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Social Showman
Survey Graphic November 1936 Vol 25, No. 11, p. 618.
THE Big Man who created the Little Man is with us from overseas
this fall. Though the two of them have not been heralded on Broadway,
the Little Man is a sound actor—and Otto Neurath is his impresario. The
significant Little Man, who represents a hundred thousand or maybe a
million of us, made his first appearance in America in the pages of
Survey Graphic in 1932. Row on row like the chorus of a review,
or among the symbols of the things men buy and sell and eat and use, or
perhaps at a halting place in man's long pilgrimage from savagery to
peace and plenty, he has become the hero of act after act in which he
may not even enter the stage at all. In business roles he signifies the
man earning over $7500, or owning an automobile, or belonging to country
clubs; or—in the field of social welfare—having a job, the toothache,
tuberculosis, naturalization papers, or no job, or what not. But he is
not really so elementary as all that. The Little Man was begot in a bed
of statistics, trained by economists, and styled by imaginative
designers. The true secret of his significance, and of the significance
of all Neurath's methods, is that Neurath, the social showman, is also a
philosopher. Authenticity in research, and precision in visualizing the
finding of the experts, do not cramp the style of Neurath s large mind
- Like the man in the moon, whom he resembles when his great
countenance is reflective, Neurath s orbit swings clear round the earth.
He sets the imagination on fire as Van Loon, or H. G. Wells, sometimes
does simply by giving us a surprising glimpse of ourselves in a moving
social procession. But with this difference. Neurath is never carried
away by his fancies, or his day dreams, into conjecture. He is, first of
all, a mathematician, disciplined in the natural sciences.
- In bringing about the "renascence of hieroglyphics" Neurath
wrested from the hierarchy of his own scientific colleagues their
monopoly of learning. Our civilization, he feels, is still under the
sway of a Middle Ages pattern in which a word language is the property
of one class alone. In the Middle Ages, it was the monks with their
Latin. Today it is the scientists whose polysyllabic books are over the
heads of most of us. Yet if democratic cooperation toward the solution
of complex problems is not to fail, we must all understand the great
forces which affect our lives.
- To Neurath the pie-chart, the bar-chart, the fluctuating lines
of the graph-makers and the map makers are almost as inadequate as fancy
words. Neurath is never without a huge pencil rooted to his hand to
chart the ideas that transcend words. Not that he is inarticulate. A
sociologist and the son of a sociologist, a logician and the husband of
a logician, he knows and speaks the language of the scientists. In
conversation, especially in German, his vocabulary carries all the
nuances of ideas and images. In his English, which he has sharpened into
the colloquial by leading dozens of detective stories on his voyages to
America, he is precise, exact. But no matter how fluently one may
describe something, he feels that to be fully understood, it must be
visualized. Back of the automobile and the skyscraper, for example, lies
r.p.m.s. and complex mathematical formulas, translated into action by
the engineers. Back of Neurath's pictures and museum exhibits lie
profound research, statistics transformed into ideas, ideas then
designed into a picture narrative, a drama of social interpretation.
- NEURATH is a practical man. For years he has worked with
research and educational organizations in half a dozen countries besides
the United States. He created and directed the famous Gesellschafts und
Wirtschaftsmuseum of his native city of Vienna. It was in that museum
that he blossomed out as a showman, the Barnum of man's life and work.
- That was in 1924. Neurath was then, at forty-two, a mature
social scientist of growing repute; his household was a center of
practical as well as intellectual discussion. Wartime experience in the
economic division in charge of civilian supplies in Poland had thrown
him into first hand contact with the source and flow of commodities. His
teaching experience. in Heidelberg and Vienna, had developed his gift
for relating science to daily life. Then as general secretary of the
Austrian Federation for Housing and Garden Cities, he expressed himself
through posters and graphs and popular expositions that indicated his
bent. When Vienna began its great program of rehabilitation and social
welfare, Neurath started the Social and Economic Museum. There, with a
group of first rate collaborators in graphic work, he directed the
transformation of facts and figures into easily understood, dramatic
exhibits—which, by virtue of their relation to each other, told their
story almost without words, as no museum displays ever had done before.
