Cabinet Posts Audio From Launch of Eva Díaz's The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College

Lucky us: Thanks to Cabinet Magazine, if you missed the launch for The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (University of Chicago Press 2015), art historian Eva Díaz's new book on Black Mountain College, a terrific audio recording of the event is now up on their site. The recording includes a performance by musician Nick Hallett, a reading by poet Jeremy Sigler, and a conversation between Díaz and art historian Judith Rodenbeck about the book.

Listen up here.

More on the book from the press:

Díaz’s focus is on experimentation. [Josef] Albers, [John] Cage, and [Buckminster] Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. These methodologies represented incipient directions for postwar art practice, elements of which would be sampled, and often wholly adopted, by Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners. The resulting works, which interrelate art and life in a way that imbues these projects with crucial relevance, not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design—they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.

At top: Kenneth Snelson, R. Buckminster Fuller's Dome, Demonstration of Strength, Black Mountain College, 1949. More on the event, which took place on February 12, at Cabinet.