BLACK
MOUNTAIN COLLEGE REVISITED
By Richard Kostelanetz
What was important, it seems to me, about Black Mountain was the dining
hall, because everyone had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. And the
classes were less important than the meals. Every time that it’s attempted to
make Black Mountain over again, it’s not understood that all the meals should
be shared by all of the people.
—John Cage, in an
interview
I’d grown up with the image of Black Mountain as the premier
American arts college, having heard about it first from John Cage in the
mid-1960s, a decade after it closed, and then again in the late 1970s from my
good friend Mary Emma Harris who was working on her book on The Arts in
Black Mountain (1985). Located inauspiciously in western North
Carolina, it housed as either teachers or students such future eminences as
Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg,
Kenneth Snelson, Charles Olson, et al. Black Mountain became the subject of
more books than Harris’s, each of them accounting for its uniqueness, all of
which I’ve read, wondering, as have others, whether it could happen again.
The closest I’ve come to experiencing something like Black
Mountain Collage occurred during my stay as Master Artist at the AtlanticCenter for the Arts in the sleepy ocean-side town of New Smyrna Beach, FL. The
ACA, as it is called, customarily invites three established personages in any
of several arts. People apply to be “associates” for three weeks. No more than
ten are chosen. Most of the previous Master Artists were more conservative in
their aesthetic orientation than myself, which is to say, for one measure, that
the Black Mountain precedent would have small relevance to them. Photos made of
previous sessions with writers customarily show the associates grouped around
the Master.
Mine in Experimental Writing worked differently. At our
first gathering, I asked each associate to introduce his or her work. I
suggested that the general assignment for each of us was to produce something
radically different from what they or anyone else had done before. A secondary
consideration was that we were also required to help make one another’s work
better. The ACA generously made available facilities that include computers, a
music recording studio, and video editing equipment. Tuesday morning we all met
again in the small building I’d set aside for our group activities.
Wednesday morning I went to the appointed place, only to
find no one there. Scarcely anyone came by until12:30, which is time for lunch.
Where were they? Working with one another in several locations around the ACA.
On Thursday morning, only one associate joined me, mostly because he preferred
working on paper, often with words and challenges provided by his colleagues.
Nonetheless, at one time or another he collaborated with everyone else in the
group, sometimes narrating their texts for recordings, at other times reworking
their words to his own ends.
I began to feel the odd man out. When the regular
ACA photographer arrived during the second week to take the customary picture
of the “group,” only two of my associates were there. I was less a leader than
a facilitator. Instead of lecturing to them all, I advised them individually,
usually to take a further step in whatever they were doing. Unlike too
many other short-term creative courses, the ACA residencies are not designed to
fleece savings from aspirants with modest talents and ambitions. Bless ‘em.
The group as a whole had extraordinary qualities. Though the
ACA billed me as a writer, rather than a media artist (which is something I
also am), all but one took their undergraduate degrees in areas other than
English literature or writing—the standard certificates for graduate writing
students. Indeed, most remembered negative experience with institutional
writing courses.
Nearly all of these writers wanted to work directly with
audio, video, and computers, some of them staying at these machines into the
night. They taught one another how to use Photoshop and video editing programs.
One designed and produced an artist’s chapbook from a text that was previously
just a manuscript uniformly typed. Some collaborated with the eight visual
artists who formed a companion group during our three weeks there. Need I say
that all of us—masters as well as associates, visual artists along with
writers--took all our weekday meals in a single refectory. The wisdom of John
Cage’s advice was not lost.
All of my associates had accepted unreservedly the premise
of Expanded
Writing that I first
articulated three decades ago—that a truly contemporary “writer” must know how
to put words on more than paper. Though the associates ranged in age from 22 to
60, none regarded any of the others as esthetically unacceptable. Since they
had, like myself, previously experienced situations in which their work was
dismissed, this degree of colleagial acceptance was an unprecedented pleasure.
None had ever before experienced a situation where everyone was
so supportive. All of them were knowledgeable not only in literature but music
and the visual arts. Only one talked about the limitations in
marketing/exhibiting/publishing their current work, promising to establish a
website in which visual poetry incorporating color could be made available to
everyone.
After overcoming initial feelings of teacherly neglect, I
realized that in collaboration with the ACA I had set in motion something
resembling Black Mountain, where, as I recall, the ambitious students likewise
helped one another under the benevolent guidance of Master Artists. I, whose
grandparents came from old Smyrna, spent most June afternoons at New Smryna’s
nearest beach, which I rank among the best in North America. Scarcely
authoritarian in temper, I didn’t want to get in anyone’s way. I love to try
something similar somewhere else sometime.
ABOUT RICHARD
KOSTELANETZ:
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work appear in
various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster
Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary
Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of
American Writers, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,
Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other
distinguished directories.
LINKS:
~“Previously Unpublished, Sometimes Incomplete Entries
Drafted for a Third Edition of my Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1992, 1999)”: