This episode presents a candid conversation with art historian and critic Eva Díaz, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt. Díaz has written extensively about R. Buckminster Fuller and is the author of The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College and the forthcoming book After Spaceship Earth: The Critique of Total Design in Contemporary Art.
In discussion with host Christina Battle and producer Angela Shackel, Díaz speaks about her research into Fuller’s life and his work at Black Mountain College.
Christina:
Welcome to from remote stars. This is one of our full length interviews when we were putting this podcast series together, we hadn’t intended on releasing any fuller interviews. You may notice they’re also a little more candid in less produce, which hopefully gives you our audience a pleasant fly on the wall feeling as you listen along. This first interview is with art historian and critic Ava Diaz. In Diaz’s first book, The Experimenters, she looks at Black Mountain College, the iconic school in rural Appalachia, where Fuller taught alongside many prominent figures in the art scene of the late 1940s, including John Cage and Josef Albers, and her forthcoming book After Spaceship Earth. Diaz delves deeper into Fuller and how his story can be woven into a broader critique of the concept of total design and contemporary art. These are just some of the topics that myself and producer Angela Shackle had a chance to talk to her about when we met over Zoom earlier this year. Maybe we’ll start going through some of the questions that we had sent previously, but we don’t need to stick to those at all. Think of it more conversational and whatever you’re willing and interested in talking about, we can center on that. But maybe first, just so that we have it on tape, if you could introduce yourself and your overall research.
Eva:
So my name is Eva Diaz. I’ve been teaching at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn since 2009, and in 2015 I published a book called The Experimenters Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, which in part focused on Buckminster Fuller. The overarching idea of the book was to think about models of pedagogy and models of art practice that came out of the college looking at important teachers there. So Josef Albers, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller ended up being the figures that I focused on. I did feel like there was a great deal of struggle that I was having with Fuller. With Buckminster Fuller ideas. Fuller created a kind of role for himself of like a soothsayer of technology, I guess would be one way to put it in a kind of post scarcity idea of the fifties and sixties of just if we we have the resources to feed, clothe and house everyone, we just have to allocate them efficiently. So those kinds of issues, not that they are meddlesome in and of themselves, but somehow the way fuller articulate them became chafing and going into his archives and spending so much time with him as a figure. And yet this enthusiasm on the part of contemporary artists often had to do with with the, I guess, the positive side of that idea of a kind of resource management possibility and the equitable distribution of resources, in addition to an aspect of his work, which is to kind of keep failing until you stop failing.
Christina:
I appreciated hearing all of that so much because I think this is one thing we’ve all sort of been talking about as we think through fuller of, yeah, like this discomfort that I know I’ve always had and wholeheartedly engaging with all of it, his ideas and trying to get a sense of like where they’re coming from, from his him as an individual or considering him as an individual. I think most artists, most creators, certainly those engaged in architecture like have a sense of fuller somehow and his work and also this idea of how like little snips and pieces of his work and his thinking and ideas have continued on. And maybe there’s enough about that to just pull up on those ideas and then go with it into the future without having to fully engage with the entirety of his ideas where he’s coming from. And so I’m curious to hear because I know that you’ve also written and spoken about others at the same time or around the same time as Fuller, who have been engaging with similar ideas, but quite differently. So thinking about like Afrofuturism and black futurism. And if you could talk a little bit about other things that are aligned with Fuller’s ideas that were happening at the same time that might not have been on his radar, necessarily.
