The Brooklyn Rail

In its inaugural exhibition, 71 Contemporary has set a high bar of elegance, concision, and ambition. Curated by Alaina Claire Feldman, this overview of the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, comprising drawings, paintings, photomontages, films, sculptures, prints, and photographs, amounts to a condensed version of the massive Guggenheim exhibition that took place eight years ago, but with many pieces not included. There is wonderful work here—serious, playful, innovative, and experimental—but most important, the exhibition gives us a chance to mark where we are photographically and aesthetically.

Not that long ago, in the photo world, Moholy-Nagy was the least well-known of a Hungarian artistic diaspora that included the nonpareil fashion photographer Martin Munkácsi, André Kertész, and photojournalist Robert Capa. Moholy-Nagy was considered more important for his attempt to re-found the German Bauhaus of the 1930s (where he had directed the photography program) as a teaching model in Chicago. His advocacy for a combination of spiritualized design, social transformation, technical experimentation, and media theory seemed to lie outside the mainstream of American photography and art, despite the impact of his teaching and writing in locations from Texas to Rhode Island, from MIT to Black Mountain College.

Not anymore. Over the last twenty years, Moholy-Nagy’s work (if not his theorizing) has moved from margin to center, with growing interest from photographers, designers, even techno-futurists. Part of this resurgence surely has to do with what we might call the re-technologization of photography through digital cameras and machine learning. Photography’s umbilical cord to the world will probably never be completely severed, otherwise how could such images move us at all, but belief will be hedged by doubt and challenged by other possibilities for these image-making systems. There are other things for “photography” to do beyond its limited documentary responsibilities, and Moholy-Nagy believed deeply in those possibilities.

To appreciate this exhibition, we need to set a context. Moholy-Nagy began his career as an artist in the aftermath of World War One. Thanks to Einstein, artists became aware, slowly but surely, of an expanding and invisible universe, governed by abstract principles that, among other things, dissolved the distinction between matter and energy. Time itself was shown to be an illusion. At the same time, the collapse of the last vestiges of feudal society, in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, had seemed to unmask history as a play of forces no less impersonal than gamma rays. Moholy-Nagy felt that it was the job of the artist to reveal this new understanding of the universe by engaging it directly, and to prepare the consciousness of human beings to advance new subjectivities. He borrowed ideas of social transformation and formal aesthetic revolution from Russian Constructivism and grafted onto them an experimental faith in the emerging power of photography to reshape consciousness.

It is difficult for most in today’s art audiences to identify with such world-changing aspirations. Moholy's drawings and paintings, with their active and precise geometric elements, suggest not a radically new visual language but rather an inventive design sense. Likewise, his experiments with photomontage and photograms:cameraless photographs made with light, photographic paper, and some object used to cast a silhouette. Two black and white images in the exhibition using a wineglass as subject are prefect examples of how to explore a characteristic of the medium, in this case material transparency, in the simplest and most attractive way. The several examples of his color photography reveal an artist investigating a relatively new technical system—with strategies from light drawing to snapshots to selfies—simply in order see what it might do.

Nevertheless. Contemporary theorizing of every aspect of visual media, beginning with cameras, lenses, and various outputs and extending to software, algorithms, distribution platforms, and audiences themselves, has given Moholy’s experimentalism a new prestige. In the one brief example of his filmmaking, evidently influenced by Dada, he plays with almost every convention of narrative cinema, from frame size to soundtrack to titling. A superb example of his 3-D painting, Space Modulator Experiment Aluminum 5 (1931-35)the star of the show—incorporates oil painting, aluminum and transparent plastic. Such optical combine painting was a road not taken in the United States, but its impact was everywhere in post-World War Two visual art in Latin America. His notion of the “light space modulator,” a dynamic sculpture generating visual effects that could be recorded on film and experienced directly, proposed a new relation between objects and viewers, one that put them in more direct and intimate contact with the energetic operations of the universe. On a small scale, this anticipates the experiential, light-based installations of many contemporary artists.

The problem with Moholy-Nagy’s art today lies outside the objects themselves, in his notion of art’s relation to society. Ultimately, the revolution he proposed was not social but personal. Having seen the perils of art enlisted in the class struggle, he dialed back the mandate of seizing the means of production and called for a revolution that involved a “satisfying occupation, work that meets the inner needs” and “a normal way of life.” That such a vision could be divorced from a basic change in economic relations, that somehow a world filled with good design and light space modulators would produce democratic human beings, people of integrity, individually enlightened, is precisely what today’s world contradicts:a world in which Ikea rules, art proliferates (and anyone can be an artist), manufactured spectacles of light and time increase in magnitude, and the gap between the few who know work that “meets inner needs” and the many who will never experience it deepens to an abyss.

Or, it could be that we just haven’t taken Moholy-Nagy seriously enough.