The Measures Taken

Albers and Moholy-Nagy- From the Bauhaus to the New World, Tate Modern



‘Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness wonderful inexhuastible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labour. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudices of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty’
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 1883



Production-Reproduction
‘We construct with straw, corrugated cardboard, wire mesh, cellophane, stick-on labels, newspaper, wallpaper, rubber, match-boxes, confetti, phonograph needles, and razor blades…in doing this, we do not always create ‘works of art’; it is not our intention to fill museums: we are gaining ‘experience’
Josef Albers, 1928

There is a feeling of crushing inevitability of the bauhaus being claimed by the museums, by what JG Ballard wonderfully describes as ‘that middle-class disco, the Tate Modern’. Nonetheless, there is a question of their bauhaus and ours. Hence, this somewhat pointless juxtaposition. Josef Albers, with some mildly enjoyable geometric reductions, on glass or on canvas, ending up as aider and abettor of the CIA-sponsored American Modernism of the 1950s; and the impossibly heroic Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, with his ferociously theorised constructions of everything from Perspex to Plexiglas, dying a tragically early death of leukaemia, sketching images of Hiroshima on his hospital bed.



Most conspicuous by its absence is any real attention to the fact that most of these objects were intended first of all to be mass-produced, and secondly to be for everyday use. The truly important work of Moholy-Nagy isn’t his occasional canvases, but the books he designed, the posters he made- in photography, typography and film, and certainly not in that hobby-horse of britart revanchism, the ‘installation’. Moholy always used the phrase ‘production-reproduction’ to denote this inextricable relationship to mechanical reproducibility- the unique object is inherently ridiculous: his line about those ignorant of these forms being ‘the illiterates of the future’ would be taken up by Walter Benjamin, in an ancestor of the post-punk ‘it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it’. He would have appreciated the comedy of reproduction Albers tables being sold at outrageous prices in the Tate shop.



A wander away from this exhibition into the rest of the gallery indicates how intractably opposed the bauhaus was to that which passes for art 80 years later. It declares, much as Moholy did to his first classes in the mid 20s, ‘I am disappointed to see that you are all suffering from Romanticism and Naturalism.’ Instead of the subject, the machine- in another argument with the expressionists that ran the early bauhaus Moholy claimed ‘the automaton, as you call it, is the motor and the form of our time. It is everything.’ This obsession with the machine is usually mentioned as if it were a rather eccentric intellectual quirk, as if these things couldn’t possibly be beautiful except in the eyes of those continental Marxist types. On the contrary, it was designed to empower people- by ‘laying bare the device’ you can see how it works, and hence can work out how to work it yourself. It’s a work both of demystification and intensification, and of democratisation, as opposed to the accusations of elitism that always accompany discussion of the bauhaus. ‘I can use it as well as you can. It can kill me as well as you. Technology knows no tradition and no class-consciousness. Anyone can be the master and slave of the machine.’

Utopia meets Subtopia

‘An evening of fun in the metropolis of your dreams’
Wire, On Returning, 1979



As my comrade Bat points out, it is supposed to be so simple a child could grasp it- a kind of knowing wonder in the face of technology. Gropius described Moholy as teacher as being like ‘an unprejudiced, happy child at play’. You can see this in the posters Moholy made in his exile in London for the tube- posters advertising the pneumatic doors and the escalators, using cutaways to show the fascinating internal workings, the cogs and the pistons. But Britain had already declared its opposition to such ‘modernismus’, its intention to keep things mystified. Evelyn Waugh in 1928 offered a pre-emptive strike against those who would be fleeing Hitler five years later in the form of Professor Silenus, his bauhaus-trained Hungarian (sound familiar?). '‘The problem of architecture as I see it’, he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro-concrete and iron, ‘is the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, for it is built to house machines and not men…man is never beautiful, he is only happy when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces...on one side, the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!’'



