Event 1: LACMA and Moholy Nagy

On April 15, I visited LACMA with a friend and we joined a tour introducing an artist called Moholy Nagy. Moholy was a painter and photographer of the 20th century and strongly advocated the integration of technology and industry into arts. This event is closely related to the course, because Moholy’s works are good examples of closing the gap between what CP Snow called two cultures.

A picture with the tour guide in LACMA

Moholy’s interest in art embracing manufacturing techniques can be seen from his experiments of integrating materials such as aluminum, nickel, glass and plastic into artworks. Examples include the spiral sculpture made of nickel-plated iron, the painting “AL3”, which is a pencil painting on aluminum, and “La Sarraz”, in which a material for construction called sandpaper is used. In “AL3”, Moholy also experimented a new technique of spraying paint using an air brush, and he succeeded in eliminating nearly all signs of the artist’s hand.

Nickel sculpture of spiral

"AL3"

"La Sarraz"

As I mentioned before, Moholy was also a photographer. However, what he did with camera was a bit different from conventional photography. Kodachrome was his first color film. In Kodachrome, Moholy chose to shoot 35 mm color slides, which he preferred to show as projections rather than prints. These images capture dizzying urban views, producing visual effects achieved by long nighttime exposures. Again, this is an example of integrating art and science.

Moholy's first color film Kodachrome

Moreover, in many of Moholy’s works, he limited the content to geometric shapes and colors, which was very similar to what Piet Mondrian did. For instance, in Moholy’s work “Yellow Circle and Black Square”, he used geometric forms of circle, square and diagonals, as well as transparency created by separately mixed, opaque colors. Another example is “Construction on a Blue Ground”, in which the deep blue ground is overlaid with geometrical bars of green, red, yellow and black.

Construction on a Blue Ground

Yellow Circle and Black Square

Moholy's notion of integrating art with technology and industry is impressive, and I saw so many new ideas in this tour, including an unique way of using camera, placing industrial materials onto an artwork, using unconventional techniques of painting and creating interesting visions by shadows, etc. All these provide convincing evidence of how science can bring artists to a brand new world. In the past, I always created art by purely sketching and coloring, but now I realize how unlimited art can be. From now on, I will try using my science knowledge to make innovations of art. For instance, I just came up with an idea of using paper chromatography, a method of separating colored chemicals in chemistry, to create an artwork. I have no idea if it would work or not, but just as what Moholy tells us, art can be full of experiments!

Paper chromatography
(from Google images)

I highly recommend my classmates to visit LACMA and if possible, take part in one of the tours, because sometimes we do not really understand what is being expressed in an artwork, and a tour guide can help us with that. In this tour, I saw a comprehensive showcase of how important science is in art and vice versa. The core of science is doing experiments, and we can do so in art as well. We should bear in mind that science is not only a tool but also a stepping stone to better and more various arts.

Sources:

Unknown. “László Moholy-Nagy”. Wikipedia.

Unknown. “AL3”, Norton Simon Museum, 2014. Accessed 16 Apr 2017. Web.

Botar, Oliver. Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered, New York, 2006, p. 135-36. Print.

Unknown. “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present”, LACMA, 2017. Accessed 16 Apr 2017. Web.

Unknown.“László Moholy-Nagy”, Andrea Rosen Gallery, 2007. Accessed 16 Apr 2017. Web.