The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979

The Expendable Reader John McHale

This edition first published by GSAPP BOOKS 2011 © The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

Essays © the authors.

All rights reserved GSAPP Books An imprint of The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation Columbia University 1172 Amsterdam Ave. 409 Avery Hall New York, NY 10027 Visit our website at www.arch.columbia.edu/publications No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

The editors would like to thank the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Office of the Dean, Mark Wigley, for generously supporting the publication of this book.

GSAPP Sourcebooks Series 1 Editor: Alex Kitnick Series Editor: Craig Buckley Graphic Design: Geoff Han Copy Editor: Daniel Berchenko Printed in Hong Kong by Kee Mei Printing Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

John McHale The Expendable Reader Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media (1951–79)

Ed. Alex Kitnick

GSAPP Sourcebooks

The last decades have witnessed a rapid expansion of the field of architecture. If the contemporary panorama appears increasingly vast and accelerated, it is simultaneously populated by a number of openings, holes, and gaps. The Columbia University GSAPP Sourcebooks series addresses itself to overlooked writings on architecture and the city. Emphasizing the specificity and nuance of a single writer, each Sourcebook is guest edited and introduced by a different scholar, critic, or architect, and concentrates on assembling texts previously scattered in disparate sources and on translating works currently unavailable to English-speaking readers. While refusing to conform to a common ideological outlook or specific institutional agenda, the desire to put these writings back into circulation is nevertheless motivated by a sense of urgency and a commitment to discourse and debate.

Contents 7 12

Acknowledgments Introduction John McHale — Hip Artificer

By Alex Kitnick

Modernist Precedents 32 37 40

Problems of Adolescent Art Gropius and the Bauhaus Josef Albers

The Fine Arts and the Mass Media 48 56 64 74 84

The Expendable Ikon 1 The Expendable Ikon 2 The Fine Arts in the Mass Media The Man from Mascom The Plastic Parthenon

Fuller, Technology, and Total Design 104 Buckminster Fuller 124 Technology in the Home 134 Marginalia 143 World Dwelling

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CONTENTS

The Future 180

205 229

The Future and the Functions of Art — A Conversation between Alvin Toffler and John McHale Telefutures — Prospective Observations The Future of Art and Mass Culture

Appendix 260

The Cultural Bomb

276

Afterword Never at Home

By Mark Wigley

Acknowledgments The texts by John McHale that comprise this volume were first published in a variety of different contexts. We thank the editors of the original publications for permitting the reproduction of the texts within this volume. “Problems of Adolescent Art” first appeared in Athene: The Journal of the Society for Education in Art, vol. 5, no. 2 (May 1951), 35–6. “Gropius and the Bauhaus” was first published in Art (March 3, 1955). The abridged version printed here is taken from The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, David Robbins, ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 182. “Josef Albers” was published in Architectural Design (June 1956), 204–5.

“The Fine Arts in the Mass Media” first appeared in Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959), 28–31, and was subsequently reprinted in Pop Art Redefined, John Russell and Suzi Gablik, eds. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 43–6. “The Expendable Ikon 1” was originally published in Architectural Design (February 1959), 82–3; the second installment, “The Expendable Ikon 2,” appeared in Architectural Design (March 1959), 116–7. “The Man from Mascom” was published in Progressive Architecture (February 1967), 170–99. “The Plastic Parthenon” has had a long life. It was first published in Dot Zero 3 (Spring 1967), 4–11, and was subsequently reprinted in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, Gillo Dorfles, ed. (New York: Universe Books, 1969),

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98–110, as well as in Pop Art Redefined, 47–52.

“Buckminster Fuller” was first published in The Architectural Review (July 1956), 12–20. “Technology in the Home” originally appeared in Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 19 (Winter– Spring 1957), 24–7. “Marginalia” was published in The Architectural Review (May 1957), 291–2. It belongs to part of a longer series the magazine ran. “World Dwelling” was originally published in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal (1967), 120–9. “The Future and the Functions of Art: A Conversation Between Alvin Toffler and John McHale” appeared in ARTnews (February 1973), 24–8. “Telefutures: Prospective Observations,” published as part of the proceedings of a conference at MoMA, first appeared in The New Television: A Public/Private Art, Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977), 262–77. The version of “The Future of Art and Mass Culture” printed here originally appeared in Leonardo 12 (Winter 1979), 59–64. It later appeared in an extended version in Futures (June 1978), 178–90. “The Cultural Bomb,” ca.

1959, is published here for the first time. I found it in the Herbert Marshall McLuhan Papers at the National Archives in Ottawa, Canada [MG31 D 156, vol. 31, file 34]. It belongs to the correspondence between McLuhan and McHale.

