Bauhaus Sculpture
For Project 2 in 3DGD we made a model sculpture that could potentially go in a museum exhibit displaying information on something to do with the Bauhaus. We could pick anything that had to do with the Bauhaus and choose photography and type as well. Before I go on with how the assignment went together, I should explain about this “sculpture” because it’s probably conjuring up sorts of images in the readers mind that probably don’t look anything like what we had to make. The “sculpture” was merely three different sized rectangular boxes of whatever material we found easy to work with that could be assembled through various techniques. We could cradle the boxes, puncture them, wedge them, or have them intersect in almost any way that we could think of so long as all the surfaces of the boxes were either parallel or perpendicular to the ground. The dimensions of these boxes had to stay within a reasonable size, which I guess meant nothing like a really long pointy stick of a block and not a flat piece of paper kind of a box…
While picking out the dimensions of our three boxes and figuring out how we were going to put them together, we had to keep elements of design in mind. This included having contrast in size and rectangular shape between the boxes, creating an interesting shape in both the positive space of the boxes and the negative space around the boxes. All this was done with various kinds of paper or foam core or whatever we thought would be a good material to make this with.
It should be noted now that at this point in the assignment we did not know what would be going on our model sculptures. We knew at some point that we would have to apply graphics and imagery to the boxes, but we didn’t know what the graphics had to be and what the sculpture was supposed to function as. This created many problems for several students including myself because it was hard to make an abstract sculpture that was visually interesting without thinking about how the final product would function and look. On top of that, once we found out that we were applying subject matter that had to do with the Bauhaus movement, most of us were unhappy with the sculptures we initially created.
While I was figuring out what sized blocks I was going to use in my sculpture and how I was going to assemble it, I fell into the category of students who couldn’t help but anticipate how the final product was going to function and ended up creating a model that I didn’t think would work as well as I would have liked it to with Bauhaus graphics. I knew I wanted this table-like structure that would have lots of photography and imagery with captions underneath them. I wanted people to then be able to walk around the main table-like piece of the sculpture by having photos and imagery arranged in a successive manner in order to get viewers to move around the sculpture. I thought this would solve the problem of needing to create something that was interesting to look at from all angles. (Unfortunately this wasn’t as successful as I anticipated and will be discussed later.) Since I was relying heavily on the concept of having a table-like structure with graphics on the top of it arranged in a successive manner, the other two pieces of my sculpture kind of came on a little awkward. I had this table piece, and to contrast it I pierced it with a long pole like box. I figured a long pole-like piece through a table-like piece utilized contrast in an effective way. The third piece was stouter in comparison to the others and was kind of lodged onto the adjacent side of the table-like piece.
So now that I had my sculpture, I got stuck trying to figure out what from the Bauhaus movement I was going to try to portray on my sculpture. This is the part of the project that really stumped me and I took way too long trying to find something that I was inspired by and would work with my sculpture. I ended up settling on a painter by the name of Paul Klee because I was fascinated by his work in trying to find a way to bridge a gap between music and paining.
Once I did some research on him and got a few books on him it was almost too late to really play with how I would go about applying imagery and graphics. I figured I would feature a few of his paintings and sample colors from them for the color scheme of my sculpture. This was done with some success, but I wish that I would have given myself more time to create several approaches to get better feedback from my professor and classmates.
Here’s what I came out with:
I got a decent grade on the final project, but I knew I could have done better. It was the classic problem of not giving myself enough time… Looking back at in now I can see that relying on having the movement around the sculture be based on the graphics was a bad idea to begin with because the whole point of the assignment was to create a sculpture that was visually stimulating and have movement be created by the arrangment of the boxes not the graphics, which in a way were secondary. One thing I do like about the final product is the giant skecth of Beethoven that Klee did as a child that I found in one of the books about him. It was pretty small in the book, but with the combination of a copy machine, scanner, and photoshop I was able to bring it to life on the front panell of the stout block. I just love the way it glares at the viewer. Too bad I didn’t create a caption for him… Oh well, chalk another one up to procrastination.
