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Reviewed by:
  • The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz
  • David Raskin (bio)
Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 215 pp.

To test or not? No, this book does not weigh the pros and cons of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, or Common Core, the assessment-based education reforms so recently loathed by middle-class America. Rather, it focuses on mid-last-century modernism and the same debate as it played out at Black Mountain College. Díaz’s study is not a comprehensive history of the institution or of its many famous alumni, who include figures as disparate as Robert De Niro, Sr., the Abstract Expressionist painter, and Deborah Sussman, the environmental graphic designer. Instead, the book builds a Venn diagram from cases studies of Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, three influential Black Mountain teachers, and then disambiguates their individual models of experimentation. In short, Díaz argues that Albers thought trial and error is a method for obtaining ethically progressive change; Cage, that contingency releases chance consequences that help individuals escape the status quo of their own consciousness; and Fuller, that only from knowledge degree zero can a fully reimagined (improved) civilization emerge. There is much good primary and secondary research here, though Díaz sometimes struggles to word the ideas that are central for each of the three. Bucky Fuller, moreover, is a bit of the odd man out, and there is certainly something arbitrary in the book’s structure. Despite the title and subtitle, this study really engages disciplinary differences among vanguardist art, performance, and design at a particular time and place, showing how their perspectives on the risks and rewards of chance diverge. [End Page 313]

David Raskin

David Raskin is Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, the open-access journal of the College Art Association. He is the author of Donald Judd and coauthor (with Christopher Cook) of Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand’s Julian Dashper.

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