Corresponding with matters of pedagogy: Bauhaus, Black Mountain and beyond.

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between the modern art school approach to un-learning and anthropology; with specific reference to Bauhaus, Black Mountain and its global resonance and continuum. As Tim Ingold reminds us, the artist-educator Paul Klee repeatedly insisted, and demonstrated by example, that the processes of genesis and growth that give rise to forms in the world we inhabit are more important than the forms themselves. As Klee wrote in his notebook, ‘Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life’ (Klee). This, in turn, lay at the heart of his celebrated ‘Creative Credo’ of 1920: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (Klee). It does not, in other words, seek to replicate finished forms that are already settled, whether as images in the mind or as objects in the world. It seeks, rather, to join with those very forces that bring the form into being (Ingold). Using this statement as a trigger the text will explore how Paul Klee’s pedagogic approach played a significant part in the formation of the art school ecology and how that relates to the way we live our lives and shape and form our futures