art and design: Jon

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Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Philosophy and changing philosophy of bauhaus

The Bauhaus:

started in Weimar, Germany in 1919 - Director: Walter Gropius

moved to Dessau, Germany in 1925 - Director: Hannes Meyer

moved to Berlin, Germany in 1932 - Director: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

closed in 1933

(each move had a different director and each director had a different philosophy)

The Bauhaus was an Art, Design and Architecture School.

1. Philosophies of Weimar Bauhaus: The Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, devised the curriculum. He wanted to break down the barriers between craftsmanship, architecture and industrial production. he brought people together that wouldn't normally work together and removed all boundaries between their disciplines. All students learned together and learned from each other. They were exposed to a vast range of materials and skills and were encouraged to find new and improved ways of designing everyday items.

"The Bauhaus became the centre of new thinking. Functionality and simplicity were combined with aesthetics, to produce a purer form of design. Previously, Art Nouveau had been about creating ornate, complicated, decorative products. The Bauhaus reduced the complexity of design to simplicity, functionality and an pure form of aesthetics." http://www.technologystudent.com/prddes1/bauhaus1.html

History

- WW1 ended in 1918

- Previously it had been a dictatorship under Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Reichstag (Parliament) could not make laws and could not appoint the Government, that was the Kaiser's job.

- However, WW1 changed everything when Germany was defeated. The Government fell apart, the Navy rebelled causing food riots and Germany had to sign the Armistice in November 1918. Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland.

- Soon after, during the political chaos, the members of the Reichstag met in the small town of Weimar, near Berlin. They decided to set up a new democratic government in February 1919, which was a Republic, meaning it didn't have a King. This is why we refer to it as the "Weimar Republic".

- The Weimar Republic was a good democracy because it had a Bill of Rights to protect the freedoms of the people and it gave the vote to all men and women over the age of 21 (equality). They elected MPs in line with the wishes of the people and let the people elect the Reichstag, which appointed the government and made the laws. Frederick Ebert was the President of the Republic, and he was also elected by the people.

- Lots of German people didn't like the new Democracy and they found themselves being attacked from both sides, left wing and right woing politicians.

- Communists (left-wing) hayted the new government, they didn't waqntdemcracy

- Many right wing germans (Nationalists) refused to belive that they had lost the war, it was the governemtntbhat surrendered, not the army.

- Proportional representation turned out to be a disaster too. It led to the election of many tiny parties, all of whom squabbled amongst each other, so no government could get a majority in the Reichstag – so it could never pass the laws it wanted. http://www.johndclare.net/Basics_Germany.htm

2. Philosophies of Dessau Bauhaus: Hannes Meyer

"Hannes Meyer moved away from artistic intuition towards building theory. He separated the sciences from the arts and introduced new subjects related to technology, natural science and the humanities. He also reorganised the workshops to meet the requirements of industry and an equal social ideal. The Bauhaus now aspired to two educational objectives: to educate the production or construction engineer and the artist. Instead of Gropius’s “exploration of the principles of design”, Meyer called on the students to base their designs strictly on the given requirements and to study the “life processes” of the future users. He promoted the expansion of the workshops on a cooperative basis and set up vertical brigades that united the students of various academic years in the implementation of projects such as the ADGB school building. The curriculum now included photography (in a photography workshop which was part of the advertising department) and lessons in urban planning.

Meyer’s continued critique of the direction in which the Bauhaus had developed caused increasing tensions with Walter Gropius, who had lost nothing of his power base even after his resignation. In addition, the Bauhaus’s students became increasingly politicised and radicalised as the communist influence grew. Because Meyer did not prohibit these tendencies in his role as director, Gropius ultimately pleaded to have Meyers fired in order to protect the school from political repercussions. On 1st August 1930, Meyer was dismissed summarily by the city of Dessau due to “Communist machinations”. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had also been recommended by Gropius, became his successor as director." http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/hannes-meyer

3. Philosophies of Berlin Bauhaus: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"Both the school and the city of Dessau had hoped that Mies van der Rohe’s authority would have a calming influence on the school’s radicalised student body. However, because of the balance of power in Dessau, which was dominated by the National Socialists, even Mies van der Rohe was unable to maintain the school’s location. He attempted to continue the school’s teaching activities in Berlin until its enforced closure in 1932.

In 1930, Mies van der Rohe became the director of the Bauhaus Dessau and began his academic teaching activities. In his brief period at the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe was compelled to make more and more concessions to the political circumstances: Pressured by the risk of closure, the curriculum became more conventional, the experimental work was reduced, the workshops were combined and the preliminary course was eliminated. The duration of the studies was shortened and the tuition fees increased. The students’ studios remained closed and the Bauhaus GmbH was dissolved.

