Analysis by Paralysis: August 2010

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

George Orwell and Leonard Woolf: a comparison

I’m writing on Goerge Orwell and Leonard Woolf, partly because the two are significant literary figures in their own right, and also, partly, because I’m more interested in George Orwell than I am in the entirety of Bloomsbury put together. That, and Leonard Woolf has been incredibly undervalued in the literature—often caricatured as a despotic husband that constantly damaged with his brilliant wife’s sanity. *

George Orwell, on the other hand, has always had a strong following. Accepted in his own day as a literary giant, his name has since come to be synonymous with masterful prose and [JP1] incisive political criticism. What can we gain from placing both literary figures together? What does the contrast tell us about two different strands of British social and political thinking?

Woolf and Orwell share many things in common, not the least of which being their commitment to socialism. While Woolf was an outspoken Fabian Society member who even ran for the Labor party, Orwell always viewed himself as a political independent who continually criticized what he saw as the unthinking and uncritical nature of British Socialist orthodoxy.[1] *[JP2] Orwell and Woolf’s lives also converge and diverge on the matter of biography as well: both served as colonial administrators early in their careers and wrote novels based on their experience, though with incredibly different styles and objectives. Yet, though both came to despise Imperialism and the economic exploitation it implied, they expressed it through very different means. Woolf wrote extensively on the imperialist system in books like Economic Imperialism and Empire and Commerce in Africa, where George Orwell confined himself mainly to the odd sniping comment or reflection in his essays.

Since Orwell and Woolf shared such oddly parallel lives it would be easy to conclude that the most major difference between them was simply generational. Offset by around twenty years, the two are natural dissimilar in outlook because they came from varying backgrounds—Woolf was a member of Bloomsbury high society, while Orwell was a middle-class writer for most his life. But, though we could simply determine the two to be contrasted through historical accidents, I’m not certain that this would be very convincing or very fruitful. Rather, I propose to analyze the contrasts between the two not only as indicative of different sub-societies, but of differing views on british socialism in the early 20^th century. Along the way, I’ll also perform the mandatory exigesis of their two novels, Woolf’s A Village in the Jungle, and Orwell’s Burmese Days for signs of their different views toward imperialism and socialism as well.

I have several hypotheses on how the difference might characterize itself over time:

1. Both writers were discussing different forms of socialism entirely. A generational gap, as described above.

2. Leonard’s association with Bloomsbury and “Bloomsbury ideals” implicates him in the larger debate. Orwell, as the quintessential outsider, never had such connections and thus was able to sell himself much more effectively as an independent political commentator.

3. Orwell’s fiction innovated over Woolf’s, as Woolf’s largely was much less political than Orwell’s.

4. This would lead to a different approach in “selling” socialism. Woolf was, on the one hand, much more predictable. He attended rallies, published pamphlets, and ran for office. Orwell, concerned largely with how language itself interacted with society, distanced himself from such measures.

I hope to arrive at some kind of unifed synthesis of the above ideas. If any of you have questions or comments about this plan, or would like to tell something helpful about it, let me know.

[1] See his famous essay, “the Lion and the Unicorn” in the collected volume of his criticism; George Orwell, Critical Essays, Reset ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946).

[JP1]See other STUDIES on the reception history of Leonard Woolf

?When [JP2]?

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Schlemmer Paper; a later complete Draft

Schlemmer’s Theory of Man and the Stage

Prompt: Discuss the spatial concepts developed by Oskar Schlemmer in his
essay Man and Art Figure. What does the stage mean to him and what
does it have to fulfill?

