50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus 1968

SEGMENTS OF THE EXHIBITION

1. BETWEEN EXPERIMENT AND PROPAGANDA: THE EXHIBITION AND GRAPHIC DESIGN OF THE 1920S TO 1940S

Starting from the designer Herbert Bayer, who, over the course of his career, worked for clients with highly antithetical ideologies, this segment of the exhibition examines the developments of the exhibition and graphic design of the 1920s to 40s, which is situated between artistic experiment and political propaganda.

In the foreground here are educational and industrial exhibitions, which are placed in relation to one another on some 20 image and text panels. The panels include large-scale projects such as Die Wohnung (The Dwelling), within whose framework, the Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhof Estate) in Stuttgart was created in 1928; Nazi exhibitions such as Deutsches Volk—Deutsche Arbeit (German People—German Work; in Berlin in 1934) as well as the war propaganda exhibitions of the 1940s at MoMA in New York. Designers from the Bauhaus and its surroundings worked on nearly all these projects. The use of photographs—and in particular the possibility to produce gigantic enlargements of them—revolutionized the exhibition design of these years, just as did photomontage, typography, and an expanded concept of space. El Lissitzky and Herbert Bayer were substantially involved in this development. They discovered exhibitions as mass media for addressing the target audience on a visual level. The totalitarian powers at the time as well as their opponents appropriated this quality. At the same time the Nazis were interested in appearing contemporary and cosmopolitan in certain circles. A number of „Bauhäusler“ and other modern designers were in favor of this, so that the exhibition and graphic design in Germany partly carried modern traits also after Hitler’s takeover.

The examples from the field of typography and graphic design range from a playful handling of letters to the “domestication” (Patrick Rössler) of avant-garde form through advertising and propaganda.

One digression is dedicated to positions of photography and graphics of the 1920s and 1930s: on the one hand to photomontage and on the other to the experiments with space and perspectives.

Artists / Contributions:
Gerd Arntz, Willi Baumeister, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Die neue Linie, Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius, John Heartfield, Kurt Kranz, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Ernst Neufert, Hans Ferdinand und Hein Neuner, Lilly Reich, Josep Renau, Xanti Schawinsky, Joost Schmidt, Jan Tschichold and others

Digressions: New Artistic and Curatorial Productions
Daniel G. Andújar, Ines Doujak

2. RESTLESSNESS OF FORM: COUNTER-MODELS TO FUNCTIONALISM AND CAPITALIST CONSUMER SOCIETY

Functionalism

One of the starting points for this segment of the exhibition is the architect Ernst Neufert, who was one of the first students at the Bauhaus and is regarded as a cofounder of the rationalization of construction. His Bauentwurfslehre (Architects’ Data, 1936) and Bauordnungslehre (BOL, 1943) are still standard works on architecture that continue to be used around the world today. Starting in 1938, Neufert put his work at the service of the National Socialists and even became a member of Albert Speer’s staff. The first edition of the BOL, for which Speer wrote the foreword, has anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and racial ideology traits. At the center of Neufert’s theories is an anthropomorphic measuring system based on standardized human body proportions. With this system, he made a significant contribution to promoting the rationalization and standardization of residential construction on a technical level.

Starting in the 1920s, the Bauhaus, with architects such as Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Hilberseimer, CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture, 1928–59), and the architects associated with it such as Le Corbusier promoted the concept of Neues Bauen (New Building) and the functional city: This denotes the rationalization of all areas of life—work, housing, leisure time, and transport—and their spatial separation. And not least the primacy of the “car-friendly city.” Their, in part, quite different approaches to the functional city—which was ideally supposed to provide affordable and comfortable living space as well as accelerated mobility for all—were discussed controversially from the very beginning, such as on the part of Team Ten. This group of architects, of which, et al., Alison and Peter Smithson and Oskar Hansen were members, would usher in the end of CIAM.

