The Conflicts and Tensions of the Landscape/Urban,

Organic/Technological in American Culture

INITIAL THOUGHTS on research

We identified the possibilities in taking further the study of the two conflicting concepts in the generation of imagery for promoting the Healthy Cigarette (tip, menthol);

1. The Landscape Background - the Natural - the Organic - the Rural - the pursuit of the Rustic in the pursuit of Reassurance. The visual language of Impression -

2. The Urban Background - the Scientific - the Mechanical - the evocation of the Scientific in the pursuit of Reassurance.

The visual language of Precisionism.

We explored the ways in which perhaps the two directions had been forced to the extremes. You can drive the paired concepts further but we knew what we meant at the time.

That the analysis of the images might well take you back to the techniques of fakery and the persona of the Confidence Man - see that excellent introduction to Melville by Tony Tanner, The Confidence Man in American Literature.

That this ultimately was more profitable as a development of thought, and indeed a conclusion that pursuing (straight faced) the dynamics of the agency and image making decisions.

That I had an article somewhere about the Tree Stump and the Landscape, that buried in American sensibilities was an inherent conflict between

1. the supposed purity and innocence of the Landscape Unspoilt and Paradisic with its Noble Savages and everything in abundance - and

2. the great power and promise of technology which was invented and sustained in America, where no problem was insuperable because of Man's (and I do mean Man's) ingenuity and commitment, a direct result of the drive and darwinian excesses of capitalist production.

Now if you go for 1 (the survivalists, Emerson, the Regionalists) then you have to define the Utopian, have to make preparations for natural Disasters (Twisters, earthquakes etc)

Now if you go for 2. then you have to face the Pollution, the Entropy, the crass disfigurement of the lives of ordinary people. In the context of the larger culture of the United States - here is a reference list from which we can start. You'll know if you want it when you see it. There may be a. titles for cursory scanning - b. there may be books for the holidays c. there may be books for the dark travelling months

1. ART and DESIGN / ARCHITECTURE The Regionalist School of Art - Thomas Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood - working for the ads (also Clarence Carter and Aaron Bohrod) The mechanolatory of the 1930's my Brooklyn Museum catalogue - modernist aesthetic in Sheeler and Ralston Crawford - the heroism of the Highway - for Romantic Landscape see Peter Hurd, the cowboy landscapes of for machine Landscapes see

2. POLITICS

• the Utopian Movements in the USA

• the Heroics of the Great Outdoors, Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party.

3. PHILOSOPHY

4. LITERATURE

4.1 The Small Town as Ideal and Facade

4.2 The Landscape and a Journey through - Twain and Huck Finn

5. HISTORY and ROOTS

6. ARCHITECTURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

• Fenno Jacob's Fortune feature, A Landscape of Industry's Leavings

• David Anderson (ed) Sunshine and Smoke, American Writers and the Environment, Lipincott, Phil., 1971

• the writings of Lewis Mumford - The Condition of Man, and Art and Technics.

7. COMPARISON WITH THE UK

8. TENSIONS statements and questions to be an american the cold war why don't they like us atomic pollutions macarthy and the red purges Truman and the pressures on organised labour sex and Kinsey science and loyalty (J.Robert Oppenheim), attitudes to foreigners

9. USEFUL REFERENCES

9.1 BOOKS

• the books of Studs Terkel - oral history of the war and the depression

• the Faber Book of America - useful compendium

• The Aspirin Age, short essyas about 30's evangelists, robber barons etc.

9.2 FILMS

• The Night of the Hunter, nightmares in Rockwell Land

• Film Noir, and anxieties of metamorphosis (Cat Woman), of status, of unfettered crime, of corrupt politics.

• Rebel without a Cause - anxieties about the younger generation

• March of Time newsreels (I have 3 hours of post war reels)

• anxiety and Nuclear Warfare, Duck and Cover