Page 58 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

longer seems worthwhile, and believes that the judge, in demolishing this theory and with it Richter does seem to be both one of the more
`fixed point of view' is obsolete; so Alloway's McLuhan's theories about language, print and sensitive plasticiens of the New Tendency group,
objections do not cut much ice. Miller has tried TV. and also a competent architect with private
to get to the underlying models of reality from If McLuhan could be thought of as a kind of visions of an ideal city. That is fine; but Vera
which each specific operation is derived. poet— George Steiner has compared him to Horvat-Pintaric's claims for the socialist
After an introduction setting out his general William Blake—then he would be genuinely significance of these visions show a paternalism,
objective, Miller devotes two chapters to immune to Miller's critique. But brilliant and a readiness to dogmatize about society, all
McLuhan's career before the publication in 1951 phrase-making is not poetry. too characteristic of some urbanists. (The
of The Mechanical Bride. It is well known that I find very little to quarrel with in Miller's mystique of the architect which she is promoting
McLuhan is a Catholic (though not so well book, which is itself a major contribution to the is surely being disowned by most young
known that he wrote an essay in 1936 in praise of debate which McLuhan has opened. I hope it architects today.)
Chesterton) and that he was influenced by the will be recognized as such, and not used by The facility to push the walls of one's living-
Cambridge literary critics Richards and Leavis. literary and artistic interests as an excuse for space in and out like a drawer (on the principle
His background in Canadian political agrarianism avoiding this debate. of Richter's reliefometer'), and the novelty of
and the literary agrarianism of the American JONATHAN BENTHALL living on a slow merry-go-round, would surely
South (associated with writers like Allen Tate be a small consolation for having a sculptor's
and John Crowe Ransom) is completely new to Yugoslav modern dream superimposed on a live society. I should
me, and most illuminating. also mention that Horvat-Pintaric sometimes
For ten years from 1936, McLuhan taught Vjenceslav Richter by Vera Horvat-Pintaric. adopts the jargon of the Bense/Moles school of
English at the Catholic university of St Louis, 108 pp, with 186 illustrations. Parallel text, aesthetics (e.g. 'Stress is put on working out
Missouri. By the early 1940s, he 'seems to have Serbo-Croat and English. Graficki Zavod effective transmitters of the aesthetic message,
stagnated into a well-recognized form of Hravtske, Zagreb, Frankopanska 26, Yugoslavia. so that its reception can be optimal as well');
cultural nostalgia', and could easily have retired (Price on application.) while some of her judgments—for instance, that
into 'irritable solitude'. He was preoccupied by `spatial awareness' has 'quite atrophied' in
the victory of science, technology, industry and Vjenceslav Richter was born in Yugoslavia in modern city life—also seem to me dubious. But
advertising over traditional culture. He was also, 1917 and practises as an architect and artist in most of the book is devoted to photographs and
as Miller shows, of a 'schismatic imagination', Zagreb. In 1951 he founded, with eight others, these are excellent.
inclined to over-simplify history, and politically the Exat 51 group, which like most similar JONATHAN BENTHALL
and sociologically naive. But during the late groups broke up a few years later. According to
194os McLuhan changed his critical accent, and Dr Horvat-Pintaric, this was the first radical Cinetopia
the tone of 'high patrician anguish' disappears. opposition in Yugoslavia to the 'establishment
Miller's key argument is that `by adopting a conceptions of socialist realism in art'. The Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood. 460 pp
stance of artful detachment and by heaping group took up the tradition of the early Soviet with 108 monochrome and 12 colour
contempt on all those who let their values show, avant garde, and stressed experimentation, illustrations. Studio Vista. £3.75.
McLuhan has managed to sponsor all his original synthesis cif the visual arts, and the need to study
preferences under the disguise of someone who abstract art. Richter has since been associated The chapter headings range from 'Radical
has achieved a superlative freedom from the with the New Tendency movement. As well as Evolution and Future Shock in the
"single point of view"'. design, architecture and interior Richter makes Paleocybernetic Age' through `Synaesthetic
In the Bride, which Miller acknowledges to sculptures in aluminium, wood and other Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism' to
be a remarkable book, McLuhan's accent shifts materials, exploring surface-modulation effects `Technoanarchy; The Open Empire'. A
from indignation to 'amused vigilance'. Later and geometric transformations. His most comprehensive review in this space is impossible,
still in his career, it shifts again to euphoric interesting innovation is his 'reliefometer' so more or less random notes will have to suffice.
acceptance of the implications of electric (1964), a rectangular system containing small Youngblood is sensitive to the media, the
technology. movable identical elements which can be slid in prerequisite for writing such a book. He attempts
Miller discusses numerous other influences or out in parallel motion so as to make an 'open' not only to give definitions and interpretations of
on McLuhan, principally Freud, Giedion, sculpture. cinema (in the widest sense, as all visual/
Wöffilin, Joyce, H. A. Innis the economic Horvat-Pintaric's introduction is mainly technological sight-extensions), but also to
historian and B. L. Whorf. (Wiener and concerned with the socialization of art and with inform on a technical level on the workings of
Shannon, Buckminster Fuller and perhaps the extension of Richter's sculptural aesthetic technological advances and our concomitant
Walter Benjamin are names that might have towards urban planning. Since 1963 Richter has social response-mechanisms. He is, of course,
been added here, but without affecting Miller's been working on ideas for holistic city planning indebted to Fuller and McLuhan, and falls prey
case either way.) The final chapter of the book (Sinturbanizam). His drawings for a city of a to their weakness : a romantic, technological
analyses in some detail McLuhan's famous million inhabitants use structural principles idealism.
theories about the effects of the media on similar to that of his reliefometer'; the city is to When Warhol says, 'Someday you'll be able
perception. Whorf provided the idea that be divided into 100 units or 'ziggurats', each to go to a party and be the only one there', he
differences in communication impose holding about 10,000 people and forming a realized the incredibly frustrated loneliness this
corresponding differences in world outlook, and more or less autonomous whole for implies, but I doubt that Youngblood does.
Innis the technological determinism. Miller production, habitation and recreation. A more Still, his exegeses on vidiotronics, holograms
suggests no antecedent other than Aquinas for recent proposal, Heliopolis, includes a peripheral (true three-dimensional 'photographs'), the
McLuhan's own key contribution, which was a urban membrane that would rotate slowly `radical evolution' of the media and the people,
psychological theory that the plurality of around a central, static core. 'Unlike the have value as explanations of possibilities. His
sensory experience is (in Miller's words) exaggerated kinetic effects which are now book is necessary reading, is a guidebook, is
`mediated by a psychic structure whose appearing in kineticized environments or everything which the long list of chapter
composition is characterized by an arithmetical programmes for urban designs, Richter's plan headings makes one expect of it. One doesn't
ratio, and that this ratio governs the quantitative for using time as a design resource is adapted to have to share Youngblood's general optimism to
representation in consciousness of each of the man's perceptual capacities and real realize the value, perhaps on a smaller scale, of
five senses'. Miller succeeds, as far as I can psychological needs.' his insights and the artistic possibilities of a
136