Queering the Bauhaus
Johannes Birringer
Book Reviewed: Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality,
Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics, 剑桥, 嘛:
麻省理工学院出版社, 2019.
Widening our lenses on the Bauhaus (1919–1933), arguably the twenti-
eth century’s most influential art institution, means introducing new
narratives and subjecting to pressure the existing historical reception
of its utopian energies. The school’s legacy has largely been associated with a
rationalist modernism, its unique holistic pedagogies for the radical pursuit of
艺术, 建筑学, 设计 (including all the handcrafts in the various workshops),
along with the emerging photography/film and graphic advertising media, ulti-
mately also linked to a production ethos, bringing functional and elegant indus-
trial design to the masses. The latter was a focus that Bauhaus founder Walter
Gropius formulated in the proclamation “Art and Technology—a New Unity,”
but this projected unity also symbolized a will for a new age (a reformed life or
Lebensreform), given that the school opened shortly after the end of a catastrophic
World War. Establishing a new model of a design school in Weimar, of all places,
was auspicious: it brought together a younger generation of students and teachers
who rejected the nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian past and believed
in the social relevance of the arts in an emerging democratic society.
Elizabeth Otto’s new book is as fascinating as it is relentless in disrupting most
of the “normative narrative,” as she calls it, looking for what has been erased or
overlooked, excavating the ghosts in the closets and cellars, searching for uncanny
spectres that haunt the institution. The excavations intend to throw new light on
the Bauhaus’s complex history, membership and production, and also on the art
school’s relevance in terms of both its inter-war context—the Weimar Republic,
to be overtaken soon by a totalitarian fascist regime—and our contemporary
cultural landscape. The latter clearly provides the discourse framework and
questions that Otto’s feminist research raises, when she reclaims the “enormous
© 2020 Johannes Birringer
PAJ 125 (2020), PP. 133–138. 133
https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_r_00530
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
range of vibrant artistic contributions made by the over 450 female Bauhäusler
throughout the fourteen-year existence of this 1253 person movement.” Plain to
see in the archives, Otto states, “mainstream accounts of the school have most
often failed to acknowledge the significance of Bauhaus women’s work either on
its own or in relation to its impact on the institution.”
Otto reveals trajectories of the school’s engagement with the weirder eurhythmics
of occult spirituality and—perhaps expected but hitherto unappreciated—the
provocations of gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. 是的, 这
Bauhaus of course had communist students who engaged in political activism on
behalf of the revolutionary workers’ class and the KPD, creating message driven
images and their own journal, as the school’s artists were clearly affected by new
ideologies and aesthetics (such as the constructivism in the Soviet Union after
这 1917 revolution). Otto reckons that by the late 1920s, under the director-
ship of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, a quarter of the Bauhaus student body
was involved in Communist activities, which led to tensions with students who
wished to remain unpolitical or were more nationalist; among the latter, a group
of vociferous right-wing students vandalized junior master Gunta Stölzl’s studio
because of her Communist activism and marriage to Jewish artist Arieh Sharon.
They were evicted from the school, but there were other students and designers,
including Herbert Bayer, who sympathized with the National Socialists and put
their skills in the service of the new regime in the 1930s.
We learn about this in “Red Bauhaus, Brown Bauhaus,” the last of five bril-
liantly researched chapters which list a very wide range of sources consulted in
the archives. The Bauhaus is “haunted” by these untold stories, Otto proposes,
and the illustrations she unearths are often breathtaking. After her introduction
(“Utopias”), this begins right away with “Bauhaus Spirits,” a chapter where she
shows uncanny photographs of ectoplasms and spirit séances, along with student
drawings affected by Johannes Itten’s Mazdaznan cult, the teacher’s unorthodox
Zoroastrian and theosophical ideas. They accompanied his crucial Preliminary
Course and involved fasting, breathing exercises, hot baths, singing, 和别的
eccentric methods for body-mindfulness and focusing the initiates’ intellectual,
spiritual and creative physical states, something that Gertrud Grunow in fact
expanded in her Practical Harmony Course. A musician, Grunow was one of
the few female teachers who held a leading position at the school, although she
didn’t stay long. For Itten’s students, 例如, Paul Citroen and Friedl Dicker,
this multi-faceted mysticism proved inspirational, and Kandinsky’s and Klee’s
emphasis on abstraction and inner expression also contributed to an atmosphere
of artistic experimentation that sometimes intermixed exalted spiritist ideas with
humorous and whimsical play.
