News from Eurotopia - COnnecting REpositories · 2017. 1. 31. · Gottfried Semper form equals matter plus purpose. More streamline alike is Sullivan´s famous formula: “form follows

News from EurotopiaA Message in a Bottle between Manifesto and

History by Moholy-Nagy

Beat Wyss

beloved by the first postwar generation. His deal-ing with chairs, irons, and teakettles are not meantto prepare the notion of the ready made.

So we can say: as an artistic manifesto, Visionin Motion came to late, whereas as a book on arthistory it came to early – four years too early to beprecise. It will be a special question to ask whyVision in Motion with its broad survey on Dadaistand Surrealist literature, did not achieve the effectof The Dadaist Painters and Poets, published in1951 by Robert Motherwell: the book which gaveway to a sweeping Dada Renaissance in the usa ofthe fifties and sixties.

In this sense, Vision in Motion is a message in abottle out of an other time, an erratic fragment ofa mental continent which has broken off. Its idio-syncratic structure shall be analyzed as follows.

1. Arts and Crafts versus PopMethodically I will show my reverence to thecharm of the book whose lay out expresses thedeep believe into the convergence of image andlanguage. I will follow closely along its formal andargumentative build up, making my commentquasi by skimming through the pages.

The illustrations are not meant just to illustratethe text, they are, instead, the autonomous visualtext to the written context. In his foreword theauthor allows the “impatient reader (…) to enjoythe pictorial material” before he will “plow troughthe written arguments.” (p. 8) Moholy-Nagy canbe considered as an early propagator of a “pictorialturn” – to speak with Thomas Mitchell. The lay outof Vision in Motion contains a critique of the “ver-balistic society” which caused by its logocentrisman “emotional illiteracy” (p. 10f). Art as imagetouches the emotions, its intrinsic meaning con-nects it with the intellect. Whereas the interrela-tion between image and language is considered tobe circular, according to the specific modernistnotion of hermeneutics, the general build up ofthe book is characterized by linearity and hierar-chy. It starts with the raw matter and the tools ofdesign, deals with the grammar of styles, before ittreats sorrowfully the arts, one after the other,according to the classical genera: Painting, sculp-ture, architecture, and so forth. The discourse fol-lows an almost Aristotelian pattern from matter toform, from nature to spirit, from the visible to theinvisible, and makes so evident the idealistic her-itage of Hegelian thinking. Moholy-Nagy´s pro-gram of Vision in Motion translates Hegel´s defini-tion of the ideal as “das sinnliche Scheinen derIdee”, the sensitive evidence of sense. Moholy-Nagy plays with the manifold meaning of “motion”as a physical, psychic, and spiritual experience.

“The true artist is the grindstone of the senses”(p. 29), Moholy-Nagy says. The process of art as a

Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, (2003) Heft 3

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One year after the death of Lázló Moholy-Nagy,Vision in Motion has been published in 1947.1 It isone of the most elaborated, and most beautifulbooks in the Bauhaus spirit, a summary of theauthor´s principles in aesthetics, pedagogy andphilosophy, and, last but not least, probably thefirst comprehensive history of the avant-garde inboth the visual arts and literature. Nevertheless ithad a meager response when it came out. Myquestion is why this book failed to find its public. Imight been asked, whether it is worth to waste histime for a book which has not been successful.Well, I does not want to be misunderstood. It isnot my intention to revaluate an presuminglyunderestimated work. Habent sua fata libelli: theprocessing history is unmerciful against ideaswhich had not taken grasp within their own time.Art history is not able to make alive death bornideas out of the leftovers of memory. The mis-judged genius exists only as a myth. The main-stream art history is documented by masterpiecesand master actors in those acting the canon of dis-course stabilizes itself, almost spontaneously, for acertain time. However, the recording of master-pieces and master actors cannot answer the ques-tion when their time is running out, how longtheir paradigmatic rule may last, and why theyhave an end. That is moment when unsuccessfulideas and works of art gain their interest: as docu-ments of paradigm changes. And even more rele-vant are such documents when they give evidenceof a person like Mohloy-Nagy, who did have hissuccess for some time being.

A first hypothesis may be launched: Vision inMotion is probably sort of a mental amphibianbetween prophecy and history, between both: astrong manifesto of an artist and at the same timethe testament of a of an epoch, passing by. If so,this book would represent a blind angle, a turningpoint of wishful topicality and involuntary historic-ity. Vision in Motion is the victim of a paradigmchange which I am going to draw along four crosssections:

First: This late manifesto of Bauhaus teaching,though dealing a lot with everyday goods andtools, has nothing to do with the outcome of thepopular culture in America. It is a ceterum censeoby an Arts and Crafts mentality out of the 19thcentury.

