bauhaus
imaginista
Edition 4

Still Undead

Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (Reflecting color-light plays, 1922
light performance, apparatus reconstructed 2016
Courtesy of Microscope Gallery and Kurt Schwerdtfeger Estate © 2016.

László Moholy-Nagy, The mechanics of the light prop, 1930
Watercolour, ink and pencil on circular paper, mounted on round hardboard, diameter: 52 cm
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, photo: Hermann Kiessling.

Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Colour Chord 21-stringed flat sound box, no date (c. mid-20th century)
Grainger Museum Collection, University of Melbourne.
Gift of Olive Hirschfeld, 1980. 01.0017.

György Kepes, Simulated effects of a proposed mile-long
programmed luminous wall, suggested for the Boston Harbor
Bicentennial, 1964–65, photo: Nishan Bichajian
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in
Art, Culture and Technology, © Juliet Stone.

Muriel Cooper, 1969, Promotional Poster for Bauhaus:
Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, 
Image courtesy
Muriel R. Cooper Collection, Morton R. Godine Library, Archive
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, reprinted by
permission of the MIT Press.

Stan VanDerBeek, Movie-Drome, ca. 1963
Courtesy: Estate of Stan VanDerBeek, photo: Bob Hanson.

Richard Hamilton, Diab DS-101 Computer, 1985–89
Tate-Modern, © R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019,
photo: © Tate, London 2019.

Article on the Bauhaus punk band,
in: New Styles New Sounds, from October 1981, p. 29
© Kasper de Graaf (Editor) and Malcolm Garrett (Art Director).

●Edition Concept

Ausgangspunkt für das Ausstellungskapitel Still Undead sind Kurt Schwerdtfegers Reflektorische Farblichtspiele aus dem Jahr 1922. Die Farblichtspiele wurden auf einem Bauhausfest in Kandinskys Wohnung uraufgeführt. Mit einer Kombination von bewegten abstrakten Schattenfiguren, Lichtformen und Sounds entstanden sie außerhalb des Bauhauslehrplans. Die Farblichtspiele erschließen mehrere Aspekte, darunter die Experimente auf dem Gebiet der Gestaltung mit Licht, der Klangkunst, der Performance und der Feste am Bauhaus.

Still Undead verfolgt die Spuren künstlerischer Experimente mit Licht, Sound und neuen Technologien an Kunstschulen und Universitäten wie dem New Bauhaus in Chicago, dem Centre for Advanced Visual Studies (CVAS) und dem Media Lab am Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Experimente mit neuen Medien und Technologien entstanden im Spannungsfeld einer Institutionalisierung und Verwissenschaftlichung von künstlerischen und populären Gegenkulturen in Westeuropa und den USA. Schwerdtfegers Reflektorische Farblichtspiele gelten heute als wichtige Referenz für das Expanded Cinema; sie weisen in eine Zukunft, in der Sound, experimenteller Film und Digitalkultur zum zentralen Bestandteil der Gegenwartskunst werden. Stan VanDerBeeks filmische Arbeiten, die Performances von Velvet Underground mit ihren Stroboskop-Lichtshows finden in den 1960er-Jahren ihren Gegenpart in der Konsumkultur und der Entwicklung von Informationstechnologien. Still Undead diskutiert, wie eine gegenkulturelle Produktion institutionelle Strukturen einerseits überschreitet, um andererseits in sie integriert zu werden. Die bereits für das Bauhaus charakteristische Verwischung der Grenzen zwischen Experiment, Institutionalisierung und Kommerzialisierung ist heute zur Norm geworden. Diese allgemeine Tendenz – die Verschmelzung von widerständigen und experimentellen Praktiken mit dem Common Sense – unterstreicht die heute notwendige Repolitisierung von Kunst, Technologie und Populärkultur.

Das Ausstellungskapitel Still Undead wurde 2019 mit dem Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) realisiert, in Zusammenarbeit mit Christian Hiller (Berlin), Gavin Butt (London) und Mariana Meneses Romero (London). Parallel zur Ausstellung am Zentrum Paul Klee wird vom 20.09.2019 bis 05.01.2020 in der Kunsthalle Nottingham Contemporary eine weitere Version von Still Undead mit einem Fokus auf die Rezeption in Großbritannien gezeigt.

