Public Symposium
History and the New Photography
June 23, 2007
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945
Illustrated lectures by noted scholars, including Monika Faber, Olivier Lugon, Peter Zusi, Douglas Nickel, Melanie Ventilla, and Steven Mansbach; a panel discussion moderated by Matthew Witkovsky will follow.
11:00 a.m.
Introduction
Matthew Witkovsky, assistant curator of photographs,
National Gallery of Art
11:15 a.m.
Heinrich Schwarz: Starting a New Way to Think about Photography
Monika Faber, curator and head of the department of photographs, Albertina, Vienna
Late in 1929, Heinrich Schwarz sent the first copies of his manuscript on nineteenth-century Scottish photographer David Octavius Hill to those most closely involved in the project, among them pictorialist photographer Heinrich Kühn, photography instructor and historian Joseph Maria Eder, and novelist Stefan Zweig. The book's publication in London (1931) and in New York (1932) would complete the labor of four years and turn what had initially seemed a minor project into a landmark in the international appreciation of Hill's work. It would also initiate a new way of thinking about photography as a whole, and, last but not least, determine its author's subsequent career. For Walter Benjamin, among others, David Octavius Hill—Master of Photography would prove a crucial formative text.
Schwarz was born in 1893 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. He moved to Vienna as a child, where he later began studies in the history of art. After the interruption of World War I he completed his doctoral degree with a thesis on the history of lithography. Starting as an assistant curator in the department of prints at the Albertina, he soon moved to the Österreichische Galerie, the collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art located in the castle Belvedere in Vienna. There he published articles not only on many works in the collection, but also on photography: he was the first art historian to write about the Germans Helmar Lerski and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In 1928, he curated the first photographic exhibition at the Österreichische Galerie. Ten years later, he was able to escape the Nazi terror thanks to Museum of Modern Art curator Beaumont Newhall, an enthusiastic reader of the Hill monograph, who provided him with the necessary affidavit for an immigration visa to the United States. A successful career as museum curator and art history professor (at Wesleyan University) followed. Schwarz died in America in 1981.
Schwarz' occupation with photography in the second half of the 1920s stems from a convergence of personal and period developments. Photography as a medium of artistic practice had gained new and very different attention, compared to the pictorialist movement a quarter century before. This culminated in the Film und Foto (Fifo) exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, which Schwarz succeeded in bringing to Vienna in 1930. Schwarz, meanwhile, had become increasingly interested in the influence of technical apparatus on artists' perceptions of reality. He considered the use of the camera obscura by artists—long before the invention of photography—to be the cause of a radically changed view of space and its transformation onto canvas. As a pupil of the Vienna School, Schwarz linked photography to a Kunstwollen dominant since the mid-nineteenth century, thereby placing scientific and technological questions at the heart of all recent artistic development.
11:45 a.m.
"Schooling the New Vision": László Moholy-Nagy, Sigfried Giedion, and the Film und Foto Exhibition
Olivier Lugon, professor of art history, Université de Lausanne
In the fall of 1928, six months before the opening of the show, the curators of the Film und Foto (Fifo) exhibition in Stuttgart believed their concept was complete. But before the end of the year, two new proposals arrived and slightly changed the direction of the project: one from the artist László Moholy-Nagy, the other one from the art historian Sigfried Giedion. The first would lead to the famous introductory "Room 1"; the second, an ambitious pedagogical exhibit called "Schooling the New Vision" (Schulung der neuen Optik), was not realized, but Moholy-Nagy, whom Giedion asked to collaborate on the project, included a number of Giedion’s art-historical views in his own presentation.
The two men had become close friends in 1925, and this friendship, not often considered until now, seems to have been very important. Giedion became deeply interested in photography at this time, as did his friends from Heinrich Wölfflin’s class, Franz Roh and Hans Finsler—three art historians whose works were shown in Film und Foto. His dialogue with Moholy-Nagy, as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy put it, "had added immensely to [Moholy-Nagy’s] knowledge of the historical and the philosophical elements in art." This impact can be traced on several levels: the conception of art history as a "history of vision" and the definition of modernity as the coming of a neue Optik (new vision), which had first to be schooled or tutored; the identification of this new vision with some of Giedion’s favorite monuments (the Eiffel Tower, the Pont transbordeur in Marseille, and Tony Garnier’s stadium in Lyon, all motifs explored by Moholy-Nagy as well); the interest in an "anonymous history" of forms; and the interest in history itself. At the end of the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy indeed became more and more anxious to construct a genealogy of avant-garde photography, to invent a "modern tradition" that would find the pioneers of the new in some old-fashioned images, in daguerreotypes and posed portraits, as Giedion did with the old-fashioned constructions of the nineteenth century. According to Giedion, these architectures contained an "unconscious" that modern eyes could now bring to consciousness, and it would be the same in photography. He explained this in his comments on Film und Foto, where Moholy-Nagy, for his part, emphasized a kind of retrospective modernity, exhumed from the past but looking like the future.
