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

The starting point for the exhibition chapter Still Undead is Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (Reflective colored light plays) from 1922, which premiered at a party held at Wassily Kandinsky’s apartment. Using a combination of moving abstract shadow figures, light forms and sounds, the work was created entirely outside the Bauhaus curriculum. The colored light-plays open up several aspects, including experiments in the field of light design, sound art, performance and the tradition of Bauhaus festivals, of which there were many.

Still Undead traces artistic experiments with light, sound and new technologies at art schools and universities such as the New Bauhaus in Chicago, the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies (CVAS) and the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Experiments with new media and technologies emerged in a field of tension between the institutionalization and scientification of artistic and popular counter-cultures in Western Europe and the United States and young people’s authentic will to create a mode of living outside the cultural mainstream. Schwerdtfeger’s reflective plays of colored light are regarded today as an important reference for Expanded Cinema; they point to a future in which sound, experimental film and digital culture would become a central component of contemporary art. Thus, Stan VanDerBeek’s filmic works, the performances of Velvet Underground—with their stroboscopic multimedia light shows—find their counterpart in consumer culture and the development of information technologies during the 1960s. Still Undead discusses how countercultural production transcended institutional structures on the one hand and was integrated into them on the other. The blurring of the boundaries between experiment, institutionalization and commercialization, already characteristic of the Bauhaus, had become the norm by the 1960s. This general tendency—the fusion of resistant and experimental practices with a “common sense”—underscores the need for a re-politicization of art, technology and popular culture in the current moment.

The exhibition chapter Still Undead was developed with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) in cooperation with Christian Hiller (Berlin), Gavin Butt (London) and Mariana Meneses Romero (London). Parallel to the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee, a second version of Still Undead, with a focus on the reception of Bauhaus-derived new media ideas in Great Britain, will be shown at Nottingham Contemporary from 21.09.2019 to 05.01.2020.

●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

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Lichtwechsel — An den Übergängen vom Kaleidoskopischen zum Stroboskopischen

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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

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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
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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

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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

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The Design of Information Overload — A Cold War Story

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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