Second: This author has the wrong passport.The American art world is fed up with the leader-ship of a leftist European avant-garde, even inMoholy-Nagy´s moderate social democratic temper.

Third: Moholy-Nagy´s emphasis for applied artdoes no more match with the ruling formalist Cre-do, stated by Clement Greenberg and his adherersof the New York School.

Fourth: Though recording the work of MarcelDuchamp, there is no “Duchamp Effect” in it, so

In every form of design, there is a delay, ananachronistic aspect. Beyond its practical useimplement has an appeal of habitual convention,recording production standards of earlier periods.This mechanism becomes definitively obsoletewhen, for instance, handles of mass products likeflat irons or water kettles, molded out of plastic,look like crafted by lathe turning. The older thecrafts, the more difficult to change their shapes.The most striking example is the most ancient craftat all: pottery. We expect dishes to be round, as ifthey still would be hand molded on a wheel. Forcompact stacking up of dishes, rectangular shapeswould be more handy.

Moholy-Nagy discerns two steps of industrial-ization: “The age of assembly” in the 19th centurymarks the mechanic period of industry, driven bythe steam engine. Its elements are the screw, therivet and the bolt. Second was the “streaming”age, developed by the motor car and airplane in-dustry in early 20th century. Everything has to bestreamed, even things which better do not movein the air like ashtrays, shoetrees and toasters. Thestreaming age is the age of “welding, molding,shaping and stamping.” (p. 52) All these develop-ments are steps towards that utopian vision whichpromises a marvelous future. According toMoholy-Nagy, design is the “essence of productsand institutions” (p. 42). In such a high claim sur-vives a notion, defined by Giorgio Vasari whocalled “disegno” to be the father of all fine arts.The avant-garde artist-engineer is a prophet tomankind: “The events of a period, its discoveries,the tendencies of the socio-economic forces, fore-cast the trend for the sensitive and synthetizingman of creative abilities. He will summarize themin a form peculiar to his medium. There is always aphalanx of creative workers moving in that direc-tion. They are the makers of the new intellectualand emotional tools which – perhaps generationslater – will be adopted for mass use.” (p. 330ff)

The march of the avant-garde along a constantprogress is uninfluenced by commercial interests.Innovation stands strictly at the service of humanemancipation from neediness and necessity. So thedesigner has to resist consumerist mechanisms.Commodity design is just for the salesman – tospeak, old fashioned, in the words of Moholy-Nagy. He is, like Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe,strictly and austerely modern holding against nov-elties just for profit.

This avant-garde optimism is only one side ofMoholy-Nagy´s statements. The other side israther pessimistic, though prophetic, but more inthe sense of Jeremy. Moholy-Nagy sees an actualtransition into a new age of “electronics” (p. 49)Not specifying it at length, his comment is highlysceptical. “It brings the stringencies of the profitsystem into an even greater conflict” than the

180Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, (2003) Heft 3

1 | Hand fitting tool handling for plastic molding

kind of grinding and refining becomes evident inthe didactics by the New Bauhaus teaching. Dur-ing the Basic Workshop, the students model socalled hand sculptures out of wood. They are con-sidered to perform “a space diagram; the result ofthe resistance of the wood to the forces applied.”(p. 73). They look like pebbles on the shore, bro-ken from a distant rock, washed by rivers and thesea, grinded by the tide. Pebbles are products ofthe eternal drive of nature which transforms mat-ter by motion.

The Aristotelian division of the thing into ulhand morfh, matter and form, belongs to theaxioms of modern design theory. According toGottfried Semper form equals matter plus purpose.More streamline alike is Sullivan´s famous formula:“form follows function”. Every matter gets itsGestalt by the forming force of use. Moholy-Nagyagrees with Sullivans slogan, but takes in consider-ation that it could be misunderstood in a merelyfunctionalist sense. Form follows function in aprimitive lumber stool and in a delicately carvedrococo chair as well. The notion of function has tobe enlarged towards symbolic meaning in psychicand social perception.

But also the technical aspect of design createssymbolic meanings. The mass production createsproducts of sober simplicity. They tend to theinvisible, becoming pure energy, as electric power,light, and air stream. Moholy-Nagy foresees theend of the chair with four legs, already halved bythe well known model of Marcel Breuer. Soon wewill going to sit on cushions of compressed air.


