ASHEVILLE, NC.- By Ann Dunn (ann.dunn@mindspring.com) What can you get for $3 in downtown Asheville, North Carolina in July, at Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center? Or free throughout August at Western Carolina University’s Fine Art Museum, nestled in the beautiful Smoky Mountains? A cool break from the heat. A quiet space for centering and regrouping. A journey into the past and, through memory and imagination, into your own spirit. The priceless gift of contemplation of the human: in nature, in creativity, in action. In short, a remarkable exhibit.

My students at The University of North Carolina at Asheville enjoy heated discussions about whether or not photography is art (really). It’s too bad that the Hazel Larsen Archer show currently hanging at BMCMAC will come down before the Fall semester starts. Any one of Archer’s images would shut the mouths of a roomful of earnest young philosophers.

Hazel Larsen Archer (1921-2001) came to Black Mountain College as a student in 1944 and taught photography there from 1949-1953. She was a polio survivor and was confined to a wheelchair, from which quiet, still perspective she viewed and documented the thrillingly mundane details of life at the school.

In her series about Hands, Archer gives the illusion of using no external light. Instead, light seems, Rembrandt-like, to come from the skin itself. The lyrical shapes of working artists’ hands emerge glowing from dark backgrounds like the night-blooming cereus. The contrast between living tissue and inanimate textures (blouse, sweater, pants) proclaims the triumph of the temporal, the grace of the flesh. And there is a deeper story told, in gesture: anxiety, blessing, labor, anger, peace – the story of our eternal emotional rhythms.

The Quiet House series seems built on the yin and yang of Zen: light and dark, the angle and the curve, what is there and what is not there, what is man-made and what is given, the line and the blur, geometry and mystery. In one-half of a photograph, the black, hand-crafted iron door-handle and its black shadow together write a shape on the white door that could be a character from the Tao, while the other half of the image is shrouded in impermeable shade – the known and the unknown that each contain the other.

Archer delights in revealing the play of edges and shadows that is always present when the man-made meets nature. As with Monet’s haystacks and cathedrals, she tirelessly explores the shifting nuances of natural light on the same architectural subject. She puts together her “elements” (stone, wood, iron, trees, sky, filtered sunlight) to tell us exactly what time of day it is in that forest clearing. It is 10:00 in the morning, 1948 or 2006.

In the interior scenes we are keenly aware of the presence of absence. A door ajar releases an aura of white light into an empty room lined with empty chairs and containing an empty bench. The knowledge that this house was built for meditation, to honor the tragic accidental death of a faculty couple’s nine year-old child, increases the poignant and powerful sense of the “missing,” the “having trod here and moved on.”

But just as we are drawn into nothingness, we are overcome with plentitude. Every square centimeter of the image speaks loudly of human agency. Someone carefully architected each stone and board of that house. Someone just recently left the door open. Someone arranged the chairs against the wall. The bench’s function is to hold the human form. This room is not empty. It cannot be empty; we hear HER breathing behind the lens. And we are there, too, standing in this corner, on the other side of a not-so-great divide.

The Dance series jumps in and out of its frames and right off the walls of the gallery. The drama, psychology, idea and emotion packed into the other series all fall away in the presence of sheer motion. Here, as Merce Cunningham once said, “The subject of dance is dance itself.” Ballon (from which we get our word balloon) is a dance term that describes the quality of being airborne, of lightness and elevation. A ballone is a jump meaning “bounce like a ball.” These images bounce like balls. Betty Jennerjahn’s buoyant joy in movement makes us want to leap and turn and celebrate the bright outdoors with all our senses, barefoot in the grass. Katherine Litz’ fragile, gestural suspension between the architecture of the dining hall and the distant mountainside makes her seem like a Darwinian link in evolution’s long dance from beauty to beauty.

Above all there is Merce -- literally “above all.” The term ballon was made for Cunningham. He soars through frame after frame, uncontainable. Free as the clouds, his shadow a distant blob beneath him, set wildly against the straight lines of tree trunks – this is a young Bachus, drunk on life, love and dance. Here are two-dimensional representations of Cunningham’s definition of what dance gives us: “nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” We look at Archer’s Merce and see our own irrepressible youth, and realize it is still inside us, fueling our ability to experience joy, if we will let it.

Archer’s Portraits, as with her other work, operate on at least two levels. Perhaps the least important, but most fun, level is that of the peep show. For those “in the know,” or who want to be, these images are a record of the astonishing parade of honest, inquisitive, focused, creative minds and personalities who imagined then made Black Mountain College – the dreamers and the doers. We experience a palpable thrill at seeing this cast of characters, alive, young and eager again (forever). In these frames they still play their art game with all the vitality of idea-infused sinew. Here, they are who they are, clear -- not muddied or enlarged or diminished by fuzzy or political memory, or by the boring necessities of history.

But as Cunningham once wrote, “Clarity is the lowest form of poetry, and language, like all else in our lives, is always changing.” Even as we look, the images shift and we see something deeper. As light seemed to emerge from Archer’s hands, so character emerges from her faces. We are no longer simply spectators, witnesses of an historical panorama. We are drawn in and invited to participate.

Robert Rauschenberg’s seemingly irrepressible sense of humor makes us chuckle at the joke we will never hear. Ray Johnson’s spare, classical solitude makes us want to pare down our own cluttered lives. Framed and thinned by the back-lighting at the end of a hall, like a Giacometti, he reminds us of the “Nothing” toward which we all stride. M.C. Richards’ centered serenity challenges us to be still in the moment. Joseph Albers’ confident stature, with his lips parted as if about to speak an oracle, urges us to lean in, to hear (across sixty years) what he has to impart. Charles Olsen sounds out a vowel. John Cage thinks up some puckish, intellectual entertainment. Trudi Guermonprez contemplates the weavings of tree branches in the mountain breeze that stirs her hair. Buckminster Fuller snaps his legs together under a geometric model like Huck Finn catching a ball of yarn. Willem de Kooning directs his lazer gaze precisely at Archer’s lens and seems to dare us to hold legend and fact in the same idea, and to allow multi-colored women to emerge from the black and white of either-or. (More)