History Is About Radical Moments

I was a dancer from an early age, and my under­­graduate degree was in Fine Arts. I was equally committed to both, being a painter and dancer, and was torn as to which direction I would pursue. When I moved to London (from South Africa) to attend the Courtauld Institute of Art, I discovered the work of Oskar Schlemmer at an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, and became immediately fascinated by his work and his writings, in which he endlessly discussed the conflict of having “two souls” as he called it: the Apollonian (intellect, painting, sculpture) and the Dionysian, (emotion, theater, dance), and was drawn to the ways he resolved the conflict between the two.

The utopian vision of Gropius and the artists attracted to the Bauhaus was, I believe, already a way to discuss politics and society through radical training in the arts. It was a time of rebuilding in Germany following the First World War, and every premise of the Bauhaus described a radical vision for a new society; it was a utopian belief in education as a way of creative thinking and living, with every gesture examined for its purest form.

Not directly, although I have always considered the Bauhaus a model for building an exciting intellectual and creative community, where all the arts are analyzed and created under the same roof. Gropius wrote about “lectures, poetry, music, costume parties,” as being part of the Bauhaus education and ethos. One of our early Performa galas took the Metal Party as its inspi- ration, even including a special “trolley” on which visitors could enter the space. It was a huge success, and introduced many people to Schlemmer and Bauhaus ideas.

The Bauhaus inspired art and architecture schools around the world for the past 100 years, including Black Mountain College, which was a refuge for several Bauhaus artists escaping Nazi terror, and which became an important instigator of truly experimental and seminal work. Artists such as Annie and Josef Alberts, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunnigham, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller gathered there in the 1950s, and would later shape New York’s downtown art community in the 1960s and 1970s. The Bauhaus is still a useful touchstone, and we will be using it to trigger a larger investigation into the art school of the 21st century, as part of Performa 19. Many aspects of the school will be examined, including “Art and Technology: a New Unity,” the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, and how those early questions about new media are still relevant today.

Artists always gravitate to the newest technologies, and of course most young artists use social media as a general platform. However, there will always be those few who will take this material to another level, who will tear it apart, and make us rethink its aesthetic potential, and who also find ways to combine its elements in live presentations, whether in a gallery or theater setting.

Live performance is indeed gaining audiences around the globe at museums and galleries, some of it for sure in response to our over-mediated world, but also because being in the presence of performers, being brought closer to the art and ideas of our times, is an enticement for audiences. This is all the more reason at this point in time for a greater knowledge and more in-depth understanding of Oskar Schlemmer’s work, and the ways in which he positioned the Bauhaus stage at the center of his teaching and creative output.

We are not looking for artists to reconstruct or to use the same elements. We’re looking for new ways of thinking about some of the issues that came up, triggering new ideas. The art and technology from the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 was used to look at what it means for young artists working with technology, live performance, and a combination of the two. The more in-depth the conversations from the Bauhaus about art and technology, the more it gives me new ways of thinking about how young artists might use this material. There are always connections to be found, though they may not immediately come to mind at first glance.

What is the art and culture of tomorrow? An interesting question that I ask myself every day. We need to maintain some level of complexity and we need to find those languages that contribute to it. It’s very much about living in the present, and it’s a question about how well we can do that, how well we can communicate and to bring people together to do that. So, let’s keep talking. I don’t have a definite answer.