ART AND SUSTAINABILITY : BAUHAUS TO SOCIAL SCULPTURE is a 12 day course that actively engages participants in an introductory exploration relevant to cultural workers and interdisciplinary practitioners in the 21st century.

It explores the connections between the radical insights of Weimar visionaries, Schiller and Goethe through the experiments of the Bauhaus and early interdisciplinary modernists like Kandinsky, to Joseph Beuys and an 'expanded conception of art' that he described as social sculpture.

Through relating this material to people's own questions and evolving practices, the course faciltates ways of working for a humane and ecologically viable future.  

The programme is led by Dr. Hildegard Kurt and Shelley Sacks. 

You need to enrol for this programme by 15 May 2008

COURSE OUTLINE - Summary

Comparing a historical cornerstone - the Bauhaus - to the contemporary concept of Social Sculpture, the course explores the following question:

Can the shaping of humane societies be approached as an aesthetic challenge?

The course includes a workshop process, where interdisciplinary artist and Beuys student Shelley Sacks, director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit -the first centre for the exploration of Social Sculpture - will assist participants to access their individual and creative responses to this question. The whole programme is in English.

Weimar was not only the home of the Bauhaus, but also of Schiller (The Aesthetic Education of the Human Being) and Goethe (new organs of perception), both of whom are central to the development of a connective aesthetics and a holistic approach to being in the world.

This is a special opportunity to explore social sculpture in relation to earlier experiments in Weimar that were investigating and renegotiating the relationship between life and art.

The Summer School has been very successful in drawing people from all over Europe, including Eastern Europe. Contact between the participants and the potential it offers to develop dialogues and work across countries, is also a very important aspect of this international programme. So we are now running it in English to extend the programme to the English speaking world and to people from countries who do not speak German as a second language.