Though this book deals in part with ideas of expendability, the discussions I had with Rey Akdogan, Craig Buckley, and Geoff Han during

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its development will stay with me for a long time.

Mark Wigley’s support has also had a positive effect, and encouragement from Beatriz Colomina and Anthony Vidler has been vital. Finally, this book would not have come to fruition without the benefit of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.

Introduction

John McHale — Hip Artificer Introduction by Alex Kitnick If one attempted to cobble together all the different roles that John McHale played in his life, one might come up with a job title along the lines of artist/graphic designer/information theorist/architectural critic/sociologist/futurist. McHale was always doing more than one thing at a time, and all his work had implications that reached far outside itself, linking up with other realms of thought.

As a key convener of London’s Independent Group, an interdisciplinary band of artists, architects, and critics that met in the early 1950s, he organized talks on subjects ranging from information theory to Dada to automobile design. He was also making collages that attempted to grasp man’s relationship to technology and writing articles about the mass media that had serious consequences for the production of art. Later on, he would pen essays about architecture, with an eye toward its consequences for ecology, and chart data that visualized the world’s resources. His idea of a working practice was always an expanded one. In 1956, Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art, tried to capture something of his activities in a bio that accompanied his essay “Technology in the Home” — an attempt to map out changes

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affecting the postwar domestic sphere. “John McHale was born in 1922,” it begins.

Taught at various schools from 1947–1951, and was recently a special student at Yale University Dept. of Design. His own work as a constructivist-collagist shown in various group exhibitions in England. He designed ‘Collages & Objects’ Exhibition at I.C.A. in 1954. Participated in ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956.

Designed ‘Picasso Himself ’ exhibition at the I.C.A. in 1956. At present preparing exhibition of the work of Buckminster Fuller.1 There is a lot going on in this short statement — both teaching and studying, making art and undertaking its display, wrestling with Picasso and Fuller alike. One notes a great hyphenated word here as well — “constructivist-collagist,” a neologism that bridges two infrequently associated avant-gardes, but which also might point toward yet another kind of practice.2 In fact, one might use this as shorthand for McHale’s project at large, bringing together as it did various parts of artistic and architectural history in unlikely and provocative confrontations. Fittingly for a Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 19 (Winter– Spring 1956 –7).

2 For more on McHale’s constructivist-type work, see Lawrence Alloway, “L’intervention du spectateur,” Aujourd’hui: art et architecture (November 1955), 25–6.

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“constructivist-collagist,” McHale was always occupied with “mass” questions — questions about mass society and mass media and how these forces transformed ideas of art, architecture, and culture as traditionally defined. At the same time, McHale was always attentive to the individual parts that went into the making of mass forms, and which, in turn, were affected by them. If McHale was a “constructivist-collagist,” he was also a “modernist-pluralist” trying to imagine a system that could account for totality and difference — society and the individual — at once. One reads him today not to agree with him, but rather to look at a transitional moment, a prehistory of the present, and to therefore get a sense of some of the possibilities and pitfalls of this moment that we have inherited.

One gets a sense of McHale’s key interests in one of his earliest writings, a review of Siegfried Giedion’s Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork, which was published in 1954. The article does not linger much over details; in fact, it is in something of a rush to make its big points. McHale credits Gropius’s work with being “the first complete attempt at a total design education, in terms of a real situation, in the early 20C scene” — the same way he would laud Fuller’s accomplishments just a couple of years later.3 Total design is a key concept that will move throughout all of McHale’s thinking, functioning as an imperative to conceive of

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the world on macro and micro scales at once, from mass housing down to table lamps. While valorizing this part of his practice, McHale criticized Gropius for refusing to separate his totalizing brand of thought from his craftsman’s ethos, and McHale quickly dismisses the Bauhaus’s ethic of “truth to materials” as “pretty useless now.” Casting aside the intrinsic worth of materiality, McHale is straight to the point as to what he thinks can be gotten out of the Bauhaus, namely its stress on “communication” and its interest in a “both/and” versus “either/or” aesthetic. How the Bauhaus stressed communication is not made particularly clear in McHale’s review, but one takes note here of the early murmurings of postmodern thought. “I prefer ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black and white,” Robert Venturi will soon declare in his gentle manifesto of 1966, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and the importance of communication to postmodernism’s sign language goes without saying.4 Read through McHale, the modernist Bauhaus becomes pop architecture avant la lettre, the total design ethos of the John McHale, “Gropius and the Bauhaus,” review of Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork, by Siegfried Giedion, Art (March 3, 1955). Reprinted in this volume. See also John McHale, “Total Design: An Essay on Buckminster Fuller,” Architecture and Building (July 1958), 244–51.

4 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 16.