●Related Articles
●Article
On the Reconstruction of Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele” (Reflective Colored Light Plays) from 1922

Kurt Schwerdtfeger conceived of Reflektorische Farblichtspiele in 1921 as a student at the Bauhaus Weimar, studying under Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Joseph Hartwig. Although the work has been discussed over the years in the context of abstract film, light sculpture, visual music, and expanded cinema, it is first and foremost a work of live performance. Decades before moving image performance would make its appearance in galleries and museums as an art form—a denotation the artistic practice still struggles to attain today—Schwerdtfeger recognized it as such, perhaps due to his immersion in the all-encompassing interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus. → more

●Article
Lichtwechsel — An den Übergängen vom Kaleidoskopischen zum Stroboskopischen

Die Farblichtspiele von Kurt Schwerdtfeger und Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, die im Kontext von frühen abstrakten Filmexperimenten, kinetischen Skulpturen und Bühnenexperimenten 1922 am Bauhaus entstanden, gelten als Vorreiter des Expanded Cinema. Um 1964 wurden sie in einer Zeit rekonstruiert, in der die filmische und lichtkaleidoskopische Avantgarde der 1920er-Jahre von einer neuen Generation von Experimentalfilmern und -theoretikern wiederentdeckt wurde. Deren Umgang mit technischen Medien war weniger von Kollektivitätsgedanken als von individualistischen Selbsterfahrungen und psychotropisch angeregten Selbstentgrenzungen geprägt. → more

●Article
Synthesis in Language of Vision — Bauhaus Sources in Gyorgy Kepes’s Dynamic Structure Order

Many of the concepts and concerns Gyorgy Kepes presents in Language of Vision have their roots in the Bauhaus. Both Bauhaus artists and Kepes shared notions of a language of art elements, universal laws, structure, and order, linking these to their utopic hope that art would have a positive effect on mankind. However, a great physical and cultural distance separated the German Bauhaus of the 1920s and 1930s from the post-World War II New Bauhaus in America, where Kepes taught and wrote. → more

●Article
Light as a Creative Medium in the Art of György Kepes

Design works employing light refraction, fixation, and reflection were already a feature of László Moholy-Nagy’s teaching at the Bauhaus. When in the summer of 1937 Moholy followed Walter Gropius’s advice and accepted Norma K. Stahle’s invitation to head the New Bauhaus in Chicago, he lay great store by György Kepes’s help in setting up the school in the New World. → more

●Interview
Interview with Filmmaker and Photographer Ronald Nameth — On filming Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the influence of the New Bauhaus

Ronald Nameth has been working with film, electronics, video, and digital media from the 1960s until today. In addition to Warhol, Nameth has collaborated with several key figures in the arts including musical innovators John Cage and Terry Riley, photographers Aaron Siskand and Art Sinsabauagh, as well as many other artists and performers. In this interview with bauhaus imaginista he recalls how the New Bauhaus method of teaching allowed him to explore the nature of various media to better understand the medium itself and its creative potentials. → more

●Article
Vision in Motion —> Information Landscapes — From Stage Props and Camouflage Techniques to Democratic Apparatus and Cybernetic Networks

The examination of approaches, models and strategies for a redefinition of visual culture, the control of images and the shaping of perception made former Bauhäuslers interesting to the American establishment. Their knowledge was incorporated in the development of democratization tools that aid in the fight against fascism and, later, were strategically used against Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. → more

●Article
Latter-day Bauhaus? — Muriel Cooper and the Digital Imaginary

The Bauhaus is a monument—a book with the physical heft to match its scholarly ambition. Published in 1969 by the MIT Press, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago stands fourteen inches tall, ten inches wide, and two and-a-half inches thick, weighing in at over ten pounds. It is the revised, expanded, and redesigned translation of editor Hans Wingler’s 1962 German tome Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin. Muriel Cooper, the MIT Press’s first Design and Media Director, consistently rated the book as one of her proudest achievements among the nearly 500 she would design or oversee during her tenure. → more

●Article
A Cold War Bauhaus

What happened to the idea of the Bauhaus in the decades after the Bauhaus? This essay examines a key figure at the center of the global spread of the Bauhaus idea after the Second World War: the Hungarian-American artist, designer and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes. Through his unusual experiments with science and technology, Kepes promoted ideas about interdisciplinarity and collaboration that first originated with Bauhaus modernism in the interwar period. But the conflicts and confrontations that defined Kepes’s career in the United States demonstrate how the Bauhaus became a fraught ideological battlefield during the politically contested years of the early Cold War. → more

