[Image: Flame Orchard by Gyorgy Kepes] Brian Holmes wrote:

I too was struck by that ‘Changing Sites of Value’ panel (Internet as Playground and Factory Conference), and particularly by Orit Halpern’s talk on the Hungarian emigre painter and designer Gyorgy Kepes. Her presentation showed the incredible inventiveness of a Central European artist confronted with the technological possibilities of the postwar USA - an artist dealing with the transformed vision of the city from a swift-flying plane, then later the staggering speed and volume of computerized information flow. Kepes seemed to be claiming an ability to shape and model the dynamics of technoscientific change. However, the very fascination I felt during the talk reminded me of what I think is one of the biggest challenges for artists and thinkers in the core countries today, and particularly in America, which is how to analyze the cutting edge of technological development without becoming strangely weightless, ecstatic with the complexity, caught up in the flow, lacking all resistance to the present. Note that this is not a critique of Orit or anyone else, but an attempt to state a much more general problem, which was also present in the talk through a reference to Picasso’s Guernica.

In fact this is an old problem of the 20th century, and Kepes himself hails from the milieu where it was first expressed with utter clarity. After the conference I went to see the Bauhaus show at MoMA. The trajectory there is fairly explicit: once they escape from the Gothic limbo of expressionism, incarnated by the shamanic figure of Johannes Itten, the central aesthetic form and operational diagram becomes the grid, which Gropius makes into the basis of Bauhaus pedagogy. The whole adventure can be seen as one of developing the potentials of the grid, as a sensible and yet also mathematizable mediator between the free-floating imagination and the constraints of the industrial process. The aim is to achieve not just a new relation to materials for the industrial age, but above all a thorough-going abstraction of human identity, promising an escape from the horrors that arose out of the combination of modern industry and German nationalism in WWI. The theme of postnational humanity, of World Man, so prominent in the US after WWII, actually has its origins here in interwar Germany. You can see it in the shocking photo of a woman reclining in a modernist chair, her limbs relaxed, her body fully present in the space - and her face erased by an uncannily smooth, reflective metal mask that depersonalizes her entirely, making her into a foreign being, an alien creature of the grid.

Even artists as “spiritually” oriented as Kandinsky and Klee adopted the grid in their own work. From this basis of abstraction and egalitarian homogeneity, they tried to create an expansive range of subjective potentials. Klee’s work with affective tonalities of color charts in particularly impressive: the grid-structure vibrates, resonates, in one painting it warps into a mobile mesh, as though blowing in the wind. Equally impressive are the very subtle colorist works that both Klee and Kandinsky made using a technique of aerosol sprays, which to my eye have all the lightness and openness of consciousness itself. But there is also the mathematical music of the textile pieces made on a Jacquard loom, or the extraordinary “Project for an abstract color film” painted by Kurt Kranz in 1930. After going back into the show a second time looking for something, the idea suddenly came to me: In a period of overt political crisis, the overarching ambition of the school was that of finding both a technics and a regulatory aesthetics for a cosmopolitan industrial democracy. Or to put it another way (and this was the phrase I walked out with): They sought to establish and inhabit the machine process as the vector of a trans-identity. In their view, this alone could provide a psychosocial regulation, or a civilizing discipline if you will, for the destructive powers unleashed by mass production. The violence of mechanized passions was to be dissolved into an infinite subjective mutability. The aesthetic of Moholy-Nagy - who was Kepes’ teacher and friend, and who brought him to the New Bauhaus in Chicago - carries this ambition to its peak, particularly with the endlessly dynamic variations of the Light-Space-Modulator.

Of course the Bauhaus was a failure in Germany. The problem, if I may interpret it in a shorthand way, was that this incredibly gifted bourgeois vanguard had no social basis of support. Near the end, when the Weimar Republic was seriously vacillating, you can see them scrambling in Dessau under the short-lived directorship of the communist Hannes Meyer, trying to create some social fundament of industrial use value for the mass of the people. The audacious formal experiments fade away in favor of a more immediate, utilitarian approach. Meyer enlists everyone to build a school for the German Trade Union Federation. It didn’t work. He was forced to step down by the government of the state of Anhalt, for being a communist. Under Mies, who was the last director, the searching cultural and subjective side of the project disappears and a technocratic, proto-corporate look begins to predominate. The International Style is on the horizon.

Curiously, it is in New Deal America that these artists find a chance to realize their utopia. The whole theme of postnational man is adopted after the war by an American intellectual elite that includes a great number of emigre German artists, thinkers and scientists. I find it ironic that the USA, the most liberal of all countries (where liberal signifies the classic bourgeois preoccupation for free trade, convertible money, commercial infinity) should be the place where an institutionalized solidarity, Roosevelt’s welfare state, would finally provide the social basis - or what thinkers of the time would have called the “metastability” - required for pursuit of the vanguard aspiration to trans-identity. I was extremely intrigued by the Kepes images because you could see that aspiration being realized, stroke by stroke, particularly with the aesthetics of information flow and the vanguard ethics that consisted in exposing oneself to a sublime overload of information, so as to learn how to navigate this transhuman environment.

From all of this I withdraw two main ideas. The first, which to my dismay I can only express in cybernetic terms, is that the constructivist epistemology taken up with such subversive brilliance by Heinz Von Foerster in the 1970s represents a fulfillment of the modernist dream that begins with the Bauhaus artists’ intimation of subjective potentials latent in the abstract grid. I dunno about you all, but I can’t help but see some family resemblance between Von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics and Bauhaus trans-identity. And whether you accept that or not (or even crack the code - sorry for the obscurity), probably no one would deny that Von Foerster’s classic statements - such as “The environment as we perceive it is our invention,” from the 1973 essay “On Constructing a Reality” - have had enormous consequences on the character of our civilization today, with its simultaneous move into infinite cyberspace and imminent ecological disaster.

The second idea is that in our age, marked by the seemingly arbitrary nature of autonomous information systems and by the weightlessly self-creative capacities of global individuals, what threatens us, perhaps with all the violence that marked the mid-twentieth century, is once again the loss of any sense and social practice of solidarity - a solidarity that I would extend, like Sean Cubitt in his talk, beyond people to things, and particularly to those “things” we used to call nature. I really do think it is the lack of any effective practice of solidarity that has now brought our liberal societies to a triple crisis, economic, ecological and geopolitical (i.e. military). We no longer need the mediating figure of Klee’s angel and Benjamin’s text, today we can feel the gathering storm and see the debris piling up in front of us.

All of which loops the loop and brings us back to the initial question: How to analyze what the world is now becoming through the application of technoscience, without losing all resistance to the present and participating in the very dynamics that seem to be rushing us toward our own undoing? How to find a language that allows one to come to grips with all this as an intellectual, and yet not lose contact with the living beings who are most immediately affected by the violence?

For me it’s a challenge, I don’t know how to do it. I guess that’s one of the basic problems that Armin Medosch and I are trying to resolve in our technopolitics project.

best,
Brian

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