Black Mountain College
Read here about Black Mountain College, where Richard Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson met and co-discovered early tensegrity structures.
Overview
In 1948 Black Mountain College was a critical gathering place for artistic talent escaping the Nazi onslaught in Europe. There Modern Art mingled with Eastern thought and produced significant innovations including Cage's Silent Piece, Rauschenberg's White Canvas, Snelson's X-Piece, Fuller's Tensegrity, and Fuller's Supine Dome. Later, the campus was the site for a renewal of poetry, particularly Beat poetry and African American poetry.
Snelson at Black Mountain
Kenneth Snelson was born in 1927 to a camera shop owner in Pendleton, Oregon. He memorized poetry, played the drums, rode bicycles and built model airplanes, each of which embodied pent-up up energy: tension pulling against solid resistance; the airplane model's cloth skin shrink-stretched over thin frames adding strength; drumheads stretched for tuning; tension strung steel cables forming the bicycle wheel’s struts. Pendleton was a remote small town far from any center of culture, and Ken Snelson signed up for training as a radio technician in the Navy two months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He entered college paid by the G.I. Bill and chose art as his major for reasons he could not articulate, studied Bauhaus with Jack Wilkinson, whose Basic Design Course advocated for art as an intellectual exercise, with discussions of semantics, Gestalt psychology and mathematics. Ken was fascinated by Josef Albers and Paul Klee, and when he discovered that Albers, a former Bauhaus instructor, was Dean of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he decided to apply for admission to the summer session.
It was at Black Mountain that Ken fell straight into the ever-narrowing gyre of tensegrity influences. Albers was teaching along with Fuller, a substitute for a professor of architecture who canceled a week before the summer began. Albers asked Ken to assist Fuller, the new faculty member, in assembling his assortment of geometric models for his evening lecture to the college. The collection was bursting with polyhedra, geometrical gossamer constructions and great circles, like models littering a kindergarten for geniuses. Fuller lectured that evening and mesmerized everyone with his ranging futurist ideas, and young Ken began to think of trying some sculpture. Albers saw an early work and said quietly six words that changed Ken's notion of his self: “These are the works of a sculptor.”
At the end of the summer session, Ken returned home to Oregon, obsessed with his sculptural explorations, moping and spending hours in his basement building things; small mobile sculptures mostly, using thread, wire, clay, metal from tin cans, cardboard, etc. He put to model making what he had learned about geometry as well as art and design from the Bauhaus. He made several small studies. Were they structures or sculptures? Undefinable, they incorporated the attitudes of both Fuller and Albers. One step leading to the next, Ken saw that he could make more mysteriously cohering structures by tying off movement altogether, tension lines stabilizing modules one to another. He sent photographs to Fuller, he did not respond.
And so, Ken Snelson brought his "X-column" with him when he returned for a second summer at Black Mountain. When he showed the sculpture to Fuller, it was clear from his reaction that he hadn't understood it from the photos he had sent. Fuller was quite struck with it, holding it in his hands, turning it over, studying it for a very long moment. He then asked if Ken might allow him to keep it. It hadn't been his intention to part with it, but he gave it to Fuller.
Next day Fuller said he had given a lot of thought to the 'X-column' structure and suggested changes. Ken went into town, purchased metal telescoping curtain rods to build the new idea, and Fuller had his picture taken, triumphantly holding the new structure. Tensegrity was born.
Cage and Silence at Black Mountain
John Cage is one of America’s top ten composers. He is widely disparaged for his concerts of nonmusical sounds which alarm audiences and caused him to be banned from some venues. He was shunned by the musical establishment, treated as a Viktor Frankenstein whose monstrosities were forbidden to share a program with Mozart, Brahms, or even the modern 20th-century masters. Yet by the time of his death in the 1990’s he had become one of the most recorded composers in America’s history. Cage stumbled into this reputation like a drunken sailor wandering from modern art to poems, from Zen koans to music, from old car parts to mushrooms, called by an elusive siren and never finding safe harbor. He adopted a tireless round-the-clock schedule, mastered the complex art of twelve tone composition, yet moved on having found no home in these manses, no experience of music like the one he barely imagined. He composed for toy pianos, percussion instruments, put screws nuts and bolts into Steinway pianos, and gathered more and more critical attention while he cruised on.
Cage’s journey relates to tensegrity as he collided with Fuller and Snelson there, He staged a play and cast Fuller in the lead role. In this environment, Cage began to experiment with chance-determined music, in an effort to free the sounds he emitted from conditioned reflexes. Listeners would later refuse to call the result music, but for many Cage's revolutionary non-ordering of sound freed them up to truly hear "sound" again, not just melody or chords.
Faculty and artists at Black Mountain College continued to explore art in the light of these profoundly Eastern perceptions. Four years later in 1952 at Black Mountain (after Fuller had left) Rauschenberg made a famous radical leap and painted his first completely white canvas. In evocative resonance with this creation, Cage composed 4’33” (four minutes thirty-three seconds), a piano score without a single note within, with instructions for the pianist to sit for three movements and not play one note. The previous year Cage had had the singular opportunity to enter an anechoic chamber—a room that is theoretically completely silent. Cage was surprised to find that there was a “sound of silence,” high and low. The staff who operated the chamber explained to him that the high sound was his nervous system operating and the low sound was his blood circulating. Cage experienced an epiphany in the anechoic chamber that day, realizing that, “There is no such thing as empty space or empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot...” Silence is really a word for listening.
A student of Zen master Daises T. Suzuki, Cage artistically expressed the challenging, complex nature of Zen emptiness. Emptiness in Zen is nothing, but it is a charged and powerful nothing--like matter and anti-matter or the quantum charged foam of outer space. Science has proven that matter was mostly empty space. Yet, if so, why does a stone hurt when it is thrown at my head? How could there be objects and any reality? Clearly structure emerged from attenuated, almost invisible members.
The achievements at Black Mountain range from painting to dance, sculpture and poetry, and regarding tensegrity, it is also the profoundly inspirational nature of emptiness and silence. For the rest of his life, Fuller told audiences that silence was a critical step in his search for tensegrity—he said that he actually was silent for years, a fiction that emphasized the fact of emptiness at the heart of tensegrity.