There’s something faintly tragic about Moholy in Metroland, marooned with the Mock Tudor and the phony medievalism. A London landmark like Tower Bridge is the diametric opposite of the bauhaus ethos, its fantastically advanced technolgy hidden by a lumbering stone monolith of historicist decoration. But then in a sense this is actually the completion of a circle- from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, much appreciated by Le Corbusier, to the technologised Radiant City- two opposed poles of the same thing, to rationalise, to decide not to leave people to the tender mercies of unfettered capital. Hampstead Garden Suburb and the Weissenhof Seidlung are both essentially the same idea, if expressed in a radically different manner. Walter Gropius’ early hero was of course William Morris, now unfortunately more remembered for vitalist wallpaper than for his hardline Marxism. The bauhaus is essentially Morris without the obscurantism, Morris if he’d taken the ‘let the machines do it’ position of his comrade Paul Lafargue, or of Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism.

‘When asked who her favourite artist was, she always answered ‘Harry Beck’’
Julie Burchill, Ambition



By the 30s London was finally beginning to embrace the much-feared machine, with Metroland, that oasis of twee semis and commuter-belt conservatism, leading the way. Charles Holden’s Tube Stations are a heartrendingly sad bastardisation of bauhaus principles applied to the Tory noose that encircles London, their elegance even now like an inchoate protest in Oakwood or Cockfosters. London Underground, who hired Moholy to help apply his machinic shock therapy to London, would be a sponsor of this movement- one which is essentially a desperate attempt to impose order on the utter chaos of this most unplanned of metropoles. Harry Beck’s tube map exemplifies this game of let’s pretend. Instead of the twisting lunacy of the actual lines themselves, rationality, order, a grid is imposed where none actually existed. Likewise the Isokon building in Hampstead, Moholy’s home in London, pugnaciously imposes itself on the bourgeois grandeur that surrounds it- so they can try and pretend this is Dessau and not North London.



‘daintily alights Elaine
hurries down the concrete station
with a frown of concentration
out into the outskirts’ edges…’
John Betjeman, ‘Middlesex’



Fittingly, one of the designs Moholy completed in his brief time in London was the photographs and a book jacket for a John Betjeman book, that supreme representative of Metroland in all its dogged obscurantism and reluctant progress, this conserver of Victorian churches with his horrified fascination with Modernism. There are things sown here which get taken up in postpunk, that modernist last stand- those commuter Belt denizens Wire’s 154 is a Metroland with the Brimstone and Treacle taken out, a garden city of geometries, clean lines, dynamism. Though Betjeman’s tennis girls are conspicuous by their absence, its protagonists, reading the Nouvel Observateur on the Piccadilly Line, are total products of subtopia.

Moholyisch Montage
‘Photography culminates in this. The series is no longer a ‘picture’ and none of the canons of pictorial aesthetics can be applied to it. Here the individual picture as such loses its identity and becomes a piece of montage, an essential structural component of the whole which is the thing itself…a photographic series can become a most powerful weapon, the tenderest lyric.’
Moholy-Nagy



Relegated to an obscure corner of the Exhibition are what are perhaps Moholy’s most fertile, least recuperable works- those small, uncategorisable montages he created in the 20s and early 30s and called ‘Photoplastics’. The curators, in their infinite wisdom, have these all jumbled up together, with their titles almost illegible. After all, these are essentially no different here or in a cheap little Phaidon book. ‘To ask for the original copy’, as Benjamin points out, ‘makes no sense.’



Photoplastics are an odd ancestor of the zine cutups of someone like Linder (think of her cover for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict) and an oblique relative of his contemporaries’ use of the form. Photomontage reaches its apothesis as a technique in the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’, the late 20s/early 30s period of suicidal ultraleftism in which the Communist Parties of Europe prepared for insurrection, only to barely notice the Nazis sneaking in behind them. In the USSR this is exemplified in the posters of Gustav Klutsis, who cuts up massive machnic crowds, marching in impossible geometric criss-crosses towards the future that would be created by the mass mechanisation of the Five Year Plans (Klutsis would die in Stalin’s Purges), or more famously in Germany, the montages of John Heartfield. Moholy’s Montage shares the satirical force of these artists, though approaching it from strange angles, puns and the use of space- Wire to Heartfield’s Gang of Four.