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former and the symbolic multiplicity of the latter becoming somehow compatible. If the Bauhaus is almost all right, McHale nevertheless gives it a bit of retrofitting to bring it up to date.

In addition to Gropius, McHale reread other classics of modernism at this time as well, making them new, as in his review of a Josef Albers exhibition held at Yale, where McHale was a visiting student in 1955. Encountering a Bauhaus master up close, McHale sensed a kindred spirit, despite their formal differences; where Albers’s paintings, such as his famous Homage to the Square series begun in 1950, systematically work through permutations of flat color within a highly delimited set of forms, McHale’s collages cobble together the assorted junk of the mass media into Arcimboldoesque accretions. Despite this, McHale saw affinities between their practices, reasoning that both were interested in the status of contemporary perception. Read through McHale, Albers’s geometric studies part ways with the Platonic absolutes associated with modernist abstraction and enter into a relationship with a kind of optical testing, probing the viewer with various tricks of the eye. Where Albers turned away from the imagery of the mass media, McHale sought to engage this material in order to show to show that one could only understand everyday reality by facing it directly. “After a year at Yale with Josef Albers,” the English art and design journal Uppercase explained,

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[McHale] returned obsessed with the American scene and its throwaway civilization. He collected endless quantities of popular imagery and began to make collages out of them — recreating the multi-evocative image (consistency or contradiction between the whole and its parts) of the surrealists in terms of the fifties. Where Max Ernst turned to nineteenth century engravings, McHale uses Vogue, Life, Colliers.5 Absorbing and expelling high-modernist teachings at once, McHale returned to London with a trunk of magazine clippings that would serve as the raw material for Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Houses So Different, So Appealing? and a host of his own crude manmachine collages. Meeting a formalist master, McHale wound up a late Surrealist, scavenging a throwaway civilization. His interest in the “multievocative image” is nevertheless indebted to Albers’s optical lessons. McHale’s scrappy collages square the stuff of society with the way one actually encounters it; they overlap and imbricate in such a way that one must zoom back and forth between part and whole. These collages, moreover, take seriously the effects that media and technology have on the individual body, as well as on society. One sees this, for example, in McHale’s famous collage, Machine Made America, 5

See “John McHale,” Uppercase 1 (1958), unpaginated.

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which graced the cover of The Architectural Review (May 1957). A steak fills out a shoulder and a TV a heart. It is an image of contemporary life somewhere between total design and consumerist mess.

In Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959), where McHale published “The Fine Arts in the Mass Media,” his essay detailing the leveling out of vertical elite culture into a mass horizontal one, as well as the function of the sign of fine art in the space of the mass media, one finds this updated bio: John McHale, artist, special scholarship Yale, 1955–6, exhibited in various groups, one man show. Articles on the ‘Expendable Ikon’ in Architectural Design 1958. Currently working in graphics and films.6 Entranced with the US, McHale nevertheless went back to London after his time at Yale; perhaps it was only because of this parallax view that he was able to pick up on American eccentricities and specificities — to feel its “pop.” In 1956 he worked on an environment with Richard Hamilton and John Voelcker for the famous This is Tomorrow exhibition, animated with a talking Robbie the Robot and a paper-thin Marilyn Monroe, but McHale also continued with his own individual work, which remained within the tactile 6

Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959), 38

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language of collage. At the same time, he made graphics and films for various companies, such as Revlon and Air France. His artwork and his workwork had a symbiotic relationship, the former reflecting on the latter’s effects. In his Telemath collages, television screens and human heads extend from one another, each seemingly downloading visual information from the next. In many ways, McHale’s graphic language parallels Marshall McLuhan’s imagining of media as “extensions of man” — an idea that McLuhan will take up in writing just a few years later.7 Using the mass media as their literal content, these collages simultaneously articulate the environment that the mass media created, which is characterized less by communication than collision. “Collage as a medium for the construction of these ikons has an appropriateness in its parallel to our actual experience of the image, as we turn the pages of a magazine, watch a movie, or scan a newspaper,” McHale wrote in a short essay accompanying these works.8 With fragments heaping one on top the other, McHale saw the world as collage, and eventually he felt that making his own miniature versions was no longer the best way to get a hold of it and analyze it. Over time, he turned more and more to writing as a way to examine and map out the media’s effects. As the critic Lawrence Alloway See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964).

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later described it, “First phase pop art had its casualties and perils: McHale, for instance, became so engrossed by the non-art material that he failed to forge it into traditionally defined art.”9 For McHale, of course, such a decision was neither casualty, peril, nor failure, but rather a recognition of changing circumstances.

