Starting at zero

"Black Mountain College was the place where Buckminster Fuller demonstrated the geodesic dome and performed in Erik Satie's The Ruse of Medusa with Elaine de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, John Cage and the young Ray Johnson. It was where poet Charles Olson, painter Ben Shahn, composer Lou Harrison and dancer Katherine Litz explored the idea of the 'glyph', Cage created 'the first happening' with Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Cunningham Dance Company was formed. In its last years it was the home to the Black Mountain poets, Robert Creeley and Jonathan Williams among them." "Conceived as an experiment in interdisciplinary education by a misfit classical academic, who drew on the ideas of A. N. Whitehead and John Dewey of encouraging learning through experience, it attracted the most remarkable roll-call of teachers and students. The first of these, Josef and Anni Albers, who arrived in 1933, virtually as refugees from Nazi Germany, became magnets for Bauhaus colleagues and then for a string of distinguished and emerging artists, writers, thinkers and musicians as a distinctively American avant-garde emerged in the wake of the Second World War." "Here five authors explore the history, the ideas and the impact of one of the most unlikely yet remarkable episodes in the arts of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.