Assignment 4 – Garnet Garcia

According to Walter Gropius and his The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus, the thing that art lacked in the past was that it isolated itself from the world and environment around it. Different kinds of arts and practices were isolated from each other as if they had nothing to do with each other. According to Gropius, this form of teaching and development resulted in “useless social drones” that were ultimately fruitless in the productive life. Being removed from the rest of life does not make a good artist, according to Gropius.

In László Moholy-Nagy’s Typophoto, he makes a similar statement and says that typeface and typesetting “ignored the new dimensions of life” by which he meant the modern life of his time. He encourages the joining of methods and embracing techniques from other disciplines like photography, instead of pretending that the two mediums are two completely different things that must be kept separate. In doing this, typophoto would allow for new relationships between the content being read and visual experience. Both stances are simple: integration of mediums and mindsets of different mediums allow for a stronger, more wholistic artistic application.

I tend to consider many of the teachings of the Bauhaus movement boring. I find the “universal language” to be an interesting practice in the context of its time but ultimately a slightly outdated principle in art. However, I wholeheartedly agree with the statements made in Gropius’ text. The first one being that “academies” should allow an artist to discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie and and recognize that ones “elementary expression” can vary from person to person. It is said variation that makes the collaborative process that much more powerful. The second being that in pulling from various artistic mediums and being aware and in touch with the “life” around you makes you a stronger artist. Believing that one form of art solely exists in a vacuum on its own ultimately hinders the artist.

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One of the most interesting and scarily spot on points I saw in the readings was not only that the methods of communication would change drastically but specifically how the methods would change would be how we store knowledge. Herbert Bayer’s On Typography specifically states that the ability to store information in micro fashion will change the design of libraries and how we store knowledge, and that we will “have any and all desired information available and ready when needed… unburdening our brains from memory ballast… the book may be limited altogether…” How interesting it is that that is almost exactly what has happened. While the book might have not completely disappeared from existence, print is becoming less and less necessary as we rely more on the “micro-storage” available to us at a moments notice. I’ve grown up mostly in a generation where we can learn about anything and everything with a few simple keystrokes into our phones and not all of that information has to be memorized in order for me to use it.