The Future and the Functions of Art: A Conversation Between Alvin Toffler and John McHale

The Future and the Functions of Art: A Conversation Between zy I. Futurism, in the early decades of the twentieth century, was the name given to a school of artists and poets led by Filippo Marinetti. Not to be confused with that historical movement, an important new tendency, also called futurism, is attracting support among writers, designers, architects, artists, sociologists, philosophers and others who see in the accelerated change of the present the breakdown of an old civilization and the birth pangs of a new one. Arguing that we must develop ‘future consciousness’-that we must anticipate change rather than chase the last crisis-the new futurists turn the mirror of tomorrow on today in an effort to see the present in a fresh way. What about the effects of high-speed change on art in the years just ahead? zyxwvutsrqp ARTnews asked Alvin Toffler and John McHale to speculate on that question and to record their conversation. Toffler is the author of Future Shock and of the earlier The CultureConsumers,a study of art and affluence in America. McHale (19221978 ), author of The Future of the Future and The Ecological Context, was an artist himself and founder-member in the early 1950s of the Independent Group, which, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, was one of the factors which triggered the very early British interest in Pop Art. McHale served asdirectorof the Center for Integrative Studies (originally located at the State University, Binghamton , N.Y.) from 1968 to 1978. The following is an edited account of the Toffler-McHale conversation. 11. ToMer: The key to -understanding art today does not lie in what artists think or do. It has to do with the new environment in which they find themselves. They, like all of us, are caught up in a wave of revolutionary change. The world is Originally published in ARTnews zyxwvutsrqpo TL(2) February 1973. Copyright zyxwvutsrqponm @ ARTnews Associates, 1973. Adapted for Leonmdo and reprinted zyxwvutsrqpo by permission. Alvin Toffler and John McHale PergamonJournals Ltd Printadin Great Britain 0024-094X/87 83 zyxwvutsrqponm oo*o00 LEONARDO, Vol. 20, NO.4, pp. 391-395,1987 simply not going to move on the tracks that were laid for it in the Industrial Revolution. I see the emergence of a radically new techno-economic system with new, postbureaucratic forms of organization, with new forms of interpersonal relationships, with new family structures, with new values; but also, obviously, with a new symbolic superstructure-a new artistic environment. Many of us are going to find the transition from industrialism to the new civilization very difficult, and artists, by doing their work well, can, I believe, soften the impact of the future. But artists themselves are going to find the period ahead deeply upsetting. This global revolution is the larger reality of which art is only a small part. Exactly what the nature of this new art environment is likely to be is, of course, a very difficult question. We can, however, at least say a few things about the next 20 or 30 years. I would argue, for example, that no school or style will dominate the galleries, the museums, the classrooms or the pages of ARTnews for long. While there may be momentary dominanceslike , for example, Abstract-Expressionism from the early to the late 1950s-the overall push is toward differentiation, diversity, heterogeneity. The other trend is the one you wrote about in your essay, “The Plastic Parthenon”, and that is the transience of artistic imagery, the continual nondurability of our artistic imagery. McHale: Yes, but an additional direction of change is the shift of focus from the artwork to the life-style of the artist. One significant example is Warhol. It is not only his discrete works which are interesting and important,it’s the cycle of works he produces, one after the other, it’s the whole Warhol output for a particular point in time. Add to that yet another important dimension: he lives the work. It’s his whole life-style which becomes the artwork. That’s true also of the Beatles and otherfigures. It’s not only the record that is picked up and listened to...