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Edward Steichen + Herbert Bayer: MOMA Road to Victory Exhibition 1942.
Fred Turner, the Stanford Professor of Communications, has researched a narrative about the United States development of a ‘democratic propaganda surround’ as an integral feature of the US anti-fascist propaganda at the beginning of World War 2. Turner explains how the Balinese anthro- pological studies of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (ethnographical research interpolated and explicated with photo-essays), combined with the design and presentational talents of refugee artists and designers from Europe (especially those of Moholy Nagy and Herbert Bayer) to create an immersive, multi-screen, montage of visual information, photographs and display typography (often combined as photo-typos) that used Bayer’s theory of a new, theatrical field of vision - in or- der to create a non-iconic scenario or exhibition-space offering visitors an objective, freedom of choice as to where to look, what order to look in, and how to ‘travel’ through such an exhibition- space - reckoned as a mode of learning and communication most suitable for encouraging an in- dependent-minded democratic citizenry. Turner calls this the Democratic Surround in his book of the same name (Turner: 2013). His well-argued and elegantly researched thesis links the develop- ments in the Democratic Surround of the 1940s, to the later expressions of intermedia and multi- media in the counter culture Happenings, and A/V light-shows of the 1960s...
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3038
Robert Brownjohn + Peter Harnden: exhibition-design American Pavilion Brussels World Fair 1958.