I’ve been afraid that writing won’t take to my ‘will.’ I don’t experience ‘drives’ as anything but drifts. I’m drifting into a life in a universe of imaginary ‘bauhaus’ shapes which blush in, out, and sometimes of earlier, related forms like the old radiator next to my bed. Abstract shapes and colors are a language that need not communicate anything except the fungibility of human minds. I learned this when I saw a Robert Beavers film that culminated in primary color stripes against white, since I had encountered approximations of these arrangements the night before (and never before) in my mind.
The beauty of my room, and of the outside world, and of the disordered shapes, and of the designs and paintings on my monitor, is one and the same. The continuity of open shapes allows for this.
In the gallery on the applied arts in the Weimar years, the Jewish museum in Berlin has a display of bauhaus china. These designs were considered ‘judeo-bolshevik’ by the Third Reich, associations not incorrect. The airbrushed, incomplete shapes on these items are images of of Jewish life in Germany, and the ‘worker’s state’ in Russia, and of their general truncation. They were smashed, outlawed and put out of production in favor of a new ceramics of folk neoclassical forest kitsch, which was manufactured by slaves in Dachau. I see this forest kitsch sometimes where I now live, in gritty eruptions of a German past throughout this neighborhood which first charmed me for its generally hypnotizing blankness.
The uniform breathing of paints into ‘geometric partial areas’ draws the already spiritual forms of cubism, suprematism, the ‘blaue reiter’ and early abstract paintings in general further toward an impersonal vision, like Coburn’s photographs of mirrored shadows which were called vortographs, and then through the ‘mass market’ of daily utility, and finally onto the softness and intimacy of domestic life. Maybe it’s the ‘bolshevism’ of these airbrushed designs that has them living on in pink, blue, red, etc. in Chinese wares and all sorts of items and places you can find here and there in Chinatown.
♡