Sticky Postings
By fabric | ch
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As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 08.2021), via all its tags!
FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
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Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we never made any money or advertise on this site).
Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).
Monday, June 28. 2021
Note: fabric | ch was part of the exhibition Shaping the Invisible World, in the middle of the world pandemic (03.03 - 23.05.21).
A new creation, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N was exhibited at this occasion (img. below), which was also acquiredby HeK and enters it's collection at the same time.
Among others, the exhibition displays works by Tega Brain, Bengt Sjölén & Julian Oliver, Bureau d'études, James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Quadrature, etc. and was curated by Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz.
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Via Haus der eletronischen Künste
The exhibition «Shaping the Invisible World – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge» examines, through cartography, the representational forms of the map as a tool between knowledge and technology. The works of the artists on view negotiate the meaning of the map as a gauge of our digital, technological and global society.
(Photo.: fabric | ch)
(Photo.: T. Marti)
fabric | ch, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N (2021) at the Haus der elektronischen Künste (photo.: fabric | ch).
Cartography – the science of surveying and representing the world – developed in antiquity and provided the springboard for communication and economic exchange between people and cultures around the globe. At the same time, maps are undeniably never neutral, since their creation inherently involves interpretation and imagination. Today, it is IT companies that drive progress in the field and drastically influence our views of the world and how we communicate, navigate and consume globally. While map production has become more democratic, digital maps are nevertheless increasingly used for political and economic manipulation. Questions of privacy, authorship, economic interests and big data management are more poignant than ever before and closely intertwined with contemporary cartographic practices.
Today’s maps not only depict, but also document, negotiate and visualize subjective views of the world. But are these maps more democratic? Who benefits from self-determined productions and what consequences do they lead to?
The strategies in digital mapping and cartography employed by the artists presented in Shaping the Invisible World – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge are subversive. Their spectacular panoramas and virtual scenarios reveal how the digital technologies culturally affect our understanding of the world.
Navigating between subversive cartography and digital mapping, the exhibition puts the spotlight on the fascination of maps in relation to the democratization of knowledge and appropriation. By uncovering hidden realities, scarcely visible developments and possible new social relationships within a territory, the artists delineate the evolution of invisible worlds.
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Artists: Studio Above&Below, Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, James Bridle, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Bureau d'études/ Collectif Planète Laboratoire, fabric | ch, Fei Jun, Total Refusal (Robin Klengel & Leonhard Müllner), Trevor Paglen, Esther Polak & Ivar Van Bekkum, Quadrature, Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Curators: Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz
(View the pictures of the exhibition directly on HeK's website).
Monday, June 21. 2021
Note: an online talk with Patrick Keller, lead archivist and curator Sang Ae Park from Nam June Paik Art Center (NJPAC) in Seoul, and Christian Babski from fabric | ch.
The topic will be related to an ongoing design research into automated curating, jointly led between NJPAC, ECAL and fabric | ch.
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Via Nam June Paik Art Center
How would Augmented Reality change exhibition curating and design in the future? Join our June Science Club and learn how the ECAL and Nam June Paik Art Center are collaborating to develop a novel range of museums. This talk program is hosted by Swissnex and Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Korea. All talks shall be in English.
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Date
June 24, 2021. 17:00 – 18:00
Venue
Zoom
Panels
Patrick Keller (Associate Professor, ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO))
Sang Ae Park (Archivist, Nam June Paik Art Center)
Christian Babski (Co-founder fabric | ch)
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Inquiry
library@njpartcenter.kr
Saturday, February 17. 2018
Note: a few pictures from fabric | ch retrospective at #EphemeralKunsthalleLausanne (disused factory Mayer & Soutter, nearby Lausanne in Renens).
The exhibition is being set up in the context of the production of a monographic book and is still open today (Saturday 17.02, 5.00-8.00 pm)!
By fabric | ch
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All images Ch. Guignard.
Monday, February 05. 2018
Note: 2017 was very busy (the reason why I wasn't able to post much on | rblg...), and the start of 2018 happens to be the same. Fortunately and unfortunatly!
I hope things will calm down a bit next Spring, but in the meantime, we're setting up an exhibition with fabric | ch. A selection of works retracing 20 years of activities, which purpose will be also to serve in the perspective of a photo shooting for a forthcoming book.
