woeful lack of personnel and equipment in the sciences.
The college's first catalog tried to put the best possible face on the meager
scientific equipment by announcing its belief that "something is gained
that is usually lost where the latest and most expensive apparatus is pro­
vided " - though gains and losses were alike unspecified. 62
One student., Doughton Cramer, recalled years later the first meeting
with his adviser, John Andrew Rice, as a rather nerve-racking-though
ultimately "educational"-experience. On a lovely, warm fall morning he
and Rice sat in green rocking chairs on the porch of Lee Hall, Rice bask­
ing in ' the sun and the beauty of the view, Cramer, nervously wondering
what was expected of him. Rice's opening remark startled him : "You are
now entering college for the first time. You have a whole new world before
you . What are you interested in studying?" Cramer didn 't know what to
answer : " Interest had never decided my choice," he later recalled , "but I
remembered that I had enjoyed history in school so I stuttered out, 'W­
well , history is sort of fun ' ."
"What phase of history do you like?" Rice asked.
Cramer was again at a loss; he'd never given the matter much thought
before. Suddenly he had an inspiration : the Depression then at its height
had considerably affected his own life, so he answered , "I want to know
what caused the Depression and how future depressions can be prevented. "
Rice laughed-perhaps because it pleased him to see again how easy it
was to start the process of self-propulsion in education, but perhaps, too ,
A BEGINNING 51
out of amusement at the contrast between the grand designs of the young
and the limited resources of the community; " You've given the college a
large order!" was all he said.
After some discussion, they decided Cramer should take Lounsbury 's
course on American history and study economics with Helen Boyden,
whose Vassar and Radcliffe training had also included history and art.
Following Lounsbury's death, Boyden suggested to Cramer that he replace
the American history course with one in Greek history with her. He
agreed , Rice joined them for discussions on Greek cultural life, and Cra­
mer never forgot " the excitement and nervous stimulation when we sat
abo.ut and discussed , with great seriousness, the meaning of Justice, the
Good , Tolerance, Moderation. . . . Mr. Rice acted as Socrates and at­
tempted to catch us up when we made unfounded assumptions. For the
first time in my life, I began to realize how sloppily words were used."
Every Sunday evening, they read a Greek play aloud, discussed its signifi­
cance for the Greeks and for the modern world, and had refreshments­
"so the evenings were totally satisfying, providing food for the body as
well as for the mind." 63
Classes at Black Mountain were always small. In his English composi­
tion class with. Joe Martin (in which he turned in three papers a week and
also did considerable reading), Cramer was the only student, and never,
during his four years, did he have a class with more than seven others in it.
Every teacher had complete freedom in choosing his classroom methods.
Occasionally someone would lecture, but the overwhelming preference
was for small discussion groups. There was greater formality in classes
during Black Mountain 's first year than at any period thereafter-it took
time to slip out of old moorings, even when the wish to do so was strong.
There was also greater adherence in the beginning to a prescribed schedule:
classes met between eight-thirty and twelve-thirty (usually for an
hour) in the morning and again between four and six in the afternoon.
The period from lunch time until four was deliberately kept free so that
people could get out of doors. Some would take part in the work program,
cutting wood, . digging on the farm , helping to improve the college road.
There was no organized sports program, but tennis courts were available,
there was an outdoor pool, a small lake on the college. property, a fairly
well-equipped gym with handball and basketball courts, horses for rent in
the village, and everywhere mountain trails for hikes and walks. At about
three-thirty every day, most of the community would gather ill the huge
Lee Hall lobby for tea and talk before resuming classes. An invention of
the second or third year was the "interlude"-a periodic announcement,
without advance warning, that all classes would cease for a week so that
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everyone could have a chance to try something they had had to defer be­
cause of lack of time-whether reading Shaw, attempting to write poetry
or sitting in the sun. 64
One experiment inaugurated the first year was interdisciplinary semi­
nars, each involving four instructors, all of whom attended every session.
The intention was "to let students see the way in which an idea, a move­
ment, a period in history, an art form, appear to a group of specialists,
and also to get the student away from the habit of trying to please the
teacher." There were three such seminars the first year, all meeting at eight
in the evening "in order to have plenty of time to follow an idea. " The
first was entitled "Philosophies of Social Reconstruction," which dealt
principally with contemporary philosophy, the second, "Creative Writing"
and the third, "The Eighteenth Century." 65
All three seminars attracted large numbers and produced lively discus­
sion that often lasted until late at night. At each session of the " Creative
Writing" seminar volunteers would be called for (from faculty or students)
to read from their work, instead of formal assignments being made. There
was no lack of volunteers, nor any need to stimulate discussion after a read­
ing; on one night, the argument over a particular story lasted until after
midnight-and then broke out again the next morning at breakfast. 66
In "The Eighteenth Century" seminar, the members decided to perform
Con greve's The Way of The World in order to put themselves more fully
in touch with the ethos of the period. A stage was constructed by curtain­
ing off some of the space in the dining hall, and rehearsals began in Octo­
ber. By Christmas, Rice, who like everyone else in the seminar had agreed
to take a role, still didn 't know his lines-indeed was "adamant and pro­
voking" in refusing to learn them. But since it was obvious that Peggy
Loram, the drama (and English) teacher, "could not survive coaching it
much longer," the piece was " given a few final licks, prayers were said for
Rice's memory, and the play was performed before the half of the College
that wasn 't in it" (Rice carrying a prompt script rolled up like toilet
paper.) Everyone pronounced it a huge success and after the curtain, there
was an uproarious party to celebrate. 67
The community took special pleasure in the Congreve production be­
cause it seemed to exemplify two of Black Mountain's convictions: that the
usual differentiation between "curricular" and "extracurricular" activity
was false, and, still more important, that music, art and drama "should no
longer have a precarious existence on the fringes of the curriculum but
. . . should be at the very center of things." Every student was strongly
urged to take course work in the arts, music, drama, drawing, color. The .
insistence that art be at the center of the curriculum was a decided innova-
A BEGINNING 53
tion in American education, for in most schools art was either viewed as
high culture to be officially dispensed, or as fun and games, to be officially
ignored .
