Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts

by Oliver Botar

Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. Sensing the Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key figure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today’s disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal figure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to reflect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.

112 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2014

Reviews

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Art and beauty subverted beyond all recognition, bauhaus travesties replacing nouveau wonders, soulless metropolitan architecture of glass and steel reflecting no society, no culture, no people and therefore belonging everywhere, and no where.’
This you can find Tarrant's manifesto published online shortly before conducting his terror attack on the Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Bauhaus and modern architecture, have very little to do Tarrant's murderous outbreak: at most, the school is perceived as a precursor of that 'post-modern marxism' which those simple souls take to work behind the scenes to fan liberal sentiment.
Modernism, post-modernism, liberalism, Marxism, Jews and reptilians form parts of the inner enemy perpetually dis-assembled and re-assembled by every YouTube-educated aspiring ideologue, as far as I can tell all parroting buzz-words and twitter-handles as if they were concepts.
For the ‘bauhaus travesties replacing nouveau wonders’ however, you need not look into the nooks and crannies of Gap: mainstream(-ish) conservatives, from Scruton to Prince Charles, often peddle this sort of rhetoric, too lazy or opportunistic to mount their own (legitimate) defence of period styles, and falling back instead on pathetically strident denunciations of a nebulous “modernism”, nebulous because it is rarely anything more than a strawman, in the face of which they can then make a glorified last stand. Histrionics of this kind have been going on for decades, but the past couple of years has certainly seen a recrudescence of conservative and radical interest in architecture qua ‘Western Civilization’ – and given the hyped Bauhaus centenary this year, it is perhaps unsurprising that such staples of the revivalist agenda found their way to Australia.
But what of “nouveau wonders” though? Amid the endemic bad grammar and misquotes of this milieu, it is difficult to decide on what is a typo and what is an innovation: Tarrant’s visit to Europe, and to France in particular, appear to play a legitimising role in his manifesto, both as a ‘baptism of fire’ on the front-line of what his overactive imagination takes to be a Muslim invasion, and as a re-rooting in his ancestral homeland as a white antipodean. The incongruous ‘nouveau’ then is likely a misshapen ‘Art Nouveau’ – more or less the direct precursor to Bauhaus functionalism.
Art Nouveau, with its floral patterns and dream-like environment never fails to appeal to dorks of all stripes: in good part because since the seventies, it has heavily inspired sci-fi comics, games and movies – often the primary source of ‘knowledge’ of the Glorious European Tradition for internet-era nationalists.
Of course, if you were to look at a Gropius building next to a Horta one, you would have to admit (as Loos did) that Art Nouveau was travesty and Functionalism stark nakedness. Furthermore, art nouveau made much use of iron and glass, and its architects (Van de Velde, Behrens, perhaps Voysey…) laid down the foundations of functionalism (long before the Bauhaus embraced this style in 1924) when working on industrial architecture. But most of all, as its name indicates, Art Nouveau is hardly a paragon of national tradition: indeed, when steeped in vernacular (as it is for example in Scandinavia) it is instead called national romanticism. Art Nouveau, instead, was perhaps the first style to seek (despite its organicist references) a cosmopolitan identity grounded novelty.
Anyway: all this to say that the Bauhaus, in the eyes of its revilers, is simple and convenient narrative, a kind of visual summary of all that is wrong with the modern world: disregard for tradition, technological enthusiasm, gender equality and internationalism, etc. What is perhaps more surprising, is that the same simplification is at work among its most enthusiastic supporters. The tensions and interactions between romantic corporatism, nationalism, Jugendbewegung, expressionism, design and commodity culture, communism, mainstream and bizarre spiritualities, etc. is all too often whitewashed into a permissive utopia, readily marketable to the throngs eager to find teenage precursors for their consumerist life-style in the age of Cabaret (https://ourfaveplaces.co.uk/site/asse...).
Botar is the ideal author to dispel those simplistic narratives. He is one of the leading lights on Moholy-Nagy, and also a writer who has written extensively on what he terms ‘biocentric modernism’ – an aspect of interwar culture which receives relatively little attention, and contradicts the simple equation ‘prewar = vilatist nationalism / postwar = mechanist cosmopolitanism’: entwined rather than opposed to the ethos of cold objectivity prevalent in Weimar Germany, there was a branch interested in life as such, human, animal and vegetal, manifested maybe most famously in Blossfeldt’s photography, but also clearly at work in the Folkwang circle for example.
The early years of the Bauhaus, under the auspices of Arts & Crafts and Expressionism, were certainly most dissonant with the today’s streamlined and well-adjusted image of the school: when headmaster Gropius endeavoured to re-orient his fledgling school toward ‘Art and Technology: A New Unity’, he started by getting rid of the teachers and the subjects less amenable to industrial production.
It is in this context that Moholy-Nagy was invited to join the faculty, teaching a general introductory course and eventually managing the metal workshop. He had impressed Gropius with his writings on pedagogy, inspired by the German youth movement (by Wynneken to be precise - much like Benjamin) which he propounded in Berlin since 1920, the date at which he had exiled himself from his native Hungary following the collapse of the Soviet Republic.
Moholy-Nagy was influenced by the MA group, and inherited a Machian slant, leading him to consider that sense-impressions being the literal constituents of the self, the variety and intensity of experiences were the prime responsibility of the artist, in charge of the literal expansion of his audience’s self. This translates into a large number of works across a dizzying variety of media, most famously collage and painting, but expanding far into light-design, installation, film and typography. The generality of his notion of experience bridges interestingly the space between abstraction and installation, and as Botar is wont to insist, many of his theoretical writings also prefigure much later media-theory.
The book itself is lovely, unusual binding with nice quality full colour pages. Though produced on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Botar, it stands perfectly well on its own. This is not a biography, and perhaps a cursory knowledge of the period would be beneficial. Botar’s texts, throughout, explore less obvious facets of the artist’s production, including an interesting foray into his short career in the US.
I would recommend it to anyone interested in the early history of media theory, in modernism and in radical pedagogies.