I Introduction: Schlemmer and his critics

Oskar Schlemmer was one of the leading figures of the Bauhaus in the Weimar Germany, famous for pioneering a radical theory of dance and theatre that incorporated technology and the mechanical world into a description of the human form. In a life replete with mysteries and contradictions—not least of which being his failed attempt to appease the Nazis—Oskar Schlemmer’s theory of man and the body encapsulates perhaps the greatest mystery of all; that of creating a new vision of humanity through dematerializing the body. His staging and theatre called for elaborate costumes, and set-designs to attempt to mask humanity underneath the weight of abstract shapes and forms, thereby allowing us the pure aesthetic contemplation of movement and beauty.[1] Schlemmer’s quest to liberate the body from the shackles of natural form led him to collapse the distinction between man and machine, creating a paradoxical theory that, on the one hand, was deeply anthropocentric, and, on the other, purposely inhuman and abstract. Schlemmer’s critics, of which there are many, have rightly detected the problems with such a theory, and, to this day, Schlemmer is (wrongly) remembered as a member of that long pageant of modernists too obsessed with the possibilities of machine to produce durable artwork.

Oskar Schlemmer’s theory of Man and the Stage has had checkered reception since his death. His work, particularly the triadic ballet, is often viewed as the evidence of machine-fetish and anti-humanism, one critic in 1971 going so far as to claim that his work represents ‘a now familiar statement of dehumanisation, with bankrupt choreography replaced by costume as décor’.[2] More recently, Karl Toepfer, held that Schlemmer’s idea of theatre amounted to “an activation of space that ultimately needed no bodies, no dancers It was the image of a machine-idol.”[3] Though various critics have come to Schlemmer’s defense, such as Susanne Lahusan in a somewhat apologetic article in 1986, the consensus position of Oskar Schlemmer’s ultimate purpose in such avant-garde works as the Triadisches Ballett emphasizes his role in appropriating mechanical motifs to the exclusion of deeper humanity.[4] I hope to right the balance by exploring how Oskar Schlemmer’s work was centered on a deeply humanist, if somewhat contradictory, conception of man’s potential as enacted on the stage. The stage was the area where man’s body and form can be most readily experimented upon, and a place where the boundaries between man and machine became soft and permeable.

II Bauhaus and the Machine Age

The discourse surrounding Oskar Schlemmer revolves around his relationship and expropriation of machine culture, and rightly so. However, in centering the discussion so completely on “machine-idols” and “human dolls,” critics have emphasized one strain of
Schlemmer’s thought to the exclusion of the others, namely, his belief that Man had potential, through the symbolic mediation of the machine, to transcend his own physical limitations. Machine and Man, abstract and natural form, are mutually supportive rather than antagonistic. In phrasing his argument this way, Schlemmer followed the Bauhaus doctrine of constructively integrating the machine into daily life.

The way to bridge the gap between Machine and Man, and thus enshrine and uplift man would be through the unity of artistic medium, represented by the Bauhaus members in Architecture—the literal “house” of art. The Bauhaus manifesto, written by Walter Gropius in 1919, claimed architecture to be the symbol for a new world order that united the machine, art, and man.[5] The architectural metaphor became extremely important in the writings and theories of the Bauhaus, for the house represented both the domestic and social center of the world; a place where theory and practice converged to revolutionize society.[6] Schlemmer’s emphasis on the stage as the place where transcendence can occur replicates the emphasis on architecture that the rest of the Bauhaus members imagined, but also expands it to another metaphor: that of stage.

The stage, as articulated by Schlemmer, was to the nexus of a new artistic order that united the distinct differences and contrasts between types and led man toward a higher awareness. This approach, which was nothing less than cosmic position on the nature of man, explains why Schlemmer theorized about a grand “total theatre” in one of his later essays.[7] According to Schlemmer, shape and space were central to art, and as such, his architectural plans, as grandiose as they were, represented the metaphysical project of unification he had earlier described. The stage was literally to be a temple, a place of communication and symbolization of powers that could elevate humanity. But beyond Schlemmer’s literal plans a drawings for a universal stage, Schlemmer’s idea of space—both in the theatrical and the cosmic sense, constitute the essential part of his theory—the point at which man can be integrated with the abstract and achieve “dematerialization.”