McHale explained his thinking in “The Expendable Ikon,” published in the February and March 1959 issues of Architectural Design. He reasoned that “the traditional role of the fine arts,” which was to make “statements about man’s total environmental situation,” had been taken over by “the technological folk arts” — with “totems, masks, a ritual dance, a poem or a cathedral” giving way to “newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the movies.”10 Albeit novel, McHale saw these media as more than messages in their own right; they carried distinct concepts and ideas that reflected on this new situation, and that somehow John McHale in Three Collagists, exh. cat. (London: ICA, 1958), unpaginated. “These images,” McHale wrote of the collages, “are in the nature of ikons. They attempt to define an approximate human image in terms of an iconography derived, often literally, from the context of the mass media. The extended environs of the movie, television, the picture magazine, and the glossy ad reflect the current human situation—both as symbol and for real.…”

9 Lawrence Alloway, “‘Pop Art’ since 1949,” The Listener, December 27, 1962. Reprinted in Lawrence Alloway, Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic (London: Routledge, 2006), 83.

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compensated for the radical shifts mass media themselves were causing. (The cacophony inherent in McHale’s collages gets filtered out somehow in his writing, where the media therapeutically offer an antidote to the chaos they create.) Perhaps the core of “The Expendable Ikon” is the various categories into which McHale breaks these messages down — “On the Space Frontier”; “Birth, Death, Rage, Joy and Destruction”; “The Big and Little Screen”; and “The Box, the Clock and the Big Question” — all of which, McHale claimed, posited man as the central element. “The Girl with the Most” is perhaps the most telling of what the “expendable ikon” might mean. Marilyn Monroe is held up as the key example — as someone not only defined by her own personal iconography but whose image had saturated the media to such an extent that she became an icon herself, serving as a model for “universal imitation.” With originals expendable, imitation becomes a valid and important form of transmission — a fact displayed in a number of pictures accompanying the article that depict other John McHale, “The Expendable Ikon,” Architectural Design (February and March 1959), 82–3, 116–17. McHale was not alone in seeing communications media as supplanting traditional sites of meaning. Alison and Peter Smithson also reached a similar conclusion. See “But Today we collect Ads,” (1956) in Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop, Brian Wallis, ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 53–5.

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starlets formed in the Monroe mould, such as Jayne Mansfield and Kim Novak. Everywhere, too, McHale saw mass imitation afoot, which gave way to hypothetically endless rows of like things and the creation of typologies, patterns, and flows.

Originals would no longer be necessary in a world in which copies engender equal effects. Expendability is no longer a threat to affective power since aura is not only mobile but can also be mass-produced. “The transference of symbolic ‘affect’ through replication has always worked through sacred objects,” McHale wrote in his essay, “The Plastic Parthenon,” published in 1967, which elaborated on much of the thinking contained in seed in “The Expendable Ikon.”11 “Replicas of gods and saints, and of their relics, carried the same magical powers as the originals.” The mass production of the media had eclipsed the unique aura of the art object in its power to shape society and, as such, the task of the true artist was now to work in the space of life. McHale concluded, The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with defining alternative cultural strategies through series John McHale, “The Plastic Parthenon,” Dot Zero 3 (1967), 4–11. Reprinted in this volume. Particularly notable in “The Plastic Parthenon” is McHale’s frequent use of art installations, including Ed Kienholz’s The Beanery and Niki de Saint Phalle’s She: A Cathedral, as examples of this new simulated environment.

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of communicative gestures in multi-media forms.

As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the masterwork may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of the art object than by furnishing new conceptualities of life style and orientation. Generally, as the new cultural continuum underlines the expendability of the material artifact, life is defined as art — as the only contrastingly permanent and continuously unique experience.12 The art object can be tossed since life — or “lifestyle” — is now the new work of art. In this formulation, one sees both the utopian potential and the slippery side of McHale’s thought. For though he sees the possibility of better living through art/design (a kind of living defined by increasing choice and “freedom”), the flipside of this dream is the situation we have been left with today, in which the minutiae of life are increasingly managed and capitalized. One might call it the dialectic of design.

Much of McHale’s thinking — his strangely prophetic probes as well as the somewhat unresolved nature of his conclusions — echoes the work of Marshall McLuhan, and certainly not by accident. McHale was aware of McLuhan’s work as early as 1951 with the publication of McLuhan’s 12

Ibid., 11.