A Photoplastic like ‘Militarism’ is a fine example of their agitational use. In white space, we have a phalanx of tanks in one corner. In another, we have, taken from some ethnographic treatise, some frolicking ‘natives’. Lines and points denote the conflict we know is going to take place. But more often, the Photoplastic is used to create discrete psychosexual puzzles. ‘Jealousy’ multiplies Moholy himself to three shadows, three copies- one empty space, one photographic negative, one silhouette, with no definitive self. A swimsuited girl is cut out and pierced by the gaze of someone placed in the Moholyisch empty space.



Louis Kaplan’s Laszlo Moholy-Nagy- Biographical Writings claims Moholy for Derrida, taking his couplings and especially his cryptic Photograms and Photoplastics as a prefiguring of deconstructive practice, as a ‘Photogrammatology’. This makes a degree of sense in the context of the Photoplastics, where propaganda takes a back seat to dialectical puzzles, and image/language games. Another, ‘In the Name of the Law/Psychology of the Masses’ encloses a pool player aiming his cue at a swimsuited circle of girls; a girl with a gun aiming at a bourgeois denuded of his skin, internal organs exposed; a general in tin hat and jackboots. Moholy wrote of such drolleries ‘photoplastics is often the bitterest fun, often blasphemy. It often reveals the nasty side of creation; but often also rears up against inadequacy: clownesque and comical, tragic and serious. Photoplastics is based on gymnastics of the eye and brain, more concentrated it falls to the share of a big-city dweller.’



The photoplastics also demarcate nicely the difference between our bauhaus and theirs. Want to make one? Take some photographs, a pair of scissors, spend 5p on a photocopier. Anyone can be the slave or master of the machine.

le corbusier's unite d'habitation

(this is my edit of my piece in last week's Socialist Worker, Utopias in the Sky -no disrespect to their lovely subs)

Architecture and Morality
‘It looks like a concrete spaceship from the Planet Crap.’ This quip of a ‘member of the public’ in the Channel 4 programme Demolition, about Cumbernauld Town Centre, is our typical reaction to the naïve utopianism of British modern architecture. Now that we supposedly know better than to try to create new forms, we let the destruction of our cities hide behind pitched roofs and redbrick façades, in the endless shopping centres or the interminable suburbia of Blairism’s Barratt Homes.


an award winning barratt home

Modernism is often dismissed by Left as much as Right- in SW1935 Stirling Howieson claims the theories of the notorious modernist Le Corbusier were akin to those of planner Baron Haussmann, who famously redesigned Paris to prevent insurrection- a failure, as proved by 1968 or the banlieue’s rising last Autumn. And aren’t the slab blocks that characterise the Paris suburbs or British estates just a way of keeping the rabble in line?


hannes meyer's trade union school

But rather than the reactionary planning of Haussmann, at the root of this architecture is the post-revolutionary moment in the Weimar Republic and USSR. In Germany, architects like Mies van der Rohe and Erich Mendelsohn joined the November Group, named after the insurrection in 1918-19 that briefly left Berlin in the control of Workers’ Councils. In the same year the Bauhaus was set up as an attempt to adapt the design theories of British Marxist William Morris to mass production, encapsulated by Lenin’s dictum ‘socialism= soviet power plus electrification’. Their architecture would disdain ornament and Victorian prissiness as dishonest, hiding labour and technology behind the styles of the past.


tatlin's tower

This was an architecture that would serve a purpose- ‘form follows function’, in Mies’ words. In Moscow Tatlin’s Third International Tower, a spiralling construction in perpetual motion, exemplified the possibilities of socialist construction. The 1920s saw many experiments in communal, Constructivist architecture, from the Workers Clubs of Melnikov, which housed facilities for everyday life within startlingly abstract forms, to Moisei Ginzburg’s streamlined apartment blocks with special collective areas.


soviet pavilion by melnikov

As the revolution in Germany and Russia curdled, so reaction clamped down on the new styles. In the late 1920s the architecture of the Constructivists would be denounced as ‘Leftism in art’, as dangerous as Leftism in politics. Le Corbusier’s design for the ‘Palace of the Soviets’ would be replaced with a never-built classicist wedding-cake. The opulence and grandeur of the Stalinist-era ‘Workers’ Palaces’ masked the fact that the workers had lost any meaningful control over ‘their’ state. Likewise in Germany, the Bauhaus was closed by Hitler as ‘cultural Bolshevism’, partly because Mies, its last director, had designed a monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.