●Article
The Design of Information Overload — A Cold War Story

In 1959 Charles and Ray Eames presented their multi-screen film Glimpses of the USA inside Buckminster Fuller’s golden dome at the American Exhibition in Moscow. This propaganda project on behalf of the United States Information Agency  was part of a series of experiments into information overload as a new form of communication and persuasion. What was radical in 1959 has become every day. We are surrounded everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate. → more

●Article
Communitas … After Black Mountain College

In the wake of Black Mountain College’s dissolution in 1954, two former students Paul and Vera Williams, left North Carolina and founded Gate Hill Artists’ Cooperative about an hour’s drive outside of New York City. “The Land,” as the Coop was often called by the artists, composers, filmmakers, choreographers, poets, and potters who built their homes and studios in this rural setting, evinced many of the pedagogical lessons of the Bauhaus translated through the American educational experiment in combining art and life that was Black Mountain College. → more

●Article
Between Form Sequences and Phase Films — The film experiments of Kurt Kranz

Bauhaus student Kurt Kranz (1910–1997) was a painter, illustrator, graphic artist, typographer, exhibition designer, inventor, programmer, pedagogue, and experimental filmmaker—an explorer of form and color in motion. By combining art, science, and pedagogy, he pursued the interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus throughout his life. → more

●Article
Festive and Theatrical — The Mask Photos of Gertrud Arndt and Josef Albers as an Expression of Festival Culture

Costuming played a central role at the Bauhaus. Gertrud Arndt’s mask photographs (a series of 43 self-portraits) derive directly from these Bauhaus festivals. As well as a series of nine color photographs taken in direct succession at Black Mountain College in 1940 by Josef Albers. → more

●Article
The Bauhaus is dead. — Undead.Undead.Undead.

The influential post-punk band, Bauhaus, helped invent the musical genre and sartorial style of goth-rock. Formed in 1979, their nineminute-long debut single Bela Lugosi’s Dead includes a refrain that has also inspired the title for this exhibition chapter. → more

●Article
Case Studies of Modernist Refugees and Emigres to Australia, 1930–1950 — Light, color and educational studies under the shadow of fascism and war

A significant number of central European and German refugees and émigrés sought refuge from war and fascism in Australia during the inter-war and post-World War Two years. These refugees and émigrés introduced an approach to modernism that was crossdisciplinary and derived its inspiration from a systematic approach to arts education. In this paper the authors offer case studies in order to highlight some of their commonalities, such as a commitment to reform education, a systemic interdisciplinary approach to modernist art education and, finally, color-light explorations in art, design and architecture that arise as a consequence of these educational philosophies → more

●Article
The Bauhaus Journey in Britain

The Bauhaus’s teaching approach emphasised the idea of working as a community of creatives and producers rather than merely focusing on the traditional pupil-teacher relationship. In this essay the focus will be on the Bauhaus’s impetus to bring art and design into everyday life highlighting in Great Britain’s visual culture in the 1930s and between 1960s and 70s and how it influenced youth and popular culture during the swinging sixties in London. → more

●Article
Bedsit Art in the Leeds Experiment

In the 1970s the city of Leeds was noted as home of “the most influential art school in Europe since the Bauhaus,” and a thriving punk and post-punk music scene. Gavin Butt explores a small art school milieu in which avant-garde experiments in photography, performance, film and sound art gave shape to non-conformist presentations of the body and of sexual and gendered identity. → more

●Article
Microfilm and Memex — Lucia Moholy, Photography and the Information Revolution

Considering the role of photography, and particularly, of the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy, in developing and envisaging information systems during and after World War II this paper focuses on the connection between her pre-war practices and her work as the director of the ASLIB Microfilming Service in wartime London, using it to think through the direction of developments in media and information technology by drawing a comparison with Vannevar Bush’s famous essay “As We May Think” (1945). → more

●Article
Penguin’s-Eye View — Lázló Moholy-Nagy meets Berthold Lubetkin at the London Zoo

One day in September 1936, Ernestine Fantl, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lázló Moholy-Nagy stood looking at the new Penguin Pond in London Zoo. Fantl was on a research trip for an upcoming exhibition, Modern Architecture in England, that would heavily feature the striking structures Soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had built at the London and Whipsnade Zoos, among them the Penguin Pond. Realizing “that no still photograph could do justice to the pool or its denizens,” on the spot Fantl commissioned Moholy to produce a film about Tecton’s animal enclosures. → more