The event will take place in a disuse factory (yet a historical monument from the 2nd industrial era), near Lausanne.
If you are around, do not hesitate to knock at the door!
By fabric | ch
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Environmental Devices · Projets & expérimentations (1997-2017)
Image: Daniela & Tonatiuh.
During a few days, in the context of the preparation of a book, a selection of works retracing 20 years of activities of fabric | ch will be on display in a disused factory close to Lausanne.
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Information: http://www.fabric.ch/xx/
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Opening on February 9, 5.00-11.00pm
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Visiting hours:
Saturday - Sunday 10-11.02, 4.00-8.00pm
Wednesday 14.02, 5.00-8.00pm
Friday-Saturday 16-17.02, 5.00-8.00pm.
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Or by appointment: 021.3511021
Guided tours at 6.00pm
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Pendant quelques jours et dans le contexte de la création d'un livre monographique, accrochage d'une sélection de travaux retraçant 20 ans d'activités de fabric | ch.
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Informations: http://www.fabric.ch/xx
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Vernissage le 9 février, 17h-23h
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Heures de visite:
Samedi - dimanche 10-11.02, 16h-20h
Mercredi 14.02, 17h-20h
Vendredi-samedi 16-17.02, 17h-20h00
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Ou sur rendez-vous: 021.3511021
Visites commentées à 18h.
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Event on Facebook.
Friday, December 15. 2017
Note: with a bit of delay (delay can be an interesting attitude nowadays), but the show is still open... and the content still very interesting!
Via Archpaper
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New MoMA show plots the impact of computers on architecture and design. Pictured here: “Menu 23" layout of Cedric Price's Generator Project. (Courtesy California College of the Arts archive)
The beginnings of digital drafting and computational design will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) starting November 13th, as the museum presents Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989. Spanning 30 years of works by artists, photographers, and architects, Thinking Machines captures the postwar period of reconciliation between traditional techniques and the advent of the computer age.
Organized by Sean Anderson, associate curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, and Giampaolo Bianconi, a curatorial assistant in the Department of Media and Performance Art, the exhibition examines how computer-aided design became permanently entangled with art, industrial design, and space planning.
Drawings, sketches, and models from Cedric Price’s 1978-80 Generator Project, the never-built “first intelligent building project” will also be shown. The response to a prompt put out by the Gilman Paper Corporation for its White Oak, Florida, site to house theater and dance performances alongside travelling artists, Price’s Generator proposal sought to stimulate innovation by constantly shifting arrangements.
Ceding control of the floor plan to a master computer program and crane system, a series of 13-by-13-foot rooms would have been continuously rearranged according to the users’ needs. Only constrained by a general set of Price’s design guidelines, Generator’s program would even have been capable of rearranging rooms on its own if it felt the layout hadn’t been changed frequently enough. Raising important questions about the interaction between a space and its occupants, Generator House laid the groundwork for computational architecture and smart building systems.
R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1970 work for Radical Hardware magazine will also appear. (Courtesy PBS)
Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 will be running from November 13th to April 8th, 2018. MoMA members can preview the show from November 10th through the 12th.
Wednesday, February 08. 2017
Note: interesting exhibition and economic setup (by Fala Atelier) for an exhibition about the metabolists in Lisbon --Nagakin Capsule Tower specifically--, in one of the many marvelous yet rotten "palaces" of the City!
Via ArchDaily
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Finding a place to live in Tokyo isn't easy. Most of the available options are expensive and usually located far from the center. Typologically, the Nakagin Capsule Tower continues to prove that it makes sense. Designed by Kisho Kurokawa and built in 1972, it represented a new typology and a different approach to the idea of urban renewal.
Nevertheless, forty years later, it is clear that something went wrong along the way. The building is getting emptier and several of the capsules are abandoned, rotten, leaking. Some of the owners want to demolish it; a few offer resistance. Each capsule was supposed to last 20 years but twice the time has passed.
Metabolism’s biggest icon is sick and stands today only as a remembrance of a future that never happened.
Anticlimax was an exhibition about the contemporary routine of a fallen hero. While presenting its current condition, the exhibition intended to illustrate the contemporary daily life of one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th Century.
