Glossaire alphabétique

Controversial media theorist Marshall McLuhan studied engineering before turning to modern literature, which he was to teach in the late 1930s and 1940s. His first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, published in 1951, examines the impact of advertising on culture and society. With the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, he founded the review Explorations dealing with language and the media, and in 1963 he set up the Center for Culture and Technology on the campus of the University of Toronto. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) traces the transition from the visual age of writing and typography to the age of electricity, characterized by simultaneity and oral forms of expression. Two years later, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man brought him international recognition. The basic argument of this wide-ranging work is that the essential fact of communications is communications itself: the medium is the message. The media used by a society determine human behaviors within that society. For McLuhan, the media are all extensions of human beings--books, cars, clothing, and any transformation in the communications process thus entails an upheaval in human nature and perception. Such arguments had a great deal of impact, among both media specialists and the general public, but they were also sharply criticized as over-simplifications. In 1973 the Vatican named McLuhan its counselor for social communications.

Bibliography: The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, with Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel (New York: Bantam, 1967). Counter Blast (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969). Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). Take Today: The Executive As Dropout, with Barrington Nevitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972). Laws of Media: The New Science, with Eric McLuhan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). The Global Village, with Bruce R. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

CD-ROM: Understanding McLuhan, 1988.

Minimal Art emerged in the United States toward the middle of the 1960s. The term was first used by Richard Wollheim in a 1965 article in Arts Magazine about the works of Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, and Pop Art. The same year, Donald Judd published the essay "Specific Objects", where he proposed to call these new productions by that name. The core

Minimalists include Carl Andre, Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris, but such a grouping reflects a common sensibility rather than a common style. These artists worked with geometric figures, variations on determined structures, and problems of volume. By drawing on easily understandable forms, Minimalism reduced the aesthetic processes of producing and receiving the works. The Minimalists were seeking above all to avoid all kinds of formal illusionism and subjectivity. They thus focused on the repetition of the form, seriality, and combinations of elementary components. Sol LeWitt's work, for example, is a variation on the

figure of the square, that of Dan Flavin, of neon, and that of Robert Morris, unitary elements, while Carl Andre considers his works as a place and space of transit. The work is only one of

the elements in the relationship among the viewer, the space, and the object. The work of art should be neither monumental nor simply decorative, and this requires a human scale, which does not include materials calling for an essentially physical relationship with the senses. Minimalism lies between painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Bibliography: Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968).