Course A: Art and Sustainability

From Bauhaus to Social Sculpture. The Shaping of Humane Societies as an Aesthetic Challenge

download schedule for this course.

Comparing a historical cornerstone – the Bauhaus – to the contemporary concept of Social Sculpture the course investigates the following question: Can the shaping of humane societies be approached as an aesthetic challenge?

The first week of the course is devoted to the Bauhaus. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus drew together and moulded a pan-European avant-garde in order to explore and design new ways of living via the arts. In doing so, pioneering artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky took up the impetus of Weimar´s Classical Period, linking ethics with aesthetics. While the Bauhaus achieved a marked international impact on modern architecture and design, its broader aim to reform industrial modernity culturally has been more or less forgotten. Why is this? What can we learn from the findings and mistakes of the historical avant-garde? The central focus of our considerations will not be architecture and design. Instead we intend to investigate whether and how the Bauhaus idea has contributed to the necessary spiritual evolution of the individual and of society.

The second week addresses Social Sculpture. Initiated by Joseph Beuys, Social Sculpture constitutes an entirely new approach to aesthetics and along with this an extensive aesthetic strategy to foster humanity and ecological sustainability. What exactly does `Social Sculpture´ mean? How does it relate to the `idea Bauhaus´ (Mies van der Rohe)? In what sense does Social Sculpture connect ethics and aesthetics, enabling us to create humane forms of living?

The course includes processes and practices, where the interdisciplinary artist and Beuys student Shelley Sacks will assist participants to access and explore their individual creative agendas. Shelley Sacks is the founder and director of the world´s first research centre for Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University. Her work since the 1970s has been a programmatic development of the conception of art summarized by Joseph Beuys in the expression: `Every human being is an artist´. The course aims to explore creative skills and offer strategies to deal imaginatively with the challenges of our times.

Invited to participate are: artists of all disciplines, art historians/theoreticians and art educators, students as well as all interested individuals.

Course Leaders: Dr. Hildegard Kurt, Cultural Researcher and co-founder of und. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability (www.und-institut.de), Berlin and
Shelley Sacks, artist and director of Social Sculpture Research Unit (www.social-sculpture.org), Oxford.

download schedule for this course.

how to read pdf documents