Upon visiting the Bauhaus-Archiv, a museum goer is confronted with a collection of objects chosen from what I perceived as the school’s more famous and possibly more obviously influential items of cultural production: architecture, furniture, lamps, tea sets, other items for the household. Along with this is a smattering of paintings, the very famous chess board (which you can purchase a copy of in the giftshop, of course) a couple of textile pieces (one of which is a truly excellent weaving by Anne Albers), some sculpture, and various other pieces from the artistic production of the school. The Museum is useful in this: as I walked through the small, open-spaced galleries, the objects appeared to me as if in a three dimensional coffee table book. Fantastic to see, but, I found myself a little disappointed in this somewhat limited presentation.
Because of the predominance of these types of selections, the role of the Bauhaus as a pedagogical institution is lost in the midst. Documentation of the life of the school barely makes it’s presence felt. There are only brief references to the kind of teaching that took place among the few examples of student work. My own encounters with the Bauhaus have been through retellings of the school itself—I had hoped to see more examples within the galleries. Within this disappointment, however, reside a number of important questions: Why does the curation of this museum value objects of direct commodification over the pedagogical development that took place in the Bauhaus, a development that would find its way into Evergreen via Black Mountain College? What is more important: its students or its objects made? Why is the student body being taken for granted as a forgotten excess to the latter? Given these, how are we to remember the institution? As a pedagogical experiment or as a producer of commodities? Is it even possible to Muezealize education or pedagogy?
In an additional obscuration, I found the galleries to not represent the character of the architecture: I had the best experience of the building sitting the courtyard drinking coffee and walking around the outside after leaving.