'bauhaus imaginista' - transnational exhibition to mark the anniversary of the Bauhaus

摘要

The exhibition "bauhaus imaginista" presents a view of the Bauhaus as a global resonance space and a cosmopolitan project. Currently the show can be visited in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the final stop after visits to Japan, China, Russia and Brazil.As the "core of the 100th anniversary year of the Bauhaus" the exhibition "bauhaus imaginista" offers numerous themes, changes of perspective and objects aimed at inviting people to make new discoveries about one of the world's most famous teaching facilities. In a show jointly organised by the three Bauhaus centres Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the Goethe Institut, the two curators, Marion von Osten and Grant Watson, conceived truly amazing views of this former smithy of the future: they go far beyond its concrete existence and attempt to address processes rather than pure design objects. Overall this show is wild, flickering, if not indeed somewhat chaotic. It departs decisively from the familiar master narratives of the Bauhaus teachers, often presenting more questions than answers. From a present-day standpoint the curators radi-cally question the achievements of this teaching facility by placing it in a wide-ranging global network of artistic processes of exchange. In order to contrast the familiar western perspective on the Bauhaus with a decidedly global view, the visit to Berlin was preceded by four exhibitions in Japan, China, Russia and Brazil and an even greater number of workshops in India, the USA, Morocco and Nigeria. In four sections with the titles Corresponding With, Learning From, Moving Away and Still Undead, "bauhaus imagini-sta" offers expansive spaces of imagination that can be read in many different ways, in which just a few selected Bauhaus pieces are related to numerous indigenous objects or materials from educational facilities outside Europe, in Morocco, Japan or India. The exhibition is also full of precious trouvailles which demand a great deal of knowledge and empathy from visitors, and therefore taking a guided tour or making use of an audio guide is highly recommended. Only a few of the relationships are presented in a way that can be easily fol-lowed, for instance when works from the Bauhaus directly encounter work by the young I. M. Pei, by Lina Lo Bardi, Ra-bindranath Tagore, Ariel Sharon, Stella Kramrisch, Marguerite Wildenhain or Andy Warhol. Those who are willing to spend a lot of time on studying the objects, the numerous installations, the texts and the films will be rewarded with unexpected discoveries. However, as regards the Bauhaus itself the show presents astonishingly little that is new. Yet again the Bauhaus is seen as synonymous with the modernism of the 1920s. More criticism of the "Bauhaus label" - which in this anniversary year has been extended in an inflationary fashion to cover almost anything and everything - would certainly not have harmed this large international exhibition project, whose final section, Still Undead, which deals with art experiments from the English-speaking world, is truly very far removed from the Bauhaus.