The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in ... - Public Culture

Public Culture
By today’s standards, such an innovation might seem mild, even trivial. From
a time in which digital screens bombard us with images from every conceivable
angle and in places as diverse as football stadiums, airplanes, and bedrooms, it is
difficult to imagine how important Bayer’s new strategy actually was. In addition
to marking a shift in the techniques of museum display, it embraced and made
visible an entirely non- Freudian theory of media reception. Within most accounts
of mass media at the time, only the makers of messages enjoyed independent
agency in selecting and making meaningful sequences of images and sounds.
Their messages entered the minds of their audiences through the trapdoor of the
unconscious first spotted by Freud and left those minds fractured and irrational.
Within Bayer’s extended field of vision, however, fragments of media surrounded
viewers — viewers who in turn reached out to the images they saw, selecting,
arranging, and integrating them in their minds into their own individual gestalts.
In Bayer’s work, viewers took charge of both the viewing process and the construction
of their psyches. As a result, at least in theory, viewers became more
independent and psychologically whole.
At the Bauhaus, this sort of individual integration formed the heart of the curriculum.
The founders of the Bauhaus hoped to produce industrial- age artists who
could integrate multiple materials into their production and multiple senses into
their perceptions. In 1930s Paris, Bayer’s extended field of vision transformed the
Bauhaus ideal of professional integration into an act of apperception. In New York
in 1942, Bayer’s field became a tool for the psychological and social integration
of a new kind of American citizen. By granting American viewers high degrees
of agency with regard to the visual materials around them and at the same time
controlling the shape of the field in which they might encounter those materials,
Bayer and Steichen could lead them to remake their own morale in terms set by
the field around them. That is, American viewers could exercise the individual
psychological agency on which democratic society depended and so avoid becoming
the numb mass men and women of Nazi Germany. At the same time, they
could do so in terms set by the needs of the American state, articulated in the
visual diction of Bayer’s extended field.
Bayer designed Road to Victory as a road, curving through the entire second
floor of the Museum of Modern Art and winding by images and texts of varying
sizes. When they entered, visitors encountered a floor- to- ceiling photograph
of Utah’s Bryce Canyon and huge portraits of three Native American men. The
words “road to victory” floated over their heads on nearly invisible wires. A
text by Sandburg translated the images into words: “In the beginning was virgin
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