“We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.”
Josef Albers, Bauhaus Fundaments (Leap Before You Look p. 33)
“[Josef Alber’s] thought of teaching art as analogous to teaching a language, hence the students had to begin with the building blocks of aesthetics; he called drawing a ‘graphic language’ that was both a ‘visual and manual act.’ “
“Alber’s color course… proved that the experience of color was ultimately fungible.”
For example: Cutting up and collating bits of paper to see how they change in relationship to each other.
Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 34)
“The relativity of our experience of color has philosophical and ethical implications, as well. If our experience of a piece of colored paper can change so demonstrably, then what side footing do we have when we appeal to ‘common-sense’ truths like color?”
“forms are subject to perception - what Albers calls experience.”
“The task of training students to see, "to open eyes," as Albers often said, was to facilitate their critical awareness of the made qualities of the world around them, to make them self-aware of their own experiences to better prepare them for the democratic work of making considered choices.”
“Rather Albers insisted on the relativity of color, the perceptual instability of human experience, and the need for a constant performance or testing of innumerable variables.”
Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look (p. 41)