The Bauhaus Dessau was closed in 1932 by a newly elected city council with a National Socialist majority. After complex negotiations in relation to the dissolution of the city of Dessau’s financial obligations towards the Bauhaus and its personnel – including the accrued revenues for licensing contracts such as those with the Kandem lamp company and the Rasch wallpaper factory – Mies van der Rohe attempted to continue to lead the school as a private institute, based in an empty telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz." http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Initial idea matamorphosis

My initial idea for this project was a lot like a stage set up. taking the scene where he decides he wants to take a sneak peek of Dianna in the bathroom, I want to take all of the feelings to why he wants to take a look in the first place and look into a deeper meaning behind that. for a basic example he may want to go ahead and have a look even though he knows he probably shouldn't. In some way you may look at this as though he has no shame of looking. Doing the project like this I would be able to link this to my subject area art therapy. Looking into deeper meanings and try to communicate this to the viewer in lots of different ways.

I thought that this idea could start of with lots of layers of curtains in which you have to force yourself through. this represents of even how much the character knows it is wrong he will still go through and also because of what we already know of what happens after he has his sneak peek it could also be a way of warning in other words he should of gone with his gut rather than his dick.

this would communicate to the viewers because whilst they decide to walk through the curtains it is because they are curious of what is to be seen on the other side. this is getting across part of his thoughts and feelings to why he carries on walking.

I would also like two other things going of as the viewer tries to walk through the curtains. For instance I liked the idea of whilst the viewer walks through each layer they also find a piece of women's clothing so skirt, top, heels, bra, pants. By doing this I show another example of why his curiosity increases with a naked women on his mind pushing him closer and closer to the door.

the second thing which I would like to happen would be to have a cd track playing the sound of a shower. this to just get a much more literal understanding across to the viewers.

I like the thoughts and ideas I have come up with but I think I really need to narrow it down. I feel I have turned it into more of an installation rather than a final piece. which for one means too much work and not enough time and also im not sure it is arty enough for my own liking.

Monday, 10 November 2014

Dada movement

The early days of Dada

Dada is a anti-art movement. Strong, Negative, and destructive element that artists were concerned, Shocked, protested against and saw it as nonsense. They rebelled against the horrors of WW1 and the decadence of European society. The shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes in a continent in upheaval. Rejecting all tradition, they fought for artistic freedom. The Dada developed literary movement after the poet Hugo Ball opened the cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland and gathering place for independent young poets, painters, and musicians. Dada's inspiration was a young Romanian poet called Tristan Tzara who edited the periodical Dada beginning in July 1917. Poet Tzara joined Hugo Ball, Jean Arp (Hons Arp) and Richard Heulsenbeck, exploring Sound poetry, Nonsense poetry, and Chance poetry. Tzara's steady outputting of Dada manifestos solidified the anti-art movement, creating an exact definition of chaos. The Dada created a new prospective of what art is. Chance placement, artistic anarachy, and absured titles was the characteristics of the Dada's style.

Hugo Ball
he was born into a strict family. He was a sensitive child, He was apprenticed as a young man to a leather factory. It was Hugo Ball who provided the Dada movement in Zurich with the philosophical roots of it revolt. 1910-1913 He embarked on a career in the theatre. His ambition was to develop a theatre modelled on the idea of Gessamtkunstwerk, which is a synthasis of all arts that could motivate the social transformation and rejuvenation. He started writing reviews on poems, articles and plays to the journals Die Neue Kunst which was known as the new art. He also wrote for Die Aktion. both pf these journals were within style and content that anticipated the later format of Dada journals. Poems written together by Hugo Ball and Hans Leybold appeared under the pseudonym Ha Ha Bailey. Young and rebellious expressionist writer Hans was was really close friends with Hugo Ball. Hans was also a great influence on Hugo Ball's intellectual development. He also helped the formation of Ball;s ideas in the Dada period especially. Abstract painter and the expressionist Blau Reitar group leader and Richard Heulsenbeck, a young doctor and student who would later become central to Dada in Zurich and Berlin, both of whom he met for the first time in Munich. in 1914 Hugo Ball tried to sign up for the army three times and was refused the job each time due to medical issues. The trauma he experienced when het took a private trip to the font in Belgium prompted him to abandon the theatre and move to Berlin where he began to absorb into political philosophy Peter Kropotkin an Mikhail Bakunin especially. He started writing a book on Bakunin that would continue to occupy him for the rest of his life. With Heuslsenbeck, Hugo Ball staged several anti war protests in Berlin. The first took place in February 1915 and was a memorial to all fallen poets. Hans Leybold included who was mortally wounded in the war.

