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László Moholy-Nagy: Transmuting technology into art

Hungary’s László Moholy-Nagy pioneered the use of cutting-edge materials and technology in art. But what really mattered to him was investigation

By Jonathon Keats

18 July 2016

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The Moholy-Nagy exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York

David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, Guggenheim Museum, New York, to 7 September

In 1933, László Moholy-Nagy began experimenting with silberit, a specialised aluminium developed for aeroplanes. Moholy-Nagy was not an engineer, nor was he a scientist. He was a Hungarian artist attracted to silberit for its extreme reflectiveness. Using the metal as a background for abstract paintings, he made his pigments appear to levitate.

Around the same time, Moholy-Nagy tested the optical effect of plastics such as Rhodoid, Galalith and Trolit, and applied pigments with industrial equipment including a spray gun and airbrush.

The spectacular results of these experiments are among the highlights of a new Guggenheim Museum retrospective that compellingly captures the remarkable achievements of a man who pioneered the adaptation of cutting-edge technology in art.

Art at the battlefront

Moholy-Nagy’s artistic career began in 1917, when he took up drawing while recovering from an injury on the battlefront. Absorbing the anything-goes ethos of the Dadaist movement and the collectivist designs of constructivism, he effectively invented his own practice by 1923.

That was the year Moholy-Nagy made five paintings by telephone. The paintings were produced at a sign factory in Germany, based on directions he dictated to the foreman. He had a chart of the factory’s enamel colours, with both men using a grid to communicate where the colours went.

Moholy-Nagy later compared the procedure to “playing chess by correspondence”, but really it was much more radical than that. By phoning in his paintings – and ordering one in three sizes, all on view at the Guggenheim – Moholy-Nagy simultaneously showed a Dadaist disdain for tradition and suggested how technology might give art a broader role in society.

His Construction in Enamel pictures were “just as mobile and just as easily accessible as a book or a daily newspaper”, asserted one critic, succinctly capturing the utopian undercurrent.

Yet even by the time those words were written, Moholy-Nagy had moved on. For instance, experimentation with photographic paper led him to an art form he called the photogram, whereby sensitised paper was partially covered with objects and exposed to light. When the paper was developed, the objects’ shadows became fixed on it.

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One of Moholy-Nagy’s photograms

Photogram: 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

Other artists, including Man Ray, were also exploring this process, but Moholy-Nagy was the only one to see it as more than a novel photographic technique. For him, photograms provided a means of working directly with light – and light was what he considered the essence of art.

Plastic expression

Through every available technology, Moholy-Nagy sought to make light “a medium of plastic expression”. Whether made on stretched canvas, enamelled steel or shiny silberit, paintings were just a means of conveying optical effects.

The full significance of Moholy-Nagy’s photograms became apparent only in the early 1930s, when he created a machine for setting shadows in motion. Moholy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage – exhibited in reproduction at the Guggenheim – incorporates several motorised grates that rotate in tandem.

Their interaction results in complex flickerings of light that are astonishingly dynamic. The retrospective includes a film made by Moholy-Nagy that is positively mesmerising.

Like the enamelled telephone paintings, Light Prop was not meant to be unique – nor exclusive to Moholy-Nagy. Produced in collaboration with German electrical company AEG, the technology was intended to optically stimulate audiences in theatres and at festivals: a truly populist manifestation of abstract art that moved abstraction into another dimension. The machine was, however, never mass-produced.

With the rise of Nazism, Moholy-Nagy fled Europe for the US, and took his exploration of light in yet another direction. Building on his experience with plastics, he started to experiment with Plexiglas, which he painted and scratched, and warped in his oven.

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Plexiglas

2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

He mounted the resulting Space Modulators on brackets several centimetres away from the wall so that light passed through them, generating complex shadowplay. They were “a new type of moving pictures”, he asserted – and he was justified in his pride. Even amid today’s ubiquitous video displays, the best of his Modulators have optical nuances that no modern technology can match.

Cutting-edge explorer

Together with some dazzling Plexiglas sculptures, the Space Modulators comprised Moholy-Nagy’s last major body of work, created until his death from leukaemia in 1946. Yet it would be a mistake to see them as the culmination of his career, let alone the ultimate product of a lifelong programme of research and development.

Although Moholy-Nagy’s entire body of work pursued light as a medium for plastic expression, he was anything but a technologist. He was more akin to an explorer, incessantly probing the technological frontier for new aesthetic experiences.

Seventy years after Moholy-Nagy’s death, the amalgamation of art and technology has become commonplace: contemporary artists are almost expected to work with the latest materials and equipment. Moholy-Nagy can be credited with helping spur this expansion of artistic means, but he must not be blamed for the present excesses of self-indulgent tech artists such as Bill Viola and Olafur Eliasson.

A deeper reading of Moholy-Nagy’s art – aided by this important retrospective – reveals that the technology is secondary. What matters is the investigation.

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