User:Luisa Moura/reading/book/moholy-nagy

PAINTING PHOTOGRAPHY FILM Moholy-Nagy 1925

INTRODUCTION - photography, the great and novel potential to arrest fragments of the world; it is also 'impossible by only manual means to fix the quintessence of a movement' the natural framing of other points of view breaking laws of traditional association: impartial approach to reality (view from top, below,...) the rich shade of greys, lessons for color composition (...) creative potential of photography still to explore - relationship between photography and painting. Distinction between colour composition and representational composition. Photography frees painting from the burden to represent. Painting can dedicate itself to pure color composition. Pure and primary composed expression. new technical means give us light paiting side by side with pigment painting. kinetic painting with static painting 'The quality of a work doesn't need to be dependent absolutely on a modern or old theory of composition. It is dependent on the degree of inventive intensity which finds its technically appropriated form. All the same it seems to me indispensable that we, the creaters of our time, should go to work with up-to-date means'

ON THE OBJECTIVE AND NON OBJECTIVE The Psycho-Physical effects of colour, composition, brighness, etc? Pureness. Absolute painting. Primal states of tension in painting of all ages. Painting makes its effect, quite apart from its theme, with the harmony of its looks. 'A picture could be standing on its head and still provide a sufficient basis for an assessment of its worth as a painting' The concept of 'absolute painting' allows us to compare works of all ages; it provides the pure tools of perception apart from its time and context: 'elementary states of tension' and 'form as determined by time' man's cultural development and the pursuit of tools of expression 'the desire somehow to hold fast the natural phenomena of its environment and the imagining of his mind has operated with special intensity' mastery and inventiveness brought up knowledge about was is essential in expression means. The 'mechanical' processes of representation alowed this distance for reflection and understanding. photography allowed painting to look at itself and look for what is essential in its nature: 'colour composition carries its 'subject' within itself, in its colour' 'natural objects, material objects: these arbitrary bearers of 'moments of colour' are not needed today for the unambiguous effect of colour composition' representational painting shall tend to disappear and give room for mechanical means of representation and their unpredictable possibiliets of extension. the discussion about objective and non-objective painting will cease to be important, there will be the simple recognition of an 'absolute' and a 'representational' optical creation.

EASEL PAINTING, ARCHITECTURE AND 'GESAMTKUNSTWERK' (unclear, the issue of colour expertise for architecture and the role of easel painting) 'no material, no field of activity, can be judged from the special character of other materials, other fields, and that painting or any optical creation has its special laws ans missions indpendently from all the others' on gesamtkunstwerk: 'the unity of life cannot emerge when the boundaries of the work created are artificially blurred into one another. Rather will unity have to be produced by conceiving and carrying out every creation from ithin its fully active and therefore life-forming propensity and fitness. Carried out by peoplw whose view of life permits every individual to reach the highest productivity in his work as it bears on the whole, because he is allowed time and space to develop those qualities which are most personal to himself. In this way man learns again to react to the slightest stimuli of his own being as well as to the laws of the material' praise of the easel painting and its representational role with culmination in the use photography and the conquer of colour composition. 'impressionists brought colour back to civilization'

STATIC AND KINETIC OPTICAL COMPOSITION New means new creative flow. colour in painting and architecture. the stained-glass window, something peculiar. the reflector and the projector.The efforts to do a colour piano. Newton and Castel (...) VIKKING EGGELING: 'on an animation desk he photographed a sequence of movementsbuilt up from the simplest linear elements and, by correctly estimating developmental relationships in size, tempo, discontinuity, etc, tried to render the complexity thet grows out of simplicity. His experiments initally borrowed form the complexities of music composition (...) but gradually he began to doscovery the vision-time element and thus his first work to be contructed as a drama of forms became an ABC of motion phenomena in chiaroscuro and variation of direction' Photogram, Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy - light films, continuous capture. Hirschfeld-Mack and the light / shadow / colour in motion experiments (BAUHAUS) The pursuit of logical parallelism between COLOUR AND SOUND (...)

DOMESTIC PINACOTHECA (...) we can today free ourselves from the domination of the individual hand-made piece and its marker value 'the possibilities of reproducing' enable many people to procure stimulating colour compositions (...) possibility of maintaining a colection of coloured slides in the way that we keep gramophone records' '(...) a picture (...) will probably be kept in compartments or shelves or 'domestic picture galleries' and brought out only when they are really needed' (reference to chinese and japanese collection of prints and drawings) film as the future of creative optics mecanization and splitting of work with the technician: the minor role that the actual 'hand' has in the process of creating art, by comparison with the mental process of creativity.

PHOTOGRAPHY photography used as tool to complete the old instead of being fully explored to actually produce new insights in reality. The traditional way of framing reality, appropriated for manual capture still in use for photographic work, even though photography could actually provide a totally new point of view. interconnections, conceptual image, we start seeing with 'different eyes' views from below, from the back, obliquous. unexpected association of objects and subjects 'nevertheless, the total result to date amounts to litle more that a visual encyclopaedic achievement. THIS IS NOT ENOUGH. WE WISH TO PRODUCE SYSTEMATICALLY, SUINCE IT IS IMPORTANT FOR LIFE THAT WE CREATE NEW RELATIONSHIPS'

PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION 'It is a basic fact of the human condition that the functional apparatus craves fro further new impressions every time a new exposure has taken place. This is one of the reasons why creative experiments are an ENDURING NECESSITY. From this point of view the creations are valuable only when they produce new, preciously unknown relationships. That is another way of saying that reproduction (repetitin of exsiting relationships) without enriching points of view must from the special point of view of creative art be considered at best only a matter of virtuosity'

PHOTOGRAPHY WITHOUT CAMERA. THE 'PHOTOGRAM' a great tool and some sugestions: investigate chemical compositions to fix light phenomena; construct new cameras, first with a camara obscura and then eliminating perspectival representation. cameras with systems of lenses and mirrors which can emcompass the object from all sides at once and cameras which are constructed on OPTICAL LAWS DIFFERENT FROM THOSE OF OUR EYES

THE FUTURE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS photography as representational art is not a mere copy of nature. the rarity of the good photographer. the evolving of photography into motion works: the film. Formal tensions, penetration, chiaroscuro, relationships, moment, tempo the potential of photography to document. what if a man would be photographed every single day of his life and alll could be seen just in 5 minutes. simultaneous representation, narratives (...) the dream of mechanical means on photographic composition

TYPOPHOTO 'typophoto is the visually more exact rendering of communication' text and photo side by side (...)

SIMULTANEOUS OR POLY-CINEMA (...)

ON TECHNICAL POSSIBILITIES AND DEMANDS (...)

ILLUSTRATIONS (...)

- extra wiki info -

DADA

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.

The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.[3]

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Richter, among others. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.

BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design.[1] The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

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However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded. The German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914).

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and De Stijl movement. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.