Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings. - book reviews

Afterimage, July-August, 1997 by Nancy Roth

The four books under consideration here mark the centenary year of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). They differ profoundly from one another, as might be expected, given their varied institutional, disciplinary and theoretical framings. But at a bare minimum they do constitute four printed volumes, consisting of both English-and German-language texts and interspersed with photographic reproductions. Each enacts some relationship to the material through which Moholy manifested himself, and upon which we also depend for any manifestations of him today. This may seem a very basic common ground, but to move back to the level of media, to a point where books, photographs and sculptures become comparable, is particularly instructive in offering a way of reading the centenary publications together, and through them, of rereading Moholy at 100.

Since Moholy worked in so many different kinds of media -- paint, photography, film, sculpture, print and classroom "broadcast" (also a medium, I would contend) -- it has often proved convenient to divide his work along these lines. The division, in turn, produces questions of sufficient depth 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 most productively and about which he wrote most prolifically during the 1920s and early 1930s, the formative phase of his career. The two museum catalogs, In Focus: Moholy-Nagy and Moholy-Nagy. Photogramme 7922-7943 clearly privilege photography in their presentations of Moholy. The first reproduces and annotates the fine and comprehensive collection of Moholy's photographic works in the Getty Museum collection; the second provides a scholarly "introduction" to a newly -- acquired and in another way equally comprehensive -- collection of his photograms, now divided between the Centre 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 one medium over another as representative of the artist's work or an effective means of grasping the artist's purposes. Here, the concept of "the artist" itself becomes diffuse. Kaplan's writing is deeply informed by that of Jacques Derrida. The subject of the study is actually neither a man nor a body 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 constructs its maker. One may protest that to even adopt a Derridean strategy is to privilege writing over photography, over film, over painting, over any other contending medium whatsoever, and that it must therefore necessarily mistreat -- homogenize -- the work of an artist so profoundly engaged with a diversity of media. On the one hand, this would seriously misrepresent Derrida's conception of writing; it would also miss not only Kaplan's considerable literary achievement, but also his singular discovery about Moholy. For unsettling as it is (and as profoundly irritating as the writing often is), Kaplan's book succeeds startlingly well in "writing" Moholy's oeuvere -- painting, photographs, sculpture and film, as well as published articles

Moholy didn't adopt media serially nor did he deliberately reject 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 very differently, and, at almost exactly the same moment, to publish The article "Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst" ("Manifesto of Elemental Art"), jointly signed by 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 onset of his engagement with photography, often 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 on a foundational purpose for art and artists: to enhance, extend or refine human sense perception. He went on to structure his thoughts about modernist culture in general around the idea of a "New Vision," a "modern way of seeing" in which photography played a pivotal role. His reasons for privileging vision in this way -- for defining vision as inherently more "modern" than, say, taste or hearing -- are not easily summarized, One might even propose that the primacy of vision forms an unexamined assumption at the heart of Moholy's conceptual project, and a point around which its meaning might be deconstructed. In any case, Moholy was perhaps the most energetic among many contemporaries who found in the phrase "New Vision" a suitable label for broad cultural shifts in the 1920s.