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The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, a compendium of advertisement and case studies that mapped out the structures of industrial man before his leap into the electronic age; indeed, “The Expendable Ikon” shares a similar form.13 McHale’s “technological folk arts,” moreover, are clearly meant to accompany McLuhan’s contemporary “tribal man.” This said, McHale was no mere imitator; he carved out his own position in relation to McLuhan, characterized by its “both/and” ethic in contrast to McLuhan’s “either/or.” In his 1967 review of McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published as “The Man from Mascom,” McHale describes a mediascape characterized by a deep heterogeneity in which printed books exist alongside electronic communications, rather than a world in which emerging forms incessantly bury preceding technologies.14 For McHale, time was less cyclical than it was for McLuhan; no new technology could rekindle the past. Ultimately, he reasoned that “tribal man” would not to be the new model of subjectivity; rather it was to be the “hip artificer” — a master of surfaces, someone quick to the most recent fluctuations in style and See Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon Books, 1951; 1967).

14 John McHale, “The Man from Mascom,” review of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan, Progressive Architecture (February 1967), 170– 99. Reprinted in this volume.

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technology. It was going to take an agile type of person to adapt to — and, indeed, to survive in — this brave new world. It would take someone who would not simply map out changes in the future, but might also help determine its shape.

In the bio accompanying McHale’s “Mascom” review, we get this update on his activities: The reviewer has had a varied career as artist and designer, has written extensively on mass communications, and is currently associated with Buckminster Fuller in conducting research on world resources, human trends and needs at Southern Illinois University.

McHale first met Buckminster Fuller when he was at Yale with Albers, and in 1956 he wrote a long text on the inventor’s work, mapping out his relationship to technology; by the early 1960s McHale had joined him at Southern Illinois University, where Fuller had taken a post in 1959. (In 1968 McHale would earn his doctorate there with a dissertation on “The Future in Social Thought: With Reference to the Social Theories of Saint Simon, Comte, Mead & Parsons.”)15 For McHale, Fuller represented both an important precedent in the history of architectural innovation, as well as a still-unheeded call for change. Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927) was emblematic of what had to be done. Constructed like a car or airplane, it was to be fabricated out of mass-produced

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parts, including pneumatic partitions, sponge floors, and climate-controlled spaces. “The Dymaxion House was never intended as a design for a unique, one-of-a-kind building,” McHale noted in his 1962 book on the inventor. “Its true function was to be the prototype for a world-wide housing industry, similar in scope to the auto, shipbuilding, or airplane industries but different in that it would rent its products on a service, repair, and new model replacement basis rather like a telephone company.”16 Aesthetically, the Dymaxion House did not shy away from its engagement with industry, even if this was simply a by-product of its means of manufacture. Contrary to the traditional idea of the house, which was built to last and constructed from bricks and stone, the Dymaxion was a metal machine meant to be used for a finite period of time and then tossed out. In many ways, it was a product for a new generation at home on the road, “an autonomous, self-maintaining unit, suitable, in a period of mobility and transience, to erect anywhere, and be close to an expendable structure like the automobile.”17 Despite this, McHale’s primary disappointment with Fuller was that in other ways his John McHale, “The Future in Social Thought: With Reference to the Social Theories of Saint Simon, Comte, Mead & Parsons” (dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1968).

16 John McHale, R. Buckminster Fuller (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 18.

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designs were not enough like automobiles, or rather, that they were more like Model Ts. Though Fuller’s work used the techniques and technologies of the automotive industry in its attempt to deal with housing crises, it nevertheless refused to incorporate the automobile’s symbolic vocabularies. Fuller’s designs were industrial products, and they looked the part. They were not gussied up with aesthetic components to entice consumers and spark trends. No styling was applied to them. Fuller often chided the first generation of modern architects, such as Le Corbusier, for calling themselves functionalists when he believed them to be more interested in the aesthetics of function — the look of grain silos and the lines of cruise ships — than in function itself; his work was to be an antidote to that.18 McHale agreed with this critique, but he saw Fuller’s refusal to engage questions of symbolism and style as a missed opportunity. If Fuller’s designs were to catch on, McHale reasoned, they would have to appeal to a public accustomed to the allure of images and advertisements, and would therefore have to style Ibid.

“Fuller’s criticism of the International Style as a ‘fashion inoculation,’ though harsh, is quite justified, for he sees that it was overconcerned with the visual aspect of both buildings and machine products, while structural function and capability had passed over into the invisible terms of hidden alloy strengths and instrumental tolerances.” Ibid, 19.

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themselves accordingly. They could not simply be expendable — they had to be “expendable ikons.”

