Walter Gropius (ed.): The Theater of the Bauhaus (1925–) [DE, EN]

“The Bauhaus movement was one of this century’s most daring experiments in arts education, and its influence on architecture, design, and the visual arts is well known. Many of its most important ideas are revealed in Bauhaus writings about theatrical performance and performance spaces. Originally published in Germany in 1925 — at the height of the Bauhaus movement’s influence– The Theater of the Bauhaus collects writings from some of the movement’s most important figures and describes a theater stripped of history, moralism, scenery, and, for that matter, narrative itself. The Bauhaus group believed traditional theater to be little more than a vehicle for propaganda, with its “peep show stage” separating spectators from performers. They rejected as well the theater of ridicule and satire practiced by the Dadaists and Expressionists. In place of both traditional drama and the avant-garde that lampooned it, Oskar Schlemmer and his Bauhaus associates created an abstract theater of movement, color, light, form, and sound-language would be added later, once the stage had been purged of its “literary encumbrance.” They believed that humanity’s essential nature–freed from history, tradition, class, and nationality–would find expression in theatrical works that incorporated pantomime, masks, dance, and acrobatics.”

Contents: Walter Gropius: Introduction; Oskar Schlemmer: Man and Art Figure; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Theater, Circus, Variety; Farkas Molnar: U-Theater; Oskar Schlemmer: Theater (Bühne); Translator’s Note.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 4 of Bauhausbücher series
84 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

English edition
Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1961
ISBN 0819560200
110 pages

Die Bühne im Bauhaus (German, 72 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, added on 2014-8-17, updated on 2022-4-13)
Die Bühne im Bauhaus (German, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
The Theater of the Bauhaus (English, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger, 1961, 6 MB, updated on 2016-10-15)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series.

Jacques Rancière: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011/2013)

Rancière’s magnum opus on the aesthetic.

“Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.”

First published as Aisthesis : Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art, Éditions Galilée, 2011

Translated by Zakir Paul
Publisher Verso Books, 2013
ISBN 1781680892, 9781781680896
304 pages
via falsedeity

Reviews: Hal Foster (London Review of Books), Joseph Tanke (Los Angeles Review of Books), Marc Farrant (The New Inquiry), Ali Alizadeh (Sydney Review of Books), Jean-Philippe Deranty (Parrhesia).
Roundtable discussion with Rancière at Columbia (video, 43 min)
Selected interviews and reviews (in French)

Publisher

PDF