From Faktura to Factography

Book Review: Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis

“…Written for the general reader, it is accessible but its broad historical and theoretical interpretations are limited. Vossoughian does refer to Peter Bürger's writings on the autonomy of the avant-garde (Bürger, 1984), Benjamin Buchloh's essays on faktura and factography (Buchloh, 1984), Walter Benjamin's distracted reception of photography and film (Benjamin, 1968) and Benedict Anderson's work on imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) to situate Neurath the urbanist and curator within the modernist tradition of critique of the autonomy of culture. As Vossoughian argues, although Neurath's urban initiatives and museum exhibits were not cutting edge artistically, they were radical in their serial reproducibility, providing a social critique of both the city and the museum as institutions.…”

Ideologies in Fact: Still and Moving‐Image Documentary in the Soviet Union, 1927–1932

“…For Stepanova, these constructive gaps are what drive audience activity, challenging the passive contemplation that results from traditional composition. She aims to move, she wrote earlier in the decade, from the model of a museum “to [the model of] an archive” (quoted in Buchloh 1984:91). Archival projects are by necessity fragmented—emerging from various imaginations and spaces, containing disparate forms and material.…”

“…Benjamin Buchloh has argued that factography enacted a shift in emphasis from the indexical quality of the image to its iconicity. Buchloh (1984:103) turns to El Lissitzky's photo‐montage work of 1927 to demonstrate how the “gradual return to the iconic” is evident not only in the composition of the individual photographs but in the photo‐montage itself. There, in earlier work, “the network of cuts and lines and jutting edges and unmediated transitions from fragment to fragment was as important, if not more so, as the actual iconic representation contained in the fragment itself.” The shift at the compositional level thus echoed the shift at the structural level.…”

Activist Photo Spaces: ‘Situation Awareness’ and the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions

“…' (1931: 177). The crucial difference between 'simultaneous collective reception' -to borrow a term from Benjamin Buchloh (1984) -and situation awareness seems to be heavy reliance on the visual versus a deep engagement with the haptic. Situation awareness in the Building Workers Unions exhibition demanded participation from a multiplicity of the viewer's senses concurrently, including touch, sight and even sound from the rotating panels.…”