Over the course of his time with Fuller, McHale’s work became increasingly technical, and he went on to compile endless masses of information about ecological issues and world resources, as evidenced, for example, in the “World Design Science Decade” — a research 19 report that the two put together. At the same time, he also continued to reflect on the implications of these data, as can be witnessed in his issue-length essay, “Man Plus,” published in Architectural Design (February 1967) and later transformed into his book, The Future of the Future (1969).20 Even as McHale spent more time thinking about ecology and resources, however, he never lost his “pop” vision — nor did he ever imagine ecologies and networks apart from the body of man. Indeed, as Mark Wigley has shown, Buckminster Fuller, “World Design Science Decade,” John McHale, ed. (Carbondale: World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, 1963–1967). “While Fuller was ready to expound for hours on the perilous state of a world poised between utopia or oblivion, it was McHale who, with sociological and statistical precision, tracked down the information crucial in authorizing the images that were themselves effective in bringing attention to the problems but useless in their solution.” Anthony Vidler, “Whatever Happened to Ecology? John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival,” Log (Fall 2008), 146.

20 John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: George Braziller, 1969).

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the body was always the nodal point for McHale, the site of connection to larger environments, which was made possible through the donning of prosthetics and “extensions.”21 (The Telemath collages are only an early iteration of “Man Plus.”)

For McHale, information and image ecologies could never be separated from ecologies of earth and oil, and it was his job to try and think them all together. Something of these hybrid interests can be seen in his essay “World Dwelling” (1967) and his long interview with Future Shock author Alvin Toffler.22 Though the latter document has been included in this book, for the most part I have left issues of ecology for another volume.

The expendability in this book’s title points to the importance of the ephemeral in McHale’s thought — a somewhat paradoxical ephemerality in which materials get trashed or recycled but affect can transfer from one thing to the next. If artworks can be expended, however, so too can this book, though hopefully the meanings and affects contained within it will be able to migrate and take up residence elsewhere. It is not only this material object that might be junked, however, See Mark Wigley’s important essay, “Recycling Recycling,” in Eco-Tec: Architecture of the In-Between, Amerigo Marras, ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 39–48.

22 “The Future and the Functions of Art: A Conversation between Alvin Toffler and John McHale,” ARTnews (February 1973), 24–8. Reprinted in this volume.

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but its beholder as well — not as a mortal being so much but as an historical entity (one who reads).

Clearly, reading is changing today, jumping from the book to the e-reader to the digital text embedded in walls or transformed into sound bites or visual glyphs — its support is constantly shifting and its affect moving into new places — and yet it still seems valuable to assemble these texts in a rather old-fashioned medium (if only to test its boundaries) in order to see how McHale imagined the future in another present, and how it feels for us to be living in it today. While we certainly face many either/or choices, there are other things of which we can have both at once.

Modernist Precedents

Problems of Adolescent Art Athene: The Journal of the Society for Education in Art, vol. 5, no. 2 (May 1951), 35–6.

That there is a need for serious attention to the teaching of adolescents is proved at exhibitions of child art which usually falter with the higher age-groups. Recently William Johnstone was quoted in Athene as recommending adolescent students to study “geometry, perspective and calligraphy” and to copy Leonardo’s drawings. However, it is doubtful if this method will encourage artistic expression nor the continuation of aesthetic sensibility into maturity, which, as Mr. McHale points out, is an essential part of the problem.

The field of adolescent art teaching is characterized by a confusion of conflicting theories and methods of teaching. The academic formal tradition still lingers on but is to a great extent being replaced by “free” progressive methods. This tradition, whatever its demerits, gave some measure of security to the adolescent. It had a coherent theory, gave guidance, instruction and a relationship to a generally accepted standard — even if it aesthetically stifled most of its pupils.

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“Free” progressive teaching, whilst it has ensured an incomparably greater continuity of individual creative expression, has failed to avail itself of any rational generally accepted theory and consequently coherent method for practical application in the field. Generally the training given to the art teacher fails to provide this. The free informal attitude to the younger child is carried on; some vague mention of the plateau period fallacy occurs and from thence goes on, via exercises in picture and pattern making, to some emotional mystique of teaching based on “the need for the adolescent to create at all cost, to externalise his conflicts and fantasies,” and so on.

This results mainly in one of two attitudes.

In the first, complete freedom of working is given to the child: due to environmental and other pressures this results, normally, in inhibition or the elaborate reproduction of kitsch. On the other hand, as dangerous a procedure occurs; the teacher imbued with a laudable if misinformed enthusiasm for creativity takes up an affect relationship with the children and, by projecting his or her own feelings and attitudes, unconsciously succeeds in working vicariously through them.

Apparently free work is produced which unmistakeably shows but one temperament and aesthetic attitude at work. It is not progress or freedom merely to substitute the encouragement of, say, the expressionist mode as against a less fashion-

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able realism. Often work of this nature by virtue of its considerable impact is acclaimed whilst that which is less spectacular but more genuinely individual is passed over.

There are, of course, exceptions to these rough generalisations, but in the main they apply, particularly in state schools.

