WEEK 3

This is what we learned today, enjoy!


We learned about those pesky Germans. Also About that pesky Bauhaus 

·      1910

·      Berlin’s population doubles to two million people

·      1911

·      Expressionists move from Dresden to Berlin

·      1912

·      Social Democratic Party is the largest party in the Reichstag

·      1913

·      Expressionists attain great success with their city scenes

·      1914

·      World War I begins
Artists George Grosz, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Franz Marc enlist in the army

·      1915

·      Grosz declared unfit for service, Beckmann suffers a breakdown and Schlemmer is wounded

·      1916

·      Dada begins at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich
Marc dies in combat

·      1917

·      Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown

·      1918

·      Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland
World War I ends
Kurt Schwitters creates Merz assemblages in Hanover
Richard Huelsenbeck writes a Dada manifesto in Berlin
Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich
Social Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic

·      1919

·      Bauhaus established in Weimar by Walter Gropius
Freikorps assassinates the Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
Treaty of Versailles signed
Cologne Dada group formed

·      1920

·      Inflation begins in Germany
Kapp Putsch fails after right-wing forces try to gain control of government
Berlin is the world’s third largest city after New York and London
First International Dada Fair opens in Berlin
National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) founded

·      1921

·      Hitler made chairman of the NSDAP

·      1922

·      Schlemmer’s Triadic ballet premieres in Stuttgart
Hyperinflation continues

·      1923

·      Hitler sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch
Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins

·      1924

·      Hitler writes Mein Kampf while in prison
Reduction of reparations under the Dawes Plan

·      1925

·      New Objectivity exhibition opens at the Mannheim Kunsthalle
The Bauhaus relocates to Dessau

·      1926

·      Germany joins the League of Nations

·      1927

·      Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis released
Unemployment crisis worsens
Nazis hold their first Nuremburg party rally

·      1928

·      Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The threepenny opera premieres in Berlin
Hannes Meyer becomes the second director of the Bauhaus

·      1929

·      Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York
Young Plan accepted, drastically reducing reparations
Street confrontations between the Nazis and communists in Berlin

·      1930

·      Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s cabinet, ending parliamentary rule
Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the national elections
John Heartfield creates photomontages for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe becomes the third director of the Bauhaus
Minority government formed by Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Centre Party

·      1931

·      Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency is declared in Germany

·      1932

·      Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition
Mies van der Rohe moves the Bauhaus to Berlin
Grosz relocates to New York as an exile

·      1933

·      Beckmann, Dix and Schlemmer lose their teaching positions
Hindenburg names Hitler as chancellor
Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime
Nazis organise book burnings in Berlin
The first Degenerate art exhibition denouncing modern art is held in Dresden
Mies van der Rohe announces the closure of the Bauhaus
Many artists including Gropius, Kandinsky and Klee flee Germany

·      1934

·      Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany

·      1935

·      The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich

·      1936

·      Thomas Mann deprived of his citizenship and emigrates to the United States
Spanish civil war begins
Olympic Games held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin
Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles

·      1937

·      German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco
The Nazi’s Degenerate art exhibition opens in Munich and attracts two million visitors
Purging of ‘degenerate’ art from German museums continues
Beckmann, Kirchner and Schwitters leave Germany

Bauhaus Architecture Intro:

·      The German design school known as the Bauhaus existed from 1919-1933

·      All the Bauhaus directors were architects, however they all gas very divergent views

·      In 1923 walter Gropius, the founder if the Bauhaus

Bauhaus graphic design:

·      These designs were known as “new typography” and it was stated that there was no preferred style of type. “we use all typefaces, type sizes, geometric forms, colours, etc “wrote Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, in 1923.

·      All attempts at the Bauhaus to design new letter forms were based on strict geometry, in a functionalist attempt to shun Renaissance designs, Fraktur and heavy calligraphic typefaces. Nueland was designed by Rudolf Koch in 1924 and consisted of marks made a craft tool. Erbar was another geometric typeface of the early 1920s Kochs. Koch designed cable in 1927, at the same time as the mist popular san-serif type Futura

·      The Bauhaus magazine began publication in 1926, this and the fourteen Bauhaus books were important vehicles for spreading ideas about art theory and its application to architecture and design. Kandinsky, Klee, Gropius, Mondrian, Moholy-Nahy, and van Doesburg were editors or authors of volumes in the series.

 

Herbet Bayer

·      Extremem contrasts of type size and weight were used to establish visual hierarchy of emphasis determined by and objective assessment of the relative importance of words

·      Bars, rules, points and squares were used to subdivide the space, unify divers elements, lead the viewer’s eyes through a apage and call attention to important elements.

·      Elementary forms and the use of black with one bright, pure hue were favoured. Open composition on an implied grid and a system of sizes for type, rules, and pictorial images brought unity to the designs

·      Dynamic composition with strong horizontals and verticals and sometimes diagonals characterize Bayer’s Bauhaus period.