Tristan Tzara,

Sound Poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic a syntactic values "verse without words". By defining sound poetry is intended for performance.

It is sometimes argued that sound poetry is found in oral poetry tradition, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th century phenomenon. The futurist in Dadaist vanguards of being of this century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms.

Sound poetry evolved into visual and concrete poetry, two forms based in visual art issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later on with the development of the magnetic tape recorder. Sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940s some sound poets were used by later poetry movement in the 80s and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble fiction or even essays.

Marcel Duchump
The voice of Dada

He was a French painter who joined the Dada movement and became its most prominent visual artist. He had analysed his subjects as geometric planes under the influence of cubism. His painting Nude descending a staircase pushed the limits of the static images, ability to record and express motion. To Duchump art and life were processes of random chance and wilful choice and he therefore became the movements most outspoken orator.

Dada as an art form
From the chaos comes a cohesive style

Matters of individual decision and selection became the new artistic act. This found freedom influenced Duchump to make ready made sculpture. such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool and present found objects (assemblages) such as the urinals shown in his exhibitions. From the inspiration of Dada this now opened the public's eyes and views of what art can expand out to and how. some got the joke whilst others were outraged, they didn't consider his work acceptable as art, they took his work as an insult because it questioned their "solid" definition of what they see as art. Another example was when Duchump painted a moustache on a reproduction of Mona Lisa. It was to represent an assault on tradition - again redefining "art", the public saw this as an attack upon Mona Lisa.

The ways of Dada quickly spread. Despite being accused of mocking and defaming a society that had become insane and not creating "art" several Dadaists produced meaningful, visual art that has contributed to graphic design. Dada artists Raoul Haussmann, Hannah Hoch claim to have invented the art of "photo montage". A technique of manipulating found photographic images to create Jarring Juxtapositions and chances associations.

Raoul Haussmann

Hannah Hoch

Kurt Schwitters and the Merz

He created a non-political offshoot of Dada that he named Merz. Beginning as a one-man art movement in 1919. His Merz pictures were collage compositions using printed ephemera, rubbish and found materials to compose colour against colour, form against form and texture against texture. His complex designs combined Dada's elements of nonsense and chance with strong design properties. when he tried to join the Dada movement he was refused membership due to the fact for being too bourgeois

Printed ephemera

He wrote and designed poetry that played sense against nonsense. In the early 1920s constructivism became an added influence in Kurt Schwitters work after he made contact with El Lissitzky and Theo Van Doesburg who invited Schwitters to Holland to Promote Dada. Schwitters and Van Doesburg collaborated on a book design with typographic forms as the characters.

From 1923 until 1932, Kurt Schwitters published 24 issues of the periodical Merz, whose 11th issue was developed to advertising typography, during this time Schwitters ran a successful graphic design studio with Pelikan- manufacturer of office equipment and supplies, as a major client, and the city of Hanover employed him as typography consultant for several years. when the German political situation deteriorated in the 1930s, Schwitters spent a lot of time in Norway and moved to Oslo in 1937. After Germany invaded Norway in 1940, he fled to the British isles, where he spent the rest of his years.

The Berlin Dadaists
Taking the axe to the axis

In contrast to Kurt Schwitters, the Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfelde), Wieland Herzfelde, George Grosz, held vigorous revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of their artistic activities towards visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change. A German WW1 veteran and founding member of the Berlin Dada group in 1919, Heartfield used the harsh disjunction of photo montage as a potent propaganda weapon and innovated in the preparation of mechanical art offset printing. The Weimar republic and the growing Nazi party were his targets in posters, books, magazines, political illustrations and cartoons.

Heartfield worked directly with glossy prints acquired from magazines and newspapers. He commissioned a needed image from a photographer only occasionally because photography was still considered a poor man's art form. Heartfield's images met with literal and comprehensive working art.
After the stubtruppen occupied his apartment studio in 1933, he fled to Prague where he continued his graphic propaganda and mailed postcard versions of his graphics to Nazi leaders, learning that he was on a Nazi watch list in 1938, he fled to London where he stayed until setting in Leipzig, east Germany in 1950. there he worked mainly as a designer for theatre sets and posters.

Before his death in 1968 he produced photo montages protesting the Vietnam war and calling for world peace, unfortunately Still Timely is the title given to retrospective of his graphic art.

