This paper seeks to compare the theoretical and practical output of László Moholy-Nagy to that of the Situationist International (SI) [1]. I hope to show that despite the apparent differences between the modest pedagogue and the radical, political movement of the 1950's and 60's, there are a number of similarities in terms of both theory and practice. I also hope to reveal some of the origins of these similarities.

This study took as its starting point the recognition of a startling similarity between an image in the 1947 edition of Moholy-Nagy's The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (fig.1) and a painting by Constant, one of the SI's leading artists and architectural visionaries (fig.2).


The images with their striking dynamics of ladders, platforms and people present us with a powerful view of the architecture of the future and articulate a strong vision for the inhabitation of space and a possible new way of life. What was it that had led Moholy-Nagy to include the Siegel photo in his book, and had led Constant to paint this view? Are the similarities merely a coincidence, or did Moholy-Nagy and the Situationists in fact share theoretical, social or political positions?

In the caption to the photo by Art Siegel [2], in The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy describes the possibilities offered by new technologies. On the one hand, thanks to the camera, we can see the world with new eyes, and on the other hand, thanks to new constructional techniques we can inhabit that world in a new way.

"Architecture" The illusion of spatial interpenetration is secured by superimposing two photographic negatives. The next generation will perhaps really see buildings like this when glass and compressed air architecture develops.[3]

Constant's painting, L'Ode à l'Odéon, portrayed the occupation of the Odéon Theatre in Paris by a large group of students during the events of 1968. During their month long occupation, the theatre became an important arena for debate which largely centred around libertarian issues such as feminism, ecology and gay rights as well as acting as a centre for the organisation of action. Not only had the theatre been taken over and used for overtly political and social activities but the occupation had also subverted the traditional, symbolic value of the theatre in Parisian, bourgeois culture. For Constant, this abduction of both meaning and use, or détournement to use Guy Debord's term, was a good example of his vision for liberated, social space that he described in New Babylon. As in Unitary Urbanism, the city of New Babylon would allow individuals and groups to actively change the use and environment of a location at will. So much so that:

The quality of the environment and its ambiance no longer depends on material factors alone, but on the manner in which they will have been perceived, appreciated and used, on the 'new way of looking' at them.[5]

The new way of looking at the world meant a clearing of tradition and habit from everyday life and the destruction of the capitalist system based on the passive 'spectacle'. One of the SI's primary tools in bringing about this new order was détournement. Literally a turning around, diversion or abduction, the technique of détournement involved the twisting of meaning, or creation of new meaning from the use of existing images and ideas. By painting over old masters or writing new, alternative slogans for well-known advertisements, the Situationists could subvert the images' intended meanings and show the public an alternative view of the world. As Guy Debord and Gil Wolman explained:

When two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed....The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organisation of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.[6]

This subversion freed the images, words and even buildings from the confines of their original context and as a result was "a real means of a proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism." [7] This would allow the objects be actively and creatively used and changed by individuals in control of their environment and everyday lives. As Debord and Wolman go on to say, architecture would be able to make "plastic and emotional use of all sorts of détourned objects: calculatedly arranged cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a defunct sculptural tradition." [8] Here we can return to the work of Moholy-Nagy.

As the titles of some of his writings suggest, for example The New Vision and Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy was profoundly interested in the way we view the world. Tools such as the camera, the x-ray machine and other new techniques such as the photo-montage allowed us to create "a new dynamic and kinetic existence freed from the static, fixed framework of the past," [9] and, more importantly, showed us new possibilities for living in that new world. The photographer, for example, would liberate the individual "from the constraints of narrow perception and consciousness" [10] and "bring to the masses a new and creative vision." [11]

Part of the new vision would be the ability to recognise and understand some of the phenomenon of the modern world especially speed and motion, and the new conception of space and time that they had generated. Through the new vision, Moholy-Nagy tried to show how, through art, the individual could understand the world around in which he had found himself.

But the modern artist could no longer take "nature" as a starting point, nor could he merely represent his own emotions as that would prevent the viewer from experiencing their own feelings. His aim had to be the establishment "of relations of volume, material, mass, shape, direction, position and light, symbolising the meaning of a new reality, based upon all-embracing relationships." [12] In establishing these new relationships between objects and ideas that would otherwise seem disjointed, confusing and even alien to us, we could begin to find a way to take control of our lives and emotions. As Moholy-Nagy explains:

Without this interrelatedness there remains only the disjunctive technical skill of handling human affairs, a rigidity stifling biological and social impulses; a memorised, not a lived life. [13]

This new responsibility should not only apply to the plastic artists, but to architects and planners too. In doing so it would be possible to create the unified environment that Moholy-Nagy saw in Siegel's photograph. The Situationist, Ivan Chtchegloff reiterated this view in his description of Unitary Urbanism. The "architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action." [14] In other words, through architecture, the individual can understand the world and, more importantly, change that world.