In stressing art, Rice wanted to encourage the student (a la John Dewey)
"to put the same faith in doing that he has been taught to have in absorb­
ing"-but by "doing" Rice didn't mean some vulgar equation between
art and "self-expression." He detested those whose "private stomach ache
becomes the tragedy of the world," who professed literature or music or
art as their "life, " but-as he said to me-forgot to put life into it: "There
is no such thing as a system of life, for life, without the quotes, is a process,
a way, a method . It is not an experiment." 69
Many who called themselves "artists" had, in Rice's view, withdrawn
from life, not embraced it. They were in love with themselves , and "loved
only what they themselves did." They were engaged, though they little
knew it, not with art , but with "self-defense" and " a plea for pity"-in
other words, ev~rything that is usually meant when identifying art with
neurosis. In the process of working with paints, sounds and words, Rice
thought the student might well express something of his inner being, but in
his view, the far more important educative aspects of the "art-experience"
lay elsewhere---;-in the discovery of "integrity." 70
When Rice stated his views on the "art-experience" abstractly-as
when he wrote, in the first Black Mountain catalog, that the student, "by
being sensitized to movement, form, sound and the other media of the arts,
gets a firmer control of himself and his environment than is possible
through purely intellectual effort" -they came out sounding derivative,
vague, romantic. But when he talked concretely of the "art-experience" (as
he does in his autobiography), his meaning becomes somewhat clearer and
more persuasive. He was not chiefly interested in producing painters, musi­
cians, poets, but in making democrats, people capable of choosing what it
was they proposed to believe in, what was going to be their world. The
"wonderful people, " he said to me are those who " will not take in what
does not belong there, to them, in their view of the kind of world they ap­
prove of. They're also the most dreadful people, some of them. One of the
greatest artists was Joe McCarthy: he was the most marvelous chooser of
evil." 71
Rice felt the arts essential in developing individuals capable of choos­
ing, because " they are, when properly employed, least subject to direction
from without and yet have within them a severe discipline of their own."
They taught , in other words, that the worthwhile struggle was the interior
one-not against one's fellows, but against one's "own ignorance and
clumsiness." The integrity an artist learns when dealing with materials,
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translates into an integrity of relationship with oneself and with other men;
"just as the artist would not paint his picture with muddy colors, so this
artist would see clear colors in humanity ; and must himself be clear color,
for he too was his fellow artist's color, sound, form, the material of his
art." The kind of artist Rice wished to produce would not be "used up in
the use; rather, made more of what he would be, a note within the sym­
phony, the clearer for having been written; giving up, and asked to give up,
nothing of himself. That was the integrity of the artist as artist. That should
be the integrity of man as man." 72
Rice's views needed more clarifying than he ever gave them, for they
were vulnerable to a variety of challenges : Do art and life translate so
readily? What if one preferred "muddy colors," valued-in art and men
-qualities of irregularity and variability quite different from the "clear
color" that Rice, oriented toward classical virtues, himself preferred? What
if the "art-experience," the attempt to establish a relationship of integrity
with one's materials proved, for various reasons, to be beyond the capacity
of certain individuals? Would that mean they were somehow "inferior,"
unable to "get right" with themselves and the world? And if so, how
would or should the community treat them? With disdain? With compas­
sion? With exile? Would the new set of standards and aspirations breed a
new snobbery rather than a new equality, a more subtle and therefore per­
haps more destructive set of discriminations?
Neither Rice, nor anyone else at Black Mountain, was particularly
aware of the ambiguities in his theories; nor of the dubious merit of at­
tempting to prescribe-even in so permissive, benign a way-for the var­
ied needs and capacities of forty or so quite different people. Not that
theory mattered much to Rice-which is why his occasional insistence on
expounding it seems (to me) incongruent, artificial. I sometimes feel, in
reading Rice's "statements" that he's needlessly elaborating formulas to
justify a college whose founding and procedures chiefly depended on ran­
dom impulses about how a good life might come into being, and on some
complex personal needs-like Rice's own fierce determination not be ham­
strung in acting out his impulsive, contradictory nature.
CHAPTER 3
ANNI
AND JOSEF
ALBERS
"Don't ask me how or why I know it," Rice would say to everyone, "but I
know it: if I can't get the right man for art, then the thing won't work."
Some of those he talked to thought Rice meant he wanted to establish an
art school. "God, no!" he'd thunder, "that's the last thing I want. They're
the most awfut places in the world! " Candidates for resident artist would
be recommended to Rice, but they never seemed to know, he claimed ,
what he had in mind; they were tied to conventional attitudes about teach­
ing art-certain techniques were right or wrong because Leonardo either
did or didn't use them.l
Finally someone suggested that Rice go talk to Edward M. M. Warburg
at the Museum of Modern Art. He and Philip C. Johnson, curator for archi­
tecture and industrial design at the museum, listened to Rice explain how
he wanted to put art at the center of the curriculum. The three men talked
for fifteen minutes or so, then Johnson said he thought he had just the man
Rice needed: Josef Albers. " But he does have one defect," Johnson added.
"Gh God," Rice thought to himself. "Here it comes-he's blind or he's got
a cleft palate."
"What defect?" Rice asked nervously.
"Albers doesn't speak a word of English."
Rice didn't miss a beat : "I don't think that's a defect. What's the matter
with not speaking English? Several people at Black Mountain speak Ger­
man and besides, we can always put interpreters in his class." Johnson, as
Rice later remembered it, was so astonished he nearly fell out of his
chair. 2
Johnson had first met Anni and Josef Albers several years earlier at the
Bauhaus in Berlin. He had seen them again in Germany only six weeks be­
ss SMT D13
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56 BLACK MOUNTAIN
fore Rice appeared at the museum and shortly after the Nazis had come to
power. Since Anni Albers was Jewish and since the faculty at the Bauhaus
had decided to close its doors rather than bow to the Nazi demand that
members of the party be accepted on the faculty , Johnson had suggested to
the Alberses that they come to the United States. They had been more
than willing, but the problem was to find them work . Neither had the
reputations (respectively, in painting and weaving) they later achieved and
Josef Albers's inability to speak English had closed off the few prospects
Johnson had thus far been able to unearth. 3
But Rice, on the spot, gave Johnson carte blanche to hire the Alberses
-and immediately. He made the decision not because he knew anything
of them or because Black Mountain was so desperate that he had to pick
names out of the hat. Rather, it was the way Johnson had looked when he
talked about Albers-and the way Rice felt while listening. "If you ever
meet anybody who has seen a great teacher in action," Rice explained
years later, " something happens as soon as you mention his name. Some­
thing happens to the person that's talking to the person who's talking
about him. You see a vision." It was one of his shrewdest intuitions, perhaps
the key decision in Black Mountain's early years.4
The Alberses, for their part, were mystified when a telegram arrived in­
viting them to join the Black Mountain staff in "North Carolina" -they
had no idea what or where " North Carolina" was. One of Albers's Ameri­
can students in Berlin described it as "beautiful country, very southern and
very mountainous," and advised them to go. Albers, always scrupulous,
first felt compelled to wire Black Mountain the confession, "I do not speak
one word English." An answer came by return telegram: "Come any­
way." Then followed a long letter in German from Ted Dreier describing
the school , including a reference to its being " a pioneer adventure." The
Alberses had long been part of an experimental enterprise at the Bauhaus;
the word "pioneering, " helped them to decide "This is our place." Thanks
to the devoted work of Edward Warburg and his commission to rescue Ger­
man artists, the Alberses were ushered past a long line of waiting people at
the American Consulate and granted nonquota visas. 5
They arrived at Black Mountain a few days before Thanksgiving, 1933·
Rice met them at the station . He felt "a little leery" about Anni from the
first. Over time they came to admire certain talents and qualities in each
other, but the relationship never became cordial. Rice thought her over­
zealous in protecting her husband's " prerogatives" -and therefore end­
lessly suspicious of him as the person most bent on diminishing them . She,
in turn, viewed Rice as " erratic" and "subjective," a braggart, noisy and
self-indulgent. 6
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 57
Rice's first impression of Josef Albers, on the other hand, was
enthusiastic-more unreservedly so than would later be the case. "Every
now and then you meet a gracious German," Rice told me, recalling that
first meeting, "and by God, it's wonderful!" Rice's German wasn't very
good, and Albers, despite a crash course during his last three weeks in
Berlin still knew almost no English. But Anni Albers, wh'o had been
taught English as a child by her governess, helped to mediate, and the
three had a drink together, walked and looked at flowers . After a half hour,
Rice was satisfied; "I knew, " as he put it. 7
As they drove up to the college, the Alberses met a warm reception.
