The Avant Garde: A Very Short Introduction by David Cottington

Author:David Cottington [Cottington, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199582730
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

3. Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919

4. Man Ray, Rayograph, 1922

Constructivism and the machine

In their poetry of (often mass-produced) things, as well as in their manipulations of the mechanized image, these ‘Rayographs’, as Man Ray inevitably called them, overlapped with a set of concerns that in other ways stood at some remove from such imagination-driven provocations of Dada. At the same time as the Rayographs, Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was making what he called ‘Photograms’ (Figure 5). Similarly made by directly exposing to light things placed on or against light-sensitive photographic paper, Moholy’s closely comparable images grew out of a commitment not to the poetry of things or the debunking of artistic creativity but to the promise that the machine, modern technology, and rational constructive principles held out for the post-war world. His was an avant-gardism that was shared by a large cohort of young artists in the decade after 1918 across Europe, whose excitement at the potential of scientific method and modern engineering brought them together in what became known as the Constructivist movement. In the words of one historian of this cohort, Gladys Fabre, they ‘made the machine their hobby-horse, vaunting its functionalism, its qualities of speed and precision, and its capacity to destroy traditional art’. This had close parallels with the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s Purism, but in place of their attachment to classical values (and through them also, implicitly, to a hierarchical social and political order), Constructivism looked for inspiration elsewhere: both to the dynamism of modern industry, and (as we shall see) to the example of the Russian avant-garde of the immediately pre- and post-Revolutionary years—both its aesthetics and its politics.

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