Post Test Part 1

Well, Dorian starts off class playing some mysterious song. Reminds me of Hawaii.

KEY THINGS ABOUT THE BAUHOUSE

- how can we make everyone's life better

- how can we make the perfect life

- ideals connected to Ruskin

- how can we make things better

Bahaus 1919 - 1933

Weimar 1919 - 1925

- 1923 First public exhibition

- 1924 letter of resignation

Dessau 1925 - 1932

- 1928 Gropius replaced by Meyer

- 1930 Meyer replaced by Van der Rohe

Berlin 1932 - 1933

Short film about Bahaus - Bahaus Broken Wings

Final days in Berlin

What if people came in and told us art was against the state and destroyed everything we did? What would we do?

BAHAUS

- if you have a community that's "economically depressed" you add an art school

- higher class will want to come and buy things and the arts will flourish

- arts revitalizes the city, brings art students, artists, and builds culture

Weimar

- after WWI Germany was in shambles

- no economy

- no jobs

- completely broken as a nation

- already an art school in place

Walter Gropius - the man with the vision

- main man when it comes to the Bahaus

- involved with the Bahaus from the beginning to 1928

- second wife was the widow of a composer

- while in WWI thinks of a new school

- maybe we need to go back to the old ways (similar thoughts to Arts & Crafts movement)

pointed to cathedrals

- painting

- sculpture

- architecture

- all of these arts should be unified in one area and equally valuable

Early Years

- powerful community spirit

- people put their wholes lives into it

- during a time where utopian ideas are very important

Council of Masters

Gerhard Marks sculpture/potter

Lyonel Feringer painter

Johannes Itten preliminary courses

Itten

- his goal was to release each students creative abilities

- courses he established wanted to unearth physical nature of materials

- "medium is the message"

- taught fundamental design principles that underlined all of the arts

- what are the basics that every artist should know?

- in classes study based on contrast

- soft relative to hard round next to rigid

- leaves Bahaus in 1923

- Bahaus moves toward rationalism and design for machine which Itten doesn't like

- shifting more toward design thinking

Assemblage

- found piece of wood

- old saw blade, piece of glass

- they used these random items because this was all they had

- rummage trash heaps for material

- it's about analysis

Poster

- cubism

- de stijl

- moving from art and handicraft toward technology

1923 exhibition

- first public exhibition of the Bahaus

Itten replaced by Lazlo Moholy Nagy

- hungarian constructivist, bit of a scientist

- likes to experiment with resins

- works with photomontage

Ad for tires Lazlo Moholy Nagy

- typeophoto

- sees photography as a replacement for painting

- uses photography to develop new visual language for a new age

- similar to Lucas Bernhard's Plakishtil

- photoplastics

Tension

- tensions in city and forced to move to Dessau

- Dessau very industrial city

Building

- modern building

- windows are curtains?

Staircase

- stairs, windows, chairs

- Schelemmer/Roy Lichtenstein make painting about students using stairs

movie intermission . . .

Universal alphabet

- we have 2 sets of letters, upper and lowercase

- experimented without capitals

Bahaus explorations

- Bahaus did away with serif

- flushing to left and ragging to the right

- contrast and hierarchy

- using bars, rules, squares, and open compositions in implied grids

- strong horizontals/verticals in compositions

Mies Van der Rohe "less in more"

Berlin

- attempted to run school in Berlin

- didn't work so closed in 1933

Conclusion

I was off on what I thought the Bahaus was about. All I remembered was that they dealt with architecture and I thought that was their main thing but I was wrong. That was just a 3rd of their focus, but I should still get some credit.

I didn't remember where Bahaus was too but I thought the time it opened was interesting. There was a lot going on during the time of the Bahaus. WWI just ended, the February Revolution happened in Russia, and later on the Great Depression and WWII would occur. There's so many important historical events that happened at this time that I think had a huge impact on the school itself. I don't even know what it would be like going to school during that time. It must have been rough. That's all I kept thinking about the entire time we covered the Bahaus.

BAHAUS

I believe it was founded by Walter Gropius and dealt a lot with architecture.

Post Spring Break Part 1

Suprematism

art should not have function

it should be pure expression

nonrepresentational

Constructivist

art should be for the benefit of the state

USSR poster

still have the original photo montage for the poster

Photomontage

becomes popular because . . .

photography seen as a tool of the modern age

it's a machine so it goes along well with the upcoming age

Sergei Eisenstein

Russian guy who makes movies

socialist regime in Russia

Alexander Rodchenko

Constructivism poster child

if you are creating something for the people it has moral good

attends art school in early 1900s

the process is the significance of the work

reminds me kind of fine arts where you don't necessarily have to understand the piece or concept. That's not the point.

Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blue

these pieces displayed in a show

"i have reduced painting to its logical conclusion"

is there a need to do more painting?

this sort of makes it have a limited shelf life, how much simpler can you get than simple?

KAKAO

you would not think of this as art

constructivism says the only true art has a function

if it is an ad it is serving the common good, it has a function, and therefore is art

moral value = function = good art

Stalin Era

at the beginning people that artists were great

art was a counter to tzarist Russia

De Stijl Duh Shhhtilll

movement developed in the Netherlands

utopian approach to aesthetic - key idea

what makes good art?

how can we create a formula to make a good art?

what is good art?

we want a utopian society . . . but it still has to be functional

characteristic:

rectilinear planes

no surface textures except pure primary hues + black and white

no trees or happy cows

we want a mathematical structure

universal harmony

not about just filling the page

Piet Mondrian

best known painter

Theo Van Doesburg

he started the Duh Shtil movement

the movement lives and dies with him

interested in working with Dada's

he published Dada poems which is kind of ironic

Why would he embrace the Dada's?

there's a philosophy at play . . .

he wants a system for universal harmony, looking at structures for order and systems

people look for these people they feel like the current system is not working

Dada's are needed to explode the system so . . .

his group could come in and steal the show

Ideas of De Stijl applied to:

architecture

sculpture

painting

graphic design

something about partridge family

Asymmetrical Balance

implied rectangle around the elements

air moves around freely

More Mondrain

his later work coincided with electrical tape

we have a trajectory of his paintings

as he developed he would paint the same tree so we could see his progression as an artist

MORE MOVIE

movie

movie

movie

Conclusion

Time to wrap it up. I'm kind of pissed I forgot to bring my Mondrian shoes at home they would have been perfect for class. I think when it comes to what is art I don't really think you need such a strict clear cut set definition of what is art and what is not. Who cares? It's such a subjective thing. People consider the Mona Lisa to be a great painting but I'm sure there's plenty of people that hate it. It's all opinionated and you can spit out all the facts you like but when it comes down to the wire it's all about what tickles your fancy.

What is art to me? Anything that a person creates in an interesting manner. And that's not just drawings, music is art, writing is art, dancing is also a form of art. Anything that pleases or entertains people is art. I don't think you need to go much more in depth than that.

Week 8

All this crazy stuff is happening in the early 1900s.

Tonight, we're going to look at the effects of Cubism on design.

Axis Graphics

- more sophisticated

- more graphic

- very reductive

Ludwig Hohlwein

- has a little stamp for his signature

- very iconic work, deal with Red Cross & Jesse Owens

- preferred allies work

Cubism

- becomes popular and people start using it

- analytical cubism early phase

- new ways of understanding space

- reclining person + railroad track = bad

- exaggerated propotion scale

Kasander

- break things up and you get different levels of meaning

- Dubo ---> Dubon ---> Dubonnet

- someone gave God a French kiss

- Paul Rand worked on the Dubonnet for 10 years

- He also clowns Cubism

Some image with trains and bars (Wagon-Bar)

- you got your wines

- fancy cheeses

- even more wine in fancy cups

- Seltzer bottle

Before WWI

- workers around the world pissed off, particularly in Russia

Russia

- 1917 Tzar forced to abdicate throne

- Lenin & Friends take charge

We're in the "ism" mode

- people are looking for universal truth

- we want answers

- what do we believe in?

- we believe we know things better than anyone else

- black madonnas

Russian Avant Garde

- first wave

Cubo-Futurism

- not like Cuban Castro

- combining Cubism with Futurism

Suprematism

- art should not have utilitarian function

- work should be about color and emotion

Constructivism

- the only meaningful art have function

- things that have function are there for art

- renounce art for arts sake

- art should serve new communist society

Vladimir Tatin

Rodchenko

Lissitszcky

- painter, teacher, architect, and everything else in the world

- influences Constructivism and Bahaus and something else

- supremacist ideas

- develops idea of the prown

- looks for intersection between painting and architecture

- what is more utopian than building

- floating spatial relationships

- uses illusion, things receding/projecting

- unity between art and technology

- how can we explore space and do architecture and what not

- it's more than just painting a square

Kandinsky

- invents abstract painting

Apparently Dorian falls into "universal designer look"

Black bars become popular in design

MOVIE TIME - RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE

How do you do good art for the proletariat?

For starters the proletariat have a different taste from their counterparts the bourgeois. They are the low wealth hard working class who just try to get by every day. Because they are not very lavish or overly fancy I feel like their art should be the same. I think the art they would like deals with not only activities that they do everyday but things they can look forward to. It should be a simplistic style with meticulous attention to detail with a subject matter of achievable goals for the working class. I think if you put effort and hear into your art the proletariat will truly appreciate your work for what it is.