For several weeks Emmy Zastrow had been presiding over a German
table, and the students had practiced short phrases of welcome-which
they promptly forgot as the Alberses came up the steps to Lee Hall.
Black Mountain, North Carolina, as Anni Albers later recalled, in their
minds "just as well could be the Philippines." She could hardly believe her
eyes when, looking up at the huge Doric columns that framed the Lee Hall
porch, she saw a photograph pinned to one of them with a thumbtack ;
someone finally explained that the columns were made of wood.8
The warmth of the reception and the natural beauty of the site immedi­
ately appealed to them. Albers was delighted at the view and at the pros­
pect of a healthy climate-"better than in most places of America," he
told me years later, "because first it ison the mountains, that means in the
summer cool, and in the winter it means warm. " Ted Dreier confirmed that
they'd sleep under blankets all year round-"a nice assurance," to Albers,
"that we would live there comfortably." 9
They were each given a bedroom and a bathroom in the side wing of
Lee Hall-the faculty wing-and each a studio in the main part of the
building. They were pleased that there was a separate faculty wing. Having
spent a dozen years at the Bauhaus, they were familiar with social experi­
mentation, and believed in the necessity of privacy and of keeping the cate­
gories of teacher and student distinct. In a community struggling for defini­
tion, willing to dispense with rigor in order to forestall rigidity, tempted to
merge enthusiasms rather than clarify doubts, the Alberses brought special
-and controversial-qualities: certitude and discipline, mastery of craft,
well-defined personal styles and an insistence on never being idle.
Albers began to teach immediately, but Anni did not. She found a few
willing students, but no equipment and a local tradition of patterned weav­
ing dating from the colonial period that simply reproduced set patterns
from the past. Anni preferred a more experimental and individual ap-
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proach; she made a firm distinction between weavings meant to be " serv­
ing objects" -functional, useful-and pictorial weavings (her own " great
concern"), weavings that met "no other end than their own orchestration,
not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at. . . ." An additional
handicap was her own need to learn a new technical vocabulary; although
her English was serviceable for routine purposes, she lacked knowledge of
the special terminology of her profession-even to the names of looms.
And so she had to build the understanding and equipment needed to im­
plement her own approach to weaving. (Frederick Georgia, fortunately,
was a master carpenter and able to make several foot-looms for her.) 10
In the first few months, moreover, Mrs. Albers had to continually divert
her energy to serve as translator for her husband . He turned to her for the
meaning or pronunciation of almost every word, and since she was some­
times baffled herself by the irregularity of American usage, the process
often exhausted her. The language struggle had its amusing side-as when
Albers , hopeful that English could be reduced to the logic of German, de­
cided that "future" had to mean the opposite of "pasture." 11
On his first day at Black Mountain a woman asked Albers how old he
was. " Forty-five," he answered. "Then you will never learn English," she
announced, "it's too late." Rice was furious when he heard of the ex­
change; he told the woman she had ruined Albers 's interest in the lan­
guage. But Albers , thirty years later, was convinced the woman had been
right; it had been too late to learn "another flexibility of the mouth," as he
put it. Eventually he did master the art terms needed for teaching, but he
never managed fluency in conversational English. Part of the trouble, he
thought, was his dislike of reading newspapers, always a convenient, suc­
cinct introduction to daily usage. Another part, in Albers's words, was that
he "was still in worse habit-not to listen to others speak if it is not ad­
dressed to me . . . I do not like to listen when people talk .. .." 12
Rice decided that a few students should sit with Albers and help him
learn the language. Two of them suggested reading Lewis Carroll; "they
started with me ' Mary in Wonderland, ' " is how Albers later described it.
Hearing the choice of text, Rice objected; it's like learning medieval En­
glish, he said; something more contemporary was needed . So John Evarts,
who spoke German, was substituted for the students, and items like music
reviews and the New Yorker magazine replaced Lewis Carroll. Albers, not
surprisingly, found the vocabulary of New York at least as impenetrable
as "Mary's" magical whimsy. (As Evarts wrote in his journal, Albers "gets
very mad at the English language. . . . so disorderly . . . . so illogical.
'Ja, es macht mich wirklich wild-manchmal-' that's why I am so slow
to learn .") 13
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 59
Hoping to at least alleviate the strain on Albers in class, Rice enlisted
Evarts and Mrs. Zastrow to attend as translators. The results were again
poor. The Alberses distrusted Mrs. Zastrow. Her son was ::l government
official in Germany and they decided she was sympathetic to the Nazis
when they continued to find newspaper clippings favorably disposed to
the German government lying around the Lee Hall lobby. (Once, Mrs.
Albers told me, she got so indignant over a clipping that she wanted to
throw it into the fireplace, but her husband told her she had no right to,
since the paper wasn't her property; he came up with his own solution by
tucking the clipping into the advertising section of The New York Times,
which was automatically thrown away .) 14
In class, Mrs. Zastrow and Evarts sometimes openly disagreed about the
meaning of Albers's sentences-their disagreements further heightened
when Rice, who also attended, would throw in his own version of what Al­
bers was attempting to convey. (Still, Albers thought Rice's attendance was
" a very healthy gesture . . . we often said 'Rice is not a good example, he
preached what he didn't do himself,' " but in this case he acted on his dec­
laration that art should be the center.) After a few weeks of contending
translations, a delegation of students went to Rice and told him that the
process was interfering with communication instead of facilitating it. Al­
bers agreed. "I had to be careful," he once shrewdly remarked, "not to
learn English too well because it would have interfered with my communi­
cation." He knew he could make his points visually, with a minimum of
words, for on his very first day at Black Mountain, during the reception
ceremony, he had managed to say, "I want to open eyes." And that, in­
deed, was the heart of his message. 15
Albers "gave you a pair of eyes-you saw things. . . . I've never for­
gotten him . . . . hardly a day passes but my eyes say 'Albers' "-that's
how John Rice, more than thirty years later, recalled his experience in Al­
bers's class. Albers would have liked the description; it fit closely with
how he viewed his purpose. As a teacher he wanted "to direct eyes in
observation-know what you are seeing and know why you are seeillg
this, and how to lubricate your fingers and hands and arms to visualize it
on paper or the blackboard or whatever you have in your hand."
