Bauhaus Psychology

[2023]

– Workshop with Robert Wilson

Collaboration between Jenny Brockmann, Henning Schmidgen (psychologist, media theorist and historian of science), Ute Ackermann (art historian ) and Paulina Olszewska (curator).

For the event “Bauhaus Psychology. Workshop with Robert Wilson” in the Oberlichtsaal at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, August 24th 2023, Jenny Brockmann created a discursive environment, which became a stage-like architecture for the workshop with theater director Robert Wilson, whose working method is reminiscent of research by former Bauhaus master Gertrud Grunow, psychologist Heinz Werner and psychologist Daniel Stern. The space of the Oberlichtsaal had been divided into 3 plateaus, on which the workshop took place. Discursive objects designed by the artist were placed on each plateau. All the socalled discursive objects had the same form: half of a sphere, on top of which an arrangement according to the referred person (Werner-Grunow-Stern) had been created.

Jenny Brockmann became interested in 2018 in the practice of Gertrud Grunow (1870 – 1944), who created a method of teaching harmony (German: Harmonisierungslehre) and which from 1920 to 1924 was a part of the preparatory year at the Bauhaus. Her learning concept combined sound, movement and colour within space and encouraged students to develop individual experiences and explore their surroundings in various dimensions.

Robert Wilson: “I was friendly with a man named Daniel Stern. Dan was the head of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University and was studying pre-verbal communication between
mothers and babies. He had made over 250 16-millimeter films of mothers picking up babies. Dan took the film and slowed it down so that you could see every individual frame which showcased
the relationship and movements of the babies and mothers responding to one another.”

In collaboration with: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Kunstfest Weimar, and Klassik Stiftung, Weimar.
Funded by fonds “100 years Bauhaus exhibition.”