AGAINST THE NEW MAN
This installation was produced and organized in collaboration with Jarrett Ley and Joanna Kopplenburg. It took place as part of Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina’s Undoing the Bauhaus: Perversions and
Performances at projekt bauhaus Werkstatt / Datatopia, Floating University Berlin.
Against the New Man forms an inquiry into the dynamics of gender and sexuality performance at the Bauhaus, examining the encouragement of experimental identity exploration and how this met with the subtler limitations and imposed binaries between the sexes. Centering the photographic work of and produced by women at the Bauhaus, a series of collages produced from original source material are deployed as an expression of how these images communicate doubly the subjugation of their positions at the Bauhaus, and of their private means to interrogate and assemble an individual sense of authorship and autonomy. Attempting to both interpret the entrapment of gendered bodies at the Bauhaus and to reimagine visually their methods to extend the material and pedagogical limitations placed on their development, Against the New Man collapses the domestic and productive spaces of the vanity and the studio as its backdrop. Exploring the photographic themes of gender expression, fragmentation, serialization and mirroring, along with the engagement with Bauhaus design objects and the school building itself, this staging uncovers this photographic work as a means for many women, nonconforming gendered and sexual bodies of the Bauhaus to quietly refuse the singular, paradigmatic “new man” that was the project of the Bauhaus, in favor of a multiplicity of selves and ways of viewing the self.
Against the New Man forms an inquiry into the dynamics of gender and sexuality performance at the Bauhaus, examining the encouragement of experimental identity exploration and how this met with the subtler limitations and imposed binaries between the sexes. Centering the photographic work of and produced by women at the Bauhaus, a series of collages produced from original source material are deployed as an expression of how these images communicate doubly the subjugation of their positions at the Bauhaus, and of their private means to interrogate and assemble an individual sense of authorship and autonomy. Attempting to both interpret the entrapment of gendered bodies at the Bauhaus and to reimagine visually their methods to extend the material and pedagogical limitations placed on their development, Against the New Man collapses the domestic and productive spaces of the vanity and the studio as its backdrop. Exploring the photographic themes of gender expression, fragmentation, serialization and mirroring, along with the engagement with Bauhaus design objects and the school building itself, this staging uncovers this photographic work as a means for many women, nonconforming gendered and sexual bodies of the Bauhaus to quietly refuse the singular, paradigmatic “new man” that was the project of the Bauhaus, in favor of a multiplicity of selves and ways of viewing the self.
Credits
Authors: Maria Alejandra Linares, Joanna Kopplenburg and Jarrett Ley
Dates: August 30 - September 2, 2018
Photography: Maria Alejandra Linares
Authors: Maria Alejandra Linares, Joanna Kopplenburg and Jarrett Ley
Dates: August 30 - September 2, 2018
Photography: Maria Alejandra Linares