A more rational approach to adolescent art would demand the utilisation of much accumulated research of the past few decades, particularly in the psychology of the creative processes. Studies such as those of Lowenfeld into visual and haptic imagery, so far used only by a few pioneers, should be part of the background of every art teacher. An excellent summary of most that is of value in the field is to be found in Dr. Read’s Education Through Art, which might be adopted as the textbook for a fresh and more coherent approach.

Towards such coherence the main points which require stressing appear to be: a) The child itself. At about eleven years old the child becomes preoccupied with adult standards consequently inhibited in his art work. Physiologically the change towards adulthood is going on — the change towards physical creativity. Psychologically the final crystallisation of the super ego (representative in the personality make-up of the adult/parent/community standards) is taking place. Now, when the child’s outlook and experience should be extending towards self-realisation

Problems of Adolescent Art 35 and integration, if the teacher/child relation remains still on the level of parent/child this will obviously be one factor making for repression. If, further, the teacher is identified with the art style which surrounds him, that of representational realism, then the stage is set for complete inhibition and repression. On the other hand, if a deliberate attempt is made towards a non-authoritarian relationship where the teacher is in a non-parental role, e.g., that of a co-worker, and if the child is shown by a wide range of examples of all periods that adult art varies almost as much as the individual, his problems and conflicts are inevitably lessened. b) Methods should be based on as much knowledge of art work and of the creative processes as is known and should within limits be systematic.

Towards the guidance and encouragement of the child the various temperamental and aesthetic type differentiations should be employed, e.g., Visual-Haptic types with, say, the acceptance of Jung’s basic function types — Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition. These not as rigid labels are to be applied but merely as rough guides to assist the teacher, who might otherwise be biased in favour of his own particular type of attitude, and to encourage the child towards his own form of aesthetic experience and expression.

Actual methods, teaching exercises may be devised from examination of the whole field of art

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work of all periods, particularly of the contemporary artist, e.g., Klee’s walk with a line, the Cubists’ simultaneous inclusion of different aspects of a form, Matisse’s flat pattern, collage, the fantasy of the Surrealists, and so on. These exercises will have value only for the teacher in differentiation of types. They represent work in a particular mode to which the adolescent may be able to relate himself; also their relevance can be shown by reference to reproductions of actual adult work. Work in all media should be encouraged, the artificial division between art and craft should be abandoned — pottery and carving on a small scale may even be carried out in state school conditions. c) Finally, after such a brief survey a few words on the aim of the adolescent art teacher. Perhaps one word would suffice — integration. That the adolescent through his art work may be assisted to develop to the full in his own way through the difficulties of adolescence in our complex society, and may on maturity retain in some measure his capacity for aesthetic experience and expression.

Gropius and the Bauhaus Art (March 3, 1955). Reprinted, in part, in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 182.

The basis of the Bauhaus was developed at Weimar, continuing, after the move to Dessau, along the lines laid down, broadening and developing the initial formulation. It stands now to the lasting credit of Gropius, as the first complete attempt at a total design education, in terms of a real situation, in the early 20C scene.

The actual influence on design, then and since, was great, although this is not the place to discuss this, but rather its relevance as idea, and how this fits with our situation now….

There is the concrete fact of a school — with nearly the productive capacity of a factory. This was adequate, and only possible, in the technology of its period — but the machine, which the Bauhaus viewed as an extension of the hand tool, is now much more the autonomous machine; major changes in industrial techniques and the new synthetics have extended the issue further. Not only this kind of factor has changed in our situation, but also, to quote Lawrence Alloway, “a fine art/popular art continuum now

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exists,” and so, where the Bauhaus had its amateur jazzband and kite festivals — we have bop and Cinemascope.

Dr. Giedion, in the book which gives rise to this discussion [Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork], sums up his idea of the significance of the Bauhaus by saying, “it consisted in exploring the means of bringing the repetitive work of the machine into harmony with the eternal laws of the nature of material.” This version of truth to materials seems pretty useless now, in a situation where material may be synthesized according to whichever particular eternal law you feel you would like to be in harmony with.

The ideas of the Bauhaus which seem now more significant, and transmissible, are: The emphasis on method and angle of approach to problems.

The rejection of certain traditional modes.

The stress on communication — in the sense of the vocabulary to be developed in collective work, and, through its range of publication, in which the function of a kind of information centre is assumed.

Finally, the general preference for both/and rather than either/or.

GROPIUS AND THE BAUHAUS

39

The ideas, one feels, developed out of experience, rather than any consistent body of theory.

Efforts to re-establish the Bauhaus elsewhere have had varying results. There have been no major attempts to do so in England. Many schools use scraps of Bauhaus technique, but usually only in ways which turn any specifically anti-academic qualities, inherent in them, to academic ends. Discussion of Bauhaus theory in the past few years has been mainly among those drawn to it from the angle of the art-object in relation to the machine — a curious inversion of original intent….

