Brutalism

 

short documentary film

by Waling the World

Europe After the Rain: Dada and Surrealism

 

documentary film (1978)

Book Review

Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism

by Elaine S. Hochman

     At the end of World War I, during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, a new art movement was born. It was called Bauhaus and its founding member was Walter Gropius. Elaine S. Hochman, in her book Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, gives an historical account of this seminal avant-garde school. She says, however, little about the art they produced and instead orients the narrative to the internal and external political problems that they faced.

Long before the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder got coined to describe the aftereffects of combat, Walter Gropius felt traumatized after fighting for Germany in the trenches of World War I. He nearly got killed several times but he turned out to be one cat that never used up all his nine lives. After his tour of duty ended, he thought there must be more to life than war and set out to found a new art movement. He went to the conservative but cultured city of Weimar and took over an already-existing school and renamed it Bauhaus. The approach was less theoretical and more practical in its method of artists experimenting in a workshop setting to bring out their inner states of emotion. In the beginning, Expressionism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were the main inspirations. Though the school did not teach classes in architecture at first, Gropius believed that all art forms signify and culminate in that discipline since its public display made art available to all people. Bauhaus was all about the transformation of society by making art available to every ordinary man or woman on the street. The school attracted some prominent avant-garde artists like Luwig Kircher, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who all came to be employed as teachers.

The Weimar Republic was an experiment in liberal democracy and it got off to a turbulent start. The centrist political parties had a difficult time holding the government together while communists, anarchists, and right-wing extremists fought in the streets. The Bauhaus was publicly funded and government battles were fought over what to do with the socialist utopian art institute. Meanwhile, internal strife involving different factions of the faculty and the students made internal management a dilemma as well. Eventually the city of Weimar told them to leave. Hochman’s account of Weimar politics is not always clear; a conscientious reader might want to look up some information about what was going on at that time in Germany to make the book a little less muddled.

In another region of Germany, the city of Dessau invited Gropius to open Bauhaus there. Dessau was a run-down place with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty. The mayor wanted to rebuild it and thought an up-and-coming art school would attract the attention and funding that they desired. It was there that architecture became a prominent part of the Bauhaus curriculum. The school came up with a plan to design student and worker dormitories that were cheap, easy to assemble, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. But the apartments turned out to be awkwardly designed spaces for living and the local population did not take kindly to the special treatment they thought the Bauhaus associates were getting. The political and managerial strife started up again and Walter Gropius was forced to step down. When the Nazis came to power, they closed the school permanently.

Bauhaus artists found a new life in America. They had a major influence in design and architecture. Ironically, their socialist ideals of making mass produced household goods and cheap, functional architecture found fertile ground in the capitalist system of the U.S.A. Anytime you see the smooth cladding of a skyscraper, a factory manufactured suburban house, or the products in a branch of IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, you are witnessing the long term effects of Bauhaus.

Hochman’s book gives a detailed account of what went on with Bauhaus. It is primarily a book about politics and educational management. Unfortunately, there is very little she says about any of the art that Bauhaus produced. For such an influential art movement, she does not give it adequate attention, and actually almost no description, of what the art of Bauhaus looked like. She provides no analysis of the architectural style they became famous for nor does she say much about the household consumer goods they also brought into the marketplace. Her thesis is that the activities of Bauhaus reflect the events and attitudes of the Weimar Republic but that should be revised since the book is more about how Bauhaus was thrown back and forth, sometimes violently, by the different political teams of that era without any regard for the practices, intentions, or theories of the Bauhaus artists themselves.

For what it is, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism gives a detailed account of what happened with this avant-garde art movement, even if it is a dry read. It is, however, not a good introductory text. With so little attention given to their art, it is something that will appeal more to people who are familiar with Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic already.

Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. Fromm International, New York: 1997.

 

Bauhaus: The Face Of the 20th Century

documentary film (1994)

 

Book Review

Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis

by Stewart Home

     The 20^th century saw a proliferation of modernist avant-garde art movements. By the 1960s, the numbers and intensity of these schools had begun to dwindle and the so-called postmodernist era had arrived. The artist and author Stewart Home got involved with a group called the Neoists in the 1980s as well as some other obscure movements and projects. In Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis some theories and activities of these groups get documented and explained.

     The core principles of avant-garde art movements are twofold: one is to critique the institution of art and the other is to radically sweep away all existing institutional forms of oppression for the complete and absolute liberation of human society. The avant-garde embraces both aesthetics and politics. Home identifies one thread of the avant-garde movements that includes Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. He does not go into great detail about these movements because, as any art student would know, they have been sufficiently explained in plenty of other places. These schools are linked to the later movements of the Situationist International and Fluxus, of which Home has more to say about since they influenced Neoism more directly.

     The avant-garde movements proved to be problematic, mainly because they quickly got assimilated into the culture of the society they wished to destroy. Their works became commodities and now a billionaire can easily purchase one of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades for a hefty price. Their rebellion became institutionalized and their critiques of capitalism became celebrated by postmodernist art critic buffoons who love using six-syllable words without knowing what they mean. The SI and Fluxus tried to work around this by de-emphasizing traditional art objects and orienting art more towards performance, happenings, and pranks.

     This is where Neoism and the loose networks of art groups mentioned in this book come in. Stewart Home embraces aspects of SI and Fluxus while deriding them at the same time. He rightfully claims that the these movements never developed a mature or coherent theory while the art institution embraced them without really understanding what they were about. So Neoist happenings, the Festival of Plagiarism, the K Foundation, and the Art Strike of 1990-1993 were set up to critique and offend the art snobs and curators who collect art the way big game hunters collect trophies mounted and manicured by taxidermists without any understand of the animals they kill.

     These anti-art movements run some serious risks though. They could be so obscure and opaque that the society they seek to fight against just ignores them. As long as they don’t make too much noise when people are trying to sleep, they might just be left to themselves. No art movement or underground scene has ever overthrown the established order and probably never will. These cells of artists can also become just as elitist and insular as the art establishment and possibly even more so.

Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis is a book of essays, articles, letters, and interviews. Along with the commentaries on the art movements Home is associated with, he also explains the literary theory of his fiction and goes into some details regarding occultism and secret societies. The latter topic could do with more explanation since he seems to be making a valid point; Home identifies certain “currents” running through society and these currents include avant-garde art movements, underground counter cultures, urban guerrilla movements, and secret societies. His claim is that these are motivated by similar social, psychological, and political impulses. It is something I have given a lot of thought to over the years and would like to hear more from other like-minded authors. There is some redundancy in the ideas presented in this book but that is not really a flaw in the writing since this is a collection of short pieces written for various sources and contexts, not a tome written from beginning to end. The ideas are provocative and serve the purpose of chipping away at the edges of whatever mental cell you have built to imprison your own mind in.

     Stewart Home’s writing almost dares you to offer an interpretation of it. You might get the impression that whatever conclusions you draw, he will tell you they are wrong. Maybe that is for your own good. 

Home, Stewart. Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis. AK Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco, 1995.