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Call Number:
MSS 60
Holdings:
Accessible by appointment in the Study Room [Request]
Creator:
McHale, John
Title(s):
Shoe-Life Stories
Date:
ca. 1954
Classification:
Archives and Manuscripts
Series:
Series I: Collage Books
Part of Collection:
Box 4, item 2a
Provenance:
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Magda Cordell McHale
Conditions Governing Access:
The materials are open for research. and Restricted fragile material. Use requires permission of the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts
Conditions Governing Use:
In Copyright

The collection is the physical property of the Yale Center for British Art. Literary rights, including copyright, also belong to the Yale Center for British Art. For further information, consult the Archives Department.
Scope and Content:
"Shoe-Life Stories (circa 1954) sliced reproductions of faces vertically and alternated these with textures of objects from a jeweler’s catalog."--Buckley, Craig. Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960. University of Minnesota Press, 2019, page 50. "McHale at this time abandoned the neural forms of his earlier work in order to emphasize the role of communications media. He wished to visualize how raw data (represented by torn bits of colored paper, newspapers, and magazines) might be organized by a human or mechanical brain into discrete messages. The collage books that he produced in 1954 (cat. no. 37) synthesized the themes of mass culture, information processing, and viewer participation. Each page of these books ... is composed of a collage cut into strips, so that the volume becomes a bound series of variable collages to be 'read' however the viewer wishes."--Baas, Jacquelynn. "John McHale" In The Independent Group: postwar Britain and the aesthetics of plenty. Edited by David Robbins. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1990
Physical Description:
1 collage book ; 25 x 21 cm (closed)
Genre:
Collages (visual works), Collage books, Interactive art, Abstract art, Drawings (visual works), Ephemera, Exhibition catalogs, Periodicals, Photographs, Posters, Sketchbooks, and Tear sheets
Subject Terms:
Art, Modern
Collage
Dot zero
Exhibitions
Human information processing
Information theory
Lady Clare magazine
McHale, John. Aluminum head.
McHale, John. Shoe-life stories
McHale, John. Transistor
McHale, John. Why I took to the washers in luxury flats
Pop art
Popular culture
Probabilities
Subject Period:
20th Century
Associated People/Groups:
Alloway, Lawrence, 1926-1990
Dubuffet, Jean, 1901-1985
Independent Group (Association : Great Britain)
Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, England)
Irwin, Gwyther, 1931-2008
McHale, John
McHale, Magda Cordell
Mesens, E. L. T., 1903-1971 (Edouard Léon Théodore)
Meyer, E. W.
Paolozzi, Eduardo, 1924-2005
This Is Tomorrow (1956 : Whitechapel Art Gallery)
Whitechapel Art Gallery
Finding Aid Title:
John McHale archive
Collection PDF:
https://ead-pdfs.library.yale.edu/11090.pdf
Archival Object:
https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/2798364
Metadata Cloud URL:
https://metadata-api.library.yale.edu/metadatacloud/api/aspace/repositories/3/archival_objects/2798364?mediaType=json&include-notes=1&include-all-subjects=1