John McHale (artist)

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John McHale (born Glasgow 1922, died 1978) was a Constructivist, and originator of Pop art, as well as a jewler, potter, designer, sociologist, educator. McHale initially developed the concept of Pop Art and coined the term "Pop Art" in 1954. He was one of the original members of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Independent Group in London. McHale was a founder of the Centre for Integrative Studies in the USA, and wrote the formative work on the Ecological Context and was one of the foremost original thinkers on ecology, he also wrote the Future of the Future and was a leading 1960's Futurists . John McHale was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a founder member of the Club of Rome, a Knight of Malta, and a founder member of the World Future Society.

[edit] Biography

McHale was from a Left Wing Scots Labour background. His father, also named John McHale, was a coal miner, who had served in the Highland Light Infantry as a machine gunner in the First World War, survived being gassed and twice shot, and later trained the IRA. His father then went on to organize the striking Dock workers as part of Red Clydeside during the Great Depression, and also run part of the underground railway for the IRA in Glasgow. His father had a twin brother who worked in the cinema in Dundee. McHale's mother, Margaret Murphy/Morrisey was from Cork and Waterford Ireland. McHale's family home was in Glasgow at #8/9 Apartment 2 Furney Street in Kelvinside Maryhill. McHale the artist had three brothers and a sister: Leonard, Lawrence, Morrise and Charlotte, and they all attended St Charles Catholic School.

After McHale graduated with honours from school, he worked for the Glasgow Medical School as a lab technician, and later for Paisley of Glasgow producing high grade surgical instruments, and combat knives for the military. With the outbreak of World War 2 he enlisted and was trained in Commando at Achnacarry, served in British Commandos and later in the Royal Marines. All training was conducted under live fire conditions. It is reputed that McHale and his Commando unit as part of their training parachuted in one night and without casulties took command of Dover Castle, which was the defended nerve centre of artillery command in Devil's Hellfire Corner during the war. McHale served in combat in Tobruk as part of the Western Desert Campaign, and as a Medic on Corvettes stationed out of Malta. Near the end of World War 2, McHale served in Admiralty intelligence analysing Japanese code decripts as part of the magic process.

Shortly after the war, McHale studied Art and Literature at Nelson Hall Teachers College in Staffordshire. He married Evelyn Hitchcock who was a Radar operator stationed in Wales during the war. Evelyn became a teacher after the war, and she bore him three sons. They lived at 35 Kilburn Priory, in London. McHale visited Paris on at least two occasions in the late 1940's where he met and became friends with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and with the French painter Fernand Leger.It was in Paris that McHale became influenced by the Existentialists, and became familiar with the Symbolists, Surrealism, Dada, Cubism, and Futurism (art).

Originally McHale had intended to meet up in Paris with his sculptor friend William Turnbull who was over there on several occasions. However it seems they could not arrange to meet at the same time. It turns out that the three Scots born artists, McHale, Turnbull, and Paolozzi were all in Paris in the post war era absorbing French culture and influences. Turnbull knew Paolozzi since they both went to the Slade together, and McHale met Eduardo Paolozzi at the ICA when he returned to London.

McHale briefly attended Hornsey College of Art, and taught at Clerkenwell. He frequented Hampstead in the late 1940's and early 1950's and was familiar with Kurt Schwitters collage work, Piet Mondrian and the Bauhaus designers that formerly resided in the area. Some of his favourite haunts were the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead, and the Lantern acting theatre. He set up his studio at # 8 Randolph Mews in Maida Vale. Frequent visitors to McHale's mews studio included the art crtitic Lawrence Alloway, the modern sculptor William Turnbull living at Fellows Road, the Australian painter Albert Tucker who was one of the original Angry Penguins, and the music composer Frank Cordell and his wife Magda Cordell. During this era McHale became an accomplished potter, jeweler, and a Constructivist, and he produced numerous sculptures some of which he exhibited at the Festival of Britain, and another at the "Artist versus Machines" exhibit at the Building Centre on Store Street. In 1952/53 he separated from his first wife, and moved his studio to share an atelier with Frank and Magda Cordell at 52 Cleveland Square in London.

John McHale was an original founder member of the ICA, and a founder member and facilitator of the Independent Group. After a number of teaching jobs he was awarded a scholarship to study design at Yale. McHale was interested in Constructivism, perceptual optical art and in Pop art. He kept well informed of post-war US consumer culture and advertising. He went to Yale to study under Joseph Albers, he also met and became friends with John Cage, Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller at Yale, and while in America he visited many of the leading New York Abstract Expressionism and other Abstract artists. He met Marcel Duchamp in New York and played chess with him while discussing art theory. Marcel Duchamp provided McHale with the rotor discs that were installed at the This Is Tomorrow exhibit with the help of Frank Cordell.

