Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings. - book reviews

The four volumes under consideration here mark the centenary year of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) They differ profoundly from individual another, as might be awaited given their varied institutional, disciplinary and theoretical framings. on the contrary at a bare minimum they do constitute four printed turns consisting of both English-and German-language true copys and interspersed with photographic reproductions. Each enacts a certain number of relationship to the material [i]or[/i] part of to the other which Moholy manifested himself, and on which we also depend for any manifestations of him today. This may strike one as being a very basic common turf but to move back to the horizontal of media, to a point where works photographs and sculptures become comparable, is particularly instructive in offering a way of reading the centenary publications together, and from one side them, of rereading Moholy at 100

Since Moholy worked in for a like reason many different kinds of media -- paint, photography, film, statuary print and classroom "broadcast" (also a medium, I would contend) -- it has frequently proved convenient to divide his work along these lines. The division, in revolve produces questions of sufficient profundity and subtlety to provide a basis for ordering the whole oeuvre

In Picturing Modernism, Eleanor Hight argues quite explicitly for photography's position as the linchpin in the Moholy oeuvre the medium in which he experimented greatest in quantity productively and about which he wrote greatest in quantity prolifically during the 1920s and early 1930 the formative phase of his career. The sum of two units museum catalogs, In Focus: Moholy-Nagy and Moholy-Nagy. Photogramme 7922-7943 clearly privilege photography in their presentations of Moholy The first generates and annotates the fine and comprehensive collection of Moholy's photographic works in the Getty Museum collection; the next to the first provides a scholarly "introduction" to a newly -- acquired and in another way equally comprehensive -- collection of his photograms, now divided between the middle point Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Folkwang Museum, Essen

The last of the four, Louis Kaplan's Laszlo Moholy Nagy: Biographical Writings does not privilege photography. In fact, it destabilizes the whole basis for choosing individual medium over another as representative of the artist's work or an effective means of grasping the artist's designs Here, the concept of "the artist" itself becomes diffuse. Kaplan's writing is deep informed by that of Jacques Derrida. The make submissive of the study is actually neither a man nor a material substance of artworks, but Moholy as a "signature-effect," arising as a difference between the signature as an artist's authorization of work and the signature as that part of a work which effectively raises its maker. One may asseverate that to even adopt a Derridean strategy is to privilege writing above photography, over film, over painting, above any other contending medium whatsoever, and that it must therefore necessarily mistreat -- homogenize -- the work of an artist in like manner profoundly engaged with a diversity of media. upon the one hand, this would seriously misrepresent Derrida's conception of writing; it would also miss not solitary Kaplan's considerable literary achievement, on the other hand also his singular discovery about Moholy For unsettling as it is (and as profoundly irritating as the writing repeatedly is), Kaplan's book succeeds startlingly well in "writing" Moholy's oeuvere -- painting, photographs, plastic art and film, as well as published articles

Moholy didn't adopt media serially nor did he deliberately eject any. One might better say he accumulated, or absorbed them, As part of the Hungarian avant-garde during World War I, he was a painter. When he emigrated first to Vienna, then to Berlin in 1920 he began to paint real differently, and, at almost exactly the same instant to publish The article "Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst" ("Manifesto of Elemental Art"), jointly signed by the agency of Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni and Moholy was published in the Journal de Stijl in October, 1921 Marking the beginning of Moholy's steady engagement with print, the date also coincides closely with the better-known storming of his engagement with photography, oftentimes linked to the article "Produktion-Reproducktion," "Production-Reproduction"), which appeared in de Stijl following year

In his teaching, speaking and above all in his published statements, Moholy repeatedly insisted upon a foundational purpose for art and artists: to enhance, reach forth or refine human sense perception. He went upon to structure his thoughts about modernist agriculture in general around the idea of a "New Vision," a "modern way of seeing" in which photography played a pivotal character His reasons for privileging vision in this way -- for defining vision as inherently more "modern" than, say, taste or hearing -- are not easily summarized, individual might even propose that the primacy of vision forms an unexamined assumption at the heart of Moholy's conceptual cast and a point around which its meaning might be deconstruct In any case, Moholy was perhaps the greatest in quantity energetic among many contemporaries who base in the phrase "New Vision" a suitable label for broad cultural shifts in the 1920s