Today we learned more about Manifestos and looked at the Futurist Manifesto, all I realised is that Italian Futurists are stuck up, Fascist Barstards 

The Futurist Manifesto

F. T. Marinetti, 1909

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

"Come, my friends!" I said. "Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness."

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel — a guillotine knife — which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. "Smell," I exclaimed, "smell is good enough for wild beasts!"

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.

"Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!"

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself — vlan! — head over heels in a ditch.

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.

We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.

Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!

Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.

They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: "We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors," it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head!

Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!

---

(Text of translation taken from James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics)

WEEK 1

We began a era of design history called Contemporary Issues in Design YAY!


We Learned about manifestos and asked to right one, this is what i wrote.

Commercialised Damnation

I live in a world were damnation is forced down the throats of todays youth.

I live in a world were it is decided for me what, I should wear, what I should listen to, what I should watch and how I should look.

I live in a world were lies hold more value than the truth, were greed holds more value than selflessness, Where arrogance and pride hold more value than humility.

How can I live in a world were people are oppressed because they are unique.

How can I live in a world were people live in deluge and despair, though God has for them a higher purpose.

The world is a sinking ship, in an ocean of self-destruction, and I have a lifeboat and I have to save as many people as I can from inevitable annihilation.

The lord has blessed me with a gift, and my gift is a tool, and I shall use my gift to build and change the fate of the people of this world.

I am a designer, and my designs are my tool and my gifts, they are of me, they are the creation of my will, just as I am the creation of the lords will. My designs will stir a passion within people, a passion that will begin a revolution, a revolution against the common normality, a revolution for a higher purpose, a revolution for salvation.

As designers we hold indispensible opportunity to insight change in our culture, and in our generation. To do anything less, to waste our gifts in the pursuit of meaningless, fickle, or nonessential material things, is no less than blasphemy. Those who continue down this path are cursed and will eternally live in the obsession and bondage of this world. We are called as soldiers to fight the evil of this, and design is our weapon.

  

WEEK 1

Had my first lesson Today. HORRRAAY!!


We began talking about different designers and began delving into research about designers within different movements. Designers were suggested to us, for our assignment. Frank Gehry was suggested to me, though his architectural designs are no short of amazing, and the way he breaks down conventions of structural definition through his use of Deconstructivism is really really cool, Frankly architecture does't really do it for me. 


Frank Gehry: Dancing House in Prague 

Then I stumbled upon Cassandre, an Art Deco poster designer. His works must be famous because they are familiar to me. His designs clearly transcend their time, and the influences of Cubism, Futurism and other abstract styles, make his designs trippy. I'd love to study more about him.   

WEEK 2 (Hurty On My Eyes)

Well today we delved deeper into the wonderful world that is Design history, we focused on early design technologies, techniques, and movements within certain time periods that shaped and changed graphic design into what we know it as today.


Design Techniques
We began by looking at how the development of technology directly relates to the development of the look of Graphic design. different techniques changed of graphic design was done, and used. inventions such as Gutenburg's printing press and then later variations revolutionised design, with the invention of typeface, which would begin the ball rolling. With the start of the industrial revolution, came the need for advertisement and the invention of such techniques as lithography. All these inventions and other such things as the typewriter and eventually the computer have made graphic design what is today and will build it to what it will be in the future.


Victorian Era
Frankly, four words 'hurty on My eyes'.


We looked at design within the victorian era, and in comparison to what design is today the designs of the victorian era are just plan nuts. 
Designs in the victorian were all about elaborate fanciness. In other words 'less is more' is completely thrown out the window. victorian designs were filled with ornate decoration. Their typography was usually on a curve and the drawings were detailed an realistic centring  on the perfect form, designs where symmetrical. 
Though as time moved closer to the Modern Era designs started to become more simplified, they also became more experimental and riske.  
Today companies like to revive victorian style designs to give their company the illusion of age.


ARTS & CRAFTS  
Finally we looked at the arts and craft movement.
This movement was a reaction against the poor aesthetic quality of the industrial Revelation in Great Britain.
It was a socialist reform movement, and was recognised as the bride between traditional victorian values and the Modern Movement. William Morris was the best known as the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The Movement tried to re-discover the traditions that existed before the Industrial Revolution.


Any way. That was lesson 2 in Design history.   
     

WEEK 3 (Transcending the Line Between Reality and Madness)

Welcome back sports fans.


Todays Lesson was a fruit basket of interesting design Knowledge.

We stuck our teeth into wonderful the wonderful movements of Art Nouveau and Early Modernism.


First up in the batting order was Art Nouveau. Now Art Nouveau was direct descendent of our friend Arts and Crafts. Art Nouveau had the honour of being the first style of commercial art used consistently to enhance the beauty of industrial products. It was also the first international style to be embraced by all of Europe.


Here are some techniques embraced in Art Nouveau:

• Curved soft shapes, rounded and bold.
• Recreates organic shapes and patterns 
• Hand made craftsmanship
• Inspired by Japanese art.