134 PAJ 125
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
On the less whimsical side, the Bauhaus is of course associated with a hand-
ful of famous artists, architects, and designers (Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky,
Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Marcel
Breuer). Otto decisively changes this narrow focus, reclaiming the historically
marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the so-called Bauhäusler,
arguing that they are central to our understanding. She shifts attention away from
the “masters,” thus Oskar Schlemmer (and the stage workshop) is a footnote,
Klee and Kandinsky deserve a passing glance. Moholy-Nagy is mentioned not
because of his animated abstract films and kinetic light display machine (Light
Prop), but in the chapter entitled “The Artist-Engineer and Shadow Masculinity”
he is seen posing in a photographed of Lucia Moholy, wearing white collared
shirt and tie in a somber gray machinist suit, standing in front of a rectangular
white unhinged Bauhaus door. This image of the engineer is then compared to
a number of Marianne Brandt’s photocollages and advertising posters displaying
highly dynamic visual languages (比照. Tempo, Tempo, 进步, Culture, 1927), 就像
her later double exposure self-portrait of 1930 depicts her as an engineer figure
in a white lab coat (Brandt is mainly known for her exquisite designs for lamps,
tea- and coffee sets, and other household items created in the metal workshop).
Photography and photomontage, 实际上, are the key media used by Otto to
investigate posings of what she calls “shadow masculinity,” where the virile or
heroic masculine self or the figure of the masterful architect-engineer is under-
mined by surreal, ironic images that keep surfacing, such as the self-mutilating
Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait) by Herbert Bayer. They seem to be hinting at
the repressed fears of the traumatized post-World War I soldier-male (famously
analyzed in Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies) who needs to protect the body’s
wholeness. Or they poke fun at the athletic engineer, depicting him as soft and
penetrable, or even a bit clownish, as Otto surmises in looking at Moholy-Nagy’s
photomontage Der Trottel (The Chump, 1926).
Foreshadowed in Otto’s productive art historical research (including Photomontages
of Marianne Brandt and her books on Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective and Bau-
haus Bodies: 性别, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School),
the constructions of femininity, gay/lesbian desire and camp sensitivities among
the Bauhäuslerinnen constitute the core of early chapters, where her close readings
of photographic works by Ré Soupault, the “transformative designs” of Marianne
Brandt, Ilse Gropius and Friedl Dicker, along with the provocative “Mask-Photos”
by Gertrud Arndt, are vividly impressive. In the chapter on “Bauhaus Femininities”
Otto describes the “convertible clothing” promoted at the time in the Werkbund
journal Die Form, before introducing Soupault’s significant work as a designer,
journalist, filmmaker, and photographer, highlighting her and the other female
artists’ richly imaginative self-portraits that use complex photomontage techniques.
BIRRINGER / Queering the Bauhaus 135
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
Interpreting Marianne Brandt’s Self-Portrait reflected in a Ball (1929), Otto takes
recourse to psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s theory of “Womanliness as Masquerade,”
and in her later chapter on camp imagery and queer performativity she briefly
illuminates her study of the work alluding to feminist writings by Susan Sontag,
Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, or Jonathan Katz’s “the art of the code,”
same-sex desire cloaked or displaced, as in Richard Grune’s photomontages of
young healthy boys striving to build a new positive collective community, 这
Children’s Red Republic (1928). She recounts Grune’s painful destiny as a homo-
性的, deported by the Nazis into various forced labor camps (直到 1945) 在哪里
gay inmates were routinely given the most brutal and deadliest work. Having
managed to survive, Grune created a series of lithographs (Passion of Twentieth
世纪, 1947) which Otto reads as disturbingly erotic renderings of torture—
attempts to explore violence and exorcise horrific memories.
