Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Telephone Pictures (1922)

Work description from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy himself:

“In 1922, I ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in porcelain enamel. I had the factory;s color chart before me and I sketched my paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone the factory supervisor had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. (It was like phayin chess by correspondence.) One of the pictures was delivered in three different sizes, so that I could study the subtle differences in the color relations caused by the enlargement and reduction.”

Critics from Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications by Eduardo Kac:
” With the three telephone pictures described above, the artist was taking his constructivist ideas several steps futher. First he had to determine precisely the position of forms in the picture plane with the minute squares in the graph paper as the grid through which the pictorial elements structured themselves. This process of pixellation in a sense anticipated the methods of computer art. In order to explain the composition over the phone, Moholy had to convert the art work from a physical entity to a description of the object, establishing a relationship of semiotic equivalence. This procedure antedates concerns set forth by conceptual art in the 1950’s. Next Moholy transmitted the pictorial data making the process of transmission a significant part of the overall experience. The transimission dramatized the idea that the modern artist can be subjectively distant, he or she can be personally removed from the work. It expanded the notion that the art object doesn’t have to be the direct result of the hand or the craft of the artist.

Moholy’s decision to call a sign factory, capable of providing industrial finishing and scientific precision, instead of, say, an amateur painter, attests to his motifs. Furthermore, the multiplication of the final object in three variations destroyed the notion of the “original” work, pointing towards the new artforms that emerge in the age of mechanical reproduction. Unlinke Monet’s sequential paintings, the three similar telephone pictures are not a series. They are copies without an original. Another interesting aspect of the work is that scale, a fundamental aspect of any art piece, becomes relative and secondary. The work becomes volatized, being able to be embodied in different sizes, Needless to say, relative scale is a characteristic of computer art, where the work exists in the virtual space of the screen and can be embodied in a small print and in a mural of gigantic proportions.”

For the whole article by Eduardo Kac  go to here.