Body and Motion

The human body was central to Schlemmer’s intellectual belief and pivotal to his cultural, aesthetic and ethical system; research into the body in motion takes his thinking to a new level, embodying as it does the force and dynamism of its organicism. Movement admits change, flux and impermanence. Within Schlemmer’s mature aesthetic, motion always forms part of the Gestalt, to a greater or lesser extent—less obviously in his paintings, more so in his reliefs, sculptures and wall paintings and majorly so in his stage work. Schlemmer’s interest lay not so much in speed and motion as manifested in the modern world of cars and trains and clock time (Kern [1983] 2003: 109–130, Hughes 1991: 9–56) as in the deeper ramifications of motion, flux, change and impermanence within philosophy, metaphysics and ethics. Whilst some early twentieth-century artists offer a somewhat limited attempt to incorporate movement in their work—as in, for example, Futurist paintings that resemble a series of film stills—other artists pushed notions around movement and change much further, and their work as a result retains a charge and resonance that still reverberates in the twenty-first century. Duchamp’s kinetic art, for example, offers a meditation upon flux and instability, and his work often manifests his more esoteric reading on new models of the universe that emerged in the early twentieth century, models which depend on abandoning Euclidean geometry and substituting new paradigms for understanding space. ¹ Schlemmer’s awareness of these new radical structurings of the universe, time and space was probably limited: his profound awareness of motion as a mysterious phenomenon that the logic and proofs of Euclidean geometry could not fully explain emerged not only from his readings in philosophy but above all from his embodied experience as a dancer moving through space. Interest in motion within the Bauhaus was widespread—manifested, for example, in photography, the Reflected Light Plays of Hirschfield Mack and in Maholy-Nagy’s kinetic work. It is also fundamental to the pedagogical design theory of Paul Klee and Kandinsky that emerged from their Bauhaus teaching (see Klee [1925] 1953, 1968; Klee [1956] 1961; Kandinsky [1947] 1979): a line was always described, for example, as a point in motion. ² Schlemmer’s approach to motion using performance offered a radical way forward that painting and the now largely extinct art of kinetic light shows and kinetic sculptures did not. ³