This definition of the role of architecture can also be applied to Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator - as, perhaps, to all his work - that he used as a tool to explore new ways of inhabiting and experiencing space and time. In passing, I would also suggest that parallels could be drawn with Moholy-Nagy's teaching of the Foundation Course, the Vorkurs, at the Bauhaus. The aim of the Vorkurs was "to liberate the individual by breaking down conventional patterns of thought in order to make way for personal experiences and discoveries which will enable him to see his own potentialities and limitations." [15]

Unlike many of his contemporaries Moholy-Nagy and other Constructivist photographers such as Aleksandr Rodchenko chose not to photograph the harsh realities of everyday life in order to shock people into action. At the time, they were criticised for being out of touch with reality, but in challenging previous conventions and forms of representation, in creating these new relationships and in opening up the imagination of individuals, they believed that the artist could help bring about the realisation the collective society.

As such, the artists can be seem to be in agreement with Walter Benjamin who wrote that:

[T]o supply a production apparatus without trying, within the limits of the possible, to change it, is a highly disputable activity even when the material supplied appears to be of a revolutionary nature. [16]

To reproduce what the eye could see already did nothing to change the society in which that situation was produced. But by "forcing vision outside the body, the camera could...teach the human eye to see." [17] In taking pictures at strange angles where traditional perspective began to break down, the Constructivists "set perspective against itself, subverting the unidirectional gaze, the certainty of apprehension, and the penetrability of space of the Albertian episteme." [18] As such the camera acted as a prosthesis for the body and created "a new, revolutionary subject." [19]

It is clear from his writing that Moholy-Nagy believed that the creation of the collective society was possible, and that it was the role of the artist to help bring about that Utopia. In fact, his work is explicitly political; as he said, the "so-called 'unpolitical' approach to art is a fallacy." [20] However, in comparison to the influence of Marx, Lukács and Lefebvre on Guy Debord and his followers in the SI which has been well documented, [21] Moholy-Nagy's own political influences are less well known and often overlooked. [22]

From his writings it is evident that Moholy-Nagy was familiar with the work of Marx yet historians rarely refer to his political ideals. In his book Visions of Totality, however, Steven Mansbach does illustrate some of Marx's influences upon Moholy-Nagy and goes on to highlight areas of common ground. He suggests that:

For both [Marx] and [van Doesburg, El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy], the future would be the ideal period wherein amateurish diversification replaces economically motivated specialisation, wherein socialist integration supplants capitalist alienation and wherein the biologically whole man replaces the divided self. [23]

For Moholy-Nagy, both the creation and comprehension of modern art were "inherently political acts." [24] But having witnessed the horrors of the battlefield in World War I and the short-sightedness of the Communist regimes in his native Hungary after the revolution there in 1919 and in Russia under Lenin who both rejected non-representational art for a "Socialist Realism", Moholy-Nagy was wary of party politics. Instead, as I have suggested, he focused on the universal, revolutionary potential of the work of art and its capacity to suggest new ways of living and thinking.

Just as modern art could not use nature as a starting point, the art of the revolution could bear no resemblance to past forms and traditions. "A truly revolutionary new system would differ in all respects from the familiar old pattern," he wrote in Vienna in 1920. [25] Towards the end of his life in Vision in Motion, the most political of his writings in English, he explains that:

Again and again artists must state that revolution is indivisible and that the intellectual and political strategy of the revolution must be accompanied by a long-term emotional education. Only correlation and integration can bring a change in habits and attitudes of the people rooted in and grown out of previous conditions. [26]

The revolution demanded new methods of communication, education and expression that did not rely on the traditions of the past. This demanded "radical changes in both art and life, and both technology and psychology, regarding transformation in each as feeding into the others." [27]

This sentiment was echoed by the Situationists who also believed that art and life could not be separated and that the revolution, the SI's primary aim, necessarily entailed the "revolution of everyday life." As Debord explained,

"We still have to place everyday life at the centre of everything... Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfilment or rather nonfulfilment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics." [28]

The revolution would bring about the end of the "society of the spectacle" in which capitalism had taken over control of the individual. Through the power of the image, in advertising and the media, businesses created pseudo-needs and desires in individuals in order to make them buy their products. As a result, the spectators had become alienated not just from their surroundings, but from their own bodies and their true needs and desires. [29] The spectacle was so powerful that all real freedom had been lost and life had been reduced to the matter of mere survival. Part of the solution was for the individual to realise (in both senses of the word) his own, true needs and desires for himself. If the individual could break through the barrier of his constructed conditioning he could discover what it was that he really needed. And since technology was almost at a point where the primary needs of food, water, heat, shelter, etc. could be provided without actually having to work for them, survival was not an issue; now individuals could act to discover and fulfil their true needs and desires.

