Freshman Seminar 61v

Dada and Bauhaus: 100 years
Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This seminar takes its departure from the fact that Dada and Bauhaus, two of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century, have been recently celebrated and rediscovered, and newly researched by a number of scholars and curators, partially in response to their respective centennial. Dada was founded in Zürich in 1916, the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and both formations were intensely international from the very beginning, unifying artists from many different European countries (Austria, France , Germany Hungary, Rumania, Russia, , Switzerland), to engender two astonishingly complex group formations. All the more amazing is the fact that these two groups were pursuing utterly opposite goals in their practices, in fact one could consider them the extreme poles of the twentieth century. Dada’s goals were primarily anarchist and anti-aesthetic, yet politically often radical and progressive, and Dada was not accidentally the first avant-garde movement to include a large number of female artists in its midst. The Bauhaus, by contrast, while having its own political perspectives ranging from Social Democratic and Socialist positions to a more affirmative production- oriented liberal democratic orientation, aimed for the improvement of everyday life for the social collective as a result of design and production of consumer goods and transformed architectural conditions. The course will focus on individual practices as much as it will develop a critical comparative reading of the various features of the group identities. Throughout the semester, we will be reading original documents and manifestoes, as much as the writings of the artists, complemented obviously with key critical essays that make up the most important recent art historical literature on both subjects. The final two meetings of the course will also address the tremendous impact that both formations had on American art of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from the foundation of the Chicago Bauhaus / Institute of Design, and Black Mountain College both institutions which explicitly modelled themselves on the Bauhaus and brought former faculty members from the Bauhaus to the United States, as much as we will trace the enormously important influence that the rediscovery of the Dada legacies had on the development of artistic practices after Abstract Expressionism such as Pop Art and Fluxus in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.