From 1965 to 1972, Gyorgy Kepes, the Hungarian-born artist who brought advanced visual art to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edited a series of books titled Vision + Value. Six volumes were published during 1965 and 1966, and a final volume appeared in 1972. These books---each organized by a theme and framed around a looming social problem---were composed of essays authored by a diverse group of thinkers, artists, theoreticians, and scientists.;This paper examines these unusual publications, finding their intellectual origins in Kepes' involvement with Hungarian Constructivism, Marxist-oriented Science, Bauhaus pedagogy and the post-war version of Logical Positivism. A new type of artist was conjured in the seven books, which functioned also as a training program for such an art practice. This new artist would engage social issues and be equipped with advanced powers of perception via a unique training in cross-disciplinary thinking made available in the books. Yet, while the books had great potential, they did not intersect with the art world of their day until the final volume on environmental issues in 1972. That mode of artist became dominant twenty years later, and this thesis considers these books in light of that history.
Language
English
Pages
148
Format
NOOKstudy eTextbook
Publisher
ProQuest LLC
Release
May 07, 2022
ISBN
0549521224
ISBN 13
9780549521228
Gyorgy Kepes' ''Vision + Value'', 1965--1972: A practical training program to create a new super-perceiving problem-solving artist.
From 1965 to 1972, Gyorgy Kepes, the Hungarian-born artist who brought advanced visual art to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edited a series of books titled Vision + Value. Six volumes were published during 1965 and 1966, and a final volume appeared in 1972. These books---each organized by a theme and framed around a looming social problem---were composed of essays authored by a diverse group of thinkers, artists, theoreticians, and scientists.;This paper examines these unusual publications, finding their intellectual origins in Kepes' involvement with Hungarian Constructivism, Marxist-oriented Science, Bauhaus pedagogy and the post-war version of Logical Positivism. A new type of artist was conjured in the seven books, which functioned also as a training program for such an art practice. This new artist would engage social issues and be equipped with advanced powers of perception via a unique training in cross-disciplinary thinking made available in the books. Yet, while the books had great potential, they did not intersect with the art world of their day until the final volume on environmental issues in 1972. That mode of artist became dominant twenty years later, and this thesis considers these books in light of that history.