TANGENT

The lesson was then suddenly blasted to the future to the far-out world of the sixties. This is because Art Nouveau found itself being recreated in Sixties Psychedelia. 

Brief Summery of Sixties Psychedelia:

• Born in San Francisco 
• Related to Psychedelic drugs taken by the youth of the era.
• Posters captured the idea of the 'trip'
• Pop Art movement apart of it.
• Abstract images
• Riske images.

BACK ON TRACK

So the second half the lesson was spent learning the wonders of early modernism. 


Early modernism was prominent between 1910-1935. EM artists were described as avon garde and experimental. bauhaus, Dada, Minimalism were prominent styles with in EM.


EM Involved a dissatisfaction of the past and the need for radical change. EM loved geometric shapes and hated ornamentation.

      

WEEK 4 (RAWR)

So today we learnt about Art deco, my favourite period.

Here's some stuff on cassandre one of the most prominent designers of the time.

The techniques used by Cassandre are what make his designs and creativity stand out amongst the Art Deco era and are what makes Cassandre such an influence of the period. Cassandre was religious in always beginning his design with the text and choice of type (which was often evented by him.) Cassandre deconstructed the figures of his designs into simple Illustrations based on geometric shapes, thus all illustrations and designs were based on geometric shapes. One of Cassandre’s most important contributions to graphic design was his belief in a total integration between image and text. Cassandre would romanticize the appeal of major forms of transport of the time, the car, the train and the ocean liner.  One of Cassandre’s more revolutionary ideas was the way he sold ideas, with use of motion and action, promoting the illusion of progress, rather than the things, or products themselves. 

WEEK 5 (A journey of wonder and surprise.)

Well patrons of the design world, this week was a wonderful treat. This week we had the pleasure of going on an excursion to the powerhouse museum.
The reason for this was to experience design up close from a range of different environments. Mainly we focused on The part of the museum reserved for the amazing Art Deco movement.


As you can see in this photo the powerhouse has parts of the beautiful Kings Cinema, just so we can lose our little designer minds over it. 


The cinema shows clear features of the Art Deco movement. Such as the geometric shaped structure, and stepping in the door frame.


What a fun day we had.       

WEEK 6 (Clash of the Titans)

Today we presented our first assignments, don't worry folks its not as bad as sounds. We presented reports on prominent Designers. My Designer was Cassandre, YAY, I HEART ART DECO. 


Here are some of Cassandre's works. 

WEEK 7 (Clash of even more Titans)

Nothing much to Report on this week Skipper, we just had the second lot of presentations. So here is a picture of a cat for your amusement.


AWWWWWWWW!!!! It's wearing a lime helmet.

WEEK 8 (HERO CHALLENGE)

Today we were given a challenge to test our research and analysis skills, so being the hero I am I said, "I accept your challenge."


So I decided I world research Jean Carlu a French poster designer in america. I focused on his 'America's Answer' poster.


Carlu used lithography because it was the cheapest way to mass produce posters.
The poster was affected by the second world war, right after america had joined. So Carlu's poster encouraged factory workers to work harder and longer, because this would mean they were doing their part for the war effort. The says all industry should go to the war.


So thats basically what i learnt today.

   
     

WEEK 9 (MAN DOWN!!!)

Unfortunately Dear Friends my Lecturer was sick, so i have nothing to post on. And if you don't like it... TOUGH TITTYS! 

WEEK 10 (Something about Nothing)

We started the lesson today watching a video on Milton Glaser.
So heres some stuff on His visual language to Keep you hunger for design at bay.

Milton Glaser’s visual language comes through his designs as didactic, giving the designs their purpose and effect. Glaser wants the viewer to take something away from the poster, hoping that viewer will learn and understand something from the design. In a hope that the viewer would understand the design and not misconstrue the meaning and purpose of the design, Glaser “exposes” him self to his viewer by including a explanation of his design. Glaser wants the viewer to be wowed by the genius of his design, and he doesn’t want his meaning lost.

Glaser wants his viewer to interact with the design, by getting the viewer to move around the design or within the design, or the time it takes the viewer to put together the meaning of the design.  

WEEK 11 (At The Movies)

Welcome Patrons of the Arts 

Today we watched a film on Helvetica, it was called Helvetica. (What, noway!?)

Yes way, the film was quite interesting, how can a film on a typeface be interesting you ask... well it just was! It was interesting to find out just how much of an impact Helvetica had on the modern world, and just how it is used in day to day life.

Also i was interested in finding out what prominent designers thought of the typeface.

Overall I give the film: 4 and a half stars.

A great film for the kiddies.

WEEK 12 (DESIGNER VS DESIGNER)

Well it has been brought to my attention that i have an essay due in the following weeks so today focused pretty much on that. We started by watching a film on Stefen Sagmeister, an experimental designer this was to help us on ideas for designers to write on.


So after much deliberation i decided i would compare Frank Miller and Nate Van Dyke. This idea was shutdown by my lecturer, so I'll get back to you on that.


I'm thinking Russian Constructivism, because I've been so into it lately.