Restlessness of Form

In the 1950s and 60s, artists also began to weigh in on the debate about the future of the city, in particular from the surroundings of the Situationist International. With the methods of dérive and psychogeography as well as with urban utopias such as Constant’s New Babylon, they tested counter-models to the functional city, alienated work, and consumer society. It is precisely here that this segment of the exhibition begins, which addresses the relationships and divergences between the surroundings of the Bauhaus and the diverse artistic groupings that formed after World War II. What they all have in common is a striving to create a new world for a new society. They could not have differed more with respect to the question of how this might be accomplished and how this new society was supposed to look.

The lines that are drawn here between the Bauhaus and the avant-gardes after 1945—up to May 68—are therefore fragile. The functionality, austerity, and economy of forms is juxtaposed with a certain “restlessness of form,” intoxication, and an economy of waste. This “restlessness of form” is represented by the Lettrists, who, in place of a typographic standard, wanted to liberate letters from the corset of language and simultaneously tested methods for appropriating public space in a creative, delirious way.

Genealogies

One line between the Bauhaus and the artistic movements of the 1950s and 60s leads to the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, established by Asger Jorn. With establishment of this movement in 1953, Jorn was reacting to the failure of his plans to collaborate on developing the HfG Ulm in the sense of a contemporary Bauhaus. For the exhibition, the Belgian artist Vincent edited the in part harsh exchange of letters between Jorn and the director of the HfG Ulm at the time, Max Bill.

The Situationist International, whose political agenda reached its zenith in May 68, ultimately developed from the Imaginist Bauhaus and other groupings in 1957. The HfG Ulm was closed in November 1968 and reestablished in a sense in Paris one year later in the form of the Institut de l’Environnement. The institute in Paris did not only invoke the Bauhaus and the “Ulm model,” but was also co-conceived by Claude Schnaidt, the last vice director of the HfG. Some of the graphic designers that were active during May 68 got to know one another at the Institut de l’Environnement, and, in 1970, established the collective Grapus, which combined graphic experiments and activism.

Dérive and Detournement

The groupings mentioned, which made reference to the Bauhaus on more or less winding paths, did not deviate from it only in questions regarding city and life. They utilized the techniques of design and mass media in a way contrary to their spirit so as to create a different and counter public sphere. Artists’ books such as Gabriel Pomerand’s Saint Ghetto des Prets (Saint Ghetto of the Loans, 1950) and the two publications jointly produced by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1959), therefore combine linguistic and design experiments of misappropriation (detournement) with the idea of urban rambling (dérive) in a direct way.

The idea of rambling is also found not least in Oskar Hansen’s concept of “open form” and Lucius Burkhardt’s methods of the science of strolling and/or promenadology.

Dynamic of the Metropolis

For this segment of the exhibition, Alexander Kluge specifically created a video triptych whose starting point is László Moholy-Nagy’s film project of 1921, Dynamiken der Grossstadt (Dynamic of the Metropolis). Moholy-Nagy’s project was never realized as a film, but does exist in the form of a graphic film manuscript, which was been published in, et al., the eighth Bauhaus book. The euphoria at the time about the dynamic of urban life has today given way to the rigorously calculated primacy of the accelerated circulation of goods.

Artists / Contributions:
Piotr Andrejew, Alice Constance Austin, Daniele Baroni, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Lucius Burckhardt, Constant, Le Corbusier, Guy-Ernest Debord, Silvia Federici, Shulamith Firestone, Francis Gabe, Grapus, Eileen Gray, Walter Gropius, Internationale situationniste, Isidore Isou, Jineolojî, Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, El Lissitzky, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marlene Moeschke Poelzig, László Moholy-Nagy, Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste, Ernst Neufert, Gabriel Pomerand, PROVO, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Alison und / and Peter Smithson, Gruppe SPUR, Superstudio, Alice B. Toklas and others

Digressions: New Artistic and Curatorial Productions
Yvonne P. Doderer, Alexander Kluge, Mona Mahall / Asli Serbest, Vincent Meessen

