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.