III Schlemmer’s Stage and Space

Schlemmer’s emphasis on space, then, lies behind his crucial theories of dance and acting as well. In his seminal 1923 essay, Man and Art Figure, argued that the quest of meaning in space led to a quandary, an impasse that would constitute not only the approach toward theatre, but also the approach toward man and life:

“Either abstract space is adapted in deference to natural man and transformed back into nature or the imitation of nature…Or natural man, in deference to abstract space, is recast to fit its mold. This happens in the abstract stage.”[8]

Man must submit himself to the rules of cubical and mathematical space in order to achieve this abstraction, and thereby, the “dematerialization” that allows him to transcend the physical limits. It is on the stage, thus, that man can reform himself. The stage provided the testing-ground for Schlemmer’s theories, where, helped by the attendant rudiments of costume and set-design Man could reach his “greatest potential”.[9]

Schlemmer’ theory, then, could hardly be seen as purely the work of a machine-mad theorist. Rather, the evidence from Schlemmer began his seminal 1925 essay, “Man and Art Figure”, implies that Schlemmer sought nothing less than the creation of a new man, transformed thorugh integration with abstract space. Schlemmer thus begins his essay with a cosmic dictum about mankind and the stage: “The history of the theater is the history of the transfiguration of the human form. It is the history of man as the actor of physical and spiritual events, ranging from naïveté to reflection, from naturalness to artifice.”^{^[10]} Man, therefore, exists in flux, between nature and artifice, between “natural law” and “abstract law”. The only way to transcend physical reality is to choose the abstract assimilation of space into the body, which leads to further “metamorphosis” through costume and form. The abstract stage, then, is the testing-ground for man on the way toward his own transformation

It is notable that Schlemmer never sought to bring a general, social transformation of man thorugh movement, as Rudolph von Laban did. Rather, Schlemmer focused on the stage itself as an area that bound and created new ideas of space itself. In sketches embedded within the text of “Man and Art Figure”, Schlemmer drew figures of man on a mathematically pinpointed stage, covered with intersecting lines representing the force and dimensions of the space around him. The human figure lies in the center of an immense diagram of criss-crossing lines and pointers, the object that both radiates its own laws and is impinged by other laws. This constructive tension between man and the abstract space around him is at the center of the dematerialization that Schlemmer presents. Schlemmer calls the figure that can accomplish this balance the Tänzermensch, the human dancer, that “obeys the law of the body as well as the law of space; he follows his sense of himself as well as his sense of embracing space.”[11] As much of a contrast or contradiction with the earlier material as this might seem, Schlemmer goes on to pronounce a judgment on the “Tänzermensch” in general, who ,apparently, is the “medium of transition into the great world of theatre.”[12] This Tänzermensh, then, incorporates both the abstract movements of space with the inner movements of the human natural and spiritual being.

The way to “metamorphose” a human being into a higher form, is to adjust the space he occupies and symbolizes through costume. By modifying the body, costumes both add to and subtract from its essential nature, both augmenting and ignoring human laws: “Costume and mask emphasize the body’s identity or they change it; they express its nature or they are purposely misleading about it; they stress its conformity to organic or mechanical laws or they invalidate this conformity.”[13] Schlemmer’s costumes, then, are based on a combination of four types of spatial laws—the most human of which are represented by the “functional laws of the human body”, and the least, by the “metaphysical forms of expression of the human body.”[14] These costumes are based, then, on laws both visible and invisible, that converge in the human body to produce different, previously unknown, forms.

