ABSTRACT
As a teacher, Josef Albers encouraged a relational approach to material that prioritized active engagement with matter through comparative and counterintuitive applications: he stressed “observing eyes, flexible minds, and skilled hands.”2 Such activity starkly contrasts with conceptions that one’s medium possesses inherent qualities, the properties of which it is the task of the artist to elucidate. The sensory-integrated practices of Bauhaus preliminary instruction, although still essential to the training of artists and designers, were denuded of value in their American context due in part to the specialized tendencies that came to dominate American art criticism following World War II. The prioritization of medium specificity common in Greenbergian art criticism posited an autonomous art object incongruent with attitudes about the functioning of creative media as propagated by Albers. Albers advanced a mode of material inquiry in his practice that viewed matter as potential; significantly, he encouraged the creation of objects that functioned pedagogically insofar as their materiality made connections beyond the work itself. As had been the case at the
Bauhaus, Albers gave precedence to process. This was cultivated through the methods and practices of preliminary instruction, to which Albers had been exposed as a student and which he was later responsible for teaching at the Bauhaus, and which he introduced at several institutions in the United States, including Black Mountain College and Yale University.3
