Okwui Enwezor | German Modernism

bauhaus imaginista

by Jean Marie Carey | 13 Oct 2019 | Art History, German Expressionism / Modernism, Michelangelost©, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

Luca Frei, Model for a Pedagogical Vehicle, 2017. Photo: Karl Isakson.

bauhaus imaginista is, or was since it’s taken a while to get this post together, an international exhibition project examining the global influence of the Bauhaus on the centennial of the founding of the school in Weimar, Germany. bauhaus imaginista’s main event, Bauhaus Week Berlin, ran 30 August through 8 September 2019, but other showcases and one-off events go through the end of the year. Headquartered at the Festival Center at Ernst-Reuter-Platz (Mittelinsel) in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the art festival includes tours of the Mies van der Rohe Haus, demonstrations of Josef Albers’ glassworks techniques, exhibits of Bauhaus printing and typography, weaving and ceramics workshops, tours of Bauhaus architecture, and re-created shop windows. Here I am condensing a review of the very comprehensive catalogue of the global exhibition, which ran in full at Museum Books, and of the exhibition, featured in ArteFuse. For a complete schedule of events, see https://www.bauhaus100.berlin/

Coming soon some very interesting provenance news – a triple header!

Satellites of bahaus imaginistaare ongoing around Germany. In Leipzig an exhibition showcasing the academy’s material culture focus is open through 29 September 2019 at the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst, with well-known manufactured items made in Saxony’s factories face contemporary examples of applied design and craft. The exhibition History, Present and Future of a City presented by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart through 20 October 2019 and is a collection of reflections by contemporary artists on the interaction of the Bauhaus with international influences.

The series of Bauhaus centennial symposiums, classes, performances, and exhibits began in March 2018 with an academic conference at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and will conclude at Nottingham Contemporary in England with the show Still Undead: Pop Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus, opening 21 September 2019 and running until 5 January 2020; bauhaus-imaginista.org is the online journal of the project.

Nandalal Bose, Anleitung zur Wandmalerei, 1929/30. Fresco on cement wall, 80 x 100 cm.Kala Bhavana, India.

On the centennial of the founding of the Bauhaus school in Weimar, an ambitious exhibition project, touring 11 countries, is revisiting – and in some cases challenging and sideswiping – the pervasive influence of the academy. Curated and directed by Marion von Osten of Berlin and London-based Grant Watson, the individual parcels of the bauhaus imaginistaare complemented by a program of cross-hemispheric satellite events, workshops, and panels. The confluence with the current critique-of-Modernism zeitgeistis fortuitous for the project, because otherwise I am not sure that bauhaus imaginistaposes a provocative question that requires a jusqu’au bout du monde-style breakneck global investigation to answer: The existence of the Nike Air Max 270 React ‘Bauhaus’ trainer seems substantive proof that the Bauhaus is both certifiably reify-able and has a broad popular influence. Notably, with most German-side events taking place in Berlin, Weimar’s present-day incarnation as an out-of-the way village with only one coffee shop to greet disappointed architecture students making the pilgrimage is glossed over.

Paulo Tavares, DES-HABITAT, 2018.

However, 15 years after the dueling canonical polemics of Okwui Enwezor’s “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form” and George Baker’s “The Globalization of the False: A Response to Okwui Enwezor” appeared in The Biennial Reader(Berlin: Hatje-Cantz, 2004) the sprawling exhibition does provide evidence of an interesting art world mutation. While Enwezor was cautiously optimistic that the global art fair phenomenon would open a cultural sphere for the inclusion of artistic practices beyond the West, Baker argued that such festivals were no more than a consolidation of hegemonic bourgeois culture, and thus by definition Eurocentric and nationalistic.

Paul Klee, Teppich, 1927. Pencil on paper and cardboard, 23 x 30 cm. Hans Snoeck Collection, New York.Photo: Edward Watkins

What has happened in the intervening years has been both predictable, as in the rise of the value and popularity of contemporary Chinese art, and surprising. Despite its widespread panning and numerous financial peccadilloes, Kassel’s 2017 Documenta 14 didhave some startling entries, from the breakout durational performance of the women of iQhiya, a collective of University of Cape Town alumnae, to the seemingly incontrovertible solution of the 2006 murder of Halit Yozgat in the installation by The Society of Friends of Halit. The cheekily named Oslo “Biennial” began this summer and runs through 2024…to be followed by the next Oslo Biennial in 2025.