It is only after this point that Schlemmer acknowledges that the human body is limited in this quest for abstraction by its physical boundaries, the most obvious limitation being the law of gravity.[15] It is here, naturally, where Schlemmer makes some of his most radical conclusions about man and his subordination to space. According to Schlemmer, the “endeavor to free man from his physical bondage and to heighten his freedom of movement beyond his native potential resulted in substituting for the organism the mechanical human figure (Kunstfigur).”[16] The ultimate way to incorporate space into a figure would be to replace the human being itself with a machine. Ironically, then, the end of man’s abstraction, the end point of his fulfillment in his “greatest potential” is to finally be subordinated so that he becomes unnecessary. The “Tänzermensch” succumbs to the Kunstfigur in the hierarchy of mortal possibilities. Yet the natural man, the fleshly man of body and blood, is not completely cast aside. Rather, the ultimate symbol of this unity lies in the “possibility of relation the figure of natural “naked” Man to the abstract figure, both of which experience, through this confrontation, an intensification of their peculiar natures.”[17] It is here where many commentators of Schlemmer miss the mark and forget that, though the Kunstfigur is the final stage in a development towards abstraction, its supremacy and expressiveness on the stage is meant to heighten, rather than diminish, Man’s role. Mankind’s essential nature, then, is intensified through its relationship with the abstracted forms, rather than to be obscured by them. In this regard, Schlemmer system could aptly be called humanist, because its final function is to unite mankind with himself through the reflective means of the art-figure himself.

IV Conclusion: Man, the measure of all things?

How much is Schlemmer’s theory a free-wheeling celebration of the machine for its own sake, and how much is it a measured account of the machine’s integration into the human body? On the one hand, Schlemmer’s critics have been entirely right to see this as a manifesto elevating machines and objects to an almost divine status. Yet, by so doing, they often forget the essential humanity that the Kunstfigur symbolizes. Some critics even create a greater error, as well, of reading backwards on the 1922 Triadic Ballet the speculations in the 1925 essay. As far toward dematerialization as the figures in the Ballet go, they are not the ultimate ideal.[18] Rather, Schlemmer places that ideal far beyond the ability of theatre in his own era—into an obscure future where dependent on the technological innovation that will make the full realization of the Kunstfigur possible.

In the mean time, Schlemmer constructed a theory of man that harmonizes with its presence of the machine. Man’s inner essence is exposed and expressed by the machine through contrast, just as much as it is augmented through its application. The stage, then, is an arena symbolic constructions for Schlemmer—a place where dematerialization can lift man up to his highest and most divine purposes and thereby better instruct him how to live. Schlemmer concludes his article by alluding to the political and social role of the stage in renewing culture. According to him, the wonders of the machine age have created a peculiar credulity in the society: “Amazed at the flood of technological advance, we accept these wonders of utility as being already perfected art form, while actually they are only prerequisites for its creation.”[19] Rather than accept technology as inherently beautiful and artistic, as such groups as, for example, the futurists did, Schlemmer instead sees mechanization and technology only as means to an end of artistic creation—a means that, when coupled with the right form, can fundamentally restructure society.

Yet for all of this, we must not forget a certain strand of self-contradiction buried deep in Schlemmer’s argument. It is frankly paradoxical to claim that mankind is the “alpha and the omega of every artistic creation,” when his end is to be, in essence, replaced by an abstraction. Yet, if we take into account Schlemmer’s notebooks on the introductory course that he taught at the Bauhaus, we can see where his theories of man might have unfolded.[20] Schlemmer proposed to teach a unified idea of man that incorporated art, sociology, and natural science, beginning with the nude and moving onto more theoretical approaches. Throughout all of the work, however, Schlemmer emphasizes the Renaissance dictum the “Man is the measure of all things”—that is, even the measure of the highly abstract realm of the Kunstfigur. Even grandiose abstractions are practical objects that have man as the ultimate goal.
Schlemmer thus presents a goal for the modern man: it is through technology, rather than in opposition to it, that Man can come to know himself.

[1] Schlemmer draws much of his argument here from Kleist’s essay, “On the Puppet Theatre.” Cited from “Kleist: Puppet Theater,” n.d., http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts/week9/puppet.html. See also, J. Olf, “The Man/Marionette Debate in Modern Theatre,” Educational Theatre Journal 26, no. 4 (1974): 488–494.

[2] Lincoln Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor, London, Pitman, 1971, p. 214 Quoted in S. Lahusen, “Oskar Schlemmer: Mechanical Ballets?,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 4, no. 2 (1986): 65–77.

