How the approaches and methods of think tanks--including systems
theory, operational research, and cybernetics--paved the way for a
peculiar genre of midcentury modernism.
In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters
between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the
approaches and methods of think tanks--including systems theory,
operations research, and cybernetics--paved the way for a peculiar genre
of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary
neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical
creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense
strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such
institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and
overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians,
economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians.
Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between
Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous
art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's
deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract
art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an
"Opsroom" for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende
in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art).
Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary
border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts
by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of
think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in
academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders
what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.