Mies' monument for Luxemburg & Liebknecht

From the Workers Council to the Council Estate
Modernism in Britain was directly inspired by what had happened in Moscow and Berlin. In the 1930s Mendelssohn was designing seaside pavilions in Sussex, while in London the Tecton collective adapted Soviet social housing. But the big take-up of these ideas was post-war. The first Housing Minister after 1945 was NHS creator Nye Bevan, who had no time for the ‘marzipan school’ of British suburbia or its ‘obsessive’ fenced off gardens. Nothing was to be too good for the working man.


alton estate, london, early 50s

Much was built fast and cheap by corrupt local councils. But at the same time there was a spirit of utopianism informed by socialism, in which the jerry-built slums of laissez-faire industrialists would be replaced with avant-garde, futurist structures: the ‘streets in the sky’ of Alison and Peter Smithson, architects who coined the term ‘brutalism’ for an urban, rough and British architecture, using concrete to create startling new shapes.


balfron tower, poplar

By the 70s the utopia in the sky had become dystopia, and social problems caused by the ravages of Thatcherism would be conveniently blamed on architecture- but people don’t stop being poor by being moved from one building to another. The class nature of this can be seen in the differing fates of two 60s blocks in London by Erno Goldfinger, both with the same vertiginously dynamic design, Trellick Tower in Notting Hill, and Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets. One has concierges, piss free lifts and is now mostly privately owned, while the other is left to rot by the council, only noticing it in occasional attempts to convince the residents to sell up to private developers. Since 1979 the very idea of ‘social housing’ has become obsolete.


trellick tower, ladbroke grove

These movements in architecture were always essentially utopian, and as such suffered a fate common to attempts at utopia under capitalism. But rather than dismiss them and put our cities in the hands of the heirs of 19th century speculators and their twee Victoriana, we could build on the foundations of the utopians, much as Marxism took its moral force from experimenters like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Then, as Ernst Bloch put it, ‘the island utopia rises out of the sea of the possible’.

The Technique= Circus. The Psychology= Head over Heels

A season at the NFT this month, Children of the Revolution- Celebrating Kozintsev and Trauberg gives a rare glimpse of one of the most little-known strains in the Constructivist movement of the 1920s- Eccentrism, an amalgam of jarring techniques, modernist disorientation, Keystone Kops slapstick and Taylorist mechanisation. Published by Kozintsev and Trauberg while still in their teens, and thrown at Petrograd passers-by from a moving car, the 1921 Manifesto of the Eccentric Actor is a playful counterpoint to the Futurist sturm und drang: self-referential and witty, undercutting its violence with a touch of the cute.

Salvation in the Trousers of the Eccentric


Importantly, the Eccentric Manifesto serves as a corrective to the still depressingly prevalent view of the 1920s avant-garde as haughtily aloof from ‘popular culture’, a myth which sees the artistic ‘vanguard’, in a parody of Leninism, as a kind of puritan imposition, trying to ‘improve’ its audience. In fact, Eccentrism marks an early salvo in the battle of vanguardism against ‘high art’ and in favour of all that horrified its denizens: read between the lines of their proclamations and you can see punk’s revaluations, via their smart-dumb fetishising of slapstick, amusement parks, Hollywood and Americanism, the belief that Communism has to harness to itself the mass production and mass art of the USA. They proclaim- ‘YESTERDAY- the culture of Europe. TODAY- the technology of America. Industry, production under the stars and stripes. Oh, Americanisation! Oh, Undertaker!’


Risk, bravery, violence, chase, revolution, gold, blood, laxative pills, Charles Chaplin, wrecks on land, sea and in the air, surprise cigars, operetta prima donnas, adventures of all sorts, skating-rinks, American books, horses, struggle, chansonettes, a salto on a bicycle and thousands and thousands of events that make today beautiful