If, as Gropius says, we are tending to yield to expedience rather than building a new faith, it is because we now find it necessary to re-evaluate most of our traditional formulations, of even such apparently basic ideas as “harmony,” “organic growth,” and “universal outlook.” Previously it was possible to think in terms of eternal basic conditions, now we have to learn to think in terms of a self-changing basis.

Josef Albers Architectural Design (June 1956), 204–5.

Josef Albers’s reputation as educator, his long association with the Bauhaus, from 1923–33, his work in the U.S. at Black Mountain College, and latterly at Yale, has tended to overshadow his personal achievement as an artist. This, despite work shown in over 600 exhibitions since 1933 (including thirty one-man shows), both in Europe and the Americas.

The present retrospective exhibition should serve to remedy this. Housed in the new Art Gallery at Yale University, where Albers has been Chairman of the Department of Design since 1950, it includes work from 1916 up to the present day, and ranges through paintings, stained glass, plastics, graphic works, typography and projects in relation to buildings. Although retrospective in character, actual time relations are created by the grouping of types of work which reflect the pre-occupations of a period and give a ‘truer’ chronology than linkage to a date line.

Of particular interest to the architect are, probably, the stained glass, plastics and mural projects. The glass includes early and recent studies, sand blasting and engraving being used in relief, as well as coloured transparency. One piece, executed during the lean years post World War I, is made of broken glass from old wine bottles,

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pickle jars, etc. Plastics belong to two main series, from around 1950, titled Transformation of a Scheme and Structural Constellations. These are really a continuation of the glass work in a less breakable form and are machine-engraved and sand-blasted by a commercial firm from a diagram supplied by the artist. Of the architectural projects, the best known is probably the brick mural for the Harvard Graduate Center.

Apart from the early pre-Bauhaus expressionist studies, the first overall impression, given

by Albers’s work assembled together, is of a puritanical adherence to early abstract dogma, with its emphasis on the pure plastic experience universally inherent in simple geometrical form, unaccentuated and mechanical line, and flat areas of broken colour. But this feeling is dispelled by closer attention to the individual work. Whilst retaining a stylistic link with such abstraction, now largely academic, Albers has managed to avoid the fate of most of its practitioners. Though he uses grids and modules as initial bases for many purposes, he repudiates any metaphysical belief attached to such usage. No reliance is placed on Platonic absolutes — the universal harmonies of forms made by the lathe or ruler — and such addiction to plain geometry as is evinced is strictly from expediency, providing merely a chosen interval on which to base his excursions.

The simplicity of the work is deliberately deceptive. One has the feeling of (as Breuer called

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Albers) a ‘frustrated architect’ at work, constructing visual illusions of simple elements with intent to confuse, and, in so doing, produce a visual excitement and tension which is contingent on the way we actually perceive. A line describes a movement but also, as we watch, moves and bends itself: an apparently stable rectangle begins to swell at the edges and fluctuate with the ground.

Patient research in colour perception has produced colours which blur, melt and flicker as we observe them, in such fashion that we are forced to participate in their metamorphoses even to the point of disquiet.

Here is, to paraphrase the artist, pragmatic psychological engineering, based on the facts, as known, of visual perception — a reliance on psycho-physical law rather than aesthetic hypotheses.

What seemed initially static, contained, dead, is seen to be self-energizing, constantly in flux and autonomous in its capacity for change. These characteristics of ambiguity, randomness (in effect, not necessarily execution), spatial and temporal illusion and interchangeability of figure and ground are those which furnish the climate of the contemporary art scene. Preoccupation with them links Albers closely to his contemporaries, and locates him firmly as a live, and vital, creative figure of our time.

Notes

1

1 p.38–9 Borrowed by Sigfried Giedion from a page of Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), in which the artist famously declares that drawing is simply taking a line for a walk, this image points — both literally and figuratively — to John McHale’s primary interests in the Bauhaus: its interest in communcation and total design. “Previously,” McHale writes,

“it was possible to think in terms of eternal basic conditions, now we have to learn to think in terms of a self-changing basis.” This image also bears a relationship to the questions of adolescent art education discussed in the first essay.

Notes

2

Notes

2 p.40–1 Made of machine-engraved Formica, Josef Albers’s Structural Constellations (1953) moved the artist’s geometric abstractions out of the discipline of oil painting and into the realm of industrial fabrication.

Joining together haptic and optic qualities, these

engravings create spatial structures with architectural implications.

According to McHale, “Though [Albers] uses grids and modules as initial bases for many purposes, he repudiates any metaphysical belief attached to such usage.”