[edit] Major Pop Art Works

John McHale originally coined the term 'Pop Art', and initially he develped the concept of Pop art in 1954. Concequently Reyner Banham called John McHale the "Father of Pop". The first exhibit of Pop Art in Britain was the 'Collages and Objects' exhibit organised by John McHale and Lawrence Alloway in October 13, 1954 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was at this first exhibit McHale showed his Transistor series of collages that contain multiple media references drawn from newspapers and music reviews along with a small comic icon that relate to his life. McHale also exhibited his Why I Took To The Washers In Luxury Flats which was an early logic gaming Pop art collage that is crammed full of Pop art media images and can be reprogrammed like manual software by the participant viewer.

In 1955 McHale discussed in a lecture the subject of Advertising at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He delivered a talk on Dada as non-Aristotelians. He followed this with extensive conversations at the ICA in 1955 on his Pop art for Team 2 in preparation for the This is Tomorrow exhibit. McHale provided at least three different and separate Poster designs for Team 2 at the TIT.

[edit] McHale's Pop Art work installed a the TIT

The erroneous impression Richard Hamilton gives in his TATE #4 interview is that McHale was in America during the preparation of the exhibition until a few weeks before it opened and according to Hamilton contributions by McHale were merely by letter. The facts are McHale returned from America with additional Pop art material, and began organizing the complete design of the team 2 Pop Art installation for the TIT. Most of McHale's items were in the form of Pop Art ready mades, much of the material he had brought over with him from America, and some he accessed with the assistance of his friend and colleague the musician Frank Cordell using his extensive media contacts. This is also corroborated by David Robbins in the MIT document The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty which clearly and uniquivocably states on page 139 about Group Two A good deal of the visual material was supplied by John McHale when he returned from his year-long fellowship at Yale; while projectors, gramophone motors for moving the Duchamp rotoreliefs, film posters, and probably the juke box, were supplied by Frank Cordell.

The list of McHale's Duchamp style Pop Art readymades at the TIT included:

• Robby the Robot, accessed by Frank Cordell, Robby opened the Exhibit
• Forbidden Planet posters of Robby the Robot
• Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, film poster
• Marlon Brando,The Wild One, film poster-- with its iconic references to "POP", Johnny, blue jeans ,leather jacket, counter culture, and the Beetles.
• Film projector, accessed by Frank Cordell, with the endless reel of film depicting the Royal Navy Fleet at sea
• The oversized Guinness beer bottles
• The film poster of the can can dancers
• The electric Juke box, accessed by Frank Cordell
• The poster of Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers
• The essence of strawberry impregnating the entrance carpet to provide a sensory smelly sensation
• The rotor discs given to McHale by Marcel Duchamp in New York, and installed by Frank Cordell.

The other Pop art collages and installations designed by McHale at the TIT included:

• The Space installation
• The 3-Dimensional interactive collage Space module
• The large Pop art collage wall mural located behind the Juke Box
• The large pop art collage panel located to the left of the Senses panel, with the mid 1950's American automobile, and womens faces, similar to the images on McHale's studio push pin tack board

McHale also designed and installed his large black and white Op art Dazzle panels at the portals to the TIT. He said these panels were deliberately intended to disorient the participants' senses. He claimed his Op art panels were based on his Constructivist investigations and on Albers, and partly influenced by Vorticism and British Military Camouflage techniques as developed by Roland Penrose and others.

Frank Cordell on his own initiative installed the microphone and electronic amplifier that provided cybernetic feedback of the audience at the TIT, and this installations represents one of the first Happenings in Britain.

As McHale explained, part of the purpose of the TIT was to provoke an acute awareness of the sensory functions in an environmental situation. His Pop art installations were intended to take into account the viewers' total sensory experience and to blur the boundaries between subject-object distinction of perceiver and perceived.

It can be noted that even before his return to England, McHale had completed his Pop Art Head collages. As Brandon Taylor remarked in his book on Collage these works by John McHale were a "new type of mechano-morph totemic figure that emerged from the (photomontage) interplay of torn paper and painted marks." Immediately following the TIT, McHale showed eleven new Pop art collage Heads at the ICA in November, and December 1956.