Aaron Siskind, Chicago, Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation Multiple Exposure, 1962
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE points perpetually beyond itself. Ironically, as a school, it had no ongoing tradition that it was meant to transmit to succeeding generations, nor did it defer to the authority of historical forebears. It sought to create conditions that would enable students to focus on processes of decision making as the revelation of thinking. At Black Mountain one learned that composition—whether of a sculpture, a sonata, a poem, or even a building—was a series of choices made in response to materials, environment, and what was happening in any given moment. With any piece, form was the manifestation of sundry choices, made consciously and unconsciously, and the maker was responsible for them all. Underneath these aesthetic sensibilities was a sense of stakes. For those touched by the circumstances and ideas at Black Mountain, art had no more abiding lesson than that life itself was similarly a series of such choices that one had to make and be responsible for, again and again.
