Review: Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Our Time), by Schirn Kunsthalle

Abstract

Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Our Time) . Kunsthalle, Erfurt, 29 March––24 May 2009 Bauhaus, Dessau, 9 June––24 October 2009. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 8 October 2009––7 February 2010 We enter the gallery. An undulating, transparent wall directs our eyes to the right half of the room as it guides our bodies leftward, toward a photo mural composed of Bauhaus architecture, design, and art (Figures 1, 2). Separated from the outset, body and vision are at least perfunctorily reunited by an endless backlit band that requires a push of a button to set into motion half a dozen large photographs, including the glass corner from Walter Gropius's 1925––26 Dessau Bauhaus building and a diagram from Moholy-Nagy's 1924 film manuscript Dynamik der Groββstadt . Three suspended, circular, glass displays appear to free their content——Wilhelm Wagenfeld's 1924 Bauhaus lamp and other design objects——from the constraints of gravity. Private, circular viewing consoles for avant-garde films——including Viking Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale (1924) and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929)——are visible at the opposite end of the room. In short, we are thrust into an exhibition environment where technological reproductions predominate; images are nearly freed from material substrates and projected as sequential stills or in fluid movement; and materials like glass, nickel, and Trolite are exploited less for artworks than as frames, bases, and encasings. We are in a recent (re)construction of the Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Our Time). Figure 1 Raum der Gegenwart by Laaszloo Moholy-Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in the Kunst Licht Spiele exhibition, Kunsthalle, Erfurt, 2009 (photos by Sabine Bielmeier, Kassel) Figure 2 Raum der Gegenwart by Laaszloo Moholy-Nagy, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in the Kunst Licht Spiele exhibition, Kunsthalle, Erfurt, 2009 (photos by Sabine Bielmeier, Kassel) The environment is hardly unfamiliar in contemporary museums, but it was without significant precedent in the interwar museological landscape. Without precedent in part because the Room of Our Time——a multimedia museum gallery …