Bauhaus

Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term  Bauhaus, literally "house of construction"  stood for "School of Building".


The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern designThe Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography


The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel (particularly in the White City of Tel Aviv) in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled, by the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv, in fact, in 2004 was named to the list of world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture; it had some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 on.


One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial" or "preliminary course") was taught; this is the modern day "Basic Design" course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural and design schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.


One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The ubiquitous Cantilever chair and the Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples. (Breuer eventually lost a legal battle in Germany with Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam over the rights to the cantilever chair patent. Although Stam had worked on the design of the Bauhaus's 1923 exhibit in Weimar, and guest-lectured at the Bauhaus later in the 1920s, he was not formally associated with the school, and he and Breuer had worked independently on the cantilever concept, thus leading to the patent dispute.) The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus#Impact

Lecture six

Postmodern space and time: Retro and vintage or unorginal and old?

- We live in a "postmodern" society
- "Postmodernity" a key concept within contemporary art and design
- 'Postmodernism' cant be understod in isolation from 'modernism'

- Some theorists argue that postmodernism is merely an extension of modernism
- Zygmunt Bauman has called it "Liquid Modernism" because it is so hard to pin down

Modernism

- Was no a "period"
- Describes a wide range of texts that influence how we now think and experience the world
- Co-exsisted with other styles and concerns
- Concerned with other styles and concerns

- Concerned with "meta-narratives" ; unified explanations
- Was a direct extension of Enlightenmen thinking/philospohy

The key concept behind Enlightenment thoughts are:

- Universe is rational and can be understoof through the use of reason alone
- Truth is arrived at through empirical observation, the application of reason, and systematic doubt
- Mans experience is key to mans understanding of truth
- All life, both social and individual, can be understood and humans are no exception
- Therefore, mankind can be "engineered" in the same way as the natural world
-Mankind is progressing
- Education and the development of their rational facilities can improve a person
- Religion has no place in a rational understanding of the physical and human world

- Modernism is a cultural movement which rebelled against Victorian mores
- Modernists presented the Victorian "civilized" as greedy and warmongering (instead of being industrialized rations and cash - based economies as hypocrites (rather than christians) and as enemies of freedom and self- realisations
- Initially modernism was concerned with evidencing progression
- World war 1 had a massive impact on modernists and hence, modernism.
-Nationalism was seen to be a source of conflict

- Fine art became increasingly apolitical, avant garde and abstract art for arts sake
- Design was driven by "reason" ; radical break with preceding forms
- Was "international" or "transitiona style
- Le corbusier referred to buildings as "machines for living"
- Driven by the bauhaus - "forms follow function"


- Clothing, cloth and footwear began to be rationed in the Uk in 1941, june.
- Rationing wasnt lifted until 1949, 2 years after the end of hostilities
- 1942 - the incorporated society of London fashion designers
- Included Hardy Amies, Digby Morton, Victor Shebel, Angele Delange, Peter Norman Hartnell
- Manafacturers using the CC41 label were forbidden from using any unnecessary trimmings, extra pockets ect.
- Created 34 utility clothing designs
- The British government introduced laws designed to give weight to the utility scheme
- Made it illegal and unpatriotic to use excess material


- "The Mao Suit"
- Argueably the epitome of modernist, "form follows function"
-Modernism struggled to survive world war 2
- Its utilitarian principles were employed in the rebuilding of Western society
- Seen as unhuman and restrictive

- Term "Postmodernism" orginally used to describe an architectual style
-Reaction to the "International Style" of high modernism
- Concerned with decoration; playful
- "style over content"
- Frequent references the past, other disciplines popular culture, ect.

- Identity as "text" to be "written"
- Roland Barthes' the language of fashion
- Identity is not fixed it can be 'rewritten'
- "Intertextual"
Music Video- Christina Agularia - Aint no other man

- 50's style
- Old fashion clothes, instruements, mise en scene

- Taste is not "neutral" or natural"
- "denaturalising" material culture
- Tase is an ideological construct
- Ideology= Body of ideas or beliefs"
- Notion of 'good' and 'bad' taste linked to class system and morality
- Taste of the "masses" was of concern to social engineers and philanthropists
- Public art galleries and museums intended to "educate" the masses
- Not neutral spaces; invariably presented an ethnocentric vision of the world.
- Taste in not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first and last, and the closest trial questions to any living creature is ' What do you like?' Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are"
- John Ruskin, English critic and reformer (1819-1900

-Taste and fashion are most definatley linked
-Changes in what is considered fashionable determines ht is considered good and bad taste
- The consumption of prestige items helps establish an individuals society identity
- Consumer culture; you are what you consume
- Still very much in evidence today


-Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the lesuire class (1899) coioned the phrases:
- "conspicious consumption"
- "conspicious leisure"
-"things" have meaning beyond their function or "use" value (Marx, Capital)
-Focus of the post - Industrial, postmodern individuals excistence is the acqusition of "things" whose "symbolic exchange" values form and specific social identities (Baudrillard symbolic exchange and death) increased controversies sales
-Young black consumers now account for approx 60- 85% of Hennessy's US sales.

Taste no longer simply "trickles down"
- Styles also "trickle- up"
- Style spotters actively seek out the nex underground, "authentic" look
- Evidence of this can be found in the speed with which subcultural identifiers are turned into styles
-Disconnection of subcultural styles form their originary contexts
- eg. Punk 

- e.g hip hop
- he music industry has typically been a white dominanted one despite black subcultures being the source of many popular and powerful genre
- While there have long been black performer in the industry, black ownership of record labels started relatively recently

N.W.A- ' Fuck tha police' - FBI contacted the record label- song should not be allowed to be listened to.