This 12-day theory-practice programme actively engages participants in an introductory exploration of social sculpture and aesthetic questions relevant to the shaping of an ecological and socially just world. It looks back to Goethe, Schiller, the Bauhaus and Joseph Beuys and forward to developing new forms of social sculpture appropriate to the challenges of the 21^st century. Its approach is genuinely interdisciplinary.

Invited to participate are: people involved in creative action for sustainability, social designers and artists of all disciplines, art historians/theoreticians and art educators, students from all disciplines and other interested individuals.

Last years programme included participants from almost every continent.  
 

Students can be granted 3 units credit by the Weimar-Jena-Academy, organizer of the International Weimar Summer Courses.

 

Now, at the start of a new century, the idea of social sculpture (Joseph Beuys) offers a comprehensive aesthetic understanding and strategy for the shaping of a sustainable world.

Social sculpture can be described as a new art discipline, but one which radically transgresses the art world. Here sculpting no longer seizes only physical, but also mental, psychic and spiritual material. Thus the primary materials of social sculpture are invisible: They lie in the ways we think, we feel, perceive, speak, listen and talk to each other. For whatever we bring into the world begins as a thought, an imagination, an intention, and then materialises: as landmine or school, as bio-piracy or fairtrade, as agro-industrial exploitation or as sustainable farming. Hence the idea of social sculpture no longer aims at bringing objects into the world. Its intention is rather to reshape the deformations of our society into forms that can really be considered humane and desirable.

This, a desirable cultural evolution, is the perspective through which Joseph Beuys’ expandingof the traditional concept of art and his well known phrase - Every human being is an artist – can best be understood. 

The course is a special opportunity to consider social sculpture in relation to earlier experiments in Weimar that also investigated and negotiated the relationship between life and art.

Weimar was the home of Goethe and Schiller, who both are central to the development of a connective aesthetics and a holistic approach to being in the world: Goethe with his “synthetic” thinking, his phenomenological approach to natural science, and his dedication to develop “new organs of perception”, Schiller with his “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919, drew together and moulded a pan-European avant-garde in order to explore and design new ways of living via the arts. In doing so, pioneering artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky took up the impetus of Weimar´s Classical Period, linking ethics with aesthetics. While the Bauhaus achieved a marked international impact on modern architecture and design, its broader aim to reform industrial modernity culturally has been more or less forgotten. Why is this? What can we learn from the findings and mistakes of the historical avant-garde?

Looking back to Goethe, Schiller, the Bauhaus and Joseph Beuys and forward to developing new forms of creative practices appropriate to the challenges of the 21^st the course investigates the question: Can the shaping of a humane world be approached as an aesthetic challenge?

Together with lectures, discussions and visits to relevant places in Weimar the course includes a range of practice-based explorations that highlight the links between imagination and transformative processes.

Our work thus fosters a new approach to theory: theory as practice.

The course presents participants with ways to meaningfully engage with and reinterpret the diverse elements of history, culture and one’s own life within the context of today’s challenge to shape a sustainable, humane world.

For this Weimar is a ideal place, as like no other town in Germany it illustrates humanity’s potential for perfection, but also for atrocities, being the location of both the high points and dark hours of German history: Goethe´s house and the former Concentration Camp Buchenwald, the famous castle and the Marstall where the Gestapo murdered hundreds of people, the German National Theatre where the Weimar Republic was founded in 1919 and the buildings of the Bauhaus – all the light and the shadows so close to each other.

It is within this context that we, the course leaders, consider this course to be a forum for creative action. Its processes and practicesoffer strategies to deal imaginatively with the challenges of our times.

The main objective is to enable participants to access and develop their individual creative abilities and insights that can be of use in the context of their own situations.

 

An open mind and an open heart, and an interest in the role of imagination in shaping a humane and sustainable world.

Goethe on Science. An Anthology of Goethe´s Scientific Writings, selected and introduced by Jeremy Naydler, Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2006.

Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller, reprint by Kessinger, USA (without year).

The Bauhaus Manifesto by Martin Gropius.

The Bauhaus. 1919 – 1933. Reform and Avant-Garde, Magdalena Droste, Koeln: Taschen, 2006.

What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys, edited with essays by Volker Harlan, Forest Row, East Sussex, GB: Clairview 2004.

Before the start of the course extracts from these books as well as texts by Shelley Sacks and Hildegard Kurt will be available as PDF´s to download from the website www.weimar-summer-courses.de.

 

As part of our activities within the course participants will have the opportunity to visit Goethe’s residence in the town as well as his garden house, the Schiller House, where Friedrich Schiller spent the last three years of his life, the original Bauhaus building – today the Bauhaus University – with the office of its founder and first director Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Museum with its exhibition of more than 300 objects. The participant’s card allows free entry to Weimar’s museums, libraries and archives.

In the evenings and on the weekends a rich cultural and recreational programme as well as topical excursions form part of the Weimar Summer Courses.

 

Every participant is invited to conceive an individual project or action during the course. Neither the theme nor the form of this is fixed in advance. Instead this work will be directed by the questions: How can I access and work from an “inner necessity” (Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys) and: How can I appropriately embody and communicate an idea, image, understanding, or intention that I consider to be meaningful?