Xanti Schawinsky Would Have Loved the Internet

NO. 5 ˚7 Xanti Scha- winsky Head Dra- wings and Faces of War BERGEN KUNSTHALL BERGEN KUNSTHALL Virtual space and war machines Milena Hoegsberg December 2015 Xanti Schawinsky would have loved the Internet. Many of his the world imagined as a kind of mechanized stage—is itself most enticing architectural landscapes beg to be animated, a symbol for potential, for movement, for cause and effect. to be pushed into the virtual realm. As an artist who worked Similarly, the figures in The Robber Ballet (Three Gentlemen consistently across media he would have made the most of of Verona), dated 1925, appear enveloped in a non-space of the technical possibilities available today, and not least been saturated thick matt ink. Outfitted in white shirts and black fascinated by the critical synergy between art, architecture, ties that peek up from their otherwise mechanical bodies, the fashion, and design—artistic and commercial work—that three gentleman carry the numbers one, two, and three as if online platforms such as DIS Magazine exemplify. What is so to underscore their identity as prototypes. The pre-robotic striking about his practice, that spans much of the twentieth figures stand identical with prosthetic “stump” legs, with century, is exactly how contemporary large parts of it seem. pistols in hand, and round red circles in place of faces. Contemporary in the sense not just of a likeness to the aesthetic cross-currents of the present, but of a timeless It is then not entirely surprising that the objects in Faces of quality that is in part a result of his continuous exploration War are machines, “masked” so as to recall the human, and of a pictorial “non-space.” Born in 1904, he spent his early like their Bauhaus counterpoints revealing little about their twenties at the Bauhaus working primarily with the stage true nature. In The Gunner, from 1942, cannons become workshop. This tactile experience sparked his commitment eyes and nose in a face comprised of a helmet merged atop to the space of possibilities afforded by the stage to set a tank. In The Admiral from the same year, two portholes architectural elements, and sometimes figures, in motion. in a large navy ship make up eyes, while the beard is This interest in the dynamism of space as a catalyst to express comprised of frothy white waves, and a round life preserver ideas—outside concrete geographic location and time—never mouth accentuates a quirky facial expression of surprise. left him. The bizarreness of the humanized objects here seems to be a tool to emphasize the ambiguity of the backdrops in a “Space - time - matter and their visualization” is the title of colorful no man’s land. This sense of a dystopian non-space is an address Schawinsky made to the Art Squad in New York heightened in the 1945 work Architectural Design, in which a City in the mid 1940s and might easily stand as the ethos of circular highway leads through the mouth of a large cement his practice, developed from the early 1920s until his death head with hollow black eyes echoing Schawinsky’s Bauhaus in 1979. Throughout his life he remained faithful to the idea stage designs while introducing a much more menacing of an interdisciplinary approach, not beholden to hierarchies atmosphere. Defined by the possibilities of graphic design— between art, architecture, and commercial design work, but chromatic bands and hues spreading across the page—these constantly evolving artistically. landscapes have a “virtual” feel, bound not by nation-state or the specifics of a given military agenda or political situation.3 The Faces of War, a remarkable series made in the early Yet the works are undeniably and even radically laced with 1940s, emphasizes how Schawinsky built on his previous critical counterpoint to the politics of the Second World War. works, cross pollinating and repeating elements that had appeared in both his artistic and commercial work—an In Untitled (War face and child), a cut-out photo of a young ideological distinction he would not have made.1 Drawn with child, preoccupied with the glass of milk he is holding, is watercolor and black pen on paper, the works render military superimposed onto one of these landscapes. Pictorially the equipment and machinery—a helmet, a tank, a ship, and a child occupies a space of his own, underscoring just how parachute—into faces with colored camouflage blots, situated divorced these war machines are from everyday human life. It in hyper-real landscapes. is safe to assume that Schawinsky would have felt the anxiety of the war and that this series was an active processing of its The desolate backdrops recall in particular works made some impact. A Swiss Jew, raised in Basel, he had been forced to twenty years earlier during Xanti’s Bauhaus years. Unlike migrate first from Germany, where he studied and worked, his mentor Oskar Schlemmer, who was concerned with the to Italy for three years, then to the United States, where transformation of the human figure