By the Bauhaus
I first went to the boring small Bauhaus Archiv and they pointed out to me that the largest Bauhaus exhibition in this history of the world was happening across town. So I cycled over to this monstrosity and was overwhelmed with knowledge. The Bauhaus was pretty fucking cool. It had people who were anti-hipsters, they were workers. WORK!
- The Bauhaus were radically modern. “What has come before us is wrong or it is no longer relevant for your times.” What they wanted was art to be inclusive of all and in tune with the mechanisms of technology. They took their visual and conceptual cues from machines. They were robots.
- You can never really have a girl that you’ve chased. You wouldn’t let yourself.
- Why did they want to merge art under he umbrella of architecture? They didn’t Gropius did architecture but the actual workshops were incredibly diverse. The overriding aesthetic was in response to the times and that is what allowed the assimilation of others, some great artists like Klee and Kandinsky, into the Bauhaus.
- Paper structures were amazing made in the workshops by students. Met a cute girl.
- Painting sculptures is a sweet idea.
- There was an interesting but obvious progression to the Bauhaus over the 14 years. First they played with the concepts in paintings and abstract art, although there was always Gropius with his architecture, and then they slowly moved to more structured studies of colours and so on. Then they developed a sophistication in this kind of machine or technological art (incl. product design, furniture, and architecture, textiles etc.)
- Oscar Schlemmer’s work was really nice. The heads fitting together. Would like to see more of his work. Beautifully proportioned, subtle work. The Bauhaus were rarely subtle until later.
- The central argument is a reduction of life into shapes and planes and colours. Structural.
- It’s amazing the extant to which a style can be reflected with consistency amongst many mediums. The theory and instruction must have been very strong. It is so rare for this to happen it seems. Some great textiles came out from the Bauhaus and this is not a surprise. It must have been a great atmosphere to be in as an artist.
- J told me that an artist usually worked with a craftsman who would help build the concept. She thought that was great, but I thought that you couldn’t really create something if you didn’t the whole thing and that’s why a lot of the Bauhaus furniture (excepting van der Rohe’s) was so uncomfortable and shit qua furniture. She conceded and said I was right. I made her say I was right four times. Real artists make terrible pick up artists, they don’t care about the audience enough.
- Typography, probably because of its natural structure was loved by the Bauhaus. They also wrote manifestos all the time.
- The Bauhaus were great marketers.
- Why were gradations so important to them? Because they were making things with discrete blocks and planes and colours had to go well next to each other. Problem meet solution.
- Awesome rugs by Roghe and someone else’s wife. The wives lived with the artists and were often artists themselves. Rather like a commune.
- There is an ignoring of, or maybe even an antagonism to the organic. Some of the architecture is inhabitable. The originial Bauhaus designs have been rejected as unusable. Even when they do trees in their models, the trees look like machines. But Ben made a good point that the showed the way, and didn’t have to consider fitness for purpose so much. That came later. The softening, the humanisation always comes later. Had a conversation with J where I nearly convinced here that the Barcelona Pavilion house was crap because if she came to visit it would be awkward because of the design. She was nearly convinced.
- The height of the ridiculous interdisciplinary-ness of the Bauhaus was reached in Bauhaus theatre. Or was it genius? There was something about the humans moving like machines that was insightful.
- Real sophistication develops in aesthetics and process and materials near the end.
- Why did it really end? Was it just politics? The Philistines?
- Hannes Mayer started the move for the architecture to get away from the purely structured buildings to becoming more organic, more thoughtful of how they were lived in.
Posted 2 years ago