Albers, like Rice, did not believe his main function should be to turn
out professional artists ("an big artist," as he called them). That was up to
the individual, Albers felt; if someone thought he was at an advanced
enough level to " express himself" then he should go and do so-though
Albers always warned that " self-expression is more than self-disclosure;
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creation goes further than expression." He warned, too, that art has con­
scious as well as unconscious sources- " intellectual order as well as intui­
tive or instinctive order." Albers-again, like Rice-distrusted those who
regarded themselves as founts of feeling readily available for emotive ex­
pression. Such people, in his view, overvalued their individuality even
while minimizing the "training of consciousness" which he considered an
essential ingredient of art. For those afraid of training, afraid, as Albers
put it, "of the understandable in art, I must say that clear thinking­
necessary in all human endeavor-will not and cannot interfere with genu­
ine feeling. But it does interfere with prejudices, too often misinterpreted
as feelings." 17
To the extent that "consciousness" had to be trained, the creative pro­
cess could be taught: one could be taught to see and to use tools in such a
way as to allow the clear articulation of what was seen. But for Albers the
creative process remained basically a mystery. There were no rules for
producing art, he believed, nor any objective interpretations for evaluating
it. Though not averse himself to attempting verbal and written formula­
tions of what he took to be the art process, Albers deeply distrusted such
efforts by others; art, he believed, "is concerned with something that can­
not be explained by words or literal description . . . art is revelation in­
stead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of
imitation or repetition. . . . Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT ;
not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content.
The performance-how it is done-that is the content of art." 18
Yet at the same time, Albers felt that "creativeness is the lucky readi­
ness to feel, to sense, to see an opportunity-to discover and to invent,"
and students could be brought to "readiness," to the kind of sensitivity that
might allow them "not to miss the chance of finding and presenting a new
idea, a new seeing." Albers believed, moreover, that even the least tal­
ented could be trained to see. "We are content," he once wrote, "if our
studies of form achieve an understanding vision, clear conceptions, and a ~
productive will." 19
One of the great tributes to Albers as teacher is that he was able to en­
courage sight and articulation in those who considered themselves un­
gifted. He himself is less sure than most as to who is or isn't gifted; "talent
cannot be measured very soon," he has said, " you have to know the people
for a long time to make a statement." He also believes that "everyone has
artistic tendencies, if not abilities, and everyone-at least to a certain
extent-everyone enjoys or appreciates form qualities, such as: color,
shape, space, movement, rhythm proportion." One student who has since
become a professional craftsman recalls that "I didn't feel I had very much
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 61
artistic capability. Somehow in his classes, through his encouragement, I
came to feel that I had an eye for color, an eye for form and texture."
And John Rice, in trying to explain why he thought Albers was an "amaz­
ing" teacher, cited to me the case of a faculty wife totally under the domi­
nation of her husband; "she was beaten down . .. she came into Albers's
class very timidly, and you should have seen what it did. She just blos­
somed. . . . With a pencil and a paper, she was growing. And as soon as
her husband found out about it, he said, 'No more art.' " 20
At the Bauhaus, Albers had been primarily concerned with turning out
professional artists who in turn would revolutionize (that is, redesign) so­
ciety . " I think we never had used the word 'education' once," Albers told
me; "we spoke about influencing the industry. " At Black Mountain, the
focus was less on shaping civic forms than individual human beings, and the
shift of emphasis modified Albers' own approach accordingly. He came to
feel at Black Mountain "much more personally obliged for the creatures
under my hands" than he had at the Bauhaus, and insists that his specific
classroom techniques (as well as his general ideas about education) under­
went considerable development. Had they not, he says, "that would be some­
what a condemnation-if an actor is not growing better with more acting,
you see." (He likes the analogy between teaching and acting: both "depend
on listeners.") Priding himself on his ability continually to change and
adapt, Albers assents to his wife's flat statement that "he didn't transport
German experiences into American."
Yet he wasn't immediately concerned with putting art at the center of
education at Black Mountain. As Anni Albers told me (implicitly dismiss­
ing Rice's claim to having originated the notion), "you even couldn't put it
down as an aim because that concept didn't exist yet. That grew." Or, in
Albers's words, "the result was not the program . . . you see a root, you
have a vague conception, and it develops as you work on it." Albers ac­
knowledged that Rice had earlier articulated the view that art should be the
chief vehicle for individual growth, but he hadn't seen, Albers told me,
"any details as I tried to formulate them in regard to observation and artic­
ulation." In any case, Albers himself moved slowly in working out those
details. The lack of pat formulas "makes a place interesting," he told me
years later, "every day was a new revelation . . . 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 yourself. The feeling of grow­
ing. 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. . . I have made a sport of growing myself. That was big sport,
and therefore helped me with the sport to make others grow." 22
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But if, as Albers believed, his involvement with "educating the whole
student" developed more out of his actual experience at Black Mountain
than out of any theory he brought with him, he was hardly innocent of
ideas when he arrived there. As George Heard Hamilton has written, "The
members of the Bauhaus and of de Stijl shared the conviction that a truly
modern art must embrace all aspects of contemporary living and penetrate
it with a new sense of cleanliness and order based upon the proper subordi­
nation of material to function and of function to communication." Along
with the belief that art put one in touch with every field of endeavor ("Art
reaches from the plaza to the church."), Albers also felt "you can build the
general character through art-you can incite interest in science, in knowl­
edge of any kind . . . any exploring and discipline and so on, can all be
developed within art." In short, Albers had never conceived of art as an in­
cidental endeavor on the periphery of life, but rather as a process of sensi­
tization and insight applicable to every facet of life, one that integrated all
fields of learning. The Bauhaus had been far more concerned with rethink­
ing the relationship between art and design, and design and use, than Black
Mountain was, but central to both was a concern with the relationship be­
tween art and life. 23
On the question of whether Black Mountain helped Albers develop
certain aspects of his own talents, personality or perspective, he, sensibly,
refuses to comment. He calls that kind of speculation "a materialistic ques­
tion about spiritual development" -the question "comes from another
climate than the problem." The most he will say is that Black Mountain,
like the Bauhaus, represented a "creative vacuum-freedom . . . you
could build up your own courses without any kind of pressure or inter­
ference from the outside." And he preferred Black Mountain students­
or, more generally, American students to European; "they are very curi­
ous-though it's very hard to keep their curiosity for long." Yet the open
climate at Black Mountain presented, in his view, opportunities, not neces­
sities. And opportunities have to be chosen. 24
In talking with me about education, Albers insistently underplayed
classroom methodology, reliance on set techniques; "Teaching is never a
matter of methods," he said, "it's a matter of art." Though he believes in
"systematic· treatment and systematic learning" and has always been
known, both in and out of class, for austerity and rigor, Albers prefers to
emphasize that "in the end it is the heart, the inner participation in some­
body else" that accounts for success or failure in the classroom. His
"whole secret," he told me, "is that I never start with books in my teach­
ing. I do not read books before I go to class. I close my eyes and think it
over. Whom do I tickle most today, or whom shouldn't I tickle today?"