12:15 p.m.
Vanishing Points: Walter Benjamin and Karel Teige on the Liquidations of Aura
Peter Zusi, center associate, Davis Center, Harvard University
The vanishing of the aura is the most celebrated of Walter Benjamin's ideas, not only in his most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility," but probably anywhere. This essay is routinely characterized as an overturning of established aesthetic beliefs so radical as to achieve epochal status. Nonetheless, the intense fascination generated by the essay has engendered a continual re-forgetting of what should be an obvious fact: Benjamin's major theses are brilliantly formulated and have a unique philosophical suggestiveness, but they are hardly original. The term "aura" may be Benjamin's, but the idea of its vanishing is not.
Benjamin's theory of the decline of auratic art took fundamental inspiration from the waves of revolt against aesthetic autonomy produced by the historical avant-garde movements during and immediately following World War I. While the importance of these precedents is difficult to deny, commentators rarely seem bothered by the time lag between the precedent and Benjamin's essay itself. Yet it seems only fair to ask: if sources for Benjamin's account of the decline of aura as a result of technical reproducibility can be traced back to the early 1920s or mid-1910s (if not earlier), wherein lies the epochal originality of Benjamin's claims, however brilliant their formulation, in 1935? Benjamin himself implies that, while Dada may have anticipated the developments described in his essay, it did so largely in ignorance of the developmental forces to which it was responding. By contrast, then, his essay represents the intellectual mastery or coming to consciousness of that original moment. Such a scheme of originary action versus conscious reflection relativizes Benjamin's debts to the historical avant-garde by attributing primacy to him at least on the level of theoretical elaboration. Yet if one pauses to examine just how far the theoretical phase of the avant-garde attack on aesthetic autonomy had in fact reached by the early 1920s, even this scheme becomes shaky.
Here is where the career of Karel Teige, the leading theorist of the interwar Czech avant-garde, takes on particular relevance. While his texts never aspire to the philosophical heft of Benjamin's, Teige articulated a theoretical position whose proximity to Benjamin's essay is patently obvious. The point here, of course, is not to claim that Benjamin was "scooped" by fourteen years or so, and thus to transfer the aura of originality from a canonical to a lesser-known figure. Teige himself made no claims to originality, rather seeing himself as a conduit of developments from various sources within the European avant-garde. But if the essay indeed marks an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics, then that shift may need to be sought at those points where it departs from, rather than returns to, the standard line of early constructivism articulated so forcefully by Teige.
2:30 p.m.
Introduction to afternoon lectures
Matthew Witkovsky, assistant curator of photographs,
National Gallery of Art
2:35 p.m.
Vision and Memory
Douglas Nickel, associate professor of art history, University of Arizona at Tucson, and director of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
The period between the two world wars witnessed a remarkable florescence of innovative photographic picture-making in Europe, and an equally remarkable effort to theorize photography in social and philosophical terms. Following the revolutionary ideas of constructivism, for instance, László Moholy-Nagy coined the term neue Optik, or "new vision," to suggest ways in which the camera might be used to help create a new visual language, one that would transform all of culture. Indeed, in 1929 the art historian Wolfgang Born proposed a "history of seeing" in the West that culminates with the advent of modern photography. The period proposed the photograph as an industrial, faktura-free vehicle for optical information, and the camera as an instrumentalized, superhuman prosthetic for enhanced human perception. The term "vision" linked a radical new aesthetic to a utopian political philosophy that understood the word figuratively.
This paper argues that the analogy of "camera vision" to human vision so typical of the era obscures the fact that many of the most interesting theories of photography concerned themselves not simply with photography's relationship to seeing, but to cognition. In particular, it will examine the ideas presented by the German writer Siegfried Kracauer in his seminal essay "Photography," published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in October 1927. In contrast to the utopian realist potentials of the camera implicit in the "vision" analogy, Kracauer's meditation on photography understands the technology in relation to memory—both individual and collective. For Kracauer, memory is the mental process by which we confer meaning upon an event, a process photography is incapable of performing. Kracauer's theorization of photography complicates our appreciation of the New Photography, even as its stands in critical relation to that of Frankfurt School colleague s such as the young Walter Benjamin and the anti-ocular formulations of the later Roland Barthes.
3:05 p.m.
