Design

Bali, Background for War (1943), Part II: A Proposal for Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA; A Proposal for the Cultural Cold War

This two-part essay introduces the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation, an exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Bali, Background for War was an important exhibition of Southeast Asian modern art history and occupies an exceptional place in the Museum’s institutional history. This second essay traces the wide-ranging infrastructural implications of Bateson’s exhibition from the unrealized Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA to the landscape of foreign capital flows and cultural infrastructure that contributed to the canonization and conceptualization of a Southeast Asian modern art during the Cold War.

Bali, Background for War (1943), Part I: A Regional Exhibition of Balinese Modern Art as a Military Technology of Worldmaking

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America. Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.

Rachel Price on Waldemar Cordeiro’s Computer Art

Waldemar Cordeiro’s work shifts from his involvement with Concrete Art in São Paulo (of which he was one of the central artists, critics, and curators), to landscape design, a unique take on Pop Art through his “Popcretos,” and his final 1970s experiments with computer art. Cordeiro’s 1970s works were produced while Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship that was skilled and innovative in its manipulation of mass media to control society and manage dissent.