- Traditionally, a museum director is a collector of exhibits, the
keeper of a mausoleum, where scattered relics fag the brain and tire the
feet. Boldly Neurath ventured into the Museum of the Future. His museum
was located on the first floor of the city hall. It was a dynamic
representation of the social, economic and cultural synthesis of the
city. At night, when the rooms were open for workmen, he introduced
novel illumination effects and movies.
- "It was called a museum," Neurath says. "It was really a
permanent exposition. It was not enough to show what the city did with
its taxes, what opportunities and responsibilities Vienna offered to its
citizens, and vice versa. Our exhibits and apparatus also made
comparisons with other cities and countries and other periods of
history."
- By popular demand, tiny branches were added in another quarter
of the city. These were the sideshows. In the main museum, in the heart
of the city, housing, health, education, science were dramatized, not as
lone exhibits, competing with all else, but through charts, apparatus,
naturalistic photographs and schematic models, as part of a living
society. The social effects of inventions (for instance, typewriters
giving women a new occupation and a new economic standing) or welfare
activities (clinics nipping disease in the bud) were shown as part of
the whole pageant of life. Always, man himself was the exhibit, man the
Viennese in a great and interrelated world.
- Neurath's skill in appealing to the general public was proved by
the length of time individual visitors remained without tiring. In
ordinary museums the strain of digesting hundreds of unrelated exhibits
is almost as great as the strain of listening to a half dozen different
languages all at once. To attractiveness and informativeness Neurath
added unity—a pattern. which utilized his great background of history,
biology, economics and political science, the whole stated for you not
in words but in things and pictures. "I tried to make it as dramatic as
New York's Broadway at night," Neurath has said. "Broadway is the most
exciting exhibit in the world. In the electric signs all the texts are
in English, all the letters are in Latin type; their size, direction,
motion and colors are standardized into half a dozen simple patterns.
Social facts can be shown in an analogous system of standardized
simplicity that he who runs may understand."
- To be sure, Neurath respects and draws upon advertising and
propaganda experience. But the product he has to sell is enlightenment.
Hence his charts, as was his museum, are not composed of competing
parts, or messages, but aim toward visual cooperation. Only once has
Neurath gone outside the ordinary channels of expression to compete with
advertisements. He and his staff having worked up a poster about a
housing exposition, he wanted it printed so that it would receive the
maximum attention in competitive display. He finally hit upon a
distinctive green color, not to be matched on any billboard in Vienna He
made that color the exposition's own.
- In 1934 the Austrian government wiped out Neurath's museum in
Vienna. But he succeeded in rescuing a large part of its exhibits, and
they were sent to Holland and added to the permanent exposition of the
International Foundation for Visual Education, of which he is the
director. That organization, founded the year before as a result of
worldwide interest in the Vienna method, still functions. Neurath lives
at its international headquarters at The Hague.
- There, with several members of his original staff, he has built
up, as it were, a whole "pictorial esperanto" for visual education. His
pictorial language symbols have become as universal as notes in music,
though much easier to understand. Dutch educators in the East Indies,
for example, are interested in the possibility of using them in
classrooms to give their pupils a new sense of connection with the world
far away—something not in any books that Malaysians will ever read. At
The Hague he and his institute have completed two books with
ISOTYPE pictures, edited by C. K. Ogden, author of The
Meaning of Meaning. Their titles, "Basic by Isotype" and
"International Picture Language" give new currency to the device here
pictured. ISOTYPE not only means what its Greek roots
signify, "always the same symbols," but is a coy acrostic using the
initials International System of Typographical Pictorial Education. The
Little Man is his trademark, his professional signature.
- Neurath is sufficiently intuitive to work by remote control, and
turns out a constant stream of ideas and exhibits for such organizations
as