I deliberated, long and hard, over writing this piece, because its subject is, like the NHS (in the UK), considered sacrosanct, in some circles beyond reproach.
Next year, 2019, marks the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, initially in the city of Weimar. However, how might one approach writing about a holy grail such as the Bauhaus without, potentially, pissing-off a whole stockpile of disciples? How might you construct an article, or essay, in the true modernist sense which underpinned the thinking of its epoch, without simply regurgitating, or repeating, what a million-and-one other pieces will all, throughout the next twelve months or so, assuredly peddle-out to an eager audience hungry for the “heritage” of the early twentieth century, extolling the virtues of Walter Gropius, and his compatriots, reviling the Nazis for, among much more besides, prematurely closing down the school, in Berlin (after having passed through Dessau along the way) in 1933, for germinating and proliferating what the third Reich considered to be “degenerate art” proffered, largely, they determined, by Jews and their Communist comrades.
It is all too easy, at the beginning of the 21st century, to cut and paste history, to splice various disparate pieces of others’ work in order to colour the story any way you chose, but ending-up with something which doesn’t particularly offer anything new, and, disingenuously, claim the piece as your own creation.
Didn’t the Bauhaus, and the modernists generally, after all, advocate the breaking with tradition, and the established, norm, to eradicate heritage for heritage sake, and to “create” something completely new, unique, functional and fit for purpose “now”, to continually evolve products, and/or the machine for living, in order to keep pace with an ever evolving, and increasingly automated, society, and its resulting lifestyles?
However, people do frequently refer to “the Bauhaus Style”, and, I’m sure, people will do so again throughout the coming months, but wouldn’t this very concept be an anathema to the likes of Gropius, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Le Corbusier (the latter never having taught at the Bauhaus though his theories and philosophies undeniably will have fed into the thoughts of both those who did, and their students)? An anathema because the concept of becoming a fixed style, something which can be referred to, aped, copied and repeated flies in the face of the philosophy which advocates eternal evolution, and in the worse-case scenario relegates a group, and their output, to the realms of heritage… a fate equal, at least, to death, to any self-respecting modernist.
And yet, it seems, “a style it has become”. Visit any gallery purporting to proffer “modern” art and you’ll mine innumerable publications which relate to modern design, and which will refer to the “Style of The Bauhaus”, or inspired by The “Bauhaus Style”. Like it or not, a hundred years after its creation The Bauhaus has become a part of the heritage industry, like a caricature of itself in a Disney parade of early 20th century design .
While we’re here, isn’t IKEA the ultimate “end-game” for “its” particular brand of modernism, and the dubious heir to a thought process which started with such noble intention? Administering a pallid, habitual, perfunctory, homogenised, mediocre, death-like flat-pack coma to an stupefied horde, a pliant public of shuffling drones, harvesting the ubiquitous cheap print to match the six-monthly cycle of changing colour scheme in their ubiquitous living rooms, embracing the one size fits all package like a millennial might embrace a security blanket, only slightly less soggy at the corners. Arguably its created a highly democratised world, a world in which every indistinguishable requirement for urban living, without the burden of having to think for one’s self, or consider any kind of personal environmental responsibility, for example, and all available under a single roof, in a giant repository on the edge of town, which happens to be identical to every other blue-and-yellow repository on the edge of every other town, in every other nation, selling a universally identical lifestyle which’ll fit into the back of your Volvo (VW, Audi, Merc, etc, select as applicable) and which you can recreate in the relative comfort of your own home, providing you possess the necessary rudimentary dexterity and cognitive requirements to do so (in other words – providing you’re not totally inept, or completely thick).
On second thoughts, forget the Bauhaus – it seemed like a good idea at the time. Bench-mark the fact that the philosophy spawned by those intellects which aggregated in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century was profound, then leave it where it is and go “make something new”… keep the faith.
