From Stage to Screen: The Bauhaus Apparatus between Theater and Cinema

Abstract

In what follows, I will argue that a distinct type of an apparatus originated at the Bauhaus—a liminal, medium unspecific, box-like, cinematic device that became, paradoxically, both a work of art and a reproducible, technological object. Encapsulating the art-technology dialectic, the apparatus accelerated the school’s transition towards a more objective (sachlich) agenda, attempting to consolidate artistic creation and mass production—a context crucial to the understanding of the operation of the apparatus. At the intersection of art and technology, the apparatus was metonymic for architecture and for the idea of a total work that would finally help resolve the dialectic. Combining the functionalism of other artifacts at the Bauhaus—chairs, lamps, advertising posters, books, or building plans—with the performativity and self-sufficiency of aesthetic objects, the apparatus materialized as a hybrid between the utilitarian, the performative-artistic, and the pedagogic. Often a false index of mechanization and electrification, the apparatus embodied the technological sublime. Spatializing in its presence, it worked at the scale of bodies—but it could have expanded to the scale of a building. By attempting to articulate an ontological theory of the apparatus at the Bauhaus, I hope to highlight its dimension as an architectural experiment, its profound role as a site for fusing art, technology, and spatial practice at the school, and its future reemergence in practices separate from, although influenced by, the school.