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 63
The painter, Sewell Sillman, who studied with Albers at Black Mountain
and later assisted him at Yale, has said that one of the many things he
learned about teaching from Albers is that "you don't have to prepare, so
much as you have to be in a state of awareness. . . you walk in and you
relate." (And occasionally, he also learned from Albers, you walk out­
"you have to be able almost to see and say with a glance that this is not
worth talking about. ") 25
Albers's need to devalue (at least retrospectively) studied preparation
and formal content may reflect a form of rebellion against the orderliness
of his own personality. But it reflects, too, his deep distrust of anything he
hasn't directly experienced. Hostile to verbalizers and intellectuals, to
those who put theory above fact, Albers has always denounced art schools
and art history-they prefer "re-search to search," and spawn all those
"funny diseases," like Picassobia," "Matisse-itis" and "Klee-tomania."
"Retrospection means reproduction," Albers once said-the imitation of
someone else's_ voice or style. Which is not to say that knowledge of the
past is, in his view, useless; "the past has led us to the present. Whether
the past will be a help to us or a hindrance, depends upon how we respect
the present." 26
And that, in turn, hinges on respecting ourselves. "My greatest warning
to my students," Albers says, "is always 'Please keep away from the band­
wagon, from what is fashion and seems now successful or profitable. Stick
to your own bones, speak with your own voice, and sit on your own be­
hind.' How can we say that in ethical terms, or in moral terms? 'Be honest
and modest!' These are the greatest virtues of an artist." Alexander Eliot,
the art critic who spent two years as a student at Black Mountain, be­
lieves that the most important lesson he learned from Albers was "care of
the soul. . . . He helped me personally gain a certain freedom from 'opin­
ion' together with reverence for the unnameable." But the lesson, Eliot
added, had to be learned implicitly from what Albers was, more than ex­
plicitly from what Albers said; the "overt part" of Albers's teaching-and
"he did impart much that was overt"-Eliot (and others) thought
" 'Bauhaus' and doctrinaire." 27
Yet the pattern could be reversed: Albers could explicitly encourage
traits not usually evident in his own person. Controlled and purposeful in
many aspects of his life, he could nonetheless defend the importance of
passion and spontaneity. Anni Albers, too-generally thought still less
warm than her husband in personal contacts-in theory insisted at least as
strongly as he on the primacy of emotion: "We investigate and worry and
analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not
through a defined deficiency." The writer Jose Yglesias remembers Albers
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hugging him in class to congratulate him for having "real feelings'" Nor
was this a self-conscious pose to bring behavior in line with theory; Albers
was a deeply sensual man even if he expressed that side of himself more in
his art than his life, and even if its absence in his life sometimes led him
to an exaggerated paean to " primitivism" that could border on the senti­
mental. 28
Because of such contrasts, Albers has seemed to many a man basically
at odds with himself : passionate and controlled, insisting on the impor­
tance of enthusiasm and order. " A disciplined romantic" is one student's
phrase for Albers, and the description has force. Albers might be con­
sidered a "romantic" -as the term is usually applied-in the sense that he
believes deeply in the significance of the individual and the primacy of the
emotional life. Yet he can well be thought of as a "cla~sicist ," too, because
the kind of individual he most admires tends to be the balanced, propor­
tionate man-and this despite the fact that in his own work Albers is so
centrally concerned with demonstrating to us the illusive nature of symme­
try, the a-symmetrical reality that lies behind all seeming equilibrium. 29
Though Albers prefers to stress the unpredictable elements in his teach­
ing ("With the change of my victims, I changed my treatment."), he ac­
knowledges that the basic drawing course he offered at Black Mountain
was closely patterned on the preliminary (Basic Design) course he had ear­
lier taught at the Bauhaus-though at Black Mountain the exercises were
applied to broader educational goals and in some ways (especially regard­
ing theories on color) considerably elaborated . At both the Bauhaus and at
Black Mountain, Albers tried to make his students see that the life of an
object involved its inner qualities, its external appearance and, finally, its
relationship to other objects. 30
At the Bauhaus Albers built on the famed Vorkurs (or preliminary
course) of his fellow faculty member, Johannes Itten, but he purged it of
Itten's cultist, mystical overtones, and developed his own exercises to famil­
iarize students with the three interrelated aspects of materials. These he
continued to use at Black Mountain. First he gave his students direct con­
tact with material-wood or string, wire, paper, stone. To get them to
handle the material thoroughly, he initially forbade the use of tools. "Our
fingers are our tools, " he would say, and he would deliberately choose un­
usual materials whose properties were not widely known or had not been
systematically applied-straw, corrugated cardboard, newspaper-in
order to discourage students from imitation and repetition .31
Among the exercises Albers used to help familiarize the student with
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS
65
both his material and his own fingers, was "paper-folding. " In the "outside
world," Albers would explain, paper was generally glued and used as a flat
sheet. "In that process, one side of the paper often loses its expressiveness.
The edge is hardly ever used. " So instead of pasting, Albers encouraged
his students to put paper together "by sewing, buttoning, riveting, taping,
and pinning it; in other words, we fasten it in a multitude of ways . We will
test the possibilities of its tensile and compression-resistant strength. " Both
sides of the paper were used, and not simply laid flat but constructed in
"upright, folded, or sculptured" ways as well. 32
The paper, moreover, was never destroyed or supplanted. In that sense,
one never had an "advanced" course with Albers-moving, say, from
Basic Design (Werklehre) to Advanced Design, or from paper to wood to
plastic. The advance was from paper to more paper, the challenge focused
on how to give new language to familiar material, each time aiming at
greater intricacy. And when the exercise was over, back to the beginning;
after the paper had been worked and reworked, it was smoothed out and
returned to its original form as a flat sheet. "That was one of the wonder­
ful things about Albers's class," Ruth Asawa, one of his students, has said,
"you never destroyed anything." 3 3
Albers believed that learning was facilitated when students continually
compared their different solutions for identical tasks-and also when each
student compared his own work from earlier and later periods ("Is the lat­
ter more or less? In what way is it more? In what way is it less than my
former work ?") All education, Albers believed, is self-education, but self­
education best proceeds through comparison. "We must teach each other,"
he continually said-and included himself: "students and I, we want to
learn together. . . for me education is not first giving answers, but giving
questions. And if a student comes to me with a question , I consider it very
carefully whether I should answer him or not. When I give him the answer
to an execution, then I take away from him the opportunity to invent it
himself and discover it himself. I say, 'Boy, I know I could answer you,
but I prefer for your own profit not to tell you .' " 34
And so Albers would make everyone talk about his own products-and
about other people's. Classroom time was not spent in turning out work ,
but in discussing work that students had done during the week on their
own . (Albers would periodically drop in on them; once he refused to go
into Ruth Asawa's study because it was so messy; he told her to send a
messenger when her room was cleaned up.) The classes themselves met for
three hours, twice a week, and students were admitted only if they brought
with them some work they had done in the interval between classes. Al­
bers would spread all the work out on the floor and then each student
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would have to justify the particular solution he had found to the common
assignment. Each was questioned, attacked or praised by fellow students as
well as by Albers-though as one said, " he saw so much more." 35
Albers didn't move around much when he taught. His physical stillness,
in combination with his physical appearance-starched linen smock, rim­
less glasses, a masklike, expressionless face and a metallic voice-at first
suggested a rather phlegmatic personality. But Albers's restless eyes and
the pervasive intensity of his manner, soon revealed the man's enormous
energy. ("I loved to teach. I did it with passion. I like to take care of young­
sters.") He was always eager to see the work that had been done since the
last class, and as he looked it over, or sketched on the blackboard, he might
wave his arms in the air, galvanizing everyone, challenging them to match
his enthusiasm. 36
Albers would be particularly severe if he thought a student was faking a
line or had been blind to the object he was supposedly drawing; you must
see "the jug with a so round tummy," he'd say, you must see "the tick­
ling life of a rose." Sometimes he would take an offending work up to the
front of the room and with a long stick, point up its deficiencies (if he for­
got to bring a stick, he'd ask somebody to go outside and break off a
branch) . " Only draw what you see," he'd say, "and train the pencil to do
what your eye sees. Don't worry about 'self-expression.' That will take
care of itself. Style will follow. What I want to find out now is if your
hand is capable of following your eye. If you can draw ." Ruth Asawa ,
who is Japanese, thought the drawing class was "very much like calligra­
phy" ; sometimes the exercise would simply consist of drawing page after
page of lines, freehand straight lines, in order to train the hand to be steady.
