If, as the saying goes, Boston is a state of mind and Chicago a movement, then Black Mountain College in the 1940s and `50s was both.
As an outpost of the artistic avant-garde, the small, progressive school near Asheville, N. C. lured luminaries in all media to its faculty, from painters such as Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers to musicians David Tudor and Lou Harrison to poet Charles Olsen. Black Mountain provided a setting for exploration and radical experimentation, and two of the explorers who went on to have a huge impact were John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.
The first of their many collaborations occurred at the college during the summer of 1951, but equally important were the exchange of ideas and the mutual inspiration that led to seminal works in their respective media. That period is chronicled in the Museum of Contemporary Art`s complementary exhibitions opening this weekend: ”Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s” and ”John Cage: Scores from the Early 1950s.”
The two had met in 1951 when Cage happened upon Rauschenberg`s first show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery when the artist was just 25 years old. That meeting proved more encouraging to Rauschenberg, ultimately, than the exhibition, the slim response to which was mostly negative.
Not so for Cage. The composer, 13 years older and already a controversial figure in music circles, recognized a kindred spirit in those works. They seemed to Cage to possess something of the found order and beauty he was espousing in music, an esthetic strongly influenced by his study of Zen Buddhism.
”I felt very close to Bob from the very beginning,” Cage recalled. ”It was a kind of understanding that didn`t require any explanation or answering questions or anything-it was an understanding that we were on a similar path.”
By that time, both had undertaken training in their respective fields under notoriously rigorous European masters. Cage had studied music with Arnold Schoenberg while Rauschenberg, like a number of young artists, was attracted to Black Mountain by the demanding reputation of the Bauhaus-trained Albers.
”It was a very intense place,” Rauschenberg said, adding that the esthetic ran the gamut ”from Bauhaus to immediately.”
By all accounts, Albers made it a bit more intense for the young Texan, whose output did little to please the teacher.
”He just hated it, that`s all,” Rauschenberg remembered with a laugh.
”He gave lots of homework, and he would come in and start every class off with `I don`t vant to know who did dot` and everyone would turn around and stare at me.”
For Cage and Rauschenberg, apprenticeships to imperious master artists eventually propelled them, paradoxically, into a trajectory that took them far from the masters` styles.
According to Cage, ”my attitude towards Schoenberg was worshipful. He was a tremendous teacher. But I couldn`t do what he was doing, you know.
”There`s a Zen story where a monk in the winter comes through the snow to a dilapidated monastery where another monk is warming himself at a fire. When the traveler sits down beside the monk at the fire he`s shocked to discover that the wood in the fire is statues of the Buddha, and he says, `How dare you burn these wood statues of the Buddha!` And the monk replies, `Well, the metal ones won`t burn.` ”
It was already apparent to Cage and Rauschenberg during the summer of 1951, when both were in residence at Black Mountain, that the metal ones wouldn`t burn.
Rauschenberg had been attempting to work roughly within the parameters staked out by Abstract Expressionism. That summer, the painter turned out his most radical works to date, the White Paintings; contiguous, modular canvases with blank white surfaces-a literal and figurative tabula rasa, an acknowledgment that his agenda departed from that tradition.
Rauschenberg said it represented ”a clear break. You just push it as far as you can get it, away from yourself and your ideas, and see if there`s still anything there.”
The White Paintings also were an outgrowth of his interaction with Cage, for they can also be considered ”Zen paintings.” Their visual meaning derives as much from random interaction with the light and air of their natural environment as from any artist-provided element.
Just as importantly, they pushed Cage to realize his composition 4` 33”- four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, a kind of aural equivalent to the paintings. Specifically, he said, ”the White Paintings gave me the courage to do it. I had the idea some two years earlier when I described it in a lecture I gave at Vassar. Many people, I knew, would not be able to take it seriously- and of course, they didn`t. In fact I even lost some important, even deep friendships over that piece. It seemed to those people who didn`t like it to be something almost fraudulent.”
Similar invective was directed at Rauschenberg as well during those early years, particularly after his 1953 exhibition at New York`s Stable Gallery. One critic called the White Paintings ”a gratuitously destructive act” and one of the harshly textural black paintings that followed them ”a city-dump mural out of handmade debris.”
The two years between the White Paintings and the Stable Gallery show were a time of far-reaching changes for Rauschenberg. He and his wife were divorcing. Unable to find gallery representation in New York, he set out for Europe and North Africa with his friend, the painter Cy Twombly. There, as at Black Mountain, he took innumerable photographs, many of which presaged the images and offhand composition of his work later in the decade.
He also created small fetish-like sculptural works out of found objects as well as boxed assemblages that became part of a series called ”Scatolae Personali” or ”personal boxes.” These in turn led to the ”Elemental Sculptures”-exceedingly simple, almost primitivist combinations of found wood, rock and twine-upon his return to the United States.
Soon after the Stable exhibition came two proto-conceptual works,
”Automobile Tire Print” and ”Erased de Kooning Drawing” that enhanced his growing notoriety. Cage, meanwhile, was pursuing further experimentation in space-time notation (wherein a quarter-note, for instance, equals 2.5 centimeters of space on the score) and chance-based procedures in compositions such as ”Haiku” and ”Water Music.”
As the exhibition at the MCA seeks to demonstrate, Rauschenberg`s works from the early 1950s-many of them seldom seen publicly in the past 40 years-helped lay the groundwork for the development of pop and minimal art and widened the eventual scope of conceptual work as well. Especially during the 1950s and `60s, his White Paintings and Cage`s ”4` 33” ” inspired artists across a wide variety of disciplines.
Black Mountain College, though, fell on hard times not long after their departure. ”Albers left and Charles Olson took his place as headmaster,”
Cage recalled, ”and Olson didn`t have the German discipline that Albers had to hold that otherwise anarchic situation together.
”There`s a great desire to repeat the Black Mountain experience, but I don`t think that`s possible,” Cage said. Then, sotto voce, he added, ”The secret was, I think, that we all ate together-breakfast, lunch and dinner-and the food wasn`t any good. It was very poor.”
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”Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s” and ”John Cage: Scores from the Early 1950s” run through April 19 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 237 E. Ontario St.