[3] Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (University of California Press, 1997)., 146

[4] S. Lahusen, “Oskar Schlemmer: Mechanical Ballets?,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 4, no. 2 (1986): 65–77.

[5] See the opening words of the Bauhaus Manifesto: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building!” “Bauhaus Manifesto,” n.d., http://www.dmoma.org/lobby/Bauhaus_manifesto.html.

[6] The Manifesto ends with a stirring and overblown declaration to this effect: “Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.”

[7] See, Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 12. “Plans and models of the synthetic ‘Total Theater’”

[8] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 22.

[9] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 17

[10] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 17

[11] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 25

[12] Ibid., 25

[13] Ibid., 25

[14] Ibid, 23-24

[15] Ibid., 26

[16] Ibid., 28

[17] Ibid., 29

[18] The criticism of Kate Elswit in her article, for example, levels this distinction, taking the Triadic Ballet as a core-text in proving the validity of the Kunstfigur itself. See Kate Elswit, “The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss,” Modern Drama 51, no. 3 (January 1, 2008): 389-410.

[19] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 31

[20] See Oskar Schlemmer, Man: Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus (London: Lund Humphries, 1971).

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Monday, August 9, 2010

Schlemmer Craziness; an early incomplete draft

[Note--please ignore any asteriks *--they're holdover's from earlier comments]

Oskar Schlemmer was one of the leading figures of the Bauhaus in the 1920’s Weimar Germany, famous in pioneering a radical theory of dance and theatre who’s insistence on incorporating technology and the mechanical world has never been matched. A life is replete with mysteries and contradictions—not least of which being his failed attempt to appease the Nazis--Oskar Schlemmer’s theory of man and the body encapsulates perhaps the greatest mystery of all; that of creating a new vision of humanity through dematerializing the body. Ironically, “dematerialization”, according to Schlemmer, only requires more material. His staging and theatre called for elaborate costumes, and set-designs to attempt to mask the hidden humanity underneath the weight of abstract shapes and forms, thereby allowing us the pure aesthetic contemplation of its movement and beauty[J1] . Schlemmer’s quest to liberate the body from the shackles of natural form led him even further into to collapse the distinction between man and machine, creating a paradoxical history that, on the one hand, was deeply anthropocentric, and, on the other, inhuman and abstract.[1] Critics have, of course, seen the problems behind both positions, and, to this day, Schlemmer is (wrongly) remembered as a member of that long, shabby company of modernists too obsessed with the possibilities of machine to produce durable artwork. However, before characterizing Schlemmer in such negative light, we must observe and review the consequences of his theory of man in the humanistic terms that he himself set out to prove.

II.

The discourse surrounding Oskar Schlemmer, then, revolves around his relationship and expropriation of machine culture. A large and grandiose part of Weimar culture at the time, fascination, horror, and embrace of the machine lay behind much of the contrasting imagery that made up the mad political and social landscape of Weimar.[2] Some artists, such as the Futurists, embraced, the machine, while others saw nothing but horror and desolation within it.[3] Faced with the terrors of machine warfare, as expressed in World War 1, artists were left with a choice; either embrace the machine, as the futurists did, turn away from machines entirely, or, in the third way[J2] that Walter Gropius defined , “domesticate” the machine and make it habitable and useful, rather than dangerous.[4]

III.

This third way was pursued actively in the Bauhaus, a group of artist, theorists, and craftsmen, that sought to unite all the art-forms toward a new way of living in harmony, rather than in opposition to, the machine society. Though the Bauhaus has often been mischaracterized as a group of soulless people desiring to make art into a mechanical, reproducible exercise,^{^[5]} the end goal of their art was, as Gropius described, to ‘tame’ the machine, and to make it habitable and useful for the modern man.^{^[6]} The Bauhaus ethos, then, was undeniably humanistic, as much as it might have been based on the practical dictates of the machine.

IV.

