Artists Space

John McHale:
The Expendable Reader

Book Launch & Conversation
December 10, 2011, 7pm

The Expendable Reader comprises a collection of writings by John McHale, edited by art historian Alex Kitnick. The volume is the first in the Columbia University GSAPP Sourcebooks series, devoted to anthologizing and translating currently overlooked writings on architecture and the city.

A black and white book cover with the text "The Expendable Reader John McHale" overlaid on a recycling logo.
The Expendable Reader, by John McHale, edited by Alex Kitnick, published by Columbia University Press, 2011. [A black and white book cover with the text "The Expendable Reader John McHale" overlaid on a recycling logo.]

A pivotal figure in British postwar culture, McHale was an “artist/graphic designer/information theorist/architectural critic/sociologist/futurist” who co-founded the Independent Group in London in 1952 and played a key role in the development of Pop Art internationally. John McHale's writings on the subjects of technology, culture, and mass communications were published widely in the UK and the US. Drawing on McHale’s 1959 essay “The Fine Arts in the Mass Media,” Alex Kitnick and Dean of Columbia University‘s GSAPP, Mark Wigley, will discuss McHale’s work, with particular emphasis on its relationship to the themes of “Identity”.