Toni Maraini teaches an art history class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, 1965.Photo by Mohammed Melehi,courtesy of Toni Maraini.

Hannes Meyer, Skizze in einem Dummy für ein Bauhausbuch, c. 1950.GTA Archiv / ETH Zürich, © Hannes Meyer.

bauhaus imaginista’s distinction is that it is likely that not one single person has seen every instantiation of the concept show. Thus a catalogue for the project edited by von Osten and Watson is valuable as an artefact for the curious and as an interesting volume in its own right (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019). The four thematic movements of the project correspond with the four sections of the catalogue, each based upon one specific Bauhaus object: The Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919; a collage by Marcel Breuer; a drawing of a patterned carpet by Paul Klee; and a light game by Kurt Schwerdtfeger. Theoretically these form the framework for bauhaus imaginista, within which specific themes, historical genealogies, and contemporary debates were to be developed. Fortunately, the catalogue content itself is rich in images of concurrent and archival works, and the individual essays are relatively short and didactic.

Doreen Mende, Hamhung’s two Orphans, 2018. Photo: Silke Briel; © Doreen Mende, Silke Briel.

Marcel Breuer, ein bauhaus-film. fünf jahre lang, 1926. From: Bauhaus, vol. 1, 1926, Offset print, 42 x 29.7 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

The Bauhaus was in contact with institutions in many countries, where it encountered similar movements that had arisen independently of it, and that lent the Bauhaus itself strong stimuli. The bauhaus imaginistacuratorial mission of commenting on this simultaneity was expressed in newly commissioned works by Kader Attia, Luca Frei, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, the Otolith Group, Alice Creischer, Doreen Mende, Adrian Rifkin, and Zvi Efrat.During the remainder of the exhibition, taking place in Germany with one more satellite show Nottingham, local art and design movements will be paired with artefacts of the historical avant-garde to memorialize the Bauhaus as well as with processes of decolonization

Takehiko Mizutani, Studie zum Simultankontrast (Unterricht Josef Albers), 1927.Gouache on cardboard; 80.4 x 55 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Ceramics by Marguerite Wildenhain at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, USA, 2016.Photo: Grant Watso

Lorna Simpson @ Haus der Kunst

by Jean Marie Carey | 2 Dec 2013 | Art History

Lorna Simpson @ Haus der Kunst

One of the aspects of Lorna Simpson’s work I have always admired is the technical quality of her photographs. At her recent press conference at Haus der Kunst she confirmed what you’d expect from examining the gelatin prints in particular but really, upon close in-person inspection, her oeuvre: that Simpson develops, prints, mounts and even frames most of her photos by herself in a darkroom/studio in New York City.

This sort of mid-career retrospective represents more than 30 years of of photography, film, video, and drawing. Known (as in these photos have entered the canon) for her mid-1980s for her language driven large-scale works combining photographs and text, Simpson’s effective enigmas are clearly coded but spacious enough to still wonder about. One of the most interesting works on view in München are a series from the 1990s of large multi-panel photographs printed on felt, accompanied by text panels describing their locations and the intimate encounters that are described but only hinted at visually. At the edge of the Englischer Garten where something exactly as described is probably happening right now only not as well concealed, the effect was actually humane and tender as opposed to amusing. The exhibit, which unfortunately overlaps with some other very strong show and with Haus der Kunst’s interactive festival also showcases Simpson’s film and video works, a group of watercolors, and an archive of found photographs from the 1950s, which Simpson has embellished by creating replicas of, posing herself to mimic the originals.

