Page 27 - Studio International - September 1968

View of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, 1925-26

People of my generation—I am in my forties— take for granted the
The Bauhaus revisited intimate relationship of art and technology. We are not, many of us,
unduly shocked to find the sculptor in the machine shop or in the
plastics factory; we read the computor's poems and look at its
graphics with the polite attention we might give to the work of any
Gene Baro gifted beginner; and we accept as music the sounds, electronically
produced, that our fathers perhaps never heard, let alone approved.
We are a generation that expects the objects of daily use to be well
designed, the cup to have an ear big enough for one's finger, the
armchair to be comfortably supporting, light-weight, easy to clean—
possibly even colourful. Our wives want to give no more than a wipe
to the stain-proof, heat-resistant table top, expect the clock to turn
on the radio and percolate the breakfast coffee. Let the oven time the
joint, we say, the freezer chill the cocktail mix, while we watch on
television the latest ways to work less at living. And if something goes
wrong with the toaster, we'll have another, in every detail the
duplicate of its predecessor, except this one works.
The attitude is reasonably new. A few decades ago, at the turn of
the century, say, many thinking people had no confidence that
utility and aesthetic value might go together. To some, the machine
was simply devilish, an instrument of human debasement. These
were the direct heirs of Morris. They looked back to the time when
the craftsman was dominant, before the machine had superseded
him by imitating his labour. In short, they rejected the economic
basis of the world they lived in, but were willing to use the excess
wealth of the system to create a simulacrum of the past. The line of
argument goes back to Ruskin and Pugin, but not forward to genuine
social reform. Morris balked when the implications of his teachings
were taken up by political activists. The alternative to reform was that
side by side with the grim factories was to be a kind of Disneyland of
gothic spires, and the patient, superfluous weaver was to work in the
shadow of the looms of Lancashire.
Another response to the machine was 'Art for Art's Sake', which