Exhibiting the former metabolist superstar in Portugal was also a provocation and the layout for the exhibition was a necessary curatorial dead-end: presenting the Nakagin in a traditional way would be conceptually wrong. The exhibition happens in an almost negligent way, reflecting the condition of the building, bringing its sense of scale and repetition to the Sinel de Cordes Palace.
All pictures © Fernando Guerra.
More images HERE.
Wednesday, December 14. 2016
Note: Interférences dimensionnelles 1, a 3d printed work by fabric | ch, becomes part of the online gallery collection ArtJaws. This piece was created at the occasion of an exhibition in Montreal (pdf) and is now edited in a slighty different version and in a limited and certificated serie of 20 pieces. The selection of works by different artists has been curated by Ewen Chardronnet, among a larger collection.
Well... It seems it comes at the perfect time for Christmas! ;)
By fabric | ch
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“Cosmos of Mutual Exchanges” is the collection curated by Ewen Chardronnet for the online gallery ArtJaws.
A few words by Ewen about it:
"Throughout my journey as an author, journalist, curator and member of collectives, meeting artists has always been a chance for me to develop my knowledge and theory around speculative fields that go well beyond the fixed borders of academic reflection.
As such, while curating exhibitions, art directing festivals, coordinating residencies and directing productions, I have always sought out a relationship between art practice and theory that, rather than merely being mutually beneficial, leads to a true exchange. I have always felt more enriched working with the artists, rather than simply writing about them. For me, an exhibition is not a final goal but a platform where each player enriches their sensory knowledge and collectively participates in opening up new ways of perceiving and acting in society, faced with our accelerated world. These are the mutual cosmic exchanges that give artworks their “value”… and can help us to rethink our politics of recombinatory commons.
So I took the opportunity of this online curation to revisit a decade of collaborating with artists and to see where this new perspective on mutual exchange (with the gallery, the collector) can lead us. During these years, Slovenian artistic life has been a major source of inspiration for me, and this is expressed in the selection, which is faithful to the community spirit. (...)"
More about the collection HERE.
Regarding the work of fabric | ch in the collection, Interférences dimensionnelles 1:
Created at the occasion of an exhibition in Montreal and revisited for this edition of 20 copies, Interference Dimensionnelle 1 is as a “matrix” in scale 1: X which instantly combines the spatial, temporal or even climatic dimensions/data of actual or virtual terrestrial locations.
Athens, Brasilia, Dubai, intersection of the Arctic Circle and Antemeridian, Montreal: 37 ° 58 ‘N / 23 ° 43’ E; 15 ° 46 ‘N / 47 ° 54’ W; 25 ° 16 ‘N / 55 ° 19’ E; 66 ° 33 ‘N / 180 ° 00’ E; 45 ° 30 ‘N / 73 ° 40’ W.
Five emblematic places representative of the architectural, territorial and energetic approaches of Western society and its history, five coordinates located on a world map and then gathered. These situations, when supplemented by the”original” mark 0,0,0, form a set of six interlaced benchmarks for new contemporary spatial situations.
21 x 18 x 18 cm, transparent and black acrylic polymer, edition of 20. €1200.-
Thursday, April 21. 2016
Note: the idea of automation is very present again recently. And it is more and more put together with the related idea of a society without work, or insufficient work for everyone --which is already the case in the liberal way of thinking btw--, as most of it would be taken by autonomous machines, AIs, etc.
Many people are warning about this (Bill Gates among them, talking precisely about "software substitution"), some think about a "universal income" as a possible response, some say we shouldn't accept this and use our consumer power to reject such products (we spoke passionatey about it with my good old friend Eric Sadin last week during a meal at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, while drinking --almost automatically as well-- some good wine), some say it is almost too late and we should plan and have visions for what is coming upon us...
Now comes also an exhibition about the same subject at Kunsthalle Wien that tries to articulate the questions: "Technical devices that were originally designed to serve and assist us and are now getting smarter and harder to control and comprehend. Does their growing autonomy mean that the machines will one day overpower us? Or will they remain our subservient little helpers, our gateway to greater knowledge and sovereignty?"