The way to bridge the gap between Art and Life, and thus enshrine and uplift man would be through the unity of artistic medium, represented by the Bauhaus members in Architecutre—the literal “house” of art. In their manifesto, Walter Gropius, written by Walter Gropius in 1919, architecture, both literally and metaphorically, became the symbol for a new world order that united the machine, art, and man, culture: “”.[7] The architectural metaphor became extremely important in the writings and theories of the Bauhaus, for the house represented both the domestic and social center of the world; a place where theory and practice converged to revolutionize society.[8] Though Schlemmer never sought to integrate dance within the home and daily life, as contemporary Dance theorists such as Rudolph von Laban and Mary Wigamn did[9], his emphasis on the stage as the place where transcendence can occur certainly replicates the emphasis on architecture that the rest of the Bauhaus members employed. *[J3]

IV.

Thus, architecture, and the stage, created for Schlemmer the forum in which he could produce his new idea of the body. The stage, as argued by Schlemmer, was to be the nexus of a new artistic order that united the distinct differences and contrasts between types and led man toward a higher awareness. This approach, which was nothing less than cosmic, explains why Schlemmer theorized about a grade world stage, a stage that could adapt itself for any purpose.[10] According to Schlemmer, shape and space were central to modern art, and as such, his architectural plans, as grandiose as they were, also represented the metaphysical project of unification that he had earlier described.

Schlemmer’s emphasis on space, then, lies behind his crucial theories of dance and acting as well. In his seminal 1923[J4] essay, Man and Art Figure, argued that the quest of meaning in space led to a quandary, an impasse that would constitute not only the approach toward theatre, but also the approach toward man and life:

“Either abstract space is adapted in deference ot natural man and transformed back into nature or the imitation of nature…Or natural man, in deference ot abstract space, is recast to fit its mold. This happens in the abstract stage.”[11]

Man then, must submit himself to the rules of cubical and mathematical space in order to achieve this abstraction, and thereby, the “dematerialization” that allows him to transcend the body. It is on the stage, thus, that man can and does reform himself. The stage provided the testing-ground for Schlemmer’s theories, then, where, helped by the attendant rudiments of stage costume and set-desgin, Only through these accompanying elements could mankind reach his highest potential.

Schlemmer opened his seminal 1923 essay with, Man and Art Figure, a cosmic dictum about the history of mankind and the stage: “The history of the theater is the history of the transfiguration of the human form. It is the history of man as the actor of physical and spiritual events, ranging from naivete to reflection, from naturalness to artifice.”^{^[12]} Man, therefore, exists in flux, between two poles of being—nature and artifice, man and machine. The only way to transcend this difficulty, as described in regards to space, would be to choose one of the other, to choose the abstract assimiliation of space into the body. *[J5]

The school was founded in 1919 on the wings of the new Weimar Republic as an experimental art and training school. Striving to achieve a true form of craftsmanship once and for all, the Bauhaus members, from Gropius to Kandinsky, argued that the unity of all art-forms allowed man to come into his own. Man, according to the Bauhaus members, was the ultimate prupose of united art-form, the ultimate object and scale of their delights. Though the Bauhaus has often been mischaracterized as a group of soulless people desiring to make art intoa form of machinic excerise, it’s members from the very start had a humanistic basis and training.^{^[13]} The end goal of art was, as Gropius described, to ‘tame’ the machine, and to make it habitable and useful for the modern man.^{^[14]} The Bauhaus ethos, then, was undeniably humanistic, as much as it might have been based on the practical dictates of the machine.

[1] RESEARCH Schl. crtiics

[2] SEE other research

[3] SEE the FUTURIST MANIFESTO

[4] GROPIUS QUOTE, GIVE counterexamples

[5] WHO SAID THIS?

[6] FIND quotation about “taming the machine”

[7] QUOTE The Manifesto of the Bauhuas

[8] ?

[9] QUOTE guidebook

[10] QUOTE Schlemmer’s essay on the stage

[11] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 22.

[12] Schlemmer, Oskar. 1996. The Theater of the Bauhaus. PAJ books. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 17

[13] WHO SAID THIS?