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2, 3 | paths of motion, peeling paint, drawing, print of Kandinsky´s palm

mechanical age. The large increase of automaticproduction will have as an inevitable consequencethe reduction of man power and labor hours.”(p. 56) That sounds somehow familiar to the stateof economy we are witnessing now.

Nevertheless one has to doubt whether themodernist remedies against postwar capitalismwould have worked. Moholy-Nagy´s criticismshows rather the helplessness of an utopist thinkerin front of the real mechanisms in Western societyand economy. Obviously not the artist, but thefinancial trusts direct the principle of constantprogress and innovation. In vain Moholy-Nagyaccuses the “propaganda machine” of the massmedia like press, radio and film, providing peoplejust with “canned music” and “ersatz”-culture(p. 20). The messianic artist-engineer had becomefossil in the transition to the second half of the20th century. The persecution of the avant-gardein Europe blures the fact that their visions wouldhave failed anyway – as in the United States,where they were free to think what they wanted.The avant-garde concept breathes the dirigistementality of modern times, and was therefore un-able to integrate the new manifestations of socio-economic standards like the commercial massmedia or the deregulated individual consumption.The triumph of popular culture has been total, andis still going strong. The modernist Eurotopia fad-ed out like old Europa after a devastating war infront of the irresistible glamour of the Americanway. It created a new type of the artist as a busi-nessman. The Pop Artist accepts the rules of capi-

talism and does not protest against the fact thathis products are handled as commodity goods –Moholy-Nagy may turn in his grave!

2. European avant-garde versus PostwarAmerica According to Moholy-Nagy, the designers duty isone of an “integrator”(p. 64) of man and machine:“The designer has to think in terms of integratedprocesses of materials and production, sales, distri-bution, financing and advertising; (...). He preparesa new and creative vision for the masses, and withit a new orientation for a healthier life plan.”(p. 269).

The means of expression for his rulership is art.And the most efficient, literally encompassingmankind, is architecture. The most advanced typeof architecture is represented by the expositionpavilion for two reasons: functionally its transition-al, ephemeral character makes it fit to work a labo-ratory of building forms; institutionally it repre-sents a platform for propagating virulent ideas to abroad public. Beyond the new developments in artby photography and film, the old hierarchy of thegenera were still alive in Moholy-Nagy´s avant-garde concept. Architecture keeps its key positionas a Gesamtkunstwerk.

An idealistic overrating of art is a typical ele-ment of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy was sure thatHitler persecuted the artist for this reason, byoffering just “trash” to the people (p. 29). From1934 on, Moholy-Nagy lived in Exile, first in Hol-


4 | Hand sculptures

land, than in England. At this time he was busywith reproductive media like print and movies.Already in Germany, he wrote an open letter tothe British Film Institute, published in Sight andSound, Vol. 3., No. 10, 1932. The text was impor-tant enough to the author, that he attached it fif-teen years later to Vision in Motion. He accuses thefilm industry for its “purely speculative business”which monopolized the “art of film”. By exploitingthe medium for populist entertainment, and push-ing actors to wealthy stars, cinema is “growingmore and more trivial every year”. Moholy-Nagyends up with the demand, that film has to be re-turned into the hands of the artists, as “art re-quires full sovereignty over the means it is em-ployed.” (p. 272ff)

Well, Moholy-Nagy jumped out of the fryingpan into the fire, what commercial cinema con-cerns when he moved to the United States in1937. Walter Gropius had recommended him todirect the “New Bauhaus” of Chicago, founded bythe Association of the Arts and Industries. Soon hehad to learn how tough the artist is treated understrictly economical principles. “New Bauhaus” last-ed only one year because the sponsors withdrewtheir money. Moholoy-Nagy had to reorganize hisown school, financed by himself and his wife SibylMoholy, nourished the steady idealism – or self-exploitation – of his crew of teachers. In order toavoid an increasing American aversion againstmemories of European domination in culture, hecancelled the name “Bauhaus” and called it just“School of Design”.

In the mean time, American artists and intel-lectuals were going to show their independencefrom their former models in Europe, discredited bygrowing totalitarianism, war-mongery and racistviolence. Vision in Motion brings the famous Kauf-mann house, “Falling Water” in vicinity with aSuprematist composition of Casimir Malewich.Frank Lloyd Wright may have considered the com-parison with an artist out of the Soviet Union to bean unfriendly take over. Wright had split up withthe European avant-garde, by proclaiming a specif-ic American architecture that fits into this wasteland of prairies. His cult of earthy matter contra-dicts the high tech predilection of Moholy-Nagywho had in 1934, by his participation at the con-ference in Athens, confirmed his belief into theciam principles, condemned so harshly by Wright.