3. AVANT-GARDE, WAR, AND EXPANSION: THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The points of reference for this segment of the exhibition are once again Ernst Neufert, the concepts of Neues Bauen—called the “international Style” in the United States—as well as the politically motivated artistic groupings of the 1960s. The focus is therefore on interrelationships betweenm the modernist avant-garde and the military-industrial complex. It examines the connections between aerial photography and aerial warfare, between dwelling, the technologies of consumption and of the armed forces as well as fantasies of expansion in the project of Modernism. The post-futuristic fascination with air transport and the air force, as it was expressed in advertising, magazines, and big, international industrial exhibitions in the 1920s to 40s in particular, is characterized by the notion of technical precision and feasibility as well as by the supremacy of the godlike gaze—and the imminent danger from the air.

The concepts of Neues Bauen and the functional city that were developed in the 1920s were first realized on a broader scale after World War II. This was facilitated in Europe above all by the fact that cities in many places had been nearly completely destroyed by aerial warfare, which then provided the need and the open spaces necessary for rational construction. Conversely, the primacy of the car-friendly city also led to the complete razing of existing urban structures by civilian means. In the open urban spaces, what was therefore implemented was not only a spatial separation between different areas of life, but also between different classes and ethnicities. The military-industrial complex became the basis for the production of urban space. The war itself also provided the expertise for the infrastructures and logistics of a serial mass production of residential and living spaces.

Moreover, this exhibition segment addresses counter-positions to the mechanization, militarization and control of public space and life.

Artists / Contributions
Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Constant, Peter Cook, Le Corbusier, GuyErnest Debord, Drakabygget, Erich Glas, Grapus, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Internationale lettriste, Internationale situationniste, Asger Jorn, Mustapha Khayati, Les Groupes Medvedkin / Colette Magny, Ernst Neufert, Józef Robakowski, Joost Schmidt, Herman Sörgel, Raoul Vaneigem, Gil J Wolman and others

Digressions: New Artistic and Curatorial Productions
Yochai Avrahami, John Barker / László Vancsa, Mona Mahall / Asli Serbest

4. MULTIPLE MODERNISMS

The final segment of the exhibition sees itself as an outlook on possible narratives of multiple modernisms. These, so the approach, require a constant re-reading and reassessment of the relationships between tradition and progress, applied arts and art, popular and elite arts, and the world of the colonized and the colonizers. The section follows three focuses:

What is concerned on the one hand is the Moscow school VkhUTEMAS, which was active parallel to the Bauhaus and is considered from the perspective of the radical antimodernist Michail Lifschitz. Secondly, light is shed on the Indian design history between European colonialism and Indian nationalism, between the first World Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and the Festival of India exhibitions of the 1980s. Thirdly, the complex history of Pasiak, a Polish folk fabric, is told. With the architectural and technical utopia Atlantropa, developed between 1928 and 1952 by the architect Hermann Sörgel, on which Peter Behrens, among others, also worked, reference is also made to a European fantasy of expansion, in which Western megalomania, pacifist intentions, and a profoundly colonialist stance come together in an unparalleled way.

In the case of Albert Speer, such expansion fantasies still endured while he was incarcerated, during which time he created a garden in the prison, which he walked through every day. In the process, he counted the kilometers and imagined what cities in the world he might have been able to reach. In a way, with this project, the Situationist idea of dérive seems to have imploded.

Artists / Contributions:
Anagram Architects, Ambrish Arora, Aniket Bhagwat, Akshat Bhat, Abin Chaudhury, Le Corbusier, Atul Dodiya, Annapurna Garimella, Shimul Javeri Kadri, Jitish Kallat, Revathi Kamat, Romi Khosla Design Studio, Michail Lifschitz, Rahul Mehrotra, Madhav Raman, Vishwa Shroff, Hermann Sörgel, Studio Lotus, Tara Books

Digressions: New Artistic and Curatorial Productions
Yvonne P. Doderer, Dmitry Gutov / David Riff, Kaiwan Mehta, Mateusz Okonski