Living life in pictures: isotype as modernist cultural practice

Henning, Michelle ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3798-7227 (2010) Living life in pictures: isotype as modernist cultural practice. New Formations (70). ISSN 0950-2378

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Abstract

The Vienna Method of Picture Statistics, also known as Isotype, has become a means for historians and theorists of modern culture to directly link visual modernism with modern social science and philosophy, specifically with logical positivism and Taylorism/Fordism. Isotype has been described in terms of Taylorist standardization, rationalism, ‘transparent construction’ and functionalism. By delineating the understanding of these terms held by Isotype’s inventor Otto Neurath and his friends and colleagues, and contextualising Isotype in relation to recent reassessments of Neurath’s other work, I suggest that Isotype participated in a modernism that was understood by its proponents in ways that were more plural, and pluralist, than we now give them credit.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: ISBN: 9781907103247
Keywords: Isotype, Neurath, modernism, functionalism, design, logical positivism, infographics, information design
Subjects: Arts > Cultural history
Graphic arts > Graphic communication
Arts > Art and design history
Depositing User: Michelle Henning
Date Deposited: 03 Oct 2017 19:13
Last Modified: 06 Feb 2024 15:54
URI: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/3979

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