But the contradicitions are not limited to anarchitectural paragone. Even more striking for anAmerican´s eye must have been the predominanceof French painters, presented in Vision in Motion.All these works by Picasso, Braque, Schwitters,Léger stem from the tens and twenties. The con-temporary paintings shown in the book are obvi-ously epigonal, devoted to the great masters of theEcole de Paris. Moholy-Nagy failed to notice agrowing reluctance of the New York art circlesagainst any European diktat. The process wasovershadowed by the entering of the usa into Sec-ond World War. Around 1940 Clement Greenbergdeveloped his art theory, based on pure formalism.The common denominator to the European tradi-tion is flatness. Involved as soldiers in First WorldWar, many avant-garde painters had been fascinat-ed by the photographs of reconnaissance flights.They show the world beyond the rigid frame of thevanishing point perspective. Its a vision face toobject, showing a flatness that inspired abstractcompositions.

But abstraction according to the Europeanartists remains relational, recording the resem-blance to landscapes and the empirical experienceof space by the figure-ground pattern. Americanabstract painting instead tended to pure form,pure color – to “you see what you see”, as AdReinhardt will sum up the mainstream fromAbstract Expressionism to Minimal Art. At thistime, French Informel suggested still poetic wan-derings through delicately composed terrariums ofcolor – abstract illusionism, so to speak. The beliefin an intrinsic parallel of spiritual and technologicalgoals is still alive in Moholy-Nagy´s last book. Heshares Mondrian´s esoteric view, visualized in hiscompositions: the essence of the cosmos in adynamic balance of horizontal and vertical lines.American artists instead did no longer believe the“Spiritual in Art”, stated by Kandinsky, and reject-ed any mental superstructure, even psychoanalyti-cal meaning.


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5, 6 | Moholy-Nagy with a tube of compressed air, chairs, flat irons and water kettles

7, 8 | Dishes, screw and locomotive

Moholy-Nagy´s ideas were not afflicted by thismove towards a sweeping secularization ofaesthetic paradigms in postwar art. He kept hisfidelity to a color theory in the tradition of Goethe,led by the belief that every shade has an equiva-lent in a specific emotional feeling. avant-gardemodernism is the last manifestation of Europeanenlightenment, a movement which converts ratioin myth, to speak with Horkheimer and Adorno.The “transition from pigment to light”(p. 163), thegoal of Moholy-Nagy´s artistic strive is literally ametaphysical one. The nonmaterial color, produc-ed by electricity, is a manifestation of progress inspirituality of mankind. Indeed – a knowledge hardto explain to Andy Warhol.

3. Modernist Totality versus NewFormalismWhy did Moholy-Nagy not become a forerunner ofPop Art, as he shows a high interest in the mediaphotography and film like few art theorists beforehim? Every expression, he says, “is nourished bythe visual food which the new photography pro-vides.” (p. 178) Well, “new photography” meansabstract photography, performed by the techniqueof the photogram. It offers the most lucid insightinto the play of light and shadow, not disturbingthe mind by showing nice subjects. Moholy-Nagy´sapproach to photography is strictly modernist: mayit have the abstract purity of a light performance,or the authenticity of a documentary snapshot.There is no place for playing with commercial

icons and idols. Even more anti-popular is Moho-ly- Nagy´s criticism of the actual film production.In a somehow utopist unwordliness he wonderswhy industrial trusts had invested billions of dol-lars for commercial film studios, whereas “theredoes not yet exist an institute of light.” (p. 284)The contemporary Hollywood film is “governed bythe antiquated aesthetics of easel painting and thestage of the renaissance.” (p. 271) Cinema has tostop being imitative and to develop towards apure drama of light.

Clement Greenberg, though one generationyounger, was highly critical against contemporarymass media, too. They both dislike the superficiali-ty of popular culture, both pronounce the term“ersatz” for commercial mass production in thevisual arts. Both are adherents to the “abstract”:But nevertheless they have a radically differentopinion about what “abstract” means. Moholy-Nagy is not to blame for having missed to ack-nowledge the most recent tendencies in Americanart. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko had notreached the summit of their public career whenMoholy-Nagy died in 1946. What he could haveknown was the theoretical manifesto, written byGreenberg in 1940. The famous “Towards a newerLaocoon” expresses a principle just opposite toVision in Motion. Greenberg claims for a strict iso-lation of the genera. Painting and sculpture has torelay on their own specific means of expression:color, a flat surface, bodily volume and space with-out any other reference. That means exactly noVision in Motion, no mix of time and space relatedarts. Narration and the aesthetic experience oftime is the business of literature and the movies.

