andu One of the most stubborn characteristics of most things is that they have no political beliefs, and of course they don’t want to pass it on. A coffee cup with a playful floral pattern was designed by a radical, conservative or even unconvincing designer, and it is not only indistinguishable from this cup. It may also have nothing to do with those who drink this cup (in order to possibly push themselves for the next political argument). However, one of the most stubborn characteristics of all theorists is their resistance to such knowledge.
For example, in the early 1950s, when there was no pattern on the cup, it was assumed that the cup was not only a container for liquid, but also an attitude. Therefore, there was a heated debate in East Germany. Today, it is strange on the one hand, and on the other hand. , In an ingenious way, it appears modern.It is about formalism, not the school founded by Victor Schklovsky and Roman Jacobson in the early Soviet Union; on the contrary, formalism is any kind of aesthetics, now, after war and Nazi rule , Want to continue anywhere Bauhaus Classical modernism had to stop: buildings without decorations, designs without decorations, simple everyday objects produced by industry.It’s about working people get the fruits of their labor; don’t delay them with painted flowers
All of this, but so complain Walter Ubricht Taste agents (inspired by Comrade Stalin) are merely a manifestation of international capitalism, or at least the aesthetic distortion of intellectuals who lack class consciousness. People want bay windows, cornices and decorations. The cup in the East German cabinet should have a pattern.
At least for the time being, modernity has lost this controversy-which is aesthetically bad luck for East Germany. This is unfortunate for Mart Stam, the Dutch architect and designer who was the most prominent modernist in East Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the inventor of the cantilever chair, only more audiences know him, even though he should be world-famous.
More luxurious than porcelain
Stam designed the Hellerhofsiedlung in Frankfurt in the 1920s, a row of houses in the ultra-modern tobacco factory Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung of the Van Nelle Company in Rotterdam. In 1930, he went to the Soviet Union to participate in the planning of new cities such as Magnitogorsk, Orsk and Makiivka. When he saw the inhumane conditions where forced laborers had to live (and often die) in the salt flats of Kazakhstan, he left the Soviet Union.
However, he was still a communist, and in 1948 he went to East Germany, first in Dresden, where he headed the Academy of Fine Arts, and then in 1950 to Berlin Weissensee as president of the University of Applied Arts. A small exhibition at the Berlin Museum of Things records this time. At the same time trying to explain how Stam failed due to socialist conditions.
The point is not that the avant-garde imposes its form on the narrow-minded mediocrity. Stam is concerned about the opposite: it is precisely because large-scale industrial production reduces the manufacturing cost of daily necessities, so more resources can be invested in its development and design. Stam and his people actually conducted research together to find the ideal, that is, useful, practical and human form of things. They are called it by nature, a bit ostentatious, and Stam believes that tea sets made in this way provide working people with a greater luxury than the most precious but unfortunately impractical Meissen porcelain. As a result, working in a team is more important to him than his own authorship. His staff paints most of the exhibits.
Disputes with opposite signs
Today it is difficult to determine whether working people are beginning to appreciate this luxury. In a letter to the new and loyal management of Weissensee, Comrade Ulbricht rated the return of decorations and jewellery in 1954 as a “significant advancement in artistic creation”. Stam left East Germany in 1952. And it took at least ten years (and the persistence of Stam’s students, they stayed) until modern times slowly came to East Germany.
But today, no matter where it used to be in East Germany, the controversy is proceeding with the opposite sign; now Eastern modernism is being dismantled, and new bay windows, cornices and flowers mark the final victory of socialism: this gives rise to the struggle for formalism. The exhibitions and reviews brought about wonderful topics. Today, as in the past, the taste judgment thinks that floral decorations are beautiful and simple and ugly, and it is unreasonable.
Early years. Mart Stam, research institute and industrial design collection. August 25-30 at the Oranienstrasse Museum der Dinge in Berlin. The catalog price is 36 euros.