Serials

by Jean Marie Carey | 16 Jul 2013 | Art History

The Popular Artist Jeremy Deller…

Felix Burrichter, the editor and creative director of PIN–UP (“the only biannual magazine for architectural entertainment”) and the curator of the current “Paper Weight — Genre-defining Magazines 2000 to Now” at Haus der Kunst explained his work process for the exhibit quite simply. The present-day print artifacts were chosen to reflect a range of well-known and unknown individuals showcased in magazines defiantly having a post-print life “off the reading table.”

More slickly produced and (seemingly) precisely targeted than Nick Logan’s The Face, which arguably is the forerunner, at least in typographic/photographic style of many of these volumes, the periodicals examined in Paper Weight are densely specific.

Visually, the exhibit at Haus der Kunst depends barely at all on a background knowledge of what are essentially very glossy ‘zines. Architect Andreas Angelidakis was clever to blow up the magazine covers to slightly-smaller-than-billboard sizes but particularly to make the finishes completely matte and impermeably saturated; they recall story boards but make visitors feel as if they are moving about the set of Lars von Trier film. (There are a few unfortunate Tracey Emin-recalling pieces of furniture here and there but nothing too invasive.

My favorite scene was the proximal juxtaposition of what happens to be the cover of the current edition of Fantastic Man featuring a stunning portrait of conceptual artist Jeremy Deller in a pink hoodie angled near a 2012 issue of The Gentlewoman featuring Angela Lansbury against a complementary tarama salada background. Fantastic Man of course is obviously trenchant and droll somewhat in the manner of the late Quentin Crisp while The Gentlewoman takes itself quite seriously (the Lansbury cover is somewhat of an anomaly with the usual sitters ranging within Beyonce and Christy Turlington to the same equestrienne-socialites you also don’t know from W and Town & Country.
(more…)

Time’s Arrows

by Jean Marie Carey | 26 Jun 2013 | Animals in Art, Art History, Franz Marc, German Expressionism / Modernism

Video is a small but strong component of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst.

The legendary documentary Degenerate Art: The Nazis vs. Expressionism is available now (and probably not for long, so, Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you know what I mean) on youtube. Part of the mythical status of this program that originally aired in 1993 on the BBC is that it was never converted from VHS to DVD or digital download and has thus been difficult to locate and view.

As you might guess from the title this documentary by David Grubin is about the famous 1937 art exhibit held in Munich called Entartete Kunst, intended by the Nazis to show, collected, the most non-enobling effects of “degenerate art.” (Der Turm der blauen Pferde was part of this exhibit in Munich, and then removed when the show traveled to Berlin, beginning its period of being missing and presumed destroyed. I wonder sometimes if it would make Franz Marc scholars more happy or more sad if it is ever recovered…).
(more…)

Haus der Kunst in the House!

by Jean Marie Carey | 14 Apr 2013 | Art History, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

Gideon Mendel and Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst.

I approached the tour of the exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (10 April 2013 at Haus der Kunst) featuring curator Okwui Enwezor and photographer Gideon Mendel with equal parts hopefulness and skepticism. The conversation and the galleries of photographs and videos were very interesting and relatively straightforwardly informational, and impressively accessible.

The event was arranged in quite a different manner than other “conversations” of this type I’ve attended before. Enwezor and Mendel actually occupied the same space as the 30 or so low-key attendees who surrounded the speakers attentively but not crushingly, giving listening and looking but not acting at all starstruck from being inches away from one of the most influential curators in the world.

The centerpiece of the talk was perhaps Mendel’s music and photo installation Yeoville, created especially for this exhibition and featuring the music of Dynamics, a South African band Mendel says he strongly associates with the mid-1980s when many of these photos were taken. Cropped to isolate details alternating with full-frame shots, these projections show Johannesburg residents during these years interacting in leisure and daily life in quotidian activities that nonetheless show, through the engagement of the mix of races and generations, the gradual, natural, erosion of the Apartheid system.

Mendel has much other work in the exhibition including a stunning color series of some Afrikaans “heritage” re-enactors. South African Jürgen Schadeberg’s work spanning 50 years is also wide-ranging. Most stunning, to me, were some of the covers and images from the 1950s magazine Drum, one of which stunningly restored the recently deceased Miriam Makeba to vibrant zenith. (more…)

« Older Entries