Monday Morning Lecture - Week No 26

Within this lecture, we looked at Modernist Universalism, which is to talk to everyone once and that there is an ideal way of living. Once we had looked at this we looked at a László Moholy-Nagy, who is a Hungarian painter and photographer who was a teacher at the Bauhaus school. Whilst looking at László Moholy-Nagy we looked at the Importance of Technology.  After we had researched into this we then moved onto look at a Swiss artist, designer and writer called Johannes Itten. When looking at Johannes Itten, we found that the designs had to include bright colours. In this lecture we recapped on a black mountain college that we looked at in the previous lecture. The artwork is like a hippy culture but have expanded interventions.

The next part we looked at in this lecture was Trellick Tower in London one piece of modernist architecture and has a structure. Hostility to ornamentation (rejection of Baroque/Rococo) Hostility to serif fonts- promotion of sans-serif fonts, that has a twist. Sans serif built on legibility and wanted to strip back all of the hand crafted font styles. Helvetica font style is mainly used in posters and advertising designs like banners. A man did a documentary about the font style Helvetica a few years ago. We questioned whether we see the Helvetica font style everyone and huswick makes a documentary that the font style is used a lot more than it actually is.

Modernist design became interested in photography and adding photography into their work. They wanted to use experimental techniques. The birth of modernism was our of the soviet context, the Russian constructivism, modernist designer learned much form the European artistic avant-garde. We then watched a short clip called the man with a movie camera, which is a machine aesthetic. The film we watched is a silent film, Vertov’s opening statement. Kinography- means kinetic/moving. Music was played throughout the film, the film included kinetic moving images and the screen was split into two. There was lots of evidence of the movie maker himself in the film. The film we were shown was produced in the 1920’s. Fast paced music.

I found this lecture good, as I learnt lots of new information about art in the past that I hadn't known about before.