C. Claire Thomson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474424134
- eISBN:
- 9781474444712
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424134.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the ...
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Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the notion of Denmark as a small country has historically been fundamental to the nation’s self-understanding as an imagined community, and how and why it has been employed in informational films made for domestic and foreign consumption. The chapter discusses the role of film in the national imagination, and the importance of medium-specific qualities in that process of imagining: for the purposes of this book, such qualities include the films’ shortness, which impacts on narrative as well as distribution and exhibition. The chapter then discusses recent scholarship on ‘small-nation’ cinema, especially in the Nordic region, and the place of informational filmmaking within the small-nation context. A final chapter section outlines a further body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy, soft power, and nation-branding in the Nordic region as a framework for understanding how images (including informational films) move across borders and re-negotiate auto- and xenostereotypes.Less
Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the notion of Denmark as a small country has historically been fundamental to the nation’s self-understanding as an imagined community, and how and why it has been employed in informational films made for domestic and foreign consumption. The chapter discusses the role of film in the national imagination, and the importance of medium-specific qualities in that process of imagining: for the purposes of this book, such qualities include the films’ shortness, which impacts on narrative as well as distribution and exhibition. The chapter then discusses recent scholarship on ‘small-nation’ cinema, especially in the Nordic region, and the place of informational filmmaking within the small-nation context. A final chapter section outlines a further body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy, soft power, and nation-branding in the Nordic region as a framework for understanding how images (including informational films) move across borders and re-negotiate auto- and xenostereotypes.
Tai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Design
The Bauhaus school in Germany has been understood through the writings of its founding director Walter Gropius and several artists who taught there: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László ...
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The Bauhaus school in Germany has been understood through the writings of its founding director Walter Gropius and several artists who taught there: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts written by women in the school’s weaving workshop. The weavers’ innovativeness can be attributed to their notable textiles products: from colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of sound-proofing and light-reflective fabric. But it was also here that, for the first time, a modernist theory of weaving emerged—an investigation of its material elements, loom practice, and functional applications. What Bauhäusler like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger accomplished through writing, as they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines (painting, architecture, or photography), was a profound step in the recognition of weaving as a medium-specific craft—one that could be compared to and differentiated from others. Writing On Weaving finds new value and significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. Employing a method that bridges art history, design history, craft theory, and media and cultural studies, it raises and seeks to answer several, interdisciplinary questions: Are the concepts of “craft” and “medium” isomorphic, or structurally distinct? How might the principles and methods of weaving challenge modernist assumptions about distinct media? To what degree are crafts and media reliant on theoretical, textual armatures to be specific? How does a medium accrue a gendered value, as “feminine?”Less
The Bauhaus school in Germany has been understood through the writings of its founding director Walter Gropius and several artists who taught there: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts written by women in the school’s weaving workshop. The weavers’ innovativeness can be attributed to their notable textiles products: from colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of sound-proofing and light-reflective fabric. But it was also here that, for the first time, a modernist theory of weaving emerged—an investigation of its material elements, loom practice, and functional applications. What Bauhäusler like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger accomplished through writing, as they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines (painting, architecture, or photography), was a profound step in the recognition of weaving as a medium-specific craft—one that could be compared to and differentiated from others. Writing On Weaving finds new value and significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. Employing a method that bridges art history, design history, craft theory, and media and cultural studies, it raises and seeks to answer several, interdisciplinary questions: Are the concepts of “craft” and “medium” isomorphic, or structurally distinct? How might the principles and methods of weaving challenge modernist assumptions about distinct media? To what degree are crafts and media reliant on theoretical, textual armatures to be specific? How does a medium accrue a gendered value, as “feminine?”
T’ai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Design
Chapter one examines the workshop’s early years (1919-23), when its tapestries and carpets were understood as “pictures made of wool,” and weaving lacked a theoretical armature. Expressionist artists ...
