▮ The Present Age

Moholy-Nagy and visual experiments in Texas

I hosted a series of four talks in the high desert exploring bleeding-edge artistic ideas and techniques across eras.

For The Present Age, I examined László Moholy-Nagy's philosophy and his work integrating scientific tools into art to expand human perception.

The talk narrowed to a curious 1942 visit to Texas: Moholy-Nagy, who pioneered the use of photography, film, and light as artistic mediums and was then running Chicago's experimental New Bauhaus, visited a women's college in Denton. The visit sparked the creation of the first studio art program in the Texas public university system and catalyzed early modern art throughout the region.

Pulling from his writing and letters to trace Moholy-Nagy's perspectives on art education and his influence on Texas modernism and women artists, I shared personal reflections from viewing his work in Budapest and Los Angeles, then followed the thread to his collaboration with György Kepes at MIT and the founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

The talk's title references both our current moment and the journal Jelenkor ("The Present Age") that Moholy-Nagy worked with while recovering from war injuries in 1917. I considered connecting his perception experiments to today's expanding visual sensing technologies: drones, telescopes, satellite imaging. Earlier artistic explorations of human sensing capabilities prefigured our contemporary tools for seeing. The border region where we gathered has become testing ground for the very visual sensing technologies that extend the perceptual experiments Moholy-Nagy began a century ago.

Presenting this material in the evening within the world's largest dark sky preserve created its own resonance. A discussion of an artist whose medium was light itself, delivered under conditions of exceptional darkness. This presentation was part of a high desert art talk series I produced examining bleeding-edge ideas across eras.