[14] FIND quotation about “taming the machine”

[J1]When phrased this way, I cannot help but be reminded of Brehct’s theatre’s similar attempt to cause “recognition of man” but alienation away from him…see BENJAMIN

[J2]Sonderweg?

[J3]You’re stumbling by combining too many arguments; move on rather than destroy yourself. I see too many hazards floating in the water; most of them should be avoided, and fast.

[J4]???

[J5]begin long exigesis of the essay, Man and Art Figure.

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Friday, August 6, 2010

Schlemmer and the Body; the quest for transcendence.

Part II.

As you all know, I’ve tried hard to reach further into the banks of memory and of knowledge that would make oskar Schlemmer into the genius of his field. I like Oskar Schlemmer, despite his Nazism and meaner spiritedness, and think that there really is something that he might, indeed, be on to.

In this installment of my essay, I’d like to discuss what Schlemmer’s conception of Man actually was, and contrast his own conception with other appropriations of his work. As I’ll go to great lengths to point out, Schlemmer’s conception of man often loses sight of his deep humanism, which, complicated as it might indeed be, cannot be mistaken for an overall program of dematerialization and impersonal robotic figures. In order to grasp Schlemmer, in other words, we need a good understanding of what Schlemmer himself stood for.

Oskar Schlemmer was an artist and dance choreographer known for his innovative Triadic Ballet (in the original German, Triadisches Ballett), a avante-garde dance piece that featured often rigidly geometric costumes. (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 – The Triadic Ballet.

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Schlemmer: Society and Stage

I’m writing this paper on this guy named Oskar Schlemmer and his crazy dance piece, the Triadisches Ballett. I’m not sure what to make of him, so I’m submitting my ideas to the collective mind of facebook.

The tradic ballet appeared early on Schlemmer’s career at the Bauhaus, and, in keeping with Bauhaus custom, saught to fuse all of the arts together into a single coherent whole. In his later theoretical work, Man and Art Figure, Schlemmer detailed how the ‘stage’ can represent the entire scope of human activites; from its intial “sacral” origins (that is, the priestly, the ritualistic) to the comic commedia del arte. The stage, according to Schlemmer, is the realm where mankind cannot only see transcendence enacted on a stage, but also create a transcendental, “dematerializing” effect on the corporeal body. He begins his treatise with nothing less than a cosmic claim: “the history of the theater is the history of the transfiguration of the human form. It is the history of man as the actor of physical and spiritual events, ranging from naivete to reflection, from naturalness to artifice.” (Schlemmer, Man and Art Figure, 17)

These physical and spiritual events that Schlemmer refers to constitute the rest of his theory; by abstracting the human form through “mechanical” costumes, man can bridge the gap between the physical and the spiritual, creating a symbolic figure who breaks the limitations imposed upon it by physical reality. To do so, then, requires a complete revaluation of space; “Man, the human organism, stands in the cubical, abstract space of the stage. Man and Space. Each has different laws of order. Whose shall prevail?” (22) In answer, Schlemmer proposes that “natural man, in deference ot abstract space, is recast to fit its mold.” (23). This, according to him, is the meaning of abstract stage.

We’re left with a dilemma. In order to achieve what Schlemmer calls “dematerialization” away from material, Schlemmer creates bizarre and extensive costumes that obscure the human body entirely, and even make its movement prohibitive. More material, more mechanization equals dematerialization and transcendence.

This paradox has been well remarked on, and Schlemmer is often scoffed at because of it. Yet I propose that Schlemmer’s theory, and the ballet that he invented from it, actually mean to make life more accessible, to place the “stage” and the new man in the center of society and, by so doing, remake the very foundations of culture itself. “Dematerializaiton”, in this view, would mean not only the dematerialization of the body but the dematerialization space, society, and city all at once. Ever found of the expression “man is the measure of all things,” Schlemmer’s art would ultimately destroy all the boundaries man currently slaves under.

