Across the early decades of the seventeenth century, Englishmen and women moved through a physical, social, and mental world organised into a carefully maintained balance of motion and pause. This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses. These discourses encompassed philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion-evoking travel beyond England's shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. The book sets in its cultural context a strand of historical analysis stretching back to the nineteenth century Heinrich Wolfflin. It brings together the art, architectural, and cultural historical strands of analysis by examining why seventeenth-century viewers expected to be put in motion and what the effects were of that motion. Vistas, potentially mobile wall surface, and changeable garden provided precisely the essential distraction that rearticulated social divisions and assured the ideal harmony. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this book is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.
‘There are no impartial observers. The battlefront is everywhere’, announced American actor Paul Robeson at a major political meeting held in London in 1937, beseeching the audience to engage with the fight against fascism.1 Robeson’s impassioned speech underlines the major theme and impetus of this book, describing, as it does, the spatial and imaginative expansion of culture implied in an omnipresent battlefront. This is the imagination that nurtured exhibitions as propaganda across a multiplicity of sites and spaces, for the two decades that are the focus of this book.
This book has been in formation for over a decade. Its focus on exhibitions as propaganda started to develop in the aftermath of the global financial crash of 2008 and gained further momentum after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America in 2016, when democratic governments increasingly came to be accused of transmitting ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ and editing news content to manipulate its meanings.2 In response, activist movements were in search of new ways to visualise their intersecting causes (from women’s rights to Black Lives Matter, climate change and anti-capitalism).3 All of this created a renewed interest in histories and forms of protest, which became clearer from my conversations with students, friends and colleagues. This book responds to this interest in visual, material and design cultures of the mid-twentieth century, considering how and why artists and designers made public political interventions through exhibitions from the 1930s to the 1950s, and giving a long view of the uses of exhibitions as propaganda within democracies.
While, during the last decade, protest cultures were manifest in the spectacle of processions, placards and posters reported regularly on the news, tragedies like London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 (when more than seventy people died in a tower block blaze, avoidable had there been sufficient government investment) provoked an ad hoc exhibition to be thrown up under London’s major West Way road.4 This display memorialised the tragedy and, more importantly, informed the passing public of the injustices meted out by a Conservative local council whose penny-pinching approach to social housing provision had had catastrophic consequences. Such spontaneous displays have become regular responses to public tragedies, such as 9/11 and 7/7.5
My doctoral study and the book that came of it focused on government engagements with British design in the immediate postwar period, through the multiple events of the Festival of Britain, held across Britain in 1951. This was an interest sparked by working in close proximity at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport with the vexed Millennium Dome project of 2000.6 My recognition, when writing that earlier book, that the forms and formations of the Festival of Britain were anticipated in exhibitions from the 1930s, made manifest in British government work during the Second World War and in the emerging welfare state, became ever clearer through analysis, yet there were no published accounts of the period or of this type of exhibition. This book acts as the prequel to my Festival work. But instead of considering formations of nationhood with and through exhibitions or how institutions and official bodies used exhibitions to amplify their hegemonic positions, this book also considers exhibitions as an urgent form of communications media that gave a voice and a platform to groups on the margins.
The focus of this book was crystallised when I heard Professor Fred Turner introducing his idea of ‘the democratic surround’ at California College of the Arts in 2015.7 During his talk, about artists and intellectuals in postwar America who had developed new models of media and collaboration in response to the rise of fascist and communist politics, I recognised a parallel and, as yet, untold story about the creation of multi-image environments, shaped and influenced by refugee artists in Britain.
Ever the slow academic, this book has been imagined, researched and written over a long period punctuated by childbirth, shattering elections, Brexit grief, in snatched moments on commuter trains, in cafés and in and out of home-schooling my children whilst in lockdown from March 2020. The Coronavirus pandemic gave the subject of my research a strong resonance when exhibition-going, an activity I had always taken for granted, became impossible as museums and galleries were closed, causing me intense reflection on the forms, purposes and meanings of exhibitions past, present and future. The archives and libraries providing the meat of this book were closed, meaning I had to find new ways of researching. With none of the sources or spaces I was used to working in available and without the benefit of regular conversation with friends and colleagues, I had to re-learn how to write as a process of solitary thinking. Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s words on the three steps of writing – ‘Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven’ – were endlessly reassuring, with their understanding of slow and painstaking work.8 Given all that has happened since the spark of the idea for this book was lit, it seems astonishing that it is in the world at last.
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