Margret Kentgens-Craig: The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999)

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.

After the Bauhaus’s closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America’s early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 026211237X, 9780262112376
283 pages

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Marta De Gonzalo, Publio Pérez Prieto: The Intention (2008)

“The Intention is an artistic and didactic project on education and audiovisual literacy. From the very start, it wasn’t conceived as a project with a closed final shape and formalisation. Rather, it was specified through different projects, and will continue to do so in the future. Currently, its chief formal presentations have consisted in a series of audio-visual pieces, in an exhibition format as an installation, and as a series of workshops and discussions with art educators and professionals.

This publication attempts to present secondary education and university teachers, art institutions and other interested parties, with a guide to the use and deep analysis of the work, in order to allow for a selection of the axes or different layers of reading in the project with which to work with their students, or, from an institutional standpoint, with the provided materials.”

Translated by Kamen Nedev
Publisher Entreascuas Editores, Madrid, 2008
Open distribution license for educational use.
532 pages

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Alessio Lunghi, Seth Wheeler (eds.): Occupy Everything! Reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere (2012)

Penned after the 2010 European student unrest and before what is now commonly referred to as the “Arab spring” began to escalate, BBC Newsnight economist Paul Mason’s “20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere” sought to establish an understanding of the motivations behind these globally disparate, yet somehow connected struggles.

What roles do the “graduate with no future,” the “digital native” or the “remainder of capital” play in the current wave of unrest? What are the ideas, ideologies, motivations or demands driving these movements? How is struggle organized and coordinated in the age of memetic politics and viral ad campaigns?

This collection of essays seeks to further explore Paul Mason’s original 20 Reasons in an attempt to better understand our turbulent present.

Contributors: 500 Hammers – Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl – The Free Association – Deterritorial Support Group – Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach – Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret – David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton & Will Barker – Antonis Vradis – Tabitha Bast & Hannah McClure – Andre Pusey & Bertie Russell – Federico Campagna – Emma Dowling

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-251-6
98 pages

Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere by Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight, February 2011)

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