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Abstract
In the interwar period in Europe, cacti emerged as significant architectural devices that challenged traditional notions of architecture, offering an alternative understanding of the discipline while embodying the politics of their time. Investigating the overlooked prevalence of cacti in early modernist writings, photographs, artwork, and spaces, this paper reveals a European obsession with the desert plant in the early twentieth century that has been hidden in plain sight. The transmaterial entanglements of cacti with the architecture of the Bauhaus and its other human, vegetal, and material occupants forged a biochemical interspecies contract, signaling shifting attitudes toward gender inequities and industrialized labor. Celebrated for their machinic qualities, their mind-altering and time-bending chemical properties, and their sexual suggestiveness, many species of cacti—while objectified—were instrumental witnesses and silent provocateurs of the period, offering whimsical and exoticized additions to the modern aesthetic. They represented a different aesthetic realm coming from the desert, and spurred radical new imaginaries concerning gender, economics, and politics. Cacti emerged as trans-geographical agents, instrumentalized as both symbols of the modern environment in Europe and of the arid geographies from which they originated—shaping a new media ecology. Further, the ingestions of cactus-based chemicals in this period transformed the consciousness of early modernists, instigating lysergic experiences that challenged linear conceptions of time, fostering queer temporality and novel futurities. By examining the role of environmental elements in shaping architectural modernism, this paper suggests correspondences between the built environment and the natural world, offering a new perspective on a significant period in architectural history.
Notes
1 The student residence building was completed around 1925–26.
2 Eckhard Neumann, ed., Bauhaus and Bauhaus People: Personal Opinions and Recollections of Former Bauhaus Members and Their Contemporaries (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 99-100.
3 Werner Zimmermann, Marianne Brandt on the Balcony of the Prellerhaus, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1928, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
4 In 1938, MoMA issued a press memo informing New York City editors that on December 7, the Museum would open “what will probably be considered its most unusual exhibition—and certainly one of its largest.” That exhibition was Bauhaus: 1919–1928, an expansive survey dedicated to the German school. On display were nearly 700 examples of the school’s output, including works of textile, glass, wood, canvas, metal, and paper. The size and scope of this tribute indicated the importance of the Bauhaus to MoMA’s development: the school had served as a model for the Museum’s multi-departmental structure, and inspired its multidisciplinary presentation of photography, architecture, painting, graphic design, and theater. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, eds., Bauhaus, 1919–1928 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 104.
5 Even the photograph’s credit has been controversial. There was no credit or date in the catalogue for the MoMA exhibition and it has often been dated to 1926-27, as in Angel Gonzalez, El Resto. Una historia invisible del arte contemporáneo (Madrid, Bilbao: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2000); or undated, per Torsten Blume, “Cactus,” Bauhaus: The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s Magazine 3 (May 2012).
6 Daniel Hartl and Elizabeth Jones, Genetics: Analysis of Genes and Genomes (Jones & Barlett, 2005).
7 As Astrida Niemanis points out through a posthuman understanding of embodiment opposed to the neoliberal paradigm: Astrida Niemanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 19.
8 Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities,” GLQ 21:2–3 (2015): 387–422.
9 The principal difference with the Wilhelm Wagenfeld design (WA 24, 1923) is the globe. In the case of WA 24, this element is opaque glass. The base and the tube are nickel-plated metal, something that he would change in his WG 24 design, with both the tube and the base in glass.
10 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).
11 The majority of the students started while in their twenties, with few exceptions: Andreas Feininger was 16 years old when he started at the Bauhaus; Max Bill and Hans Bellmann were 20; Annie Albers, Gunta Stölz, Lotte Stam-Beese, Paul Citroen, and Wagenfeld were 23.
12 This building would become the Bauhaus in 1919.
13 The building was designed for this specific purpose by Georg Muche.
14 Most of the discussion of Marianne Brandt’s biographical notes and photomontages has been based on Elizabeth Otto, Tempo, Tempo!: the Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Berlin: Jorvis, 2005).
15 Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1969).
16 In 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament in Saxony to the Nationalists who cut the funding of the Bauhaus. It closed in 1925 and moved to Dessau in 1926, when the new building was finished.
17 During this period at the Bauhaus there were three departments that translated in three diplomas: 1. Preliminary course; 2. Instruction in a craft; 3. Instruction in Architecture. Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (Munich: Bauhausverlag,1923), Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
18 Befähigungszeugnis, Marianne Brandt, 1928, collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
19 Hin Brededieck (1904–1995) was a German industrial designer enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1927, where he graduated in 1930. He worked for Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, and BAG Lighting Manufacturing Company in Turgi, Switzerland, where he introduced mass production techniques in manufacturing. In 1937 he was invited by Moholy-Nagy to join the New Bauhaus in Chicago and in 1952 became the first director of the new design program at Georgia Institute of Technology. Hin Bredendieck, “The Legacy of the Bauhaus,” Art Journal, College Art Association 22:1 (Autumn, 1962): 15–21.
20 As Banham put it as one of the milestones of modern architecture. Reyner Banham, “The Bauhaus” Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1980), 276–304.
