Bauhaus Centennial

The Bauhaus logo

"The ultimate goal of all art is the building!" is the first sentence of the Bauhaus manifesto. 

The German school Bauhaus (literally translated as "building house" () was founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius in April 1919 and was operational until 1933. The main philosophy was about design as an interdisciplinary practice involving architecture, painting, sculpture, performing arts, graphic, industrial and interior design and typography. The notion of Gesamtwerk ("total work") and Gesamtkunstwerk("'total' work of art") was informing any methodology and product.

The manifesto continues with enthusiastic appreciation of craftsmanship 

So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come. 

Architects, sculptors, painters—we all must return to craftsmanship! For there is no such thing as “art by profession”. There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan. The artist is an exalted artisan. Merciful heaven, in rare moments of illumination beyond man’s will, may allow art to blossom from the work of his hand, but the foundations of proficiency are indispensable to every artist. This is the original source of creative design. 

 The Bauhaus has provided great inspiration for my interdisciplinary practice Space Ink integrating art, architecture and design at different scales, merging physical products with computing methodologies. My work with performance art also finds references in Oskar Schlemmer, another great Bauhaus master.

Google Doodle also celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement.

Eva Mueller's Bauhaus Tattoo 

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vernissages |NYC, Gesamtkunstwerk on January 30

Gesamtkunstwerk has become increasingly widespread in the past two decades with conceptual and installation art. Yet it was a quite unique experience to encounter three completely unrelated exhibitions, yet with a similar intent to bring work from several media and processes, sometimes with a multidisciplinary approach.

Generating sound, found objects and industrial material in the 1970 "Rainforest" by David Tudor
recreated by Composer Inside Electronics at Broadway 1602

Light and motion in László Moholy-Nagy photographs and camera in Production/Reproduction at Andrea Rosen

Pablo Helguera "Strange Oasis" at Kent Fine Arts

Art Events | Sun Xun "Time Vivarium" and Gesamtkunstwerk?

What we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk, alongside and separated from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtwerk (life) which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.  

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 

The Bauhaus notion of Gesamtwerk is become pervasive in the current art production which is often, in some instances, interwoven with everyday life -my own practice is an example.

A glorified commercial -yet beautiful- example is Sun Xun's oeuvre, currently on view at Sean Kelly spanning film, installations, artist books, prints. 

Even literal trash byproduct of art production becomes a commercially viable merchandise :-)

Research Excerpts | Humanistic Geometry: Oskar Schlemmer "Man"

Oskar Schlemmer's study of proportions, after Durer

I continue in my research journey to the exploration of geometric narratives of human body and movement; the many encounters with the Bauhaus masters are most inspirational and make me wonder what they would have done with contemporary technologies. The "master" du jour is again Oskar Schlemmer: I am plunging into "Man" an edited collection of his teaching notes. Already in the introduction, by Heimo Kuchling, the intent is clearly stated:

In Goethe's vision [Johann Wolfgang Goethe,Wilhelm Meister's Travels, Book 2, 'The Man Aged Fifty Years'], quoted by Oskar Schlemmer in the notes to his 'Course on man', the Bauhaus master saw the ideal of the Bauhaus: it should be a centre of work and teaching with a conscious goal, co-ordinating the arts and examining the laws of form, a refuge for artistic reflection, in which new ideas would be born and tested and in which they could mature. Harmonious collaboration between teachers and pupils was to create a total work of art combining architecture, painting, and sculpture, which was to set the path for the future and clarify the confusion of period styles. 

Kuchling, Heimo, ed. Oskar Schlemmer: Man: Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus. MIT Press, 1971. 

The human body is often analysed and decomposed in a series of parametric segments, with end points corresponding to anatomical joints. It becomes a dynamic diagram, almost an energy chart as shown in several drawings where the human figure is decomposed in a series of circles

Oskar Schlemmer's diagram of figures

In the transition to the moving body Schlemmer simplifies the process even further: the body becomes a series of vectors, lines and arrow representing physical forces:

 

A moving figure according to Oskar Schlemmer

Images from:

Kuchling, Heimo, ed. Oskar Schlemmer: Man: Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus. MIT Press, 1971.

Research Excerpts | The Bauhaus Gesamtkunstwerk

In the past week my research was inspired by the Bauhaus notion of gesamtkunstwerk  (total work) which emerged from my subconscious or art and architecture history; I was surprised that this inspiring and relevant precedent did not appear at earlier stage.  The Bauhaus had an organic synergetic approach to design and the gesamtkunstwerk included architecture, visual and performing arts, as well as crafts. The concept is best expressed in Walter Gropius' introduction to Die Bühne im Bauhaus (The Theatre of the Bauhaus) by Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Farkas Molnár: 

...the Bauhaus embraced the whole range of visual arts: architecture, planning, painting, sculpture, industrial design, and stage work. The aim of the Bauhaus was to find a new and power- ful working correlation of all the processes of artistic creation to culminate finally in a new cultural equilibrium of our visual environment. This could not be achieved by individual withdrawal into an ivory tower. Teachers and students as a working community had to become vital participants of the modern world, seeking a new synthesis of art and modern technology. Based on the study of the biological facts of human perception, the phenomena of form and space were investigated in a spirit of unbiased curiosity, to arrive at objective means with which to relate individual creative effort to a common background.  

I find a lot of overlapping between the focus of my research on the geometry of movement and Oskar Schlemmer's studies on the geometric definition of human body and space, often expressed in the design of costumes. I found also this description very relevant to my research (p. 91)

...man remains perforce our essential element. And of course he will remain so as long as the stage exists. In contradistinction to the rationalistically determined world of space, form, and color, man is the vessel of the subconscious, the unmediated experi- ence, and the transcendental. He is the organism of flesh and blood, con- ditioned by measure and by time. And he is the herald, indeed he is the creator, of possibly the most important element of theater: SOUND, WORD, LANGUAGE. 

Costumes are body extensions to space and create forms which integrate both. The 1922  "Triadisches Ballett" is probably the most inspiring work: geometry informs both the human body and pattern of movement:

Text  excerpts and images from: 

Schlemmer, Oskar, L. Moholy-Nagy, and F. Molnar. "The Theatre of the Bauhaus (Middletown, Conn." (1961).