5+1 questions for Judith Raum on her performance “Fabrics in Revolt”
The artist Judith Raum has been researching items related to Otti Berger at the Bauhaus-Archiv since 2020. In our interview, we spoke with her about the relation between Berger’s textiles and architecture, Judith’s discoveries in the archive and how she turned them into a lecture performance.
Judith, why did you decide to present your research on the Bauhaus textile designer Otti Berger as a lecture performance, scheduled to take place on 17 November at the temporary bauhaus-archiv?
I find things in the archive and react to them in the studio, but what I miss is that interaction with the audience. Video works and installations cannot include all the aspects that interest me, so I looked for a more narrative format. In a lecture performance, I can show visual material and sculptural actions live and combine them with a spoken narrative. This creates a density of sensory experience which allows people to perceive the material in more ways than just language.
The lecture performance at the temporary bauhaus-archiv is based on a version I presented at Yale University during an architecture symposium. When it comes to reconstructing modernist architecture, most people focus on just the furniture and interior design. I would like to draw attention to how textiles gradually disappeared from the discussion on modernist architecture, although both were conceptually connected in earlier times. Otti Berger did just that and collaborated with architects like Hans Scharoun and Ludwig Hilberseimer.
You’ve been occupied with the life and work of Otti Berger for about seven years. Why is she so fascinating to you?
Ever since I started learning about the textile workshop at the Bauhaus, I was immediately fascinated by Berger’s fabrics. They are designed in a conceptually stringent fashion, and yet they emanate a timeless freshness, elegance and sensuality. They’re almost always monochrome and typically use a variety of threads and well-considered knotting techniques. They come across as vibrating fields of colour, very modern, and in no way outdated. I’m also moved by Berger’s tragic fate. She was prohibited from working in her profession by the Nazis and was later murdered in Auschwitz. She never had the possibility to explain her work, to document it and make herself visible as an artist. That motivated me all the more to dig up a piece of history, to hold these fabrics in my hand, to study them and lend her visibility retrospectively.
What makes Berger’s work interesting to us today?
In contrast to furniture design, for example, the development of functional fabrics is a chapter of design history, which has hardly been studied. And yet the artistic achievement and level of innovation in Berger’s textiles is on par with those in furniture design. She developed some of the most diverse types of fabrics – upholstery and wall covering materials for trains and airplanes, hospitals and movie theatres. She reacted to the new housing and living conditions of her times and pulled textile-making out of the hand-weaving niche. Otti Berger consistently designed furniture upholsteries, curtains, indoor fabric wall coverings, no single pieces like tapestries, which she could have easily spun off to the art market. She worked on developing all types of interior textiles, and that with a focus on industrial production. She even registered for patents on several fabrics, some of which she was granted, but not in every case. Receiving due credit – being mentioned by name – was important to Berger. All those issues – questions of authorship as well as a supposed hierarchy between different creative disciplines – still matter for today’s producers.
Did you encounter anything surprising during your work at the Bauhaus-Archiv?
Lots! One of the highlights was the so-called “piano blanket”, which had at some point been falsely named in the internal database. Using documents and scraps of fabric, I was able to reconstruct and prove that this piece was in fact a bedspread for a daybed, not a protective or decorative cover for a grand piano. Otti Berger was commissioned to design this bedspread by Walter Gropius in 1937 for a daybed by Marcel Breuer, which Gropius owned. I reconstructed the bed’s body in real size and positioned the blanket on top of it. Suddenly you could see how the woven piece of fabric functioned spatially! The blanket responds exactly to the form of the bed, its spatial design is clearly associated with a three-dimensional object. In other words, you can only understand it three-dimensionally – not laid out flat. It’s also a topological weave through and through. Depending on where you stand, different fields of colour come into view; the weave is so deeply furrowed that only certain threads and colours are visible from certain angles. Thus, the blanket was designed for use in the room. To discover what the blanket was meant to do was truly a formative experience.
Can you still go shopping for textiles like carpets, clothing in your personal life?
Once you’ve trained your eye so well, it’s hard to shut it off. But it’s also nice because the range of things you like gets smaller. Lots of things don’t interest me because the quality is poor. With regard to fabrics, we live in a very impoverished environment. I’m happy when I discover something with quality that goes beyond the standard fare.
The Bauhaus-Archiv is home to the most extensive Bauhaus collection in the world. We’ve chosen a photo from our collection, and now you have the chance to tell us whatever you associate with it!
I see a marionette which can do little else but hang, without any strings attached to its limbs, maybe it was meant to be a wiggly doll toy. You just want to reach in and swing it back and forth.
Judith Raum lives and works in Berlin. She studied the fine arts at the Städelschule Frankfurt a. M. and in New York, as well as philosophy, art history and psychoanalysis at Goethe University in Frankfurt a. M. Based on detailed research, her work seeks the symbiosis of artistic and scientific formats (of recognition) and addresses philosophical questions from an aesthetic perspective. In her current works, Judith Raum focuses on the textile designer and Bauhaus graduate Otti Berger.
The lecture performance “Fabrics in Revolt” takes place on 17 November 2022 from 6:15 to 7 pm in German and from 7:15 to 8 pm in English at the temporary bauhaus-archiv. Find more informationen about the event and registration here.