Isolation, demanded as an aesthetic strategy byGreenberg, is just the weak point to overcome,according to Moholy-Nagy. He deplores the “pe-culiar isolation” (p. 216) of sculpture. Its historicistpast as a medium for ceremonious memory build-ing in the service of policy and propaganda madeit a traditionalist, opportunistic genus of expres-sion. Avant-garde sculpture had to find out newvisual fundamentals of the three dimensions likevolume, shape and space in a structural puritywhich stopped illustrating and imitating ideas.Greenberg would certainly agree so far; but thecross section of a completely different notion ofsculpture becomes evident in the following argu-mentation: The most intrinsic traditionalism ofsculpture consists in its immobility, says Moholy-Nagy. Art in space has to become kinetic. Thisdemand does definitely not match the Greenber-gian dogma of splitting sharply both the time andthe space related arts. Moholy-Nagy´s famousLight Display Machine is something like an aesthe-tic centaur, a hybrid crossover of sculpture, paint-ing and movie. As much Moholy-Nagy and Green-berg share their aversion against the “ersatz”


9 | Frank Lloyd Wright: Falling Water, 1937


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10 | Casimir Malevich: Suprematist drawing, 1917 11 | Schwitters, Angelo Testa, Frances Senska

12 | Moholy-Nagy: Photogram 13 | Lester Ball: Negative with white spots


14, 15 | Moholy-Nagy: Light display machine

16, 17 | Light traces by space modulator, 1940


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18 | The Constructivist-Dadaist-Congress in Weimar, 1922

culture at the eve of Pop age, they have a differentstrategy to fight against it. Moholy-Nagy trustsinto high message and responsibility of the artistas a leader of mankind who will re-educate theblack sheeps of mass industry in order to create aGesamtkunstwerk, in which all arts are unified.Greenberg instead does not believe in such allcompassing remedies, especially as mass culturehad become a dominant economic factor of thesociety. The strategy of aesthetic isolation corre-sponded to a differentiation of the art system,becoming a niche for some elite connoisseurs, whoresist the banality of mass culture by indulging thefrugal qualities of pictorial flatness. Modernistessentialism has given way to nominalism and for-malism.

4. No Duchamp EffectMoholy-Nagy considers chronography, Futurism,and Cubism to be the ancestors of his space mod-ulators. There is a pseudomorphotic parallel topopular culture, when he mentions the animatedcartoons of Mickey Mouse and Popeye films asderivations of artistic experiments by Viking Egge-ling and Hans Richter who had created abstractanimated movies. One of Moholy-Nagy´s favoritesin this field was Walt Disney´s Fantasia, of whichhe deplores that the producer had not had theguts to go further in this direction of the animatedabstract because it did not pay out. Nevertheless,the theory of Moholy-Nagy shows more elasticitythan the rigid concept of the abstract by Green-

berg. The syncretism of arts and methods, appro-priate to an artist, also busy with design and engi-neering, makes it open to some tendencies in thesixties – at least implicitly. There is a rule of novel-ty, by which models of recycling tend to jump onegeneration. Astonishing enough for a Bauhausteacher, Moholy-Nagy undertakes a synthesis ofConstructivist and Surrealist tendencies, stressingthe high importance of the subconscious in thecreative process. This synthesis is documented by aphotograph, showing the Introitus of the DadaLeaders Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and Sophie Täu-ber-Arp, lining up like the Three Magi to payhomage to Nelly van Doesburg, the wife of thehost in the middle who had called for a Construc-tivist-Dadaist summit at Weimar in 1922.

Behind every type of expression there is a “uni-fying experience, namely the consciously absorbedor passively endured reality common to all peopleliving in the same period.” (p. 292) The mentalhorizon of the contemporary (Zeitgenossenschaft)becomes verbally manifest in literature, whoseteaching was an integrated element of Bauhauseducation. In the last two chapters of his book,Moholy-Nagy outlines the imaginary library, thecanon of “verbalized communication” (p. 293ff.),valid for a Vision in Motion. Guillaume Apollinaire,Vladimir Mayakowski, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound,Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, BertBrecht, James Joyce and Sigmund Freud take partin this panorama of episteme. Most remarkable isa historical survey of the Dadaist movement, com-piled by the sources of their members as RichardHuelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and HugoBall, enlarged by artists like Kurt Schwitters, MaxErnst and Marcel Duchamp. Moholy Nagy is oneof the first stating that “Dadaism is not an erraticoutburst but a part of literary history which con-tributed a new variety to the existing lyrical idiom”(p. 316).2 which will be inherited and topped bythe works of Joyce.