Via WMMNA
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Installation view The Promise of Total Automation. Image Kunsthalle Wien
Cécile B. Evans, How happy a Thing Can Be, 2014. Image Kunsthalle Wien
The word ‘automation’ is appearing in places that would have seemed unlikely to most people less than a decade ago: journalism, art, design or law. Robots and algorithms are being increasingly convincing at doing things just like humans. And sometimes even better than humans.
The Promise of Total Automation, an exhibition recently opened at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, looks at our troubled relationship with machines. Technical devices that were originally designed to serve and assist us and are now getting smarter and harder to control and comprehend. Does their growing autonomy mean that the machines will one day overpower us? Or will they remain our subservient little helpers, our gateway to greater knowledge and sovereignty?
The “promise of total automation” was the battle cry of Fordism. What we nowadays call “technology” is an already co-opted version of it, being instrumentalised for production, communication, control and body-enhancements, that is for a colonisation and rationalisation of space, time and minds. Still technology cannot be reduced to it. In the exhibition, automation, improvisation and sense of wonder are not opposed but sustain each other. The artistic positions consider technology as complex as it is, animated at the same time by rational and irrational dynamics.
The Promise of Total Automation is an intelligent, inquisitive and engrossing exhibition. Its investigation into the tensions and dilemmas of human/machines relationship explore themes that go from artificial intelligence to industrial aesthetics, from bio-politics to theories of conspiracy, from e-waste to resistance to innovation, from archaeology of digital communication to utopias that won’t die.
The show is dense in information and invitations to ponder so don’t forget to pick up one of the free information booklet at the entrance of the show. You’re going to need it!
A not-so-quick walk around the show:
James Benning, Stemple Pass, 2012
James Benning‘s film Stemple Pass is made of four static shots, each from the same angle and each 30 minutes long, showing a cabin in the middle of a forest in spring, fall, winter and summer. The modest building is a replica of the hideout of anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski. The soundtrack alternates between the ambient sound of the forest and Benning reading from the Unabomber’s journals, encrypted documents and manifesto.
Kaczynski’s texts hover between his love for nature and his intention to destroy and murder. Between his daily life in the woods and his fears that technology is going to turn into an instrument that enables the powerful elite to take control over society. What is shocking is not so much the violence of his words because you expect them. It’s when he gets it right that you get upset. When he expresses his distrust of the merciless rise of technology, his doubts regarding the promises of innovation and it somehow makes sense to you.
Konrad Klapheck, Der Chef, 1965. Photo: © Museum Kunstpalast – ARTOTHEK
Konrad Klapheck’s paintings ‘portray’ devices that were becoming mainstream in 1960s households: vacuum cleaner, typewriters, sewing machines, telephones, etc. In his works, the objects are abstracted from any context, glorified and personified. In the typewriter series, he even assigns roles to the objects. They are Herrscher (ruler), Diktator, Gesetzgeber (lawgiver) or Chef (boss.) These titles allude to the important role that the instruments have taken in administrative and economic systems.
Tyler Coburn, Sabots, 2016, courtesy of the artist, photo: David Avazzadeh
This unassuming small pair of 3D-printed clogs alludes to the workers struggles of the Industrial Revolution. The title of the piece, Sabots, means clogs in french. The word sabotage allegedly comes from it. The story says that when French farmers left the countryside to come and work in factories they kept on wearing their peasant clogs. These shoes were not suited for factory works and as a consequence, the word ‘saboter’ came to mean ‘to work clumsily or incompetently’ or ‘to make a mess of things.’ Another apocryphal story says that disgruntled workers blamed the clogs when they damaged or tampered machinery. Another version saw the workers throwing their clogs at the machine to destroy it.
In the early 20th century, labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) advocated withdrawal of efficiency as a means of self-defense against unfair working conditions. They called it sabotage.
Tyler Coburn, Waste Management, 2013-15
Tyler Coburn contributed another work to the show. Waste Management looks like a pair of natural stones but the rocks are actually made out of electronic waste, more precisely the glass from old computer monitors and fiber powder from printed circuit boards that were mixed with epoxy and then molded in an electronic recycling factory in Taiwan. The country is not only a leader in the export of electronics, but also in the development of e-waste processing technologies that turn electronic trash into architectural bricks, gold potassium cyanide, precious metals—and even artworks such as these rocks. Coburn bought them there as a ready made. They evoke the Chinese scholar’s rocks. By the early Song dynasty (960–1279), the Chinese started collecting small ornamental rocks, especially the rocks that had been sculpted naturally by processes of erosion.