Heartfield's younger brother Wieland was a poet critic and publisher who edited the journal Neue Jugend. which was designed by Heartfield. After being jailed in 1914 for disturbing communist literature, Wieland started the Malik Verdag publishing house an important avent grade publisher of Dada. left wing political propaganda and advanced literature.

The painter and graphic designer George Grosz was closely associated with the Herzfelde brothers. His biting pen attacked a corrupt society with satire and caricature. He advocated a classless society and his drawings project an angry intensity of deep political convictions in what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate Milieu.

The end of Dada
The flame that burns the brightest

Having inherited assault upon all artistic and social traditions. Dada was a major liberating movement that continues to inspire innovation and rebellion. Dada was born in protest against war and its destructive exhibitionist activities became more absurd and extreme after the great war ended.

In 1921 and 1922 controversy and disagreement broke out among its members and the movement split into factions. French writer Andre Breton who was associating with the Dadaists, emerged as a new leader who believed that Dada lost its relevance and that new directions were necessary. Having pushed its negative activities to the limit lacking a unified leadership and with its members facing the new ideas that eventually led to surrealism, Dada floundered and ceased to exist as a cohesive movement by the end of 1922.

Dada's rejection of art and tradition enabled it to enrich the visual vocabulary started by futurism. though a synthesis of spontaneous chance actions with planned decisions Dadaists further rid typographic design of its traditional precepts by continuing cubism<s concept of letters as visual shapes rather than simple phonetic symbols.

Sunday, 9 November 2014

Manifesto

the definition of manifesto is a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives or motives issued as a government, sovereign, or organization.

Surrealism examples 1920

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic, philosophical, intellectual and political movement that aimed to break down the boundaries of rationalization to access the imaginative subconscious. It is a descendent of the Dadaism movement, which disregarded tradition and the use of conscious form in favour of the ridiculous. First gaining popularity in the 1920s and founded by Andre Breton, the approach relies on Freudian psychological concepts.

Proponents of surrealism believed that the subconscious was the best inspiration for art. They thought that the ideas and images within the subconscious mind was more “true” or “real” than the concepts or pictures the rational mind could create. Under this philosophy, even the ridiculous had extreme value and could provide better insights into a culture or a person’s desires, likes or fears.

A major reason why many people took issue with the movement was because it tossed away conventional ideas about what made sense and what was ugly. In fact, much of what advocates produced was designed to break rules in overt ways. The art and writing of the style often holds images or ideas that, under traditional modes of thought, are disturbing, shocking or disruptive

Although all surrealists agreed that the subconscious was the key to accessing the imagination, not all of them agreed on how to view the subconscious mind. This led to some differing views and practical applications. Two schools developed, automatism and veristic surrealism.

Automatism was a form of writing in which a person holds a pencil or pen, tries to clear away conscious thoughts and then simply allows the pencil to flow. The technique eventually crossed over into visual art such as drawing and painting. It relies heavily on the free association and dream techniques of famed psychologist, Sigmund Freud. People who practiced automatism used abstractionism and didn’t worry about analysing the meaning of images, believing that lack of form was a good way of rebelling against social and philosophical issues.

Veristic surrealists adopted Carl Jung’s belief in the universal subconscious, which was the theory that all people possess an innate knowledge and understanding of images. By looking at the images and identifying the metaphoric significance within them, these individuals hoped to access and understand subconscious behaviour and thought. Writer and professor Joseph Campbell later did significant work on this topic, exploring the commonalities among different mythic structures and reoccurring symbols in myths.

Practitioners and Examples

Artist Pablo Picasso was a practitioner of automatism. His work lets go of traditional practices and results in a more primal form of art. Much of his work is based in his concept that children’s ingenuity can provide essential access to the inner mind.

Most writers who practiced surrealism were French poets who followed automatism, including Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon. The works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce also employ a stream of consciousness approach. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats advocated the use of automatism and showed an interest in the topic prior to the start of the movement.

Salvador Dali is an example of an artist who followed the veristic school. He very much believed that art should be studied and mastered, and that expression of the unconscious would spring from metaphor. His work juxtaposes contrary or anachronistic images and derives more directly from Dadaism. He lent his skills not only to painting, but to film, as well, designing the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. People now regard this sequence as one of the best examples of the style in film.

Contemporary Surrealism

Though surrealism gradually waned in interest and was replaced by the artistic philosophy of modernism, one does not have to look far to see examples in modern art and film. Miyazaki's 2005 film Howl’s Moving Castle places ridiculous and anachronistic images in front of background drawings of very realistic early 19th century English towns. Many children in primary grades are taught self-portraiture relying specifically on portraits by Picasso. In literature, magical surrealism in works by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Selman Rushdie contain elements of the style.