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Marion
von Osten, photo by Wolfgang Stahr |
Following the expanded overview at HKW, the
bauhaus imaginista exhibition will continue to travel:
Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern will showcase the HKW exhibition
of bauhaus imaginista from September 20, 2019 to January 12,
2020. Nottingham Contemporary will show bauhaus
imaginista: Still Undead with a focus on the UK from September
21, 2019 to January 5, 2020. In addition, the Goethe-Institut
and the curators commissioned the artist Luca Frei to create a
sculptural element in the form of a walkable space where
visitors can engage with the various levels of the project. The
mobile exhibition bauhaus imaginista: collected research will be
shown at more Goethe-Instituts and other partner institutions
worldwide from 2019 onwards.
bauhaus imaginista: Curators‘
introduction
Today, in the twenty-first century, the question remains of how
to reimagine the relationship between the arts and society. The
need to radicalize art education as part of this question ran
through the twentieth century, and when thinking about the
historical Bauhaus an example of radical pedagogy immediately
appears. Established in 1919 in Weimar as a new model of a
design school in the immediate aftermath of the First World War
and the German Revolution, the Bauhaus brought together a
younger generation of artists and architects who rejected the
nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian past and insisted
on the social relevance of the arts in an emerging democratic
society. Helping to shape this radical imagination for new
practices, new forms of learning, and new lifestyles was the
idea that the individual and the material environment should be
freed from all that was unnecessary and that the relationship
between the arts, craft, design, and the building should be
rethought. In the light of the Bauhaus school’s centenary, from
a contemporary perspective, how can we reimagine the production
of design and culture as a social project, and invent the kinds
of institutions and practices that we need today?
From its inception, the Bauhaus was internationally oriented;
students and teachers travelled from different parts of Europe
and Asia to become part of the school. As curators of the
bauhaus imaginista project we understand the global circulation
of Bauhaus ideas not in terms of impact, but rather through its
participation in international networks prior to 1933 and how
this was mirrored in the school’s afterlife. The school itself
was heterogeneous, and at different times took ideas from the
British Arts and Crafts movement, socialism and communism, as
well as spiritualist and esoteric concepts. It had links both to
revolutionary Soviet constructivism and the Netherlands-based De
Stijl, and its members participated in movements such as the
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).
Heterogeneity contributed to the success of the Bauhaus, but
this diversity also produced contradictions and conflict. There
were discrepancies in its utopianism; for example, despite steps
toward women’s emancipation, gender hierarchies and stereotypes
persisted at the Bauhaus, and tensions between art and design
education, between learning and commercial production, between
egalitarian aspirations and a largely up- per middle-class
clientele for its products went unresolved. Ultimately, this
complexity mitigates against any canonical reading of the
Bauhaus or attempt to reduce it to a single style, something
that has been reflected in our approach.
The vision of the Bauhaus according to Walter Gropius— the
school’s first director from 1919 to 1928—constituted a break
with classical and academic training, including its separation
between the fine and applied arts. This revision was equally
important in other parts of the world where decolonizing
education meant doing away with the arts/crafts hierarchies
often imposed through European colonization. Gropius believed
that experimental and artistic research could intervene in the
conditions of mass production. Hence, the Vorkurs (preliminary
course) introduced formal and mate rial studies, which fed into
the workshops and eventually through to collaborations with
industry. Under its second director, Hannes Meyer (1928–30), a
more collectivist and egalitarian, but also more
polytechnic-style approach to teaching took hold. This included
research on the exploration of the spatial, topographical, and
societal underpinning of architectural projects, which were also
infused by international ideas of new cooperative housing
developments and urban planning. In its final phase, the Bauhaus
took the form of an architecture school under the directorship
of the architect Mies van der Rohe (1930–33). The Bauhaus, in
all its different phases from 1919 to 1933, consistently
remained a school for practitioners led by practitioners based
in material experimentation, in contrast to the privileging of
the cognitive over practical and manual skills today.
The rise of the right wing forced the Bauhaus to move from
Weimar to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, be- fore the
National Socialists seized control and perpetrated their
violence through the state apparatus. The Bauhaus disbanded
autonomously in 1933 rather than provide the Nazis the
opportunity to close the school down. Consequently, as many
international students and masters fled Germany to settle in
different parts of the world, the ideas of the Bauhaus radiated
out to many different nations and cultures. It is this
transmission of knowledge that bauhaus imaginista follows: a
transfer via migration of students and teachers, but also via
the interpretation, appropriation, and imagination of diverse
Bauhaus ideas, in China, North Korea, India, the Soviet Union,
the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Nigeria, Morocco,
and Brazil.
The multiyear research (2016–19), which bauhaus imaginista was
able to gather in collaboration with international researchers
and cultural producers from Brazil, China, India, Japan, Morocco,
Nigeria, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom,
shows to what extent and under which local conditions new design
ideas and Bauhaus pedagogy were taken up and developed further.
In this way, the project opens up a perspective on a
transnational history of modernist art and design, marked by
wars and dictatorships, non-aligned movements, the Cold War, and
the processes of decolonization. bauhaus imaginista traces the
history of a twentieth-century transcultural exchange from the
perspective of international correspondence, relationships,
encounters, and resonances. Putting this approach into practice
in 2018, over the course of a year, bauhaus imaginista has
realized a series of transnational exhibitions and events with
international partners: Le Cube—Independent Art Room, Rabat; the
China Design Museum, Hangzhou; the Goethe-Institut and partners
in New York, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; the SESC Pompéia, São
Paulo; the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, and University of Lagos;
and the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, as well as the
Goethe-Instituts in each location. Important elements of the
results will be on show in Berlin and Bern in 2019.