The Politics of Aesthetics in Hungarian Photography
Melanie Ventilla, doctoral candidate, department of art history, Columbia University
How should we understand Hungarian interwar photography? The work of photographers who lived and practiced in Hungary between the two world wars—such as József Pécsi, Rudolf Balogh, and Lajos Lengyel--has been little discussed in scholarship outside of Hungary. It is not adequately characterized as simply preparatory for or derivative of that of better-known emigrants such as László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, and Brassaï, for their most productive years occurred outside Hungary, in distinct social, artistic, and political settings. Nor is it helpful to view the lesser-known Hungarian photographers as belonging to a single unified group or movement; overly simplified characterizations of them as entirely apolitical, limited in their palette of formal resources, and guileless in their artistic methods do not capture the complexity of their rich and multifaceted body of work.
The key to understanding Hungarian interwar photography is the identification of the three primary motivations that shape these efforts—what we might call the propagandist, the activist, and the pedagogic impulses. The new world order established by World War I left Hungary an independent nation-state, vastly reduced in both size and resources. The group of photographers that remained in Hungary after the war helped renegotiate the face of the nation in visual terms, with a plethora of tactics and emphases, representing different factions ranging from the far right to the far left in their political persuasions. Propagandist photography, such as Balogh's Crying and Laughter, 1930, reinforced the government's simplistic messages. Activist photography, such as Lengyel's Violence, 1932, sought to agitate the masses to question the party line. Pedagogic photography, such as Pécsi's The Newspaper Az Est, 1927, played yet a different role, focused on introducing and exploring new techniques and possibilities for the medium itself without a defined political agenda (although, of course, these formal techniques were soon adopted by more politically active figures).
A system of classifying works according to their underlying motivations allows us to untangle major confusions about the artistic techniques and aesthetic qualities of Hungarian interwar photography. In particular, the question of the degree and form of international influence in this work can only be understood by recognizing crucial distinctions between the ways in which international inspiration was sought and materialized in manifesting each work's particular functional goals. For instance, contrary to common assumptions, international influences can be identified in both propagandist and activist photography. But propagandist photography sought to conceal these influences so as to preserve an underlying nationalistic message—in such work, international influences appear in subtle forms, such as in layout or sequencing. By contrast, activist photography often flaunted its international influences, for the very ideas of "alternative" messages and transparent presentation were essential to its cause. In this and many related instances, the morphology of the image in Hungarian interwar photography exemplifies the politics of the aesthetic.
3:35 p.m. -3:45 p.m.
Break
3:45 p.m.
Writing the History of Modern Art: Scholars as Partisans
Steven A. Mansbach, professor, department of art history and archaeology, University of Maryland
During the 1930s and 1940s, a gigantic wave of art historians (more than two hundred) emigrated from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other central European lands then under fascist control, resettling in England and the United States. Among these historians were future authors of fundamental texts for undergraduate reading in art history, including Rudolf Wittkower, Walter Friedlaender, John Rewald, and, above all, Ernst Gombrich and Horst W. Janson. The "stories of art" told by these central European émigrés introduced American students especially to a wealth of contextual, sociopolitical, and iconographically rich meanings in world art from the ancient period through the baroque. When it came to modern, especially twentieth-century art, however, these historians eschewed all social or other contextual analysis in favor of purely formal readings divorced from the authors' own historical surroundings.
What was to be gained, and what was lost, in the decision to separate classical modern art from the contingencies of history and of politics—dimensions that were in fact crucially important to the very makers of such art? With the benefit of hindsight, one can see in the willful description of modern art purely as a succession of styles a pointed refusal to engage in politicization. Granting art a political valence seemed, in the age of totalitarianism, to be a tool for the suppression of artistic liberty, rather than (as the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s had seen it) a means precisely to liberate art and humanity alike from the shackles of convention or past traditions. To concentrate on style—and thus on skill and ability—seemed also in the post-World War II years a means to ensure the rational, humanistic basis of art that had been labeled "degenerate" or otherwise condemned as the product of untalented "deviants."
Nevertheless, much went missing in this formalist account of classical modern art. Gone particularly were the contributions of a legion of progressive individuals and circles in the fine and applied arts, architecture, and photography from central and eastern Europe. These individuals and groups expressly intended their work to serve a local, contextual function. They were invested in reshaping cities and the built environment, in redefining the look of their countries and communities—in making the world anew. Contingencies of history and politics, and of the consumer and media environments that surrounded them, were what originally motivated these artists. The omission of the arts of central and eastern Europe from Anglo-American undergraduate survey curricula at the very moment that these were developing is thus a product not just of the Cold War and the Sovietization of Europe's eastern half; it also derives from the pre-World War II climate of central Europe itself, the cradle of institutional art history.
4:15 p.m.
Panel discussion