Four years after Vision in Motion, The DadaPainters and Poets, an Antology, was published byRobert Motherwell.3 The young artist had workedon it for six years, consulted by Hans Arp, MarcelDuchamp, Max Ernst, and Hans Richter. RichardHuelsenbeck and Georges Ribemont-Dessaigneshad contribued each a short history of the move-ment, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Harriet and SidneyJanis, and Raoul Hausmann wrote memorial lettersto the publisher. Among the European authoritiesand time widnesses, also Moholy-Nagy´s name isdropped for credits. Both books deal with thesame issues and the same sources. But only thebook by Motherwell was successful. Even twoyears after the publication, a reviw came out in theTimes Literary Supplement4: the first front pagereport about an American book on modern art inthat magazine.

Moholy-Nagy wrote Vision in Motion as a man-uale for modernist art in order to perpetuate itsoriginal techniques, and its intentions. Mother-well´s anthology, instead, presents the issue withhistorical detachment. The poems and manifestoesare treated as sources out of a bygone past. Thethe younger writer had historizised the issue, and,doing so, it the became apt for a Renaissance inthe spirit of creative misunderstanding.

Moholy Nagy´s appreciation for Marcel Du-champ concerns the cubist painter and the dadaistwriter. The ready made is not mentioned in Visionin Motion. However, the rediscovery of the readymade was exactly the starting point of the interna-tional post war generation. The legendary “Foun-tain” became the icon of a new discourse on art.Duchamp even criticized this productive misunder-standing by the youngsters who imitated him. PopArt was, according to Duchamp, too narrowlyframed on the notion of Anti-Art. Nevertheless theready made was the key word for a general transi-tion from modernist essentialism to postmodernNominalism.

By writing his history of Dada and Surrealism,Moholy-Nagy keeps emphasizing the surrealistconcept of inspiration by the subconscious. Thepostwar writers and artists instead were no longerinterested in the Freudian or Jungian meaning ofthe subconscious, reacting so against the inspira-tion concepts of the artists of Abstract Expression-ism and Informel, their fellow precursors. To makesense by the creative process has given way to

“Stop Making Sense” by Fluxus and Happening. Let us conclude: By mid of the 20th century art

has achieved its absolute autopoietic character, soto speak in Niklas Luhmann´s terms of Systemthe-orie. The art system uncoupled from the industry,the economy, and the policy systems. Every auton-omy is also an act of self limitation. The generationof Pop accepted the fact, that the artist can nolonger claim for influencing the design of massproduction. The Aristotelian Arts and Crafts ethicshas shown its limitation in front of the mechanismof mass consumption. It based on the model ofindividual deregulation, developed by a liberalism,made in usa, which was going to triumph overdirigiste utopias of which the avant-garde wasone, and even the most innocuous, dream agent.With absolute autopoiesis “double closure” comesinto play, which means: art does not only differen-tiate itself from the outside world but also fromother, earlier notions of art. It becomes fully selfreferential, a process demonstrated by the readymade revival in the fifties. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy canbe considered as a messenger from Modernismwhose ships had taken off from the Romanticislands and now, after two centuries of errantcruising, finally have been redeemed by drowninglike the Flying Dutchman.

Author:Beat WyssUniversität Stuttgart


19 | Marcel Duchamp: “Book” (Green Box), 1936


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Notes:

1 László Moholy-Nagy: Vision in Motion, Chicago 1947.

2 He quoted the poems in an English translation in transition (No. 25, fall 1936) by Eugene Jolas.

3 Robert Motherwell: Dada Painters and Poets, an Anthology, ed. by Robert Motherwell, New York

1951; see also: The collective Writing of Robert Motherwell, ed. by Stephanie Terenzio, New York

1992.

4 October 23, 1953.

Credits:

All images are from László Moholy-Nagy: Vision in Motion, Chicago 1947.

Documents

News from Eurotopia - COnnecting REpositories · 2017. 1. 31. · Gottfried Semper form equals matter plus purpose. More streamline alike is Sullivan´s famous formula: “form follows