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CURATED BY ANN STEPHEN Bauhaus Now! Title Contributors Bauhaus Now! is published by 4 Director’s foreword Buxton Contemporary Bauhaus Now! — Prof Susan Best is Professor of Buxton Contemporary, University — Ryan Johnston University of Melbourne Art History and Theory at Griffith of Melbourne. 26 July – 20 October 2019 Authors University. Best is the author of Exhibition curated by Ann Stephen Susan Best, Ann Stephen Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Cover image 12 Bauhaus Now! Feminine Avant-garde (2011) and Mikala Dwyer and Justene Williams, Director ISBN 978-0-6482584-5-2 Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing Mondspiel / [Moon Play] 2019 — Ann Stephen Ryan Johnston in Contemporary Art Photography (details), mixed-media installation Artists (2016). She is currently completing comprising performance; video 24 A User’s Guide to Mondspiel / [Moon Play] Curator Mikala Dwyer a book titled Impersonality: (with performances by Phillip Melissa Keys Justene Williams Self and Other in Body Art and Adams and Deanne Butterworth); — Susan Best and Ann Stephen Michael Candy Performance (contracted to thistle garden; painted coffins; Collection and Peter D Cole Bloomsbury Philosophy). welded and painted sculpture Exhibition Manager Christopher Handran with crystals; rocking theremin Projects Katarina Paseta Shane Haseman — Dr Ann Stephen is an art historian sculptures; painted wooden 36 — Lantern Parade Gertrude Herzger-Seligmann and Senior Curator of the University sculptures; wall painting; fabric 40 — Thistle Garden Operations Manager Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Art Gallery and Art Collection at banners; sculpture, fabric and clay Kate Fitzgerald Paul Klee the University of Sydney. Her books on scaffold; acrylic, collage and 44 — Shane Haseman, Triadic dance Rose Nolan include Modernism & Australia: fabric tassels on canvas. Courtesy of the Secondaries Program and Visitor Elizabeth Pulie Documents on Art, Design and of the artists; Anna Schwartz Services Coordinator Jacky Redgate Architecture 1917–1967 (2006) Gallery, Melbourne; Roslyn Oxley9 48 — Bauhaus Now! Toys Ashlee Baldwin and Modern Times: The Untold Gallery, Sydney; Sarah Cottier 52 — Bauhaus Now! Film Program Editor Story of Modernism in Australia Gallery, Sydney Visitor Services Melissa Keys (2008), both co-edited with Andrew Lucas Andreatta McNamara and Philip Goad and This work is copyright. Apart from 54 List of works Olga Bennett Copyediting and proofreading published by Miegunyah Press, any use as permitted under the Anna Dunnill Clare Williamson Melbourne University Publishing. Copyright Act 1968, no part may be Camila Galaz reproduced by any process without Anthea Kemp All installation photography by The historical research underpinning written permission. Enquiries Rosie Leverton Christian Capurro; performance this exhibition is drawn from should be directed to the publisher. Clara Murphy stills p. 26 and pp. 44–47 by an Australian Research Council Anatol Pitt Eugene Hyland; p. 29 (top) Discovery Grant (DP160103820) © Copyright 2019 Buxton Eleanor Simcoe photograph by E. Scarlett and published in Prof Philip Contemporary, University of Gail Smith Snowden; p. 36 photograph Goad (University of Melbourne), Melbourne, the artists and Nikki Van der Horst by Ryan Johnston; pp. 37–39 Dr Ann Stephen (University of the authors Alex Walker photographs by Mark Anton Sydney), Prof Andrew McNamara Basmadji; p. 41 photograph (Queensland University of The views expressed in this Technical Assistant by Melissa Keys Technology), Prof Harriet Edquist publication are those of the Anatol Pitt (RMIT University) and Prof Dr contributing authors and not Design Isabel Wünsche (Jacobs University, necessarily those of the publisher. Studio Round, Melbourne Bremen) (eds), with research by Dr Wiebke Gronemeyer Buxton Contemporary respectfully Publication design (Jacobs University, Bremen), acknowledges the Boonwurrung Tristan Main Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: and Wurundjeri peoples of the Transforming Education Through Eastern Kulin Nation, on whose Printing Art, Design and Architecture, land this book was produced. We Print Graphics Melbourne University Publishing, acknowledge their ancestors and Stocks: Sovereign Silk 350gsm, Carlton, Vic. and Power Publications, Elders, who are part of the longest Knight Digital Smooth 140gsm University of Sydney, 2019. continuing culture in the world. Edition: 600 Buxton Contemporary Corner Southbank Boulevard and Dodds Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia www.buxtoncontemporary.com Director’s foreword College of Art – Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology and — Ryan Johnston Jacobs University, Bremen. Exhibition contributors span disciplines, including visual