Many in the creative sector see AI as an existential threat not only to their livelihood but to public perceptions of the value of the arts. Controversies can erupt when the use of AI in putatively “human” creations is exposed. Still, it’s hard to know where to draw the line.
The 2024 film The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect who immigrates to the US after World War 2. This character is partly inspired by Moholy-Nagy. In a curious twist, director Brady Corbet has had to defend the use of AI in some of the dialogue editing and, simultaneously, to deny the use of AI in rendering the scenery (including Bauhaus buildings). How much AI is too much?
I doubt Moholy-Nagy’s ghost could help us answer this question. His work, innovative as it was, remains visually and conceptually bound to a mechanical world. Yet his earlier paintings and drawings, influenced by Constructivism and Cubism, are nonetheless a key point of reference for many artists today. Among them is South African Guy Tillim.
Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Tillim has blurred the line between photojournalism and fine art photography. From his front-line reporting with Afrapix in the 1980s to his architectural portraits of post-apartheid Johannesburg, Tillim’s oeuvre is strongly associated with black-and-white images or the muted colour palette of a concrete jungle.
In Lusochroma, his new exhibition at Stevenson’s Cape Town gallery, there is a stark contrast between this aesthetic and the bold colouration of some of the works on display — most impressively in the alteration of photographs taken during Tillim’s travels in Mozambique in the early 2000s. These images have been painted to achieve what the artist calls “geometric interventions with kaleidoscopic effects”, drawing Moholy-Nagy into “irresistible communication” with the built environment of Maputo.
The result is a dazzling exercise in perspective, forcing the viewer to look afresh at what might otherwise seem to be familiar urban African tropes (Tillim refers to the “recognisable iconography” in which a photographer supplying international news agencies is expected to trade).
A more haunting gaze predominates in Jemila Isa’s Held By Invisible Hands, which is exhibited alongside Lusochroma. The subjects in Isa’s paintings represent Nigerian women who, denied agency in a patriarchal society, are trapped by traditions that impose a narrow vision of fertility and motherhood. Their “startled eyes” and facial expressions — “vacant, apathetic and embodying a quiet urgency” — convey the “invisible constraints imposed by rigid beliefs”.
If Tillim’s painted photographs bring out the geometric vibrancy of the abstract early 20th century style to which Moholy-Nagy contributed, the faces of Isa’s female figures recall the many disturbing eyes of Cubism. While Picasso et al fragmented the two-dimensional plane to imply multiple perspectives, the “flat” eyes painted by Isa belong to women who seem unable to move.
• ‘Lusochroma’ and ‘Held By Invisible Hands’ are at Stevenson Cape Town until June 21.
Business Day.
CHRIS THURMAN: When AI threatens perceptions of the value of the arts
The artists of now occupy a world in which the human is no longer unquestionably at the centre of creative practice
Image: Supplied
Artists and designers facing difficult decisions about whether to embrace or resist the incursion of AI into the process of creating images — and if so, how — may find themselves turning to the past to consider how their predecessors responded to technological developments. One wonders, for example, what figures like Làszló Moholy-Nagy would have said or made if they were alive today.
Moholy-Nagy was an artist and professor in the Bauhaus school in Weimar (a Hungarian Jew, he left Germany for England and the US when the Nazis came to power). Working in photography, collage, painting, sculpture and film, and pioneering new forms such as light art, he was also a tech enthusiast. It is tempting to imagine Moholy-Nagy experimenting with Midjourney or other AI image generators.
The difference is that, even when imagining “things to come” — to borrow from the title of HG Wells’ science fiction novel, which was turned into a 1936 film for which Moholy-Nagy designed the special effects — the artists of that time still occupied a world in which the human was unquestionably at the centre of creative practice. These humans could expect their work to be attributed to them, and could reasonably hope to be paid for it. There was monetary and social value attached to their skill and expertise.
CHRIS THURMAN: ‘Why not a print?’ shows you don’t make a print on a whim
Many in the creative sector see AI as an existential threat not only to their livelihood but to public perceptions of the value of the arts. Controversies can erupt when the use of AI in putatively “human” creations is exposed. Still, it’s hard to know where to draw the line.
The 2024 film The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect who immigrates to the US after World War 2. This character is partly inspired by Moholy-Nagy. In a curious twist, director Brady Corbet has had to defend the use of AI in some of the dialogue editing and, simultaneously, to deny the use of AI in rendering the scenery (including Bauhaus buildings). How much AI is too much?
I doubt Moholy-Nagy’s ghost could help us answer this question. His work, innovative as it was, remains visually and conceptually bound to a mechanical world. Yet his earlier paintings and drawings, influenced by Constructivism and Cubism, are nonetheless a key point of reference for many artists today. Among them is South African Guy Tillim.
Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Tillim has blurred the line between photojournalism and fine art photography. From his front-line reporting with Afrapix in the 1980s to his architectural portraits of post-apartheid Johannesburg, Tillim’s oeuvre is strongly associated with black-and-white images or the muted colour palette of a concrete jungle.
In Lusochroma, his new exhibition at Stevenson’s Cape Town gallery, there is a stark contrast between this aesthetic and the bold colouration of some of the works on display — most impressively in the alteration of photographs taken during Tillim’s travels in Mozambique in the early 2000s. These images have been painted to achieve what the artist calls “geometric interventions with kaleidoscopic effects”, drawing Moholy-Nagy into “irresistible communication” with the built environment of Maputo.
The result is a dazzling exercise in perspective, forcing the viewer to look afresh at what might otherwise seem to be familiar urban African tropes (Tillim refers to the “recognisable iconography” in which a photographer supplying international news agencies is expected to trade).
A more haunting gaze predominates in Jemila Isa’s Held By Invisible Hands, which is exhibited alongside Lusochroma. The subjects in Isa’s paintings represent Nigerian women who, denied agency in a patriarchal society, are trapped by traditions that impose a narrow vision of fertility and motherhood. Their “startled eyes” and facial expressions — “vacant, apathetic and embodying a quiet urgency” — convey the “invisible constraints imposed by rigid beliefs”.
If Tillim’s painted photographs bring out the geometric vibrancy of the abstract early 20th century style to which Moholy-Nagy contributed, the faces of Isa’s female figures recall the many disturbing eyes of Cubism. While Picasso et al fragmented the two-dimensional plane to imply multiple perspectives, the “flat” eyes painted by Isa belong to women who seem unable to move.
• ‘Lusochroma’ and ‘Held By Invisible Hands’ are at Stevenson Cape Town until June 21.
Business Day.
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