In the discussion of earlier photography after he was asked to leave the Bauhaus
(he failed the Preliminary Course in which he was a fellow student of Anni
Albers), Otto concedes that she is reading queer content into work by Grune. 这
same could be said of her interpretations of abstract paintings by the “queer single-
ton” Margaret Leiteritz. Comparing her to Georgia O’Keefe, Otto suggests that
Leiteritz’s science-inspired Painted Diagrams (1961–1974) show an “atmosphere”
of abstracted natural objects, “modulated like clouds in the sky,” or hinting at
“exquisite, solitary trajectories that arc through a graph of time and space, 仿佛
they were an abstracted representation of a beautiful solo life.” Otto reaches this
conclusion having chosen a biographical approach, noting that Leiteritz (nick-
named “Mark”) was “unmarried, unpartnered, and at times ambiguous in her
gender performance,” similar to her critical reading of Max Peiffer Watenphul’s
1921 colorful tapestry which she takes to be blandly abstract, with forms that
could be called “quintessentially Bauhaus,” yet at the same time could be read
as “medium drag.” Peiffer Watenphul had joined the weaving workshop that was
generally considered women’s work. Otto also recounts that he already was a suc-
cessful painter, left the Bauhaus in 1923 to pursue his career in Düsseldorf and
意大利, remaining in touch with the “Bauhaus network” and exulting in his later
erotic photographs of male sitters and the flamboyant “Grotesques,” photographic
portraits of hyper-feminized women and drag queens.
Like Florence Henri’s nude photographs of women in various erotic and sensual
姿势, creating provocative new female types of sexually self-possessed modern
女性, Peiffer Watenphuls photos were published in Paris. Otto is obliged to
speak of queer artists developing new forms of campy portraiture in the “Bauhaus
diaspora.” Henri came to visit Dessau briefly in 1927 and stayed only for a few
月 (forging intimate friendships with Margarete Schall and Grete Willers
136 PAJ 125
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
who were studying there), taking up photography and immediately experimented
(taught by Lucia Moholy) on complex self-portraits through mirrors that verge
on surrealism. By the end of the 1920s, her compositions became widely known
and were often featured in French magazines, but to call her a Bauhäuslerin is a
stretch. 同时, such a stretch in a wider reading of contemporaneous
cultural productions—(Hannah Höch’s photomontages; the camp cabaret work
of Valeska Gert and Anita Berber; the revue nègre of Josephine Baker, ETC)—could
open up fertile terrains of radical difference.
Otto’s book is thought-provoking in many ways, especially if we were to take up
this notion of a Bauhaus diaspora, looking at it from the perspective of gender
performances and how photography/photomontage may have been instrumental
in defining and disseminating progressive sexual representations. Or how new
media design, new materialism (the culture of objects) and transgressive corpore-
alities in decorative crafts may have been sites of great ambiguity and tension, 不是
only between the arts, producers and processes, between real gender and artistic
性别. Queering the Bauhaus clearly shifts attention away from it as a beacon of
modernist architecture and a political tool (冷战期间), with Gropius
and Mies van der Rohe heading important schools of architecture in the United
States and many of its radical teaching ideas traveling, 说, to Dartington (英国),
and in the U.S. to Black Mountain College, 芝加哥, Yale and Harvard; 但是也
to Argentina, 以色列, 日本, Turkey, and lesser known ceramic artists’ colonies such
as Pond Farm in California. There may in fact not be a “normative” narrative of
the Bauhaus legacy, since design and architecture were associated with divergent
political ideologies (in the Weimar era, in West Germany, the GDR, 美国. 和
the Soviet Union after World War II).