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Chapter one examines the workshop’s early years (1919-23), when its tapestries and carpets were understood as “pictures made of wool,” and weaving lacked a theoretical armature. Expressionist artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten saw painting as a conduit to the artist’s soul, while weaving was too domestic and laborious to hold significant depth. Setting these objects and texts against contemporaneous, Marxist debates about labor, this chapter considers the vexed status of abstraction in the Weimar Republic.Less
Chapter one examines the workshop’s early years (1919-23), when its tapestries and carpets were understood as “pictures made of wool,” and weaving lacked a theoretical armature. Expressionist artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten saw painting as a conduit to the artist’s soul, while weaving was too domestic and laborious to hold significant depth. Setting these objects and texts against contemporaneous, Marxist debates about labor, this chapter considers the vexed status of abstraction in the Weimar Republic.
T’ai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.003.0002
- Subject:
- Art, Design
The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt-Nonné, and Gunta Stölzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings ...
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The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt-Nonné, and Gunta Stölzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings and catapulted itself toward a technological future, a modernist theory of weaving was born. Harnessing the functionalist (Sachlichkeit) discourse of the Neues Bauen movement (Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius), they specified the use of textiles in architectural space.Less
The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt-Nonné, and Gunta Stölzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings and catapulted itself toward a technological future, a modernist theory of weaving was born. Harnessing the functionalist (Sachlichkeit) discourse of the Neues Bauen movement (Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius), they specified the use of textiles in architectural space.
T’ai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.003.0003
- Subject:
- Art, Design
Drawing on László Moholy-Nagy’s arguments regarding the “optical” nature of photography, weaving student Otti Berger developed a complimentary theory of tactility as it pertained to weaving and ...
More
Drawing on László Moholy-Nagy’s arguments regarding the “optical” nature of photography, weaving student Otti Berger developed a complimentary theory of tactility as it pertained to weaving and fabric. While close-up photographs of Bauhaus textiles in magazines and brochures worked to sell the workshop’s products, Berger reflected on the simultaneous visuality and “hold-ability” (Haltbarkeit) of the woven medium.Less
Drawing on László Moholy-Nagy’s arguments regarding the “optical” nature of photography, weaving student Otti Berger developed a complimentary theory of tactility as it pertained to weaving and fabric. While close-up photographs of Bauhaus textiles in magazines and brochures worked to sell the workshop’s products, Berger reflected on the simultaneous visuality and “hold-ability” (Haltbarkeit) of the woven medium.
T’ai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Design
In 1932, Otti Berger began to seek intellectual property protection for her textile fabrication techniques. Identifying herself as a patent “author”—an “inventor” in a design world mostly marked by ...
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In 1932, Otti Berger began to seek intellectual property protection for her textile fabrication techniques. Identifying herself as a patent “author”—an “inventor” in a design world mostly marked by anonymity—she would also define her craft anew. What she developed through patent applications (in dialogue with her patent attorney) was a theory of textiles for the modern age—a language that combined legal rhetoric with that of functionality and media “properties.”Less
In 1932, Otti Berger began to seek intellectual property protection for her textile fabrication techniques. Identifying herself as a patent “author”—an “inventor” in a design world mostly marked by anonymity—she would also define her craft anew. What she developed through patent applications (in dialogue with her patent attorney) was a theory of textiles for the modern age—a language that combined legal rhetoric with that of functionality and media “properties.”
T’ai Smith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816687237
- eISBN:
- 9781452949031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687237.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Design
After Anni Albers immigrated to America with her husband, Josef, in 1933, her writing practice quickly expanded. Through texts published in magazines or catalogues and ultimately in two books—On ...
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After Anni Albers immigrated to America with her husband, Josef, in 1933, her writing practice quickly expanded. Through texts published in magazines or catalogues and ultimately in two books—On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965)—she considered terms like “medium” and “design” as they integrated and, in postwar America, increasingly eclipsed the work of “craft.” In this chapter, Albers is set into dialogue with several significant and incongruent voices on media from this moment.Less
After Anni Albers immigrated to America with her husband, Josef, in 1933, her writing practice quickly expanded. Through texts published in magazines or catalogues and ultimately in two books—On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965)—she considered terms like “medium” and “design” as they integrated and, in postwar America, increasingly eclipsed the work of “craft.” In this chapter, Albers is set into dialogue with several significant and incongruent voices on media from this moment.