Coburn’s rocks are thus artificial objects that crave an aesthetic value that can only come from natural objects.
Accompanying these objects is a printed broadsheet which narrates the circulation and transformation of a CRT monitor into the stone artworks. The story follows from the “it-narrative” or novel of circulation, a sub-genre of 18th Century literature, in which currencies and commodities narrated their circulation within a then-emerging global economy.
Osborne & Felsenstein, Personal Computer Osborne 1a and Monitor NEC, 1981, Loan Vienna Technical Museum, photo: David Avazzadeh
Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein, Personal Computer Osborne 1a, 1981, Courtesy Technisches Museum, Wien
Several artifacts ground the exhibition into the technological and cultural history of automation: A mechanical Jacquard loom, often regarded as a key step in the history of computing hardware because of the way it used punched cards to control operations. A mysterious-looking arithmometer, the first digital mechanical calculator reliable enough to be used at the office to automate mathematical calculations. A Morse code telegraph, the first invention to effectively exploit electromagnetism for long-distance communication and thus a pioneer of digital communication. A cybernetic model from 1956 (see further below) and the first ‘portable’ computer.
Released in 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation, the Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer. It weighed 10.7 kg (23.5 lb), cost $1,795 USD, had a tiny screen (5-inch/13 cm) and no battery.
At the peak of demand, Osborne was shipping over 10,000 units a month. However, Osborne Computer Corporation shot itself in the foot when they prematurely announced the release of their next generation models. The news put a stop to the sales of the current unit, contributing to throwing the company into bankruptcy. This has comes to be known as the Osborne effect.
Kybernetisches Modell Eier: Die Maus im Labyrinth (Cybernetics Model Eier: The Mouse in the Maze), 1956. Image Kunsthalle Wien
Around 1960, scientists started to build cybernetic machines in order to study artificial intelligence. One of these machines was a maze-solving mouse built by Claude E. Shannon to study the labyrinthian path that a call made using telephone switching systems should take to reach its destination. The device contained a maze that could be arranged to create various paths. The system followed the idea of Ariadne’s thread, the mouse marking each field with the path information, like the Greek mythological figure did when she helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Richard Eier later re-built the maze-solving mouse and improved Shannon’s method by replacing the thread with two two-bits memory units.
Régis Mayot, JEANNE & CIE, 2015. Image Kunsthalle Wien
In 2011, the CIAV (the international center for studio glass in Meisenthal, France) invited Régis Mayot to work in their studios. The designer decided to explore the moulds themselves, rather than the objects that were produced using them. By a process of sand moulding, the designer revealed the mechanical beauty of some of these historical tools, producing prints of a selection of moulds that were then blown by craftsmen in glass.
Jeanne et Cie (named after one of the moulds chosen by the designer) highlights how the aesthetics of objects are the result of the industrial instruments and processes that enter into their manufacturing.
Bureau d’études, ME, 2013, © Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt
Bureau d’Etudes, Electromagnetic Propaganda, 2010
The exhibition also presented a selection of Bureau d´Études‘ intricate and compelling cartographies that visualize covert connections between actors and interests in contemporary political, social and economic systems. Because knowledge is power, the maps are meant as instruments that can be used as part of social movements. The ones displayed at Kunsthalle Wien included the maps of Electro-Magnetic Propaganda, Government of the Agro-Industrial System and the 8th Sphere.
I fell in love with Mark Leckey‘s video. So much that i’ll have to dedicate another post to his work. One day.
David Jourdan, Untitled, 2016, © David Jourdan
David Jourdan’s poster alludes to an ad in which newspaper Der Standard announced that its digital format was ‘almost as good as paper.’
More images from the exhibition:
Magali Reus, Leaves, 2015
Thomas Bayrle, Kleiner koreanischer Wiper
Juan Downey, Nostalgic Item, 1967, Estate of Joan Downey courtesy of Marilys B. Downey, photo: David Avazzadeh
Judith Fegerl, still, 2013, © Judith Fegerl, Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter, Wien
Wesley Meuris, Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering, 2014. Image Kunsthalle Wien
Installation view The Promise of Total Automation. Image Kunsthalle Wien
Installation view. Image Kunsthalle Wien
Installation view. Image Kunsthalle Wien
More images on my flickr album.