21 George H. Marcus, Masters of Modern Design: A Critical Assessment (New York: The Monicelli Press, 2005), 79.
22 Neumann, Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, 98.
23 Probably the best example of gender segregation in the Bauhaus was the case of Gunta Stölzl. When George Muche left the direction of the weaving workshop, Stölzl took his place despite the opposition of the majority of the faculty, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Only after the pressure of the students to have her as a director of the workshop was she named the master, the sole woman who occupied this position at the Bauhaus. Even after this, Gropius continued to be alarmed with the “growing number of women” (never more than 150 students), which prompted him to steer women away from the supposedly “masculine” architecture curriculum and toward the traditionally “feminine” crafts workshops. Ulrike Müller, Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Paris: Flammarion; London: Thames & Hudson, 2009).
24 Walter Gropius remained in charge of the Bauhaus international exhibitions.
25 Wingler, The Bauhaus, 153–54.
26 Neumann, Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, 97.
27 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 4.
28 Ann and Jürgen Wilde and Thomas Weski, eds., Albert Renger-Patzsch: Photographer of Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998).
29 New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015).
30 Bayer et al., Bauhaus, 1919–1928, 5.
31 “Per què han triomfant els Cactus,” D’Ací i d’Allà 170 (Barcelona, November 1932).
32 In the words of J. J. Lahuerta: J. J. Lahuerta, Decir anti es decir pro: escenas de la vanguardia en España (Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 1999), 153.
33 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: The MIT Press, 2007).
34 Most of the information on cactus was provided by Miles Anderson, Cacti and Succulents (Oxford: Sebastien Kelly, 1999).
35 Information provided by the Junkers Museum in Dessau.
36 The photograph is in the MoMA archive: call number 1614.2001.
37 Wolfgang Joop, “Die reduzierte Notwendigkeit: Lis Volga’s Bauhaus-Kleid” (2009), Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
38 Siegfried Krakauer, “Essay on Boredom,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995), 334.
39 Marcel Breuer’s first chair also illustrates the concept of a stable framework with an elastic covering. The back of the chair is formed by a fabric designed by Stölzl, who also designed the seat cushion. The still-visible warp yarns, the distinct traces of workmanship on the wood elements, and their painted décor are reminiscent of works of folk art, something that is going to change in future Breuer designs, like the club chair B3 or Wassily chair, in reference to the revered master Wassily Kandinsky. The chair was described by Breuer as “a design for a new lifestyle” and was part of the furniture collection designed for the Bauhaus Building in Dessau: from craftsmanship to industrial design.
40 Elizabeth Otto, “A ‘Schooling of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt,” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009, Duke University Press), 101.
41 Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (London: Phaidon, 1995).
42 By the end of the nineteenth century, Porfirio Diaz and Otto von Bismarck signed an agreement to explore the potentials of Mexican agriculture. More than 450 German families settled in Mexico, dedicating themselves to harvesting coffee and cacti. Ana Luisa Rojas Marín, Del bosque a los árboles (Puebla: BUAP, 2012).
43 Valentin Scholz und Hermann Stützel, Chronik der Deutschen Kakteen-Gesselschaft e. V. (Bremen: 1999).
44 Blume, “Cactus,” 12.
45 Blume, “Cactus.”
46 Neumann, Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, 101.
47 Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” The Art Bulletin 85:4 (December 2003): 739.
48 Koss, “Bauhaus Theater.”
49 Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 36.
50 Of course, cacti can be found in projects in the United States, especially in Frank Lloyd Wright’s early projects, even as motifs, like the stained glasses of the Biltmore Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona (1929), and in the landscaping of architects like Richard Neutra, John Lautner, or Albert Frey after the Second World War. But the purpose of this research is to study the presence of the cactus in Europe in the period between the wars.
51 Bifur 7, Paris, 1929–30.
52 In the second surrealist manifesto, André Breton will condemn Bifur as a “remarkable garbage pail,” stating the importance of the Parisian milieu. André Breton, “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” Manifestoes of Surrealism (The University of Michigan Press, 1966), 166.
53 Variétés, Brussels, 1929.
54 Denis Wood with John Fels and John Krygier, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010).
55 J. Santamaria, “Els cactus,” Claror 14, Barcelona (June 1936): 179–80.
56 As Breton stated in “Frida Kahlo de Rivera” in Surrealism and Painting (1938), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002).
57 André Breton, “Souvenir de Mexique,” Minotaure 12–13 (May 1939), Paris.
58 Breton, “Souvenir,” 32.
59 In the end, this image was censored and not published.
60 Breton, “Souvenir,” 31.
61 About tequila, its history, and the processes of extraction and distillation, see Ana Guadalupe Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan, Tequila!: A Natural and Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).
62 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 95.
63 This and the other references on Artaud in Mexico are in volume 8 of his complete works: Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
64 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 53.
65 Antonin Artaud, The Peyote Dance (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 75.
66 J. L. McLaughlin, Peyote: An Introduction (Lloydia, 1973). [PMC][4576311]
67 In this sense, it’s revelatory that Sergei Eisenstein explored his sexuality and became openly gay in Mexico, epitomized in his drawings and in one of his most famous photographs: Eisenstein posing with a cactus between his legs, as if it were a gigantic phallus.
68 Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
69 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 70.
70 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, London: New York University Press, 2009), 16.
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Notes on contributors
Ivan L. Munuera
Ivan L. Munuera is a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. A visiting professor at Bard College and Barnard-Columbia, his research has been generously sponsored by PIIRS (Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies) and CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture). In 2020, he was awarded the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship at Princeton University. This fellowship recognizes scholars displaying the highest academic excellence and professional promise.