Since this had little-in an immediate sense- to do with "self-expression,"
some students (and especially the professional-minded or those who had
had some prior work at art school) would become frustrated and irrita­
ble.3 7
But Albers would persist. Developing freedbm in the fingers, arms and
muscles was essential, he felt , for gaining rapport with the object to be
drawn. " Come in swing!" he would repeat, in his shorthand English, " You
must try to come in swing! " His aim was to develop a synchronized rhythm
between the movement of the arm and the material. Only familiarity with
the nature of the material , in combination with a trained ability to make
the pencil do one's bidding, could produce drawing that " truly" (as opposed
to photographically) represented the object. 3 8
One student entered Albers's drawing class expecting little difficulty
considered himself a reasonable draftsman for his age and during the
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 67
first weeks of class decided that his drawings were obviously superior­
more "developed and responsible" -than those done by his amateur fel­
low students. But under Albers's sharp eye, the smugness vanished. All the
student had learned earlier, Albers told him, was how to make an accurate
replica of something ; he was a "victim of copying," of producing a lifeless,
unfeeling photographic line. 39
To correct that kind of academicism, Albers u'sed a variety of demon­
strations. One was to put a plain, wooden chair in front of the room and to
follow the chair's curves with his hands. Note, he would say, how some of
the lines curve rapidly-but not all; to appreciate other lines in the chair,
one had to slow one's hand in order to feel their rhythm. Then Albers
might sit in the chair-to demonstrate that you could. Or, he might simply
stand back and look at it, often making some new discovery himself about
its shape; at least once, a discovery excited him so much that he danced a
little jig. And so, as one student has put it, finally the chair "would really
come alive and would be something that was really solid and was really
round." Those insights came because Albers believed in that chair, in its
particular properties. He made his students see that no chair is an abstrac­
tion, and so should never be treated as one-just as no individual, he
would say, ever should. He had enormous contempt for the categorizers,
for those who dismiss the special qualities of an object (or a person) by
saying, "Oh well , that's only a chair." To categorize anything was to take
it for granted, to forget its unique properties-in other words, to ignore its
reality, its life. "We must characterize, not define," he would say .40
Another cardinal point with Albers was "thrift" -the most economical
possible use of labor and materials in order to achieve a desired effect.
Both the Alberses applied their principles across the board; they admired
"lean-ness" in people no less than in art objects. As Anni Albers once
wrote, "Very few of us can own things without being corrupted by them ,
without having pride involved in possessing them, gaining thereby a false
security . Very few of us can resist being distracted by things. We need to
learn to choose the simple and lasting instead of the new and individual
. . . . This means reducing instead of adding, the reversal of our habitual
thinking." 41
To achieve economy, Albers said, one needed discipline-or, to be
more precise, "disciplined freedom." His own teaching techniques, though
varied , implicitly demonstrated how to be "strikingly simple and right."
Explicitly, he would make that point by introducing students to the study
of the relationships between materials. "Adding two elements," Albers
believed, "must result in more than just the sum of those elements; the result
also yielded at least one relationship. The more these elements strengthen
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each other, the more valuable the result, the more effective the project." 42
One exercise Albers used to introduce that concept was "figure-ground"
-the checkerboard pattern being an example. Is it white on black, or
black on white, he would ask? Which is the "figure" and which the
"ground"? Clearly the checkerboard could be read either way: the figure as
ground, or the ground as figure-which meant that "whatever is figure or
whatever is ground is interchangeable." To put it another way, every ob­
ject had to be seen in its particular context: "nothing is big, or nothing is
small, when we do not see it in neighborhood of something bigger or
smaller . . . that's the relativity of all evaluation . . . ." A chair, for ex­
, ample, continually interacts with the background in which it's placed. The
space around any object-be it a chair, a color, a person-never merely
serves the object or is dominated by it. Albers especially enjoyed juxtaposing
colors to demonstrate how they change value in relation to each other­
like making a gloomy raw sienna look as alive. and shining as gold by
"working on its neighbors." Depending on the moment and the perspec­
tive, one part of an interaction achieves more prominence than another
-it's "like people," Albers would say: "no one person is continually most
important." An individual, like a color or a line, could dominate tempo­
rarily but "perceptual ambiguities" soon shift the mix, someone or some­
thing else emerging into the foreground; "when you really ltnderstand that
each color is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that
you have learned about life as well as about color." This was the heart of
Albers's sociology as well as his art-though some thought his colors
yielded dominance more readily than his perSOn. 43
Albers alternated exercises on the essence and interrelationship of mate­
rials with others that dealt with the external appearance of materials­
what he called matiere studies. He classified surfaces according to "struc­
ture, facture and texture," and then created exercises to show both the
relatedness and contrast of various surfaces. Changing surface qualities
fascinated him; "changing of articulation," he called it-"how to make a
brick looking like something spongy . . . . How can we make something
looking like bread and it is stone?" Albers didn't merely emphasize how
one surface differed from another-which was what Johannes Itten had
done at the Bauhaus-but how surfaces correspond and can be combined.