in space, Schawinsky was he acquired citizenship in 1939 and lived for close to three more interested in spatial composition as a catalyst for visual decades. In the years Schawinsky produced Faces of War possibilities in its own right.2 In a delicate tempera drawing, in New York, he also worked for the United States Army Air titled Entwurf to einen konstruktiven raumbuhne (Design Corps designing camouflage patterns, in addition to other for a constructive spatial stage), from 1926, a kind of Ferris commercial graphic design work.4 He would have experienced wheel architecture of loosely connected elements, sketched at close range the industrial optimism surrounding the boom in soft watercolors, floats seemingly waiting to be triggered in American military production in its efforts to “out-produce,” by a human agent who remains unseen. The architecture— in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, its enemies. The Faces of War series then emerges as a testament to the dehumanizing qualities of war. Unlike the playfully performative “war rigs”—greased by human blood—in George Miller’s apocalyptic 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road, Footnotes: Schawinsky’s war machines are by contrast cloaked by the 1 For an excellent essay that explores this synergy between absence of human agency in the face of objects turned Xanti’s commercial and artistic work, and also in relation to the human. In Soldier’s Rest (Faces of War), one of the tank heads Head Drawings on view at Bergen Kunsthall, see: Juliet Koss, has been split open revealing a classic portrait outline, the “Facing Design” in Xanti Schawinsky, Head Drawings and human signifier passively contained inside the machine. Faces of War, Drawing Papers 119 (New York: The Drawing Center, 2015), pp. 11–43. Drawing on a visual language closely related to the aesthetics of propaganda posters of the 1940s, Schawinsky’s Faces 2 See: Torsten Blume, “The Bauhaus Years,” in Xanti deliberately fail to deliver any clear message. Their sinister Schawinsky (Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst & JRP playfulness recalls the subversive charge of Dadaist anti-war Ringier, 2015), p. 22. responses to the devastation of the First World War, and also the robots in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927, particularly 3 Michael Bracewell characterizes it “a stateless yet the dystopian underbelly of technological optimism. The atmospheric space” - a “nowhere” place, in the essay machine aesthetic had been taken to an extreme in Hitler’s “Elegance and Doom: A Contemporary Perspective on the fantasy of the Übermensch. “Swift as greyhounds, tough as Drawings of Xanti Schawinsky” in Xanti Schawinsky Head leather, hard as Krupp steel” was his chilling description of Drawings and Faces of War, Drawing Papers 119 (New York: his aspirations for Hitler Jugend, underscoring the ambition The Drawing Center, 2015), p. 46. of the Nazis to dehumanize its youth and make them into unbreakable machines. In the shadow of this disturbing 4 See: Tobias Peper, “Biographical Notes” in Xanti Schawinsky rationale, Schawinsky’s work stimulates uncertainty and (Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst & JRP Ringier, 2015), reflection through ambiguity. The faces are playful yes, but p. 163. only inasmuch as they are making a mockery of war machines, in the same way that the three Veronese gentlemen, outfitted as clerks, seem to be poking fun at the bureaucrat while exploring the agency of geometric forms in space. Schawinsky went on to produce numerous other bodies of work right up until the end of his life. It is interesting to speculate about what his response would have been to the world of today, specifically how our understanding of time and space is being rapidly reconfigured with the omnipresence of the digital realm and its impact on social relations, economics, politics, and resistance. How would he have responded to the military-industrial complex, and warfare enabled by sophisticated technology such as drones that allows visual, physical, and psychological distance from a target now appearing only as a pixilated image? More than eighty years after their production, Schawinsky’s humanized machines are still capable of raising questions that seem all too relevant about the impact of the technology we invent, and where that leaves us as human agents in a time when our humanity is consistently at risk. Xanti Schawinsky – Soldier’s Rest (Faces of War) Facsimile: The Drawing Center, Drawing Papers 119, Xanti Schawinsky – Head Drawings and Faces of War ENG XANTI SCHAWINSKY HEAD DRAWINGS AND FACES OF WAR 8 JANUARY – 28 FEBRUARY KUNSTHALLEN Curated by Brett Littman Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky was a first generation Bauhaus artist who studied in Weimar under Oskar Xanti Schawinsky was born 1904 in Basel, Switzer- Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius land, died 1979 in Locarno, Italy.

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