M+M: Martino Stierli: Montage and the Metropolis

Interlocutor: Brigid Doherty

Montage is omnipresent in modern culture and discourse. Rooted in industrial production and popular image practices in the nineteenth century, and achieving its recognizable form in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, the juxtaposition of (photographic) elements became, through adaption and analogy, a primary compositional principle in all artistic media. A direct consequence and function fo what Walter Benjamin termed “the age of technological reproducibility,” montage addresses the mode of perception specific to the mechanized metropolis. Engaging history and theory of architecture, photography, film, literature, historiography, and popular visual culture since the late nineteenth century, Montage and the Metropolis reassesses the category of montage as not only a dominant modernist compositional principle but also a way to think about embodied moving through space more generally­—a key strategy for the production of meaning, adopted by multiple constituencies.

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), a role he assumed in March 2015.

Brigid Doherty is an associate professor in the Departments of German and Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.

Online Event
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