The Democratic Surround

Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

Bibliographic Data

ID4155040
AuthorsCraig J Peariso (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume103
Issue2
Pages540-541
Publication date2016-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThe Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, Fred Turner, 2013
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaw301
OpenAlexW2488390441
LanguageEN

In his latest book, The Democratic Surround, the media historian Fred Turner asks not what Democracy might mean, as several political theorists have done in recent years, but just who the democratic citizen Americans envision might be and how their conception of that individual was formulated. Beginning in the late 1930s with a brief, fascinating account of Americans' distrust of the technologies of mass communication—a distrust sparked, in many ways, by European fascists' apparent use of films and radio broadcasts to turn populations into mindless followers—Turner chronicles a cultural response that looked to use open-ended media installations to foster a contrasting, productive individualism. From the German emigrant and former Bauhaus instructor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to composer John Cage, Turner highlights several midcentury artists and designers who attempted to create exhibitions and performances that would engage viewers or listeners as active participants in the construction of meaning. By refusing to adopt the voice of authority, they believed, artists might empower the public rather than manipulate it, leaving viewers with a sense of their own responsibility for a given event. Unlike those who might frame these experiments as but another formulation of the liberal understanding of the individual, however, Turner seems to appraise the period in question as something like a golden age for our conception of citizenship, in which men and women were prompted to find their own way through a reasonable number of preselected paths. In the concluding chapter, discussing artistic developments of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Turner proposes that Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Allan Kaprow's numerous Happenings were, in effect, misguided adaptations of the earlier generation's experiments. Where their predecessors presented a multitude of images to highlight viewers' agency, he suggests, these later artists seemed more often to delight in assaulting audiences with disjointed stimuli. In doing so, they reintroduced the authorial control that artists such as Cage had attempted to undermine and smothered the seeds of social and political progress that the earlier works had planted

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Distrust · Exhibition · Individualism · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law

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