"Combination" became one of the key words in the art lexicon at Black
Mountain, and Albers felt that this Dadaist playing with surfaces was for
some of his students-and especially for Robert Rauschenberg-the most
exciting and durable feature of their Black Mountain experience. 44
Albers encouraged students to bring in any material they found, and on
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 69
at least one occasion (this was later, in the mid-forties) was himself tested
by the "solution." Several students hostile to Albers, and impatient of
.,t. what they took to be the endless mechanics of the course, decided to do a
three-dimensional construction out of a material not singular to Black
Mountain but found there in plentiful supply: cow dung. That day in class,
as always, the constructions were placed in front of the room, without
names attached to them. Albers-again, as always-picked up each piece
in turn, examining and criticizing it. "Ah (as he passed down the row), a
good swindle: marbles made to look like fish eggs . . . and what's this
one? Wonderful-it looks exactly like muddy cow turd! So real you want
to pick it up and smell to be sure . .. ." -at which point he did; and was
sure. But he never batted an eye. He simply put the turd back down, omit­
ted his usual comment on the "material's" color and form, and blandly pro­
ceeded on to the next construction. 45
The division of student opinion about the "cow-dung episode" -some
amused at what they considered an appropriate rebuke to Albers's rigidity,
others indignant at the insult-was characteristic of the varied responses
that Albers aroused. The chief complaint was against his "Prussianism"
-his austerity, his dogmatism, his inflexibility. "He was very definite in
what he said and what he appeared to think," one student told me. An­
other, a girl who had developed an intense dislike for authoritarian educa­
tion during her schooling in England, "just couldn't take" what she called
Albers's "tense and rigid" personality. A third student, Dan Rice, himself
a well-regarded painter today, quit Albers's course before the end of a se­
mester: "it's that heavy Germanic pedagoguery. He seemed so-stiff." 46
But some who agree that Albers was aloof in social contact, deny that
he was so in a classroom setting. John Andrew Rice went so far as to de­
lineate "three Alberses" -the teacher, the social being and the Pruss ian­
and told me "they had no relation to each other at all, as far as I could
ever uncover." As an example of the Prussian Albers, Rice told me of
Albers' objections to Rice's lack of "proper" leadership-and especially
his failure to provide strict agendas for meetings of the Board of Fellows;
"You're the leader of this college," he would say to Rice, "you should
iead." In recalling the incident Rice sighed: "you can't talk to a German
about liberty. You just waste your breath. They don't know what the hell
you mean." But even Rice insisted that Albers was far more flexible in the
classroom than out of it, and that he tried to bring out what was in each
student rather than to impose his own perspective on them. That Rice could
appreciate Albers as a teacher was a compliment to both men since, volatil­
ity aside, they were very different: Rice, verbal, consciously paradoxical,
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sardonic and relativistic ; Albers, suspicious of words and of psych ological
probing, intuitive, confident of the re".Iity in any given situation and of his
own ability to perceive it. 47
Many , besides Rice, were struck by the difference in Albers's behavior
in and out of class. The psychoanalyst, Fritz Moellenhoff, who had known
Albers since 1920 in Germany and who, with his wife, Anna (also a doc­
tor), came to Black Mountain in 1935 at Albers's suggestion, has said that
"psychologically speaking," Albers was always "a riddle" to him-he
could be " so flexible when he was functioning as a teacher" but otherwise
" couldn't compromise or see different facets. " And one student who
thought Albers "terribly rigid as a human being," also insisted that " in
teaching he didn't impose his own ideas at all. In fact he rather erred on
the other side, because he was somewhat inarticulate." 41a
Many believed Albers was at his best in class with beginners, with those
who lacked basic skills-and claims to originality. His patience with such
students was enormous and his effect on them profound. "He always dis­
played concern for us," according to the novelist, Peggy Bennett Cole,
"Why, he was like a fatherly lover to each and everyone of us, male and
female alike. Stern, just, yet appreciative. " Because of his concern, she
added, " we all became ever more conscious of many kinds of beauty to
which we'd previously been blind-the beauty of ordinary appearances we
had been taking for granted, the beauty of the extraordinary world we'd
learned to ignore." 49
Such students, Albers's detractors claim, became- if they went on in
the art world in any capacity-teachers or c,ommercial artists. Few became
painters, and almost none became painters of stature. The two most prom­
inent exceptions usually cited are Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschen­
berg, both of whom took classes with Albers during the late 1940S at
Black Mountain. Between Albers and Noland there is today little love- or
credit-lost. Albers expressed deep resentment to me at Noland's "denial"
of him-though in fact that denial is less profound than Albers apparently
believes. Noland told me-with no trace of niggardliness-that he had
found Albers's "perceptual insights unbelievable," and that later, when a
teacher himself at Catholic University, had offered a course on the funda­
mentals of design patterned directly on what he had learned in Albers's
class. But Noland did add that he studied for only a single term with Al­
bers at Black Mountain, disliked his occasional sarcasm-the "jeering
manner" that could drive a student in tears from the room-and worked
longer and more congenially with Ilya Bolotowsky (Albers's temporary re­
placement during a year's leave in the late forties). Noland thinks it's
likely, in fact, that Albers resents him chiefly hecause he's corrected certain
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 71
"bios" that he felt overstressed Albers's influence on him and omitted or
underplayed Bolotowsky's.50
Between Albers and Rauschenberg, there has always been greater
warmth and mutual appreciation. If anything, in fact, Rauschenberg
credits Albers with more impact on him than Albers himself does . "I con­
sider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had," Ril.Uschenberg has
said, citing especially the sense of discipline that Albers communicated,
his insistence on each student developing a "personal sense of looking,"
and his attention to (and respect for) the specific properties of the materi­
als being used . Albers "didn't teach you how to 'do art, ' " Rauschenberg
adds; drawing was about "the efficient functioning of line"; color "was
about the flexibilities and the complex relationships that colors have with
one another." Albers, on his part, has no clear memories of Rauschenberg
as a student. He believes Rauschenberg "couldn't have overlooked what
was going on" at Black Mountain, since the work done in Albers's classes
was continually displayed and discussed. And-as regards Rauschenberg
at any rate-Albers is content with the idea that "a student has a stronger
memory of his teacher than the teacher usually has of one of his many
students." 51
Besides, Albers has never prided himself on disciples (and recognizes,
in any case, that "influence" is impossible to establish with precision).
When one of his students spent years turning out canvases that almost ex­
actly repeated Albers's own, and then finally gave up the imitation, Albers
. was relieved. He wanted to teach clarity of observation and articulation­
but he also wanted to leave each student to his individual formulations,
believing there was no single "correct solution" to a given artistic problem.
As one student, Pete Jennerjahn, has put it, Albers felt "that people
should see and get some basic things going for them-and then make their
own paintings. " This is not to say that his intention to stimulate diversity
wasn 't sometimes impeded by those elements in his character that de­
manded discipline and exuded certainty. His taste, moreover, wasn't wholly
catholic; he disliked the political painting of the Mexican muralists, for
example, and as regards music, he thought Bach the only composer (Wag­
ner, especially, was beyond the pale) . Yet he could be appreciative of artists
whose work differed greatly from his own ; in class, for example, he gave
Picasso "full credit" and spoke of his achievement "totally without rancor
and envy." 52
Given Albers's openness to difference, why then was he ever resented ?
