Seminar Notes

DADA

https://libcom.org/files/imagecache/article/images/library/dada.jpg
Form rather than substance
Walter Benjamin
The dadaists attached muss less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion.
Francis Picabia , L’Oeil cacodylate, The cacodylic eye, 1921
Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918

Bauhaus

Wassily Kandinsky - Triangle, Square Circle, A Psychological Test, 1923
Universal font (one of the most important fonts to be produced from Bauhaus). There’s no uppercase on the font, only lower to reflect that we don’t speak in uppercase or lowercase

Form and function

Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School (1890s) - “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognisable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law”.
Adolf Loos Ornament and Crime - “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - “less is more”. ‘We use the German word ‘Baukunst’ that is two words, ‘Bau’ (building) and kunst’ (art). The art is the refinement of a building. We hated the word ‘architecture’ because architecture is something from outside.
Walter Gropius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-KeLk1sECI
Conclusion:

Uncanny

Cindy Sherman - Black & white film still - creating something which looks like it belongs to a film but doesn’t actually exist
Margitte
For an uncanny effect we can distinguish:
something strange about something familiar from
something strange
Uncanny likeness… a likeness that is strange, but not complete (‘complete’ likeness would be identity rather than likeness)
We are used to thinking of people as unique, so it is unsettling to see twins, and twins can be used to create an unsettling effect in photography and film. Freud says the ‘double’ is an element in the uncanny - the closer the resemblance the more we see the difference. Any one of these girls on their own would seem quite normal
Masahiro Mori, The Uncanny Valley (1970) - this idea is concerned with the question of likeness or resemblance. (Note that where the characters are more or less like humans, a human isn’t ‘like’ a human, so a ‘real person’ doesn’t represent the goal of realism)
FREUD ON THE UNCANNY:
Freud thinks this question of likeness is not very interesting and not the real meaning of the uncanny.
He thinks it is more about repressing a disturbing memory though repeated behaviour.
‘Return of the repressed’ - Louis Bourgeois
The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1816) - THE KEY REFERENCE FOR ALL STUDIES OF THE UNCANNY

Postmodernism (Part 1: constructivism)

Linear perspective: was it invented or was it discovered? - A postmodernist would say invented.
Relativism: denies, ‘that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.’
We would not privilege linear perspective as ‘true’. It is merely a different kind of visual representation.
Constructivism: ‘The most radical postmodernists do not distinguish acceptance as true from being true; they claim that
Examples: Culture Nature, Rich Poor, Rational Emotional, Wake Sleep, Man Woman, Line Colour, Mechanical Organic.
The dangers of supplement - Jeans Jacques Russo: Essay on the Origins of Languages
Russo thinks SPEECH is authentic, and that WRITING is merely a supplement to speech.
Examples of dangerous supplement:

University - Year 1