Page 38 - Studio International - July August 1975

Photography and Moholy-

Nagy's Do-it-yourself

Aesthetic

Caroline Fawkes

I
A survey of Moholy's variegated career
can leave the impression that he must
either have been a twentieth-century
incarnation of renaissance man or merely
an exuberant dilettante. His chameleon
aspect has led to his work being discussed
most often within some limiting pre-
defined framework : his role as a
bauhaus teacher or as a constructivist
painter, his contributions to graphic
design, or his status as a grand old man of
kinetics. His photographs and
photograms have been located in terms of
the formal and technical development of
the photographic medium, but what this
kind of treatment cannot reveal, for
obvious reasons, is a sense of Moholy's
primary identity, and in the following
discussion I shall concentrate on the
general premises of his work in order to
establish what photography meant to
Mcholy, and how it relates to his other
activities, particularly in the first decade
of his career. For Moholy was neither a
photographer who indulged in other
activities on the side, nor an artist who
happened to take photographs :
photography was central to his aesthetic, How to Stay Young and Beautiful 1925
and gave the direction to many of his Photocollage, 28.5 x 20.6 cm.
non-photographic activities. Some of the Reproduction: Nigel Greenwood Inc. Ltd.
ideas which preoccupied him from 1922
onwards emerge in another form in
Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay 'The `aura' of the original work of art itself, `exhibition value' or public presentability
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical the 'quality of its presence', was never of art. Whilst the art of the past had
Reproduction', and both Moholy and reproducible. spanned both these values, the
Benjamin regarded the development of Up until the development of mechanization of the reproduction
photography as having radical photography (which occurred industry underpins an exclusive
consequences for twentieth-century art `simultaneously with the rise of cultivation of art's 'exhibition value'.
and sensibility. The differences in their socialism") , art is seen as functioning Since the introduction of photography,
outlook are as revealing as the across a spectrum between two the old spectrum has virtually ceased to
similarities, and may serve to throw opposing values. At one end of be operative: 'For the first time in
certain concepts into relief. Benjamin's spectrum, there is the 'cult world history, mechanical reproduction
For Walter Benjamin in 1936, what value' of art, which is embodied at its emancipates the work of art from its
was at issue was not photography's purest in prehistoric art, where what parasitical dependence on ritual." This
status as an art form, but 'whether the mattered is likely to have been the radical change in the function of art,
very invention of photography had not existence of a representation and its ritual derived in the first instance from
transformed the entire nature of art". function, regardless of whether or not it photography's role as a reproductive
Photography had made works of art was actually on view. The unreproducible medium, was to have repercussions
generally accessible in a form that was no `aura', Benjamin's term for what can be where photography appeared as art in its
longer dependent on the interpretative transmitted uniquely by the presence of own right. Benjamin observes that
filters of manual reproductive processes; a work of art, has always had its basis `free-floating contemplation' is
photographic reproduction was in a residual ritual function; and he inappropriate to Atget's photographs
relatively neutral, besides being refers to the way early film critics felt of deserted Paris streets around the turn
infinitely faster. But in curtailing the the need to read ritual elements into the of the century: 'They stir the viewer;
interpretative role of the reproducer's cinema experience in order to safeguard he feels challenged by them in a new
hand and eye, it filtered out the only the film's status as art. At the other end way'.4 The film medium not only makes
possible qualities of uniqueness that a of the spectrum is an overriding this challenge more explicit, but removes
reproduction might transmit. For the emphasis on what Benjamin calls the art from the private sphere of the
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