Trans/Formation: Arts, Communication, Environment - Volume 1

1950

Editor's note: A truly multi-disciplinary journal which affirmed that “art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise…” This publication, which existed for only three issues, treated the arts and sciences “as a continuum.” –Public Collectors

[Devoted] neither to art nor to architecture but to a proposition that the arts and the sciences could be brought together in a common enterprise.

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Transformation affirms that art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise… but today they are too often treated as if they were cultural isolates and mutually antagonistic. lack of time, misinformation, specialized terminology make it hard to keep pace with advances in all fields. it is difficult enough to keep pace with a single one.

Transformation will cut across the arts and sciences by treating them as a continuum.

Transformation will provide authentic glimpses into the emerging forms of the ‘now.’

Transformation will present unifying views, specialization is a condition for progress but we are opposed to mutual ignorance, prejudice, cultural civil war.

Transformation will emphasize the dynamic process view as against static absolutes.. open as against closed systems… culture under transformation.”

Three annual issues were released before the journal folded in 1953, and at the height of its popularity it had about 1,000 sub-scriptions.

• Transformation it was a venue for a wide list of contributors from the areas of the arts and architecture; its fostering of a ‘holistic’ approach to what was then called the ‘environment,’ could be thought as anticipating what was going to be fully developed and tested in the still to come ‘experiments’ of the 1960s.

While embedded in the art world, trans/formation was devoted neither to art nor to architecture but to a proposition that the arts and the sciences could be brought together in a common enterprise. To that end, the journal solicited contributions from natural and social scientists. Further, in addition to the CIAM contingent, it featured an array of other voices in the arts—Gyorgy Kepes, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, John Cage, Bernard Rudofsky—representatives of plural modernisms, “alternative” and “avant-garde.” Trans/formation therefore encompassed within a single historical object positions that have often been conceived to be communicating along an axis of oppositions: major and minor, central and marginal, dominant and critical.”

(Vallye, Anna. “The strategic universality of trans/formation, 1950-1952,” Grey room ,New York, no. 35 Spring 2009: 28-57.)