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 September 8: Gesamtkunstwerk

Chelsea and Hudson river view from the rooftop of the Maxwell Davidson Gallery.

Thursday marked the opening of the Chelsea fall season; a multitude of gallery presented major art exhibitions. The gesamtkunstwerk is present in the immersive installations, where the whole gallery space is involved, sometimes expanding then artwork from the walls to the ceiling and floor. The boundaries between object and space, gallery as container and contained art as objects are blurred. The art viewer becomes a participant in even a multi-sensorial experience, sometimes involving the sense of taste, like in After Pasteur, where samples are offered at a fermented milk-bar.

Ian Davenport at Paul Kasmin Gallery

George Grosz: Politics and Its Influence at David Nolan

NENDO at Friedman Benda

Sarah Cain "Dark Matter" at Galerie Lelong

Victor Vasarely "Analog" at Maxwell-Davidson

Lars Fisk "Mr. Softie" at Marlborough Gallery

The stairway at Paxis International Gallery

The Gesamtkunstwerk is highly present at Lehman Maupin, where the twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, known as OSGEMEOS. From the gallery statement the artists "transform multiple rooms into an immersive installation that combines drawing, painting, collage, mixed media sculpture, and kinetic and audio elements. These newest works represent an evolution of the style OSGEMEOS has honed over decades, while also returning to their early experimentation with diverse mediums, including new oil paintings. This exhibition will offer a heightened multi-sensory experience that embraces the power of human imagination and the vast possibilities in visually interpreting the subconscious." OSGEMEOS emerged in Brazil in the late 1980s as graffiti writers, influenced by  New York street art.

 

OSGEMEOS "Silence of the Music" at Lehman Maupin

Hamish Fulton "Walking Artist" exhibition is of a different nature, yet based on Gesamtkunstwerk. In Hamish Fulton's work, making art comes from experiential practice, walking—which is translated into objects displayed on the gallery walls. Such approach—ephemera from an experience becoming artwork—is almost opposite to the site specific installation, where a physical place is transformed into an experiential ephemeral environment.

Hamish Fulton "Walking Artist" at Josée Bienvenu Gallery

Sol LeWitt at Paula Cooper Gallery

Slav and Tatars "After Pasteur" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth

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 :-)