art, dance, music, architecture, design and horticultural science. Buxton Contemporary presents the exhibition Bauhaus Now! to mark the Student participation has been integrated into coursework and workshops centenary of the Bauhaus, arguably the most important, and certainly the best- across multiple institutions, resulting in lantern-making classes and a public known, art and design school of the 20th century. Operative during the complex parade through Melbourne’s CBD with visual art, design and fashion students; and increasingly regressive political climate of inter-war Germany, the Bauhaus a practical unit on Bauhaus-inspired toy design undertaken by Master of was both peripatetic and short-lived. Political pressure forced it to move twice, Architecture students; and the performance of a newly commissioned first from Weimar to Dessau and then to Berlin, before the Nazi Party closed it composition by dance students. permanently almost immediately upon assuming power in 1933, just fourteen years after the school was founded. Most of its faculty left Germany in the The overall project has its origins in a major, and again pan-institutional, Australian years that followed (if they hadn’t already), resettling in locations including the Research Council Discovery Grant. This exhibition coincides with the publication United Kingdom, United States, Israel and Australia. Yet despite, or perhaps by Melbourne University Publishing and Power Publications of that project’s major even because of, this compact cycle of enforced reinvention and dispersion, outcome: Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education Through Art, the Bauhaus has since exerted a remarkable sphere of influence. Design and Architecture, edited by Prof Philip Goad, Dr Ann Stephen, Prof Andrew McNamara, Prof Harriet Edquist and Prof Dr Isabel Wünsche. While relatively few of its students became artists of note, the Bauhaus changed Bauhaus Now! is, in other words, an excellent example of how exhibitions at the course of Western arts education dramatically. It is frequently cited as university art museums can powerfully leverage academic expertise and enhance inaugurating a paradigmatic shift from the academic, talent-focused training student learning while maximising public engagement with both. model rooted in observation and imitation to a new creativity-focused pedagogy premised on invention and the pursuit of medium specificity. As art historian As implied by the above, there have been many contributors to this exhibition. Thierry de Duve, among others, has observed, countless art schools around In particular, I would like to thank our many partners and supporters who, in the world were subsequently founded on versions of the Bauhaus pedagogical addition to the institutions already named, include the Centre of Visual Art at the premise, and its implications and assumptions continue to underlie, or even University of Melbourne, the Goethe-Institut and the Australia Council for the haunt, curricula internationally to this day (including in Australia).1 Arts. The exhibition features works held in public and private collections across Australia, and I acknowledge the many lenders who have generously made At the same time, the Bauhaus’s design legacy – spanning everything from these available to us, including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Geelong 4 architecture to furniture to urban planning – is perhaps even more profound. Gallery, the University of Sydney and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the 5 Indeed, architectural historian Mark Wigley has recently, if provocatively, gone so University of Melbourne. I also thank all of the artists who have contributed new far as to argue that the Bauhaus’s concept of a ‘good’ or ‘total’ design ‘divorced and existing work to the exhibition: Michael Candy, Peter D Cole, Christopher from politics’ did much to inaugurate our present ‘global economy wherein capital Handran, Shane Haseman, Rose Nolan, Elizabeth Pulie and Jacky Redgate. I am and biology have become the very medium of design’.2 In making this case, Wigley also deeply appreciative of the major commitment Mikala Dwyer and Justene argues that no product exemplifies this Bauhaus aesthetic ideology as much as Williams have made to this show from the very beginning and the extraordinary the Apple iPhone, the smooth and seamless finish of which both anaesthetises new work that they have developed for the occasion. and belies its design-led ‘radical transformation of our body, brain and planet’.3 I thank the members of the Buxton Contemporary Committee for their Given the enduring influence of the Bauhaus on both pedagogy and praxis, ongoing support, as well as the museum’s dedicated and highly professional combined with the fact that this centenary comes at a time when, as many staff Melissa Keys, Katarina Paseta,