Eva:
Yeah, that’s one aspect of maybe I should just back up and think about these different terrestrial and extraterrestrial Fullers that I’ve been kind of charting or interested in through art practices. Really Fuller had these kind of amazing models just visually that people have sort of worked with, and they were almost all sort of prototype or at least in his arc of what he intended the scope of them to be, let’s say, the geodesic dome. There was never really a universalized of that form, but it was a really important form of. The 20th century and into the 21st century, it was in a way, a kind of democratic form. People felt that they had purchased on it to define some vision of modernity and that they could perhaps construct it themselves and also feel like they were participating in a new aesthetic of of of their present or developing a present in this in this aesthetic of the dome. And then I thought about the way in which Fuller’s very phrasing of Spaceship Earth. But so internally contradictory, and that figures that now we call Afro futurist like Sun Ra or Harlem. George Clinton in that same period were developing ways of thinking about Earth very differently. And what let’s say, like Spaceship Earth as a concept is a proposal of a kind of technological ecosystem that we sort of made this spaceship and we can junk it when we’re done finding artificial technologies somewhere else that we make or or terraform or whatever. And this kind of, I guess in a way, is sort of Janus faced to that techno utopia.
Utopianism in Afrofuturism is to be suspicious of the very notion of this kind of human authored ecology and to sit to sort of see and witness in the history of colonial projects of which spaceship earth as having surrogates and other planets. Spaceship Europa spaceship moon spaceship Mars would perhaps carry over the same contradictions of inequality on Earth. And so imagining, let’s say, the the vessel of travel, not the spaceship, but let’s say the slave ship, you know, like what are these forms of transportation that have led to colonialism? And how are we going to rethink them so that they know they’re honest about the histories of inequality and particularly around race, but also the gendered nature of like the hope for a colony of virgin territory to colonize or to impose oneself on has been rather masculinist vision of transposing one society into another and in space. There’s, of course, an outer space. There’s a sense that there’s this this virgin terrain, but it doesn’t really account for what is who gets to go. What are the terms of that of that flight? If we’re talking about ecological catastrophe or political instability being the motivation for many of these fantasies of leaving Earth? There’s still going to be the politics, I guess, of colonialism who cleans the toilets in space, who does, you know, the things that are not part of this kind of ideal society of like whole cloth invention?
Christina:
And also this you’ve talked about failure or mentioned failure a bit, but also I think this sense of thinking about mothership Earth. I sort of read it as a sense of refusal to engage while at the same time engaging sort of like picking up certain parts of a thing, but refusing to engage with the other parts. Could you talk a little bit more about Fuller’s process and relationship to failure? You mentioned it when speaking about him teaching and with Black Mountain College. I think with the geodesic domes. But I’m sort of curious about this idea of failure as it relates to thinking about futures as well.
Eva:
Yeah, I think that was for many. What the takeaway, I guess for for like a study of fuller or an engagement with Fuller is this proposition. The way I thought of it is that his model of experimentation was that you have an ability to workshop out something and then try it. And then if it fails, it’s really a kind of process in a kind of scientific or teleological vision of understanding the total universe. And he really did believe that technology was going to be the the way to attain this kind of pure and essential truth of of science. I mean, it’s not uncommon again in science to even think that I think failure kind of falls on that side of, let’s say, and the geodesic dome assembly in nineteen forty eight at Black Mountain College, where he attempted to build a geodesic dome out of Venetian blinds, slots, you know, like commercially available window treatment. And it failed. And he called it the supine dome. And I think that is something that forever more people refer to as the kind of like fuller in this kind of knowledge that it wouldn’t stand, but it proves something in the process of not standing, which is you can you can build something up until it doesn’t stand, and that shows you something about architecture, which is that most buildings are very overbuilt and that we could think about lightness as the component of how a new nomadic form of architecture is going to be possible. And it’s only possible if you kind of work in that zone of the experimental. Yes, I think that that is really that. I don’t know. Just the often a very inspiring thing for people about Fuller is that there was, I called it ad hoc ism, but it’s it’s really taking what’s available and then doing something with it. And then if it fails, it’s still a lesson.