In Moholy-Nagy's view, the new environment, that new technologies had made possible, would be able to respond to man's true needs in a dynamic way, much as the Situationist's Unitary Urbanism would be able to respond to the desires of its inhabitants. Architecture itself would play a vital role in the realisation of that environment, it would be seen:

not as a complex of inner spaces, not merely as a shelter from cold and from danger, not as a fixed enclosure, as an unalterable arrangement of rooms, but as a governable creation for mastery of life, as an organic component of living.[30]

For the SI, as it was for Moholy-Nagy, this new way of viewing architecture and life itself could not be separated from "the authentic accomplishment of the creative individual," [31] who took on an active role in the formation and development of his environment rather than being a passive spectator and consumer.

For Constant, the new found creativity was a fundamental part of the revolution since their goals were "the one and the same: the realisation of our lives." [32] He saw creation as "the supreme way of knowledge and therefore of liberation and therefore of revolution." [33] Creativity offered the individual an alternative to the fixed, reified and homogeneous world in which, as Moholy-Nagy believed, man suffered "from the materialistic evaluation of his vitality, from the flattening out of his instincts, from the impairing of his biological balance." [34]

For Moholy-Nagy, the creative individual would remain rather rational and sober in character, but for the SI, fun would be his chief concern. The Situationist man, homo ludens, was free to play creatively in the construction of situations. [35] These situations would enable the individual to explore their inner desires and alter the nature of their immediate environment accordingly. Here man could achieve complete freedom and could express himself as he wished. In his analysis of the Situationists, Greil Marcus suggests that in a world of complete freedom and unlimited leisure time:

...each individual might construct a life, just as in the old world a few privileged artists had constructed their representations of what life could be. It was an old dream, the dream of the young Karl Marx-every man his own artist! [36]

Taking 'artist' in the strictest sense of the term, it is debatable whether Debord would have agreed with the above as art was to be superseded at the revolution and situations were in fact the "opposite of works of art," which in his view were "attempts at absolute valorisation and preservation of the present moment." [37] In this sense too, Moholy-Nagy would have questioned whether everybody could in fact become artists as, in his view, self-expression and art were not the same. However, it is clear that the notion of the individual as creator is a fundamental character of Moholy-Nagy's vision of the future as it is for that of the Situationists.

In this essay, it has not been possible to cover all the similarities between the SI and Moholy-Nagy or many of their differences, for that matter, [38] nor has it been possible, in most instances to go into much depth in my comparisons. It is clear, however, that despite their radically different methods of communication and overall intentions, the similarities between the work and thought of László Moholy-Nagy and the action and theory of the Situationist International are undeniable, and even surprising. Moreover, I would suggest that the SI may not have existed were it not for Moholy-Nagy and his contemporaries. As Sadie Plant says:

Both the experiments of the avant-garde and spectacular society itself reveal the possibilities for the construction of situations, the manipulation of environments, and the creation of atmospheres and ambiances. To be able to play with techniques of conditioning and experiment with a multitude of environments and atmospheres in a world in which the imperatives of work and survival have long since passed was the situationist dream. [39]

as it was for Moholy-Nagy!

In a way, Moholy-Nagy and the SI can be seen as the two extremes of the same political spectrum. At one end, a mild and optimistic teacher; at the other, a subversive and somewhat nihilistic group of revolutionaries. They shared similar goals, the revolution of everyday life in its simplest terms, but their experiences and temperaments brought them towards that goal from totally different directions.

Moholy-Nagy had seen a revolution, he'd also seen death on the battlefield; he had experienced the creative energy generated by that revolution in Russia and wanted to inspire this same energy in others. He could not trust the politicians and so took his message into the studio where he showed his students, and whoever else would listen, how to overcome their second-hand subjectivity and discover their own creative potential in opposition to the pacifying world around them. Through the education of the individual, the "revolution of everyday life" would occur naturally.

On the other hand, the SI had only seen the failure of the post-revolutionary Russia and a second world war. They too could not trust their politicians but neither could they leave the realisation of the new order to the factory or the canvas. So, rather than withdrawing into education, they set about the destruction of the system itself. Only after the complete collapse of the spectacle could the individual find his true, creative freedom.

In the struggle to escape from the capitalist prison, Moholy-Nagy's aim was to teach us how to build a tunnel to freedom. The Situationists could consider nothing less than razing the structure to the ground.

Matthew Watts

Written November 1998 as part of an MA (Architecture) in History and Theory
The University of East London under Andrew Higgot.

This text can also be seen on the Psychogeography.co.uk website

Bibliography

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