Q&A on the Bauhaus with Dr. Karen Koehler
Karen Koehler teaches courses in modern and contemporary architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, and design, with a special emphasis on connections between the built environment, art, critical theory, and socio-political history. Dr. Koehler is associate professor of architectural history at Hampshire and co-coordinator of the Five College Architectural Studies Project.
She was guest curator of Bauhaus Modern, an exhibition throughout fall 2008 in the Smith College Museum of Modern Art.
Q: How did you come to be involved in Bauhaus Modern? What was the inspiration for the exhibition?
A: I have been working on the Bauhaus forever. My first art history professor at the University of Illinois, Marcel Franciscono, is a Bauhaus scholar. I began to focus on the Bauhaus for my dissertation, completed at Princeton on a fellowship to Harvard. I am now working on a book for Phaidon Press on the Bauhaus.
The exhibition started when I was working with my students in the Cunningham Print Center at the Smith College Museum of Art with Aprile Gallant, the curator of prints, drawings, and photographs. We learned how deep the museum's holdings were in Bauhaus art, and it grew from there. Eventually we borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Met, the Neue Gallerie, Albers Foundation, Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum, and others. It was a blast to work in these collections, choosing the work. It was an honor to have people from all over come to the opening—even from Berlin. But most of all, the exhibition came from the collections of Merrill C. Berman, who gave us almost 50 percent of the work in the show. We are indebted to his generosity. He is the most outstanding collector of modern graphic design in the world and he worked with us each and every step of the way. His approach to art and politics mirrors that of the Bauhaus—and, I would venture to propose, that of Hampshire College: that you CAN change the world with art.
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A: There were three courses in fall semester connected to the exhibition:
I taught a first-year tutorial, Apocalypse and Utopia: German Art, Architecture, and Design, 1890-present. These students gave presentations right in the museum, in front of the works.
I also taught a seminar on the Bauhaus, with students working on advanced projects on individual Bauhaus artists.
Thom Long, Five College assistant professor of architectural studies, based at Hampshire, is taught Mutations in Expression—Unpacking Cross-Pollination in Design and Representation, a design course using the Bauhaus foundations courses and the categories of the exhibition as a take-off point.
Students in the Bauhaus seminar and in Mutations in Expression put together Bauhaus Redux, an exhibition at Hampshire of their own work as well as Bauhaus, Bauhaus-derived, and abstract German films. Selections were on a loop in the gallery and used in other creative ways. Some of the students worked with the college's Lemelson Center to interpret in a new way some of the more experimental "machines" of the Bauhaus—the Light Space Modulator by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Colored Light Machines by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. There will even be a catalogue of the student work.
Q: You suggest that Bauhaus is best understood not as "a style" but as "modes"; would you explain what you mean by that statement?
A: Today, the word Bauhaus is often used as a stylistic term, like Cubism or even Baroque. It is also used interchangeably with modernist architecture or industrial design. Arguably the most important school of art and architecture in the twentieth century, it is certainly true that the Bauhaus has had a remarkably pervasive influence on the look of the world that surrounds us today—from museum buildings in Manhattan to housing complexes in Israel to office towers in Beijing. Yet the Bauhaus was not and is not a "style." The Bauhaus was an institution—an art school—made up of teachers and students, drafting tables and costume parties, cafeterias and critiques. The story of the Bauhaus is the story of student schedules and faculty meetings, exhibitions, and evaluations. Perhaps most importantly, the work that they made there varied widely, from totally abstract paintings to straight photographs, to experimental images like photograms or collages, as well as furniture, fabrics, and graphic designs.
There were performances of many different kinds—theatrical performances as well as impromptu things that we might today refer to as "happenings." And of course there were their famous parties based on themes. At one of their last parties, the Metallische Fest (Metal Party), the entire building was outfitted in metal or metal-like surfaces. Faculty, students, and friends dressed in metallic outfits, and entered the building on a huge metal slide.
The point is that there was not a single kind of art or architecture made there. It was diverse and multifaceted from start to finish. To isolate one small kind of Bauhaus art and use it to represent the work of the entire school, over its entire period, is wrong. Moreover, it is in fact often the 1950s postwar work done in the United States by Bauhaus emigrés that is often used to define the school (think New York's Seagram Building). That is a corporate modernism that couldn't be further from their ideologies in Germany.
What was consistent throughout was a desire to: (1) incorporate the art made into an architectural context, to imagine an embedded viewer, to always think about the art in terms of its spatial surround, and (2) a belief in the power of art and design to change the world—and by this they meant politically, socially, economically, and spiritually. It was at its ideological core a utopian institution that nonetheless was ready to tackle the problems of design from a pragmatic point. It was a complicated equation!
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A: Scholars now accept that there was not a single type of normative "modernism" but rather, multiple directions in art and design that formally intersected with the issues, exploits, and contradictions of a rapidly changing world—that is, with modernity not as a style, but as a temporal and cultural phenomenon driven by the social, economic, and political transformations of the twentieth century. This approach was advanced by the MoMA 2000 series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Big Bang show at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2005, as well as others. These exhibitions arranged works not by typical stylistic, nationalistic, or chronological alignments, but rather by themes or topics that reached across different groups and mediums.
For the Smith exhibition, I decided to explore what would happen if this non-chronological methodology were applied to the Bauhaus. Rather than the usual method of displaying Bauhaus work (i.e., emphasizing a strictly chronological evolution of style—from the Expressionism of the Weimar years to the Constructivism of the Dessau period), as is most commonly done—or one based on medium and technique—that is, showing the work of the photographers by themselves, or the printmakers, or furniture makers, etc.), our exhibition emphasizes the varied content and stylistic diversity of Bauhaus art and design—not by offering a competing historical narrative, but by presenting works in a way that challenges the very notion of a singular, progressive Bauhaus story.
I began to think of Bauhaus art as modes: modes of expression, communication, and production, and modes of perception and critical reception.
The word mode, though, also implies a specific kind of temporality—an immediacy, a current-ness, and (in this) a sense of the avant-garde, and a sense of fashionableness—however edgy and non-normative.
I also wanted to try to find a way to show that this relationship between Bauhaus modes and European modernity was reciprocal—to indicate that Bauhaus art was engaged with the shifting modernities of the years between the wars, while at the same time the school clearly contributed to defining that visual culture. So, we came up with categories in order to enhance this.
Our goal was to look at the Bauhaus in terms of audience. The Bauhaus targeted both the individual collector, but also an unidentified mass audience, made up of entirely different beings: users of non-unique objects and of a public visual culture—a modern man or woman in motion. And this condition is as true for the hand-printed exhibition postcards made in 1923 as it is for mass-produced advertisements made in 1930. They were part of the explosion of graphic design and the proliferation of mass imagery, as well as mass-produced goods.
Info: Bauhaus Modern featured over 100 posters, examples of graphic design, ephemera, prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, architectural drawings and models, and furnishings by a wide variety of artists associated with the experimental German art school, the Bauhaus (1919-1933). Exhibition site
Artwork Accreditations (top to bottom):
1. Werner David Feist. German, 1909-1998. Städtische Bäder (Municipal pools).
1928. Offset lithograph on paper. Collection Merrill C. Berman.
2. Fritz Schleifer. German, 1903-1977. Building Design. c.1923-1925.
Ink, watercolor, gouache. Collection Merrill C. Berman.
3. Werner Rhode. German, 1906-1990. Pit & Renata (Ellen Auerbach and
Renata Bracksieck). c.1933. Gelatin silver print. The Daniel Cowin Collection,
courtesy of Joyce Berger Cowin, Smith class of 1951Werner Rhode. German,
1906-1990.