The anniversary exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
(HKW) is divided into four chapters. Each chapter departs from a
focal object selected from Bauhaus masters and students. What
these four objects have in common is their propositional
character and their material ephemerality. They include a copy
of the Bauhaus Manifesto and first curriculum by Walter Gropius
of 1919, the drawing Teppich (Carpet) by Paul Klee of 1927, the
collage ein bauhaus-film by Marcel Breuer of 1926, and the
“Reflecting color-light plays” by Kurt Schwerdtfeger of 1922.
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Grant
Watson, photo by Martin Christopher Welker
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These four objects pose questions that are still vital today.
Yet, while our curatorial approach has been to decipher these
objects in relation to their own historical specificity, we have
also sought to make sense of what they suggest going for- ward
as a genealogy of forms, practices, and concepts. Each chapter
in the exhibition features historical and archival material, but
through our research we have tried not only to explore the
international reception of the Bauhaus in the twentieth century,
but also to understand the stakes of each chapter, its themes
and ideas, in terms of a contemporary politics. The question of
the contemporary emerges in particular through the artist
commissions, through discursive events, but also, we hope, in
the reflections and responses of the audience.
Chapter 1, Corresponding With, departs from the Bauhaus
Manifesto of 1919 to explore early twentieth-century art and
design pedagogy at the Bauhaus and at two other connected
schools: Kala Bhavan, established in 1919 by Rabindranath Tagore
in India, and Seikatsu Kōsei Kenkyūsho (Research Institute for
Life Design), established by Renshichirō Kawakita in Japan in
1931, from which later emerged the Shin Kenchiku Kōgei Gakuin
(School of New Architecture and Design). These three avantgarde
institutions participated in cosmopolitan networks and variously
navigated the tensions between internationalism, nationalism,
colonial rule, and the rise of fascism.
This chapter points toward the possibility of a radicalization
in art, design, and pedagogy to shape the semiotic values
embedded in material cultures and to remove this from a
reactionary ethos. By looking to historical examples, it becomes
possible to consider how institutions today, including schools
of art and design, can imagine new ways of living that respond
to patriarchal, xenophobic, and nationalist pressures.
Chapter 2, Learning From, takes Klee’s drawing of a North
African carpet to reflect on the modernist appropriation of art
outside the European mainstream. It includes the revival of
local knowledge of crafts in post-independence Morocco at the
École des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Casablanca, the
influence of pre-Columbian textiles on Bauhaus émigrés to the
Unites States, and figures such as architect Lina Bo Bardi, who
embraced the Bauhaus as well as popular culture to redefine
Brazilian modernism.
This chapter encourages audiences to consider the value of
“learning from” alongside questions concerning the asymmetrical
power relations present in cultural appropriation, the blind
spots in histories of collecting, as well as arguments for
reparation. It explores the powerful dislocation of
meaning which occurs when materials are decontextualized and how,
simultaneously, indigenous groups experience the destruction of
their culture and environment.
Chapter 3, Moving Away, takes the evolution of the chair in
Breuer’s collage to trace the transformation of Bauhaus design
and architecture in response to societal and geopolitical change.
From the modernization of the USSR, to post-independence India,
to campus projects in Nigeria, there is pressure for
architecture and design to adapt. Former Bauhaus directors
Hannes Meyer and Walter Gropius had to update their own concepts,
while courses at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG, School of
Design), Ulm, and at the National Institute of Design (NID) in
Ahmedabad both take up and leave behind certain Bauhaus ideas.
This chapter looks at how, during the twentieth century, the
modernist plan conceived between architects, designers, and the
state served both progressive and repressive ends. The
subsequent critique of planning and state intervention, along
with privatization and deregulation of the public do- main, has
weakened our collective response to the present crisis of social
and economic inequality and the growing threat of climate change.
This suggests the urgent need to regain the power to plan
collectively in the interests of the common good.
Chapter 4, Still Undead, was realized together with the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt. It tells the story of light- and sound
experiments; starting with Schwerdtfeger’s Reflektorische
Farblichtspiele (Reflecting color-light plays) at a Bauhaus
party in 1922. These kinds of experiments were developed further
subsequently by László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus (later
named the Institute of Design, IIT) in Chicago and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by his colleague
György Kepes. Such experiments transgressed the boundaries of
academia, entering the world of pop culture via electronic music
and strobe lighting. Through works from the United States, Great
Britain, and postwar West Germany up to the present, Still
Undead shows how countercultural productions can emerge from and
transgress institutional structures only to be re-assimilated.
This chapter addresses the overlapping territories of artistic
surplus, hedonism, micropolitics, selffashioning, and commerce.
It questions how in a neoliberal economy a re-politicization of
art, technology, and popular culture can be conceived. Can the
creative energy exemplified by art schools, and its surplus
beyond the curriculum, be oriented towards political ends,
including anti-fascism and the queering of norms, to avoid being
subsumed by commodity culture and the entertainment industry?
This international research project could be realized only by
working intensively for a number of years with academics and art
practitioners from Brazil, Chile, China, Germany, France, India,
Israel, Japan, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden,
the United Kingdom, and the United States. We are extremely
grateful to these researchers, designers, and artists for their
generosity and for sharing their ideas with us. We would also
like to acknowledge the support received from the committed
project teams in Berlin and international partner institutions,
as well as the initiators of this project: the Bauhaus
Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar, the Goethe- Institute, and the
Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Finally, as this is the first
large-scale project of its kind—one that leaves Western
historiography of the Bauhaus behind—we propose this exhibition
as a point of departure: as an experiment in a dialogical,
transdisciplinary, and transhistorical narrative comprising the
potential to germinate future study, reflection, and imagination.
Marion von Osten & Grant Watson