Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls Author(s): Juliet Koss Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 724-745 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177367 Accessed: 10-01-2017 01:14 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 10 Jan 2017 01:14:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls Juliet Koss But when I attempt to survey my task, it is clear to me that exemplifying the bond between gender and mass culture, I should speak to you not of people, but of things.-Rainer to provide models of mass spectatorship for the Weimar Re- Maria Rilke, 19071 public. "The history of the theater is the history of the transfigu- In 1961, Walter Gropius grandly declared that "the Bauhaus ration of human form," Schlemmer asserted in 1925, with embraced the whole range of visual arts: architecture, plan- "the human being as the actor of physical and spiritual ning, painting, sculpture, industrial design, and stage work."2 events, alternating between naivete and reflection, natural- While the statement is not inaccurate, the straightforward ness and artificiality."6 Such contradictory attributes often inclusion of theater as one of six fundamental components of appeared simultaneously on the Bauhaus stage, where per- the visual arts belies the field's more complicated status at the formances combined human subjectivity and its deadpan Bauhaus.