Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
10 - Group 12 and Information Theory
from Section B - Continuum, 1952–1961
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
Relatively ignored in relation to its more photogenic, even iconic exhibits, the Group 12 exhibit at This is Tomorrow pitched together Alloway, Toni del Renzio and the architect Geoffrey Holroyd who created an environment that ably demonstrates Alloway's interest in the “communications network.” An Information Theory approach resulted in art, advertising, film, and other discourses being viewed as sign systems rather than as either unique expressions of human creativity or as detached aesthetic form. The form of the exhibit was devised by Holroyd who, in 1953, had visited the designers Charles and Ray Eames in California, and was heavily influenced by their House of Cards creative game of 1952. The cards resembled an open-paged magazine with a tackboard on the left and images on the right with information to help the spectator “learn how to read a tackboard, a tackboard being a convenient method of organizing the modern visual continuum according to each individual's decision.” Those decisions, and the resulting relationships, could be changed, so the tackboard was highly appropriate because it was “a recognition of the potential connections and variable meanings of everything.” A wooden frame of pegged struts was overlaid with perspex panels and functioned both as an “assembly kit” container for the images and as an analogy of the type of interconnected and active thinking required by the spectator/citizen to deal with modern life. Images were grouped into types approximating to objects, materials, and actions, and the “imageability” of some of them recalled Parallel of Life and Art. The model of Information Theory was here presented in visual form in an aesthetic that—as Alloway put it later—“responds to the communications explosion and does not try to restrict its operations to unique artefacts above a certain level of refinement.”
Holroyd, with Frank Newby, Laurence Backmann, and Alloway, had shown one of the Eames’ films, A Communications Primer, at the ICA in April 1956, and Alloway recognized that the designers’ way of going about designing related closely to his own interests in inclusiveness and anti-hierarchy. Indeed, Alloway developed his ICA session notes into an article on Charles Eames that was published just before This Is Tomorrow. Citing the House of Cards as a good example, he argues that “The key to Eames’ world is his toys.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 56 - 58Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012