For Chris
Everyday serendipity is often the last resort. I look in the global electronic mirror (in part, the bots take into account the geographical origin of the initial search zone; let’s not kid ourselves about the democracy of knowledge), and come across images, drawings, paintings, photographs. One of the bookmarks (three in all) is a photograph by László Moholy-Nagy. I’ve long been attracted to László, but until this morning, 10:25, I hadn’t yet reached the kairos. And here it is, I feel it, I know it. Kairos is not inspiration, it’s a phenomenon that’s hard to put into words. Let’s try anyway. It’s a conjunction made up of the actualization of a correspondence with “something” plastic, but even with the living, of course, with the recipient’s own disposition (a philosophical concept); and the word must be understood almost literally: the body is also a receptacle, the “matrix” of the khôra.
For Plato, the khôra is the vehicle of becoming; exactly what every natural thing is, the receptacle of becoming. Do you follow? The khôra is always available, always open, the kairos is not. The kairos can’t be summoned, it can’t be given an appointment; it’s absolutely unpredictable (capricious?). But it comes, eventually, and always shows up. Let’s say that it manifests itself if there’s something already engaged with it, on a specific subject; what remains is to make the connection between the subject and “it”, in other words, the actualization of kairos. And this can take time; sometimes years (if done). That’s the way it is. There is no time limit. Perhaps you know it, or recognize it?
And yet, after having put myself in a state of maximum receptivity (as if this were exceptional), like the other day at the Musée d’Art Moderne (Beaubourg), if there was indeed a perceptual connection, there was no “higher order” perception (“Higher order thoughts”, as the philosopher David Rosenthal would say). Indeed, perceiving a as a is not yet “saying” something about a. To say “I see the fog in the street” is not to “say” something other than formal and informational; it is not transcendental (take the term as just a “displacement”, as G. Genette — rightly — understands it).
Although I’d seen Moholy-Nagy’s photographs before, until then, there was no connection, i.e. no link between A and B. We understood that the connection A = A is tautological, which is why it doesn’t say much. Transcendence, on the other hand, is the +, the side-step, the new, hence the B. Do you follow?
And then, we come to this image, a ‘bot’ from the Saint Louis Art Museum:
The year is 1925. It’s almost prehistoric. But it’s still “talking” (metaphor), and a photo that’s still “talking” from 1925 is a good one. Not everyone will be able to say the same in… 99 years’ time! We don’t know how it’s done, though of course we assume light effects, reflections and an assortment of model-like objects. All this, I’m guessing, has to fit on a small surface. And yet, as soon as you zoom into the picture, you travel. Surfaces become individual, distinct and express their character, as seen here:
Accident or not, we don’t know.
Or here:
Areas of shadow, areas of light. Photography. (I consider this detail ↑ magnificent). So, before I even started writing about László, I didn’t know that I was going to keep in mind this notion of a journey, actualized during the zoom into the image; a kind of impression, all in all, that I don’t think I’ve experienced before, if I remember correctly. What if this is what a photograph is? A journey. But isn’t that the broader definition of a work of art? Claro que si.
The more I look at this photograph, the more I realize, as with this close-up, that Moholy-Nagy is all about connection. And here, in this close-up instantiation alone, it connects.
This photograph by Moholy-Nagy raises the question of what a photograph is. There are photographers who give us answers, but sometimes, with the supremely seductive power it embodies, it can seem that the whole question is How long does the answer last? By this I mean, once again, that photography remains a young art, as is cinema; 180 years is young for an art (I obtain this age by subtracting 1844 from 2024, the date of the first book illustrated with photographs, The Pencil of Nature, by W.H.F. Talbot). This does not mean that photography was already an art form in 1844; I think we need to wait a little longer. Above all, photography is a technique for the “reproducing” of the real, and Talbot, like other pioneers, was a mathematician and physicist. Without these qualities, Talbot would not have invented the negative (in the 1840s). In short, inventing a technique is not yet inventing an art form; that’s going to take time, and we’re still in that time.
Ref. Gérard Genette, L’œuvre de l’art. Immanence et transcendance, Seuil, 1994, Paris
Léon Mychkine