Walking on a Möbius Strip
The Inside/Outside of Art in Brazil

It is quite hard to know where to start with Hannes Meyer in Moscow. It’s hard because, while there is plenty of documentation on him and his team in the Bauhaus Brigade—as well as other Western designers and architects (of these, Ernst May is at least as significant as Meyer, as is the Dutch designer Mart Stam, and each went on to produce more substantial work than Meyer after their respective Russian episodes)—the legacy of his work there presents certain difficulties in evaluating. Thus, some questions that arise when considering the presence of Western designers in the USSR are these: how can we measure significance?; what was the potential importance of the work and vision of such planners and architects in the structures and unfolding of the first and second five year plans that reorganized Russia on a scale of necessity beyond their real capacity to intervene?

Die Farblichtspiele von Kurt Schwerdtfeger und Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, die im Kontext von frühen abstrakten Filmexperimenten, kinetischen Skulpturen und Bühnenexperimenten 1922 am Bauhaus entstanden, gelten als Vorreiter des Expanded Cinema. Um 1964 wurden sie in einer Zeit rekonstruiert, in der die filmische und lichtkaleidoskopische Avantgarde der 1920er-Jahre von einer neuen Generation von Experimentalfilmern und -theoretikern wiederentdeckt wurde. Deren Umgang mit technischen Medien war weniger von Kollektivitätsgedanken als von individualistischen Selbsterfahrungen und psychotropisch angeregten Selbstentgrenzungen geprägt.

Many of the concepts and concerns Gyorgy Kepes presents in Language of Vision have their roots in the Bauhaus. Both Bauhaus artists and Kepes shared notions of a language of art elements, universal laws, structure, and order, linking these to their utopic hope that art would have a positive effect on mankind. However, a great physical and cultural distance separated the German Bauhaus of the 1920s and 1930s from the post-World War II New Bauhaus in America, where Kepes taught and wrote.