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Article Excerpt
"o.b.": A Name
There are more than one thousand samples of the Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger's textiles in the Busch-Reisinger Museum Archives at Harvard, many of which are variations on the same basic design. They include a sample book from a series of textiles based on her patent, "Mobelstoff-Doppelgewebe," which she applied for in 1932 and received in 1934. (1) With the words "Schriever-Rosshaar Doppel Gewebe, o.b., Deutsches Reichspatent" and a logo bearing two mirrored horses emblazoned across its bright yellow cover, the sample book opens to fifty or so swatches based on three distinct textile patterns made of nylon, each in various colors. (2) Having patented her invention, Berger signed over production rights to the Schriever corporation with the condition that her initials be imprinted on the book and all samples, so a simple "o.b." appears on the cover and within the Schriever trademark.
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Once a student of and teacher in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, "o.b." has only recently been given an art-historical identity. (3)This is mainly because the Bauhaus weaving workshop has itself almost systematically stood at the periphery of Bauhaus discourse. Several art historians in the last ten or so years have provided general discussions of the weaving workshop in spite of what many deem as the technology-focused (and rather masculinist) historical accounts of the Bauhaus. Sigrid Wortmann Weltge and Anja Baumhoff, for instance,
Of course the discovery of the weavers' work in painting and printmaking has aided in finding exceptions to this rule. Anni Albers and Gunta Stolzl, the historians Ingrid Radewalt and Virginia Gardner Troy suggest, are indeed artists, worthy of monographs and biographical accounts. (5) But while this latter approach--which turns to "art" in order to buttress the weavers' identities--has its value, it leaves us with another problem. The accounts of the first female workshop master Stolzl's watercolors uneasily disregard the shifting landscape of the Bauhaus, where the question of authorship was in actuality never so simple or coherent, linked as it was with the concerns of collectivity or anonymity in modern design. Thus perhaps it would help, instead, to locate what was different in the weavers' identities--to consider anew the specific transformations in authorship at the Bauhaus, and for the weavers.
In the example of "o.b" (Otti Berger), we find that a new kind of author was born--or rather invented. Berger was certainly not the "creative" author-artist--at least insofar as that would have signaled a reflection of the deep recesses of her inner life, the projection of her soul onto her work. But neither was she the anonymous factory laborer. She did manage to achieve the status of an individual "inventor" during her brief, though immensely prolific career. "Otti," as many of her friends and colleagues often referred to her (not "Fraulein Berger," as she was addressed more formally by the Reichskammer), was foreign-born--a "wandering Jew" from Yugoslavia--but diligently carved out a space of her own in the burgeoning German and Swiss design world of the 1930s.
After a year spent teaching weaving technique at the Bauhaus's interior-design workshop headed by Lilly Reich, Berger left in the summer of 1932 and quickly opened a textile design studio, "otti berger atelier fur textilien," in her apartment in Berlin, Charlottenburg. There she analyzed materials and woven structures with the objective of making advanced fabrics. She pursued a number of contracts with, among other firms, the Swiss interior design company Wohnbedarf AG, for which she designed curtains and upholstery for a movie theater in Zurich. (6) Throughout the mid-1930s, Berger published both articles and images of her designs in two major industry magazines, International Textiles out of Switzerland and Berlin's Der Konfektionar, making herself a name in what the magazine editors often called "the otherwise anonymous field" of textile production. Between I932 and 1937, she did something that no other weaver from the Bauhaus would ever bother to do: she applied to patent three of her textile designs, or rather inventions. (7)Though her third application was rejected, two patents were ultimately granted: one in Germany in I934 and another in London in 1937.
Through the act of naming her work in a patent and branding it with her lowercase initials "o.b"--a sufficient mark without being immodest in an otherwise signature-free industrial field--she established herself as a new kind of textile-author, an inventor, for the modern, synthetic world.
Inventing Authorship
What is the model of authorship at stake in the invention, the patented textile? What kind of author is Berger in the 1930s, if we can call her an "author" at all? As differentiated from an earlier Bauhaus model of the Expressionist painter--typified, for instance, by the school's form-and-color-theory masters Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee--this new author (the inventor) is neither defined nor driven by deep, personal intentions. Instead, she is defined by the patent text, by the rhetoric of legal loopholes and the details of the invention system. The inventor is part of the machinery of industry and advancement in technology--not so that her individual subjectivity can express itself (or an inner spirit) but so that her innovation and intellectual property can be established and so that the item can be reproduced with proper credit. The artist sells his painting (a specific commodity) to a collector who cherishes that work. The individual or corporate author of a patent or design prototype sells rights to the reproduction of that entity for sale on the market, where it may be bought by any number of anonymous consumers or corporations.
The descriptive text of Berger's patent provides insight into the parameters of authorship at stake here, as well as the nature of that author's object and its consumer. The material used as the warp and called in German patent #594075 kunsthliche Rosshaar (synthetic horsehair) is strong and sharp, a plastic thread that produces a smoothly textured surface resistant to both wear-and-tear and water. (8) Kunstliche Rosshaar was an early type of nylon (polyamide), so the fabric is not entirely stiff--it's flexible'--but it does not fold easily; no creases enter into the space of cloth and its surface remains smooth. On the "face" side of the fabric intended for upholstery, the nylon is visible as a shiny surface, whereas the colored thread (the weft) shows through as if from behind the transparent Rosshaar warp, which acts as a screen--a smooth, Plexiglas-like surface that shields the thinner weft threads beneath. (9) An additional warp, seen from the back but not from the front, is made of a white, cotton fiber. This forms a double layer, which works to increase the fabric's durability--to effectively cover and protect the seats and walls of railway cars and automobiles (as specified by the patent text). As a surface with no comfortable, deep folds to cushion an occupant bent on dwelling, or at least staying awhile, Berger's patented fabric sets a boundary, a kind of distance between the space and the transient individual. Covered with this dirt-repellent, water-resistant, and easily washable artificial material, the modern train interior likewise helps the passenger maintain distance from all the other passengers who formerly sat in that seat; the textile's artificial, glazelike surface perfectly suits the anonymous passenger-subject of railway cars and chilly train stations. So in spite of the crowded proximity of the train interior, there is another kind of distance to suit the modern passenger, and the textile is the perfect mirror for the smooth, textureless, "cool persona" who appears so frequently in Weimar literature. (10)
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If Berger's textile mirrors the person intended to use it, it also gives some sense of the person who made it. The branded object "reflects"--conceptually and metaphorically--a specific kind of author: one raised in the technological culture of engineered inventions and legal documents in the 1920s and 1930s. Leaving behind the deep folds of an "inner self" that occupies the privatized domestic interior and creates (or dwells in) novels and paintings, the new author-inventor is exteriorized in the "cool" public spaces of modernity and the language of legalspeak that encourages her to rephrase her object's description (its structure and function in transit spaces) in order best to justify a patent.
The description for Berger's second patent, originally named "Gewebe (Lame-Plume)," was sealed in London as patent #476,966 and given the title of "Improvements in or Relating to Textile Fabrics Made of Ramie Fibers." According to the patent, the innovation of the textile was a "new method of crossing or interlacing the threads" that
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gives the fabric remarkable tensile strength, combined with pliability. ... According to the...
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