Christina:
Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me thinking about failure and how fuller sort of engaged with it and like a hands on sense that artist would so clearly sort of glom onto that as strategy. And I’m also just stuck thinking about like, I wonder how fuller would engage with technology now that we sort of, you know, I think, well, you know, clearly there are so many still problems and and sort of blind spots to thinking about technology. But I think we have a better sense overall of some of the failures of at the center and the core of this approach of relying on technology to such a degree. Do you have any sense of how like do you think he would have sort of tried that strategy and failed and then sort of picked up a different strategy had he continued working another 20 years or so?
Eva:
Although I thought about maybe a related issue, which was I was like rereading some stuff about. You had mentioned this arc of space optimism and then sort of turning into like after the Cold War, there was this like, well, nobody needs to go to space now. The space race is over because it was actually a military adventure of military competition. And so the nineties and early two thousands was a huge investment in outer space, and one can go into all the sort of ends like the end of manned space manned space missions. I say that in quotes. But I think that in that in that moment of like the end of the space race, there was a kind of like inner space is what we’re into now, not outer space. And there was I think that was a quote from the economist like on a cover. And what I think they meant by inner space was like the internet, right? And that was like the beginning of Web 2.0 and this new kind of self publishing of identity that happens through technology and the constant construction and sort of managing of attention that is going on with with Silicon Valley, all California, mostly white men, you know, doing that and some of them turning into the people that are doing space. But that that moment, I think what 10 years ago that that that would have been proclaimed. It’s very much like kind of like a fuller moment or the threshold of like Fuller would, I don’t think have ever agreed with that. And I think now that we’re into this like outer space in, it’s almost like a reaction to that, that strange like technological introversion that happened through like these apps that we give our so much time to Instagram where you’re just sort of like scanning human behavior and just like in this kind of like relentless, like sort of maelstrom of like your attention being sucked away and then space presents like this prospect right of like a vision outside of that device, the iPhone or whatever of that focus and concentration on the inner.
And now I think we’re sort of back to the fuller space optimism with all of its burdens of what how that implies an occupation of other sites in the universe. But but I think like that might have been sidestepping what you’re saying, but I think in a way there was like maybe an ebbing of of the kind of Fullbright, you know, thing. And now we’re sort of back into this like an ascendancy, literally sort of recapturing a right of like bodies into like Interplanetary Life, which I think goes, it’s like, how? I mean, it’s obviously very different than the space optimism of the Sixties, when so much happened in so little time. You know, within like 10 years, you had, you know, people first entering, like leaving the envelope of the Earth, going to physically set foot on the moon, and then not that much progress happened. And now I think a lot of the rhetoric is about catching up like we lost all that time. We weren’t like doing all this. Now we’ve got to catch up now it’s all about Mars. And I think that sadly, in certain ways, like very much a fuller worldview. And I don’t think he would have been so into Instagram.
Christina:
Yeah, I mean, that’s where maybe some of this hesitancy and refusal to totally dive in and with fuller comes from too of this sense that, yeah, you probably would have been one of those guys. It seems not quite questioning like which bodies get to go to space, but excited about it anyway. Because you spoke about Black Mountain College, if you could talk just a little bit about like, describe it and how it ended because I think there’s a sense that quite a few of us have like, we know it, we’ve heard of it, but also don’t know much at all. Sure.
Eva:
The topic of a book. Yes, but that was founded in nineteen thirty three in western North Carolina, a small town of Black Mountain, which is 10 miles east of Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and its internal politics come out of a faculty governance controversy at a small Floridian college called Rollins College, where some of the faculty left and founded Black Mountain College. And by the sad historical coincidence of nineteen thirty three being the coming to power of the Nazis, many European and eminent Europeans were looking for. Germans were looking for a way out. And so at the college, there was this first largely German wave and then through the nineteen forties, there were as Albers began to direct the summer institutes of the college. Many important people at very early stages of their career came to Black Mountain to teach, often before they had taught anywhere else. And in fact, Fuller came to Black Mountain College in forty eight, and he was. It was really his first teaching commission. He was at that time, just beginning to teach it Institute of Design in Chicago. And someone like John Cage came to Black Mountain in forty eight that same summer for a summer institute, and he had never been asked to teach composition. He’d always been the accompanist for Merce Cunningham, who also was there then. So these this kind of aspect of a very experimental model of allowing people to, you know, to teach what they wanted, really? So for me, at least, thinking about Black Mountain College, one of the important takeaways is to understand how important the language of experimentation was there and to also understand with some of the other visitors to the college how important the language of Expressionism in that period in America was in visual art.
