Review: »Bauhaus Psychology« - A Workshop with Robert Wilson
On August 24, 2023, the legendary theater director Robert Wilson held a guest lecture and workshop at the Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar. Together with about 100 participants, he devoted himself to the topic of »Bauhaus Psychology« in the Oberlichtsaal. Following an idea by Henning Schmidgen, the workshop was organized by the bauhaus.medien.bühnen laboratory of the Bauhaus-Universität in cooperation with the Kunstfest Weimar and took place as an event to mark the 100th anniversary of the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition.
Wilson moved in a plateau architecture designed by Jenny Brockmann, which was characterized by discursive objects and projections. In dialogue with other participants - Henning Schmidgen (professor of media theory and history of science at the Faculty of Media), Jenny Brockmann (artist and research associate, Faculty of Media), Ute Ackermann (art historian, curator at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar), Paulina Olszewska (art historian, curator at Galeria Studio, Warsaw) and many students - he reflected on his connections to the Bauhaus and an associated psychology.
The intertwined paths of this psychology lead from the often forgotten Bauhaus master Gertrud Grunow to the Hamburg psychologist Heinz Werner, with whom Grunow collaborated after her departure, to the developmental researcher and psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, with whom Wilson cooperated since the late 1960s. Wilson also spent part of his architectural studies with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who was committed to the Bauhaus. Against this background, Wilson discussed with the participants and the audience the role of the body in space, its movements and sensations, and how a correspondingly centered doctrine of balance can be carried forward today - in architecture and art, as well as in dance, theater and film.
Based on a task that Sibyl Moholy-Nagy once set Wilson, the first part of the event defined the exercise "Design a City in 3 Hours" within the framework of a performative dialogue. During the break - the said three hours - the active participants of the workshop worked on their answers. In parallel, the psychological films "Every Little Thing" (Nicolas Philibert, 1995) and "Ce gamin, là" (Renaud Victor, 1975) were shown in the studio of the artist Jana Gunstheimer. In the second part the participants then presented their answers, works and sketches, which Wilson looked at in detail and commented on.