We have witnessed restagings of the Degenerate Art exhibition launched by the
Nazis in Munich (1937) which included quite a few Bauhäusler, highlighting the
suppression of avant-garde art under fascism, just as futurists and constructiv-
ists in Russia were silenced under Stalin. In late 2019, as innumerable exhibi-
tions and symposia of the centenary 100 jahre bauhaus festival drew to a close,
it became abundantly clear that any revisionary exploration would be decen-
tralized, pointing beyond the framework of a Bauhaus in Germany towards its
international entanglements. The Art Institute of Chicago, 例如, added
In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico in Midcentury, a large
retrospective of female designers and “weavers,” including Anni Albers, 克拉拉
Porset and Lola Álvarez Bravo, drawing attention to the significance of inter-
related cultural traditions of cross-over work (furniture, jewelry, photography,
photomurals, 印刷, sculpture, and textiles), nomadic urban modernism mingling
with indigenous forms.
BIRRINGER / Queering the Bauhaus 137
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
The changing historical contexts of sexual politics, the civil rights movement, gay/
lesbian activism for the legalization of homosexualiy, (反式) gender equality, 这
current obsession with identity politics, ETC。, all point to complex anxieties and
differently situated struggles. Otto’s attempts at sketching a “queer hauntology”
of certain Bauhaus works might be less convincing when her case studies are art-
ists who either were only visiting the Bauhaus for a brief spell (Florence Henri) 或者
developed their art practice elsewhere in other contexts (Peiffer Watenphul, Leiter-
itz). Otto foregrounds Leiteritz’s abstract oil paintings (例如. Point Interceptor, 1962),
created many years after the closing of the Bauhaus. More intriguing perhaps are
the figurative drawings and costume designs Leiteritz made during her 1928–1931
Bauhaus period, depicting almost cartoon-like illustrations of women named after
Roman goddesses. If one were cynical, and compared them to Aubrey Beardsley’s
图纸, they’d pale considerably and probably would be justly forgotten.
Sadly, links to theatre, and the riotous Bauhaus performance parties that took
place in Weimar and Dessau, are not made. An interest in Schlemmer’s impact
on theatre, dance, and costume design, and the question of Schlemmer’s shadow
masculinity, is not apparent. Nor does Otto use the opportunity to tie her
“masquerade” ideas to the haunting that may have been created by the wonder-
ful ambiguities of gymnastics classes led by modern dancer Karla Grosch on
the Dessau rooftop, leaping women who a few years ago were dancing in the
nude to Itten and Grunow’s breathing exercises, posing with masks in Breuer’s
notorius Bauhaus chair during the Metal Party after arriving in outrageous
costumes made of aluminum foil, pots, pans, and spoons, or performing in
Schlemmer’s uncanny constructivist Metal Dance and Glass Dance. After reading
this book, it was not always clear to me who haunted whom. Compared to her
vast knowledge of the archival material, Otto is less conceptually focussed with
her critical categories. She does not always indicate what “ghostly matters” are
meant here (adopting the term from sociologist Avery Gordon), and how she
wishes readers to apprehend the theory of a “queer hauntology” (adopted from
Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories) when in fact
these performances were not happening at the margins at all, as Otto implies in
her too literal reliance on queer theory of the closet. Masquerade was the norm,
one might rather surmise, and gender performativities in this volatile, exuberant
Weimar era a common thread.
JOHANNES BIRRINGER is a contributing editor to PAJ and a choreographer/
co-director of the Design and Performance Lab. He recently edited Tanz
der Dinge/Things that dance, an anthology of writings on dance and new
materialism. DAP-Lab’s multimedia dance Mourning for a dead moon
premiered in December 2019.
138 PAJ 125
我
D
哦
w
n
哦
A
d
e
d
F
r
哦
米
H
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
我
r
e
C
t
.
米
我
t
.
e
d
你
p
A
/
j
j
/
我
A
r
t
我
C
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
4
2
2
(
1
2
5
)
/
1
3
3
1
8
6
8
6
0
5
p
A
/
/
j
j
_
r
_
0
0
5
3
0
p
d
.
F
乙
y
G
你
e
s
t
t
哦
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
米
乙
e
r
2
0
2
3
下载pdf