Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and the Search for the Absolute Stage

Some company recently was interested in buying my "aura." They didn't want my product. They kept
saying, "We want your aura." I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it.
So I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to figure out what it is.

—Andy Warhol

From the standpoint of our time, it seems that aesthetic aura persists not despite but precisely because of the instruments of mechanical reproduction that have come to dominate our society. Though mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin argued, may strip an artwork of its aura in the sense of its originality or uniqueness, not even this now seems assured. Consider the prices that mass-produced Bauhaus "originals" now fetch on the contemporary art market. Consider, too, the way in which mass reproductions of an artwork often serve only to add to the luster of the original, such that the production of a million ten-dollar Mona Lisa posters is inseparable from the ongoing worship of the Mona Lisa and even—more intriguingly—of Warhol's Mona Lisa (Colored). Moreover, even when mechanical reproduction strips the uniqueness of an artwork, it may create a wholly new ritual function for the artwork. The mass reproduction of Disney products, to take just one example, is inseparable from the mythological role they play in American society; each Disney character functions simultaneously as logo, franchise, artwork, and archetype, linked symbolically and commercially to the pilgrimage site that is Disneyland. ¹

The Disney corporation, however, generally tries to obscure the mechanical and mass-reproduced aspects of its kingdom and therefore provides an ambiguous antithesis to Benjamin's claim. A more direct antithesis, and a fuller understanding of the auratic qualities of mass reproduction in a capitalist economy, may be found in the work of the Bauhaus. The dream of many members of the Bauhaus in the 1920s—not only of Gropius, but also of Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy, the two principal theoreticians and practitioners of the Bauhaus Totaltheater—was that society might be fundamentally improved through the proper employment of systems of mechanical reproduction. This dream entailed a more or less utopian vision of a future society constructed along roughly socialist lines. By bringing together all of the divided crafts, many of the Bauhaus artists hoped to forge a unified artwork, a new artistic community, and, ultimately, an aestheticized future society. Consciously distinguishing themselves from Wagnerian followers such as the Symbolists, they imagined a form of total art that would consciously embrace rather than reject mechanics and technology. Though the relationship between the 1920s Bauhaus and commercial culture was highly ambiguous and largely hidden, the relationship between the Bauhaus and mechanical reproduction was generally explicit and affirmative.

From the wide spectrum of Bauhaus activities, the Totaltheater has received comparatively little attention and yet perhaps best demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of the Bauhaus project. Clearly connected to the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Bauhaus theater differed markedly from Richard Wagner's project at Bayreuth. Where Wagner advocated the occultation of stage mechanics in order to present his music-dramas as spontaneous manifestations, Bauhaus theater artists such as Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy reveled in the mechanical nature of their productions, celebrated the "electro-magnetic impulses" that energized their hypermodern stage. Despite their enthusiasm for mechanics, however, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy were still deeply indebted to the tradition of the organic work of art. In their most radical writings and performances, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy argued that organicism would be achieved by pushing mechanism to its farthest extreme, by turning the stage into an absolute machine. Absolute machine as absolute organism: it is in this paradox that the Bauhaus theater found its form.

The Mechanical Organism

In the 1920s, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy shared a belief, common among Germans living in the aftermath of World War I, that human...