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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathMontage/Sampling/Morphing
 
 
 
 
 

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and photograph and the simultaneous disillusioning display and thus appropriation of the media necessary for the illusion.

On the other hand, one observes that by using new technology—photographs and film—art strays from the nineteenth century discourse of justification geared towards individual capabilities: the discourse of sensitivity, of rarity, of the decadent and sentimental, the skilled person and the master—and which art accepts, indeed celebrates as the greatest narcissistic insult to the civil individual and other known humanisms: the subordination to an objective. The objective here is rarely politics, politicization, or progress, but technology itself. Because one can still subjectively argue over the epitome of the objective—society— one chooses another term for the objective, in order to perhaps also creep up from behind on the socially objective: technological or scientific progress—a strategy, by the way, that even today is still widespread. The classic case for the in truth absolute vagueness and need for interpretation of this kind of subordination to, or justification by, such new technologies is futurism [see Luigi Russolo] or

 

constructivism [see Gustav Klucis]: discernible in the fact that both extreme right-wing as well as extreme left-wing versions were possible. But what is decisive about this second version is that one does not—with the aid of technology and justified by it—do what one anyway demanded, be it aesthetically or politically justified, but derived from the design of technology, progress no longer being oriented towards previously known criteria; rather on the contrary one rejects the previously known aesthetic and political aims and their humanism in favor of the objective arrival of technology. In the process, illusionism is not a problem. Rather one of the aims of the montage should be—as for instance in designs by Moholy-Nagy—to perfect the illusion—not in the sense of an intentional fraud of course, but as the augmentation of the wealth of artistic forms of representation, which however have no intention of breaking with the illusion.

In both of these versions of the montage there is still a very decisive traditional and, from that point of view, also falsifiable factor: that of building. Montage may build from new material, with new tools and with different and more precise, more illusionistic or more

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