●Article
To train not only for, but also against something! — A plea to think politically about the interdisciplinary art academy

Art colleges where the fine, applied and performing arts are taught under one roof often refer to the historical Bauhaus. Although the institution possessed no separate workshop for music, the experiments on the Bauhaus stage are regarded as prototypical for the further development of interdisciplinary art approaches later in the twentieth century. This text deals with the interdisciplinary art academy on the slide of a deregulated present. It reviews a number of developments to which we have already become accustomed. It is precisely for this reason that we should recall the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary education in both an artistic and political sense. → more

●Research Archive
Zwischen Formreihen und Phasenfilmen. Die Filmexperimente von Kurt Kranz
Christian Hiller

in: Maske & Kothurn. bauhaus & film (Thomas Tode), Band 57, Heft 1-2, 2013, S. 141–156.

DE Size: 1 MB
Capturing Modernity, Jazz, Film, and Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage
Edit Tóth

from: Modernism/modernity, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 23–55.

EN Size: 2 MB
Source:See a more detailed discussion of the Light Prop and other Bauhaus works' relationship to phenomenology in: Edit Tóth: Design and Visual Culture from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art: Optical Deconstructions, Routledge, London 2018.
A “Schooling of the Senses”: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt
Elizabeth Otto

from: New German Critique, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 89-131.

EN Size: 836 KB
Stroboscopic: Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable
Homay King

from: Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 457–479.

EN Size: 1 MB
Bauhaus
Kasper de Graaf, Malcolm Garrett

from: New Sounds New Styles, Oct. 1981.

EN Size: 2 MB
Case Studies of Modernist Refugees and Émigrés to Australia, 1930–1950. Light, Colour and Educational Studies under the Shadow of Fascism and War
Andrew McNamara, Ann Stephen, Isabel Wünsche

from: Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro, (Ed.) Migrations. Migration Processes and Artistic Practices in a Time of War: From the 20th Century to the Present. Belas-artes, Lisbon, pp. 271–289.

EN Size: 1 MB
●Related Events
●All Articles
Filter by Language:
  • EN
  • DE
Vision in Motion —> Information Landscapes — From Stage Props and Camouflage Techniques to Democratic Apparatus and Cybernetic Networks EN
The Bauhaus Journey in Britain EN
Festive and Theatrical — The Mask Photos of Gertrud Arndt and Josef Albers as an Expression of Festival Culture EN
Festives und Theatralisches — Die Maskenfotos von Gertrud Arndt und Josef Albers als Ausdruck von Festkultur DE
Communitas … After Black Mountain College EN
Latter-day Bauhaus? — Muriel Cooper and the Digital Imaginary EN
Bedsit Art in the Leeds Experiment EN
Light as a Creative Medium in the Art of György Kepes EN
Interview with Filmmaker and Photographer Ronald Nameth — On filming Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the influence of the New Bauhaus EN
Lichtwechsel — An den Übergängen vom Kaleidoskopischen zum Stroboskopischen DE
The Design of Information Overload — A Cold War Story EN
To train not only for, but also against something! — A plea to think politically about the interdisciplinary art academy EN
Nicht nur für, sondern auch gegen etwas ausbilden! — Ein Plädoyer, die spartenübergreifende Kunsthochschule politisch zu denken DE
Between Form Sequences and Phase Films — The film experiments of Kurt Kranz EN
Zwischen Formreihen und Phasenfilmen — Die Filmexperimente von Kurt Kranz DE
Case Studies of Modernist Refugees and Emigres to Australia, 1930–1950 — Light, color and educational studies under the shadow of fascism and war EN
The Bauhaus is dead. — Undead.Undead.Undead. EN
The Bauhaus is dead. — Undead.Undead.Undead. DE
Microfilm and Memex — Lucia Moholy, Photography and the Information Revolution EN
Penguin’s-Eye View — Lázló Moholy-Nagy meets Berthold Lubetkin at the London Zoo EN
A Cold War Bauhaus EN
On the Reconstruction of Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele” (Reflective Colored Light Plays) from 1922 EN
Synthesis in Language of Vision — Bauhaus Sources in Gyorgy Kepes’s Dynamic Structure Order EN