Eccentrism, in its early incarnation as the acting school The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) first of all abolished the theatre’s preoccupation with subjectivity, with the depiction of a character’s inner torments. The model for this, physically and politically, was slapstick- Chaplin himself would return the favour with the Constructivist tributes all over Modern Times. If anything could work as agitational slapstick, it was films like Chaplin’s The Bank (1917); the opening scene of which shows Charlie walking up to a bank vault, unlocking the door and walking past the unguarded gold bars to pick up a mop, bucket and cleaner’s uniform. Or Buster Keaton’s Haunted House (1920), where Keaton’s bank teller pours glue on the notes, covering the customers in useless money that they can’t physically remove from their bodies. While the progenitors of method acting like Stanislavsky would spread their pernicious insistence on Representation all over cinema history, Eccentrism offered another, woefully un-acted upon possible future for film- take Chaplin or Keaton, their irrationalism and their contempt for authority, and harness them for the creation of a rational society. Walter Benjamin approved of this approach, citing the Eccentrist’s ‘overcoming of inner impulses and the body centre…the man who has the chair he is sitting on pulled from him and stays sitting’


Presentation- rhythmic wracking of the nerves
The author- an inventor-discoverer
The actor- mechanised movement, not buskins but roller skates, not a mark but a nose on fire. Acting- not movement but a wriggle, not mimicry but a grimace, not speech but shouts

The earliest surviving example of Eccentrism’s foray into filmmaking is The Devil’s Wheel (1926), a delirious cut-up comedy of the Leningrad lumpenproletariat, centring on an amusement park and the descent into the dissolute of a Red Army man (many of the films of the early Soviet film vanguard centred on this figure, frustrated by the failure of the revolution to spread, at the risk of disillusion- Protazanov’s visionary Aelita solves this problem by having its protagonist start a revolution on Mars). It establishes a tension from the very start between its socially redeeming aims and its obvious joy in the criminal underworld it caricatures. The first scene shows a Leningrad apartment block, surrounded by rubble, with blasted-out windows which are suddenly filled with people dancing, fighting, kissing. As Ian Christie points out in his Introduction, the film anticipates the French New Wave in its un-socialist realist conception of social realism- presenting the everyday via the Verfremdungseffekt of jump-cuts and cheap but effective tricks. Nothing is too crass for them, much of the film’s tricks rely on such obvious props as sticking fireworks in the background, having its characters walk through halls of mirrors.

For the director- a maximum of devices, a record number of inventions, a turbine of rhythms


The tension in Eccentrism between its Bolshevism and its fixation on the socially dubious comes out in certain moments in The Devil’s Wheel. At one point the hoodlums, led by a circus magician named ‘Mr Question’ go to attack a Workers’ Club, and one briefly wonders which side Kozintsev and Trauberg would want to win in that particular fight. There’s a prefiguring here of the Situationist notion of criminals as a wellspring of revolutionary possibility, as articulated in Attila Kotanyi's Gangland and Philosophy. The suggestion is that the world inhabited by these characters, with their obsession with thrill and sensation for its own sake, is the true and correct way of experiencing technologised everyday life. The manifesto itself hails ‘the cult of the amusement park, the big wheel and the switchback, teaching the younger generation the BASIC TEMPO of the Epoch’. The rollercoaster as educational.

We prefer Charlie’s arse to Eleanora Duse’s hands
The play- an accumulation of tricks. The speed of 1000 horsepower. Chase, persecution, flight.
Humped backs, distended stomachs, wigs of stiff red hair- the beginning of a new style of stage costume. The foundation- continuous transformation
Horns, shots, typewriters, whistles, sirens- eccentric music. The tap-dance- start of a new rhythm


This ambiguity continues in their celebration of the Paris Commune, The New Babylon, where events are viewed not through a Socialist Realist archetype, but through the eyes of a boutique shopgirl. There’s a refusal to incarnate the Heroic Worker who struts through Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Their Marxism was subtler than that- their 1926 Gogol adaptation The Overcoat is like a filmic essay on the section in Capital on commodity fetishism, instilling its quotidian subject with outlandish properties, giving it more animation and life than the clerk who owns it. Nonetheless in the 30s they too would turn to films of bygone revolutionary heroism, as in their hugely popular and populist Maxim trilogy. But the dialectic they outlined earlier on, the affinities between futurism and technocracy, revolution and the fairground- a taking literally of Trotsky’s phrase on revolution as a ‘festival of the oppressed’- is still rich with possibility. The Left is as ever all to ready to don its sub-Keaton stoneface- the Eccentric, meanwhile giggles on the barricades.