So people like de Kooning taught there. William de Kooning and his wife, Elaine de Kooning, were there. And Franz Kline taught there. Clement Greenberg briefly taught at Black Mountain. When I say taught, I mean, one thing about Black Mountain is that it’s like people teach everywhere, right? People are always like Disney. But there’s there is often like a real sense of the gelling, particularly in the summers of a kind of like. Maybe idealistic rusticated vision of being out in the country and just being able to do whatever you want. So the isolation did breed a certain interdisciplinary collaboration between figures that perhaps would not have known each other work together in a more cosmopolitan situation like New York, which is where many people were coming from. And when I wrote about the college, I wanted to be really to really focus on different models of experimentation. So someone like Josef Albers brought from the bathhouse a vision of what you call laboratory experimentation, in which there’s a careful testing of variables and interests and changing habits of perception. Those variables rely on the material appearance of form and really understanding those aspects.
So to really sort of bear down on the fact that everything in the world has form and that if you don’t know how it looks and how it’s made, you’re just going to mindlessly reproduce those elements. And so to really get into a testing procedure is to to work out like in a consistent and almost systematic way, like what the constitution of the world is and how you can make it remake it as an artist. Someone like John Cage was developing chance processes at Black Mountain College, and for him, experimentation was a situation in which outcomes are unknown. That that’s what an experiment does. It creates indeterminacy, ideally. So at first he begins with chance processes, which is, you know, doing something that results in a product that has been created by chance. He was unhappy with that because let’s say music for changes is nineteen fifty one composition he did and part of Black Mountain, you roll a dice or you cast yellow sticks or you flip a coin and you have the elements of the score. But that never changes. You have music for changes is performed created by chance, but performed in a determinate fashion. He became interested at Black Mountain, let’s say, through what is called the first happening with ways of imagining indeterminate performance in which many things, let’s say, happen simultaneously. And there isn’t a real scripting of everything. You allow freedom to the performance and that makes it indeterminate any time you perform that piece.
And so you just in that there’s a great deal of variability. So that idea of like outcomes unknown was his chance protocol. I called it. And then Fuller’s idea of the experiment was again, this testing in the interest of total knowledge, meaning total knowledge. But in that recognizing that failures are experimental procedure, that’s very productive because it allows you to to work in ad hoc ways to be able to, like, take into account the limited resources around you, let’s say, and to work with those as opposed to having an extremely expensive experiments that end up sort of like limiting possibilities by their narrow definition of what an outcome would be, for example. So that’s what I thought of as experimentation at Black Mountain. There’s many other things going on in Black Mountain, and this was at least for me. I focused on the implications of these models in visual art or how they became very inspiring to visual artists. Cage was not a visual artist, nor was fuller. But this, this way of thinking, had had an arc into the sixties in particular, where many, many practices drew upon Cajun aesthetics in a way, even though they’re not really. But they became ways of creating. I guess aesthetics in the broadest sense is like a sensory experience outside of expression, because Cage never wanted Albers and really didn’t care about like personal expression. Anyway, that’s might be TMI on Black Mountain College.
Christina:
No, that was great. It’s really great. And thanks for spending the time to
Angela:
Really, really appreciate the time. Yeah, yeah.
Christina:
Ok, we’ll be in touch.
Eva:
Take care. Yeah. Take care.
Christina:
Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this interview episode from remote stars and a big thanks to Eva Diaz for taking the time to meet with us from Remote Stars is a production of Carleton University in partnership with Western University, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.