Starting point

Symbolism:

The starting point of this body of work is a symbol extrapolated from a photograph of a model that is the only surviving documentation of Walter Gropius' entry for the international competition to design the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931). This proposal, along with those of Le Corbusier and Ginsburg was amongst those that were rejected by Stalin’s panel in favour of a 400m high neo-classical structure topped with a 100m high statue of Lenin in full declamatory pose.

For more information and test shoot see http://www.trayner.org/gropiusstadt.html
& http://trayner.org/test_shoot.html


Casting dates: April 2010
Filming dates: few days in May/June 2010

Gropius 2010 Film piece

                               
                                        16mm short by Jonathan Trayner & Yvonne Riepl

'Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the Past' is a multi-layered project that rotates around a central film piece. This film was shot on discontinued Kodak 16mm stock using a Soviet-era Krasnogorsk-3 camera in a field in Brandenburg, in the background of the shot can be seen the high-modernist tower blocks of Gropiusstadt, a suburb of the old Western Sector of Berlin, placing the location in the death strip of the strip.


Naked figures march in and out of shot in the early morning carrying seven different flags representing various strands of enlightenment thought marked with a barely identifiable symbol (in fact the floor plan of Walter Gropius' design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow). The soundtrack to the film is an excerpt from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana suite, a politically dubious choice considering the favour his work found with the Nazi regime; but also interesting because of the Rabelaisian nature of the original cycle of profane monastic songs and poems on which it was based.

Symbolism

The symbol started off as a mark of the failure of modernism as narrative - an ambivalent gesture as it encompasses both sides of the division between utopianism and its (inevitable?) degradation into totalitarianism. It has subsequently evolved in my mind into a blot or psychic stain; the mark of the obscene other of modernism; the repository of all the un-acknowledgable violence of the enlightenment. However, this symbolism is clouded and the mark becomes orphaned - existing as a floating shape that presages an event of indeterminate meaning. It has become a McGuffin; as it has moved beyond its origin and is now just a device, or a signifier in a sea of different futures; an ideological parasite looking for a host organism. Does the symbol in the end equalise and flatten the pre-existing meanings of the various flags and their supported ideologies under its own sign, or are the semiotics of these ideologies too strong to be subsumed?

“You have to fly a flag, otherwise you have nothing to wave”

design by Jonathan Trayner

Flying, for instance, the flag with the German colours and Walter Gropius' high modernist design on this specific cornfield works on many different levels. The piece 'Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past' is going to be performed and recorded before the backdrop of the satellite city Gropiusstadt, on the outskirts of Berlin, a town born by Walter Gropius' ideas about social housing projects during the 1960's after the construction of the Berlin wall.

Gropiusstadt has, especially during the 1980s repeatedly been associated with the alienation of youth and despair, and has become internationally known as the setting of the autobiographical movie Christiane F. directed by Uli Edel. (Subtitled "Image of a Generation" Christiane F. is the true story of a lonely, bored teenager in the '70's who gets into the drug scene at 12, hooked on heroin at 13 and becomes a prostiture at 14 to support her habit)

DV-Stills from the test shoot during summer 2009

The scene opens with the seven flags standing in a row. The seven actors enter the scene from behind the camera take up the flags and march with them in time to the music, following a choreography based on the Palace of the Soviets symbol. The march will finish with the actors returning the flags to their starting positions, they will then exit the scene back past the camera.

The corn field setting is itself also part of the former death strip dividing East and West and would during Berlin wall years have only be accessed by DDR (GDR) security guards.

Therefore, young adults carrying the flags while marching naked at dawn over this particular corn field to the neo-romanticist tune of Carl Orff expresses in itself a problematic gesture somehow signaling a defiance to the perceived failure of a possible progressive high modernism in favour of a reminiscent and accepted totalitarianism.

The flags are a shortcut ,
they are symbols representing certain aspects
of the Enlightenment project.

The flags flown all represent particular aspects of the enlightenment project, the progressive drive that led to the development of modernism as an overarching thematic structure, and which contains so many antagonistic strands. Some of these strands developed out of others, out of the merging of others or in response to them but all of them are distinct and the core ideologies that drive contemporary politics.

For more information on his ongoing project involving flags check Jon Trayner's page on http://www.trayner.org/taz/flags/

Background and additional information

Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past – film development proposal

Location:Gropiusstadt(former death strip)

Scene: Dawn, a feld in Brandenburg, just outside Gropiusstadt, Berlin/Germany (before 1989: GDR)

Actors: Seven actors (both male and female). In their twenties, fit, normal build, ethnicity unimportant. Naked.

Props: Seven flags (see image) on poles.

Music: Carl Orff, Ecce Gratum.

Duration: Approximately 5mins.

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Design by Jonathan Trayner

Background: The film is the follow on from Jon Trayner's artist residency in Berlin last year with Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt where he produced a test shoot for this film. This was produced with only one actor and a small MiniDV camera.

How the public will engage with the work:

The work will be exhibited in one of Manchester's foremost galleries with a history of public engagement both within art audiences and the wider community and has been submitted to art festivals around Europe (for 2010/2011)

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Cross-reference: Unity in diversity

The Bauhaus' "novel method of education in design has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. The present generation is inclined to think of it as a rigid stylistic dogma of yesterday whose usefulness has come to an end because its ideological and technical premises are now outdated. This view confuses a method of approach with the practical results obtained by it at a particular period of its application. The Bauhaus was not concerned with the formulation of timebound, stylistic concepts, and its technical methods were not ends in themselves. It was created to show how a multitude of individuals, willing to work concertedly but without losing their identity, could evolve a kinship of expression in their response to the challenges of the day. Its aim was to give a basic demonstration of how to maintain unity in diversity, and it did this with the materials, techniques, and form concepts germane to its time. It was this method of approach that was revolutionary…” -- from “The Role of the Architect in Modern Society,” address given at Columbia University (March 1961) by Walter Gropius
(I found this quote on a recent blog which is followed by numerous responses by the blog's subscribers regarding Gropius’ ideas about gathering artists and collaborating together, see
http://roberttracyphdhonors400.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/german-bauhaus/)

Processed film

Viewing back the developed S16 footage of the 'Gropius' shoot

on a traditional Steenbeck 16mm cutting unit at LUX studios.

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For the project we used four rolls of discontinued

Kodak Eastman 5245 / 7245 EXR 50D Colour Negative film.

The processing was done at Soho Images under the supervision of Len Thornton.