There is something incredibly political about this, and possibly, even, proto-fascist. Yet before I label him, I need to do more research. In the mean time, I’m left to grapple with a bunch of questions. Perhaps you can help me out with them:

1. How political is Schlemmer’s stage, and how is that related to the body?

2. Is Schlemmer’s new conception of the body really that of “dematerializtion” through mechanization, of is his relationship with machine more ambivalent? How could this be related to Russian constructivism or Italian futurism?

3. Does the Triadic Ballet, of all things, really succeed in this aim?

4. Can we ever know for certain if Schlemmer succeeded, since that footage and documentation is lost to us? Is the attempt to cast praise or blame on Schlemmer silly—should we re-evaluate the terms we’ve used so far to imagine him?

I don’t know.

That’s what I’ll find out.

Posted via email from Scribblings of James Perkins

Monday, August 2, 2010

Alienation and Czechs that act a lot like Americans

I was chatting with a friend at Dinner today, and not paying much attention to time, so I missed a screening for a film class I’m not technically enrolled in. Undeterred, however, I went and saw a movie on my own: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die.

I couldn’t help but be rather ambivalent to the film. It wasn’t quite as incredible as I was expecting, but it wasn’t Hollywood trash either. Rather, it boasted a script by no one less than Bertolt Brecht, who’s plays and theories I’ve been enmeshed in for weeks. How could a production with such high-end german producers fail to please?

Well, so far as I’ve been able to tell, the film suffered from competing interests from the start.[1] Fritz Lang, unable to escape his habitual sentimentality even in times of crises, couldn’t accept some of the more shocking, and in my view, more realistic ideas in the original script. Instead of alienation theory and scary actors, we are left with a Czech citizenry that seems to serve as nothing more than an analog for anti-nazism American patriotism. Though the german accents are believable enough, the American habits and mannerisms of all the actors are distracting rather than, to use Brecht’s terms, “astonishing.” We’re left with a thriller of credulous Nazi’s and starry-eyed heroes without any of the disturbing counter-balance Brecht and Lang are known for giving--a film with all the intrigues of M without its shocking implications.

There is only one scene that cut me to the quick. As the Nazi’s haul off their victim for exectution in the final scene, he begins to plunge into hysterics. He mouth breaks upon into a wide o, and he laughs his way in the car to a death he still can’t believe is coming. Framed by the Czech underground he betrayed, the tragic irony of it all breaks his personality clean in two. He composes himself only long enough to be shot fleeing from his Nazi hangmen, dying on the steps of a cathedral that chimes his literal death-knell.

The chiming of the bells, the image of the staggering, falling victim, breaks entirely with the next shot. Bells shift suddenly into a triumphic cuckoo-clock behind a Nazi official’s desk. The contrast between the execution and the banal Nazi regularity is astounding, even ‘astonishing’. Perhaps it was the only thing Brecht could have approved of.

[1] See, Gerd Gemünden, “Brecht in Hollywood: Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film,” TDR: The Drama Review 43, no. 4 (1999): 65-76. “Brecht, in contrast, insisted in his collaboration on Hangmen Also Die that the realistic depiction of the fight against Hitler and not the persuasion of the American movie-going audience should be the most important goal of any anti-Nazi film. Thus Brecht voiced opposition to many of Lang's directorial changes, including, for example, Lang's omission of a scene in which Brecht had depicted the hostages as showing signs of anti-Semitism only minutes prior to their own execution. According to Brecht, this scene was to convey the startling and contradictory impact of totalitarianism on the population. In a similar vein, a scene of mourners at a mass grave--a scene that would have constituted the first on-screen depiction of Jewish victims of the Nazi terror (McGilligan 1997:296), and one that Brecht and Wexley had particularly wanted--was not included in the final cut. For Brecht, more important than emotional engineering was instructing the American audience about the historical roots of German national socialism, and challenging the common perception that all Germans were Nazis. But thinking beyond the American audience, Brecht was hoping that a quasidocumentary film would emerge that could be shown to German audiences once Hitler was defeated. “