Some were annoyed by certain personal traits, by what they described as
his formidable, prickly, unbending presence. In a community as small and
emotionally intense as Black Mountain, "disagreeable" qualities easily got
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magnified, since people could rarely avoid each other for long. Perhaps
"pleasing" traits became larger than life, too; many of Albers's students
still insist, in direct contrast to his detractors, that he was easily ap­
proached, good-humored, "wonderfully sweet and understanding." Which
probably only proves that Albers, like most of l!S, responds differently to
different people-and is perceived differently by them. 53
Others in the community felt threatened by the pervasive force of Al­
bers's influence, reacting in some cases more to the idea of dominance than
to the specific individuals who embodied it. As Peggy Bennett Cole has
said, "the human spirit resents any powerful human being who dares assert
him- (her-) self so strongly as to transform the whole environment, as Al­
bers did." Rice had as much presence and influence as Albers, but whereas
Rice's specialty was paradox, Albers's was decisiveness. He radiated so
much self-confidence and spent so little energy on vacillation or analysis,
that he made others, even Rice, seem by comparison timid and irresolute.
In view of the "titanic rearrangement" Albers produced in how people saw
and thought, some resentment was inescapable. Few welcome the actual
arrival of change-no matter how loudly they might clamor for it in ad­
vance. 54
It's my impression (nonstatistical, n()nscientific) that the more strong­
willed among Albers's students resisted him the most passionately­
perhaps because they had the most to defend. Conversely, some of
Albers's most devoted students seem to have been, at least initially, the
most passive. Ruth Asawa, for example, has said that she "had no desire to
really express myself. . . I was a very obedient student . . . I followed
directions." Another Albers student frankly admits to having been "a
nothing, absorbing . . . I didn't have enough sense to ask questions"
(had he not been able to borrow an identity from Albers, he adds, he prob­
ably would have "literally committed suicide"). 55
At any rate, some students who better trusted their own vision-or who
at least believed that they had one-felt Albers cramped their style, limit­
ing their own way of working. Bob DeNiro, for example, an ebullient, vol­
atile man, instinctively resented all authority-and especially when out­
fitted in formal, geometric lines. After one particular run-in with Albers,
DeNiro became so enraged that he picked up everything in his room,
including his paints, threw them out the third-story window-and left the
college. Another student, the American Indian painter Harrison Begay,
quit Albers and Black Mountain after a year for reasons that seem to have
been almost opposite to those of DeNiro. Quiet and withdrawn (and some­
what given to the bottle) Begay apparently wanted to be led more rapidly
into a "contemporary" style than Albers was willing to do, for he felt con-
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS 73
cerned about breaking the continuity of Begay's cultural heritage. (" I do
not believe much in environment," Albers told me, " but I believe more in
heritage.") 56
Despite the variety of response to Albers, I doubt if anyone would dis­
sent from the statement that his presence, however felt, was pervasive at
Black Mountain. He and Rice were unquestionably the dominant figures in
the early years and Albers, with his peculiar accent and severe life style,
was the, more remote and therefore, in many minds, the more powerful of
the two. As Peggy Bennett Cole has said, coming across Albers in Black
Mountain's "hillbilly setting, in the Southern Baptist Convention country
of the Tarheel State was a little like finding the remnants of an advanced
57
Nor was Albers's influence confined to art students. Education at Black
Mountain took place all the time, not merely in classrooms; individuals
encountered each other in a wide variety of daily situations. Albers's own
designs-from the subtle coloration of his clothes to the chairs and tables
he built-were part of everyday seeing at Black Mountain. And though
Albers insisted on privacy and on time to do his own work (once he put a
sign "Exit Only" on his door; at another time, " Not to Open Before
Christmas"), he cared deeply for Black Mountain and involved himself
continuously in the community's multiple activities and responsibilities.
Those who weren't enrolled in Albers's courses not only heard about them
constantly-since art was a reigning topic at Black Mountain-but still
more, saw and heard Albers himself in community meetings, at mealtimes,
while lining up a row of seeds, or walking a mountain path. His views were
continually quoted and argued about: Did a preoccupation with the past,
as Albers claimed, produce imitation and prevent creativity? Did a han­
kering for individuality lead to conformity? Was fashion the enemy of
honesty? Did words betray feelings and introspection atrophy the senses?
Finally, Albers's courses themselves were never narrowly technical; they
involved principles and procedures applicable to a wide variety of
activities-the need to be aware of everyday objects and their individual
properties; the essence of primary experience, of direct seeing and feel­
ing, of problem-solving out of one's own experience; the importance of
economy, leanness and discipline; the realization that form has meaning,
and that "foreground" and "background" shift value according to context.
What Albers embodied above all was a search "to make some kind of
order out of things" -some perfect order-a search many took to be em­
blematic of the purpose of the college as a whole. "Albers as emblem" has
been perfectly caught by Will Hamlin, a student at Black Mountain in the
late thirties: " that crisp magical precision of color contrasts and space re­
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lations which cried out to you JUST RIGHT, made people work hard to get
something of the same sense in things they were doing. . . or perhaps it
was his sharp critical eye or his emphasis on working from the simplest
basic design elements; at any rate, his presence was a vital factor in dis­
couraging the sloppy, the casual, the makeshift. Which is not to say he was
against play, but he wanted it sharply separated from the work it might
..
InspIre. . . . " 58
John Stix, now a theater director but during his years at Black Moun­
tain a photography buff, further attests to the way Albers's vision could be
utilized in various fields. Stix arrived at Black Mountain with all his pho­
tographic equipment, set up a darkroom and started working with a Speed
Graphic, a plate camera that best lends itself to composed, textural shots
rather than candid ones. Albers took an interest in Stix's work and helped
him capture a "true line" in his photographs ("so that if you did a photo­
graph of a head it was the head that came through and not a lot of garbage
around it; he pointed out the interferences"). Albers, Stix said, "could
make you see an experience that you could then translate into the medium
you were working with." He added, though, that the Albers vision had its
limitations; it screened out certain elements in order to emphasize others.
Later, after Stix entered the theater, he came to miss the "romantic im­
pulses" that, in his view Albers downgraded. "I came to feel," Stix said,
that one shouldn't "screen out distasteful things always . . . shouldn't be
restrained . . . shouldn't be harnessed as much as I was made to fecI that
any art should be." 59
The undisciplined, the unexpected, the capricious, were not qualities for
which Albers felt special sympathy and so he tended to discourage them in
others. But finally that's only to say that Albers's vision, like any well-de­
veloped one, takes on its particular shape, its identifying features , by rejec­
tions as well as embracings. Selective blindness may be one definition of ge­
nius; it is almost surely both source and symptom of strength. Those who
disagreed with Albers's emphases turned away from him and sought their
inspiration elsewhere. But not entirely away. One of Black Mountain's
most provocative-and enervating-features was that you could never
wholly escape from whatever it was that displeased you. That produced in­
tense psychological pressure, but also the rare experience of having to con­
front fear and distaste.

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