Also in the exhibition: Prototype II (after US patent no 6545444 B2) or the quest for free energy.
The Promise of Total Automation was curated by Anne Faucheret. The exhibition is open until 29 May at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. Don’t miss it if you’re in the area.
Wednesday, December 30. 2015
Note: could a perfect ending for this year be this post about (yet another) new exhibition (in Boston)? It is about the fantastic, the radical and the utopian Black Mountain College in North Carolina that became an important school for a large part of the post-war avant-garde in the United States/East coast.
It was an "adventure in progressive education" which points again how schools, when they remain "wild" enough, can become important structures to crystalize creative energies and momentum (and that is therefore also logically listed in Beatriz Colomina's research project about historical "Radical Pedagogies" in architecture).
Via MIT Press
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"Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957," an exhibition currently showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, focuses on how Black Mountain College (BMC) became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. "Leap Before You Look," the first exhibition in the US to examine BMC as a hotbed for the American avant garde, opened on October 10, 2015 and will show through January 24, 2016. Senior Production Coordinator Christine Savage recently checked it out and shares the following insights:
The story of Black Mountain College (BMC) serves as an excellent reminder of how brilliant, prolific, and innovative people can be. The school was an idyll, an embodiment of a progressive, collaborative, utopian future. The college was also an absolute anomaly, and serves possibly as an even better reminder of how rarely we come together to achieve such promise.
If only it hadn’t gone broke and closed after only 24 years.
“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” is a remarkable exhibit that does a wonderful job of illustrating BMC’s proud stature among the great artistic moments in the last century. The collection features music and dance performances, as well as over 200 pieces of artwork created at the college. A history of the school and the art created there can be found in the MIT Press book, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art edited by Vincent Katz, which documents the brief—but influential—existence of the school, and offers a fascinating glimpse of campus life.
BMC was a tiny school with a disproportionate influence on art and culture in the 20th century. (A partial—yet still absurdly impressive—list of artists who taught and studied there includes Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Ruth Asawa, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Vera B. Williams, Franz Kline, Buckminster Fuller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne, and Walter Gropius.)
Founded in 1933 at a former summer camp with 22 students in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, BMC was an adventure in progressive education. Less an art school than a perpetually broke experimental liberal arts college, the program’s philosophy centered around the belief that artistic experience was instrumental to all aspects of learning and grew students into better—and more curious—democratic citizens. Fortunately for art lovers the world around, BMC’s college life and curriculum revolved around the artistic process at a critical moment when American Progressivism combined with European Modernism.
Photographs at the start of the exhibit show the communal, egalitarian style of living and working at the school. The faculty owned and operated the college, and governed it together with students. In the early 1930s, sweat equity was more useful than tuition—they grew their own food, cooked their own meals, and built their own classrooms.
The founders of BMC kicked off their utopian educational experiment by hiring Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, who brought with them a healthy dose of enthusiasm for communal idealism and experimentation. These values remain evident in the profoundly interdisciplinary art created at the college during its brief existence, spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, poetry, dance, music, and theater.
The exhibit begins with the colorful geometric paintings and prints of Josef, and the striking, modernist weavings and jewelry of Anni. In nearby rooms, photographs and models showing Buckminster Fuller’s experimental architecture—and the oftentimes unsuccessful attempts at constructing it—sit in conversation with the geometric and organic drawings and sculptures of Ruth Asawa, as well as the vibrant, expressionistic paintings of Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
Later in the exhibit, the artistic creations of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg showcase the collaborative, bodily nature of the work at BMC. Displays and performances using their choreography, music, and set decorations—schedules of which are available on the ICA website—allow museum visitors to share in an experience that, well, grew from shared experience.
As one might expect from the school’s summer camp beginnings, it was a perfect storm of intense closeness, idealism, freedom, and collaboration. Throughout the ICA’s galleries, the works of art from BMC seem to speak to each other, and to be in their presence is to get a glimpse of how their creators exemplified the school’s motto of “learning through doing.”
It’s an education in the importance of experimentation and exposure to difference, and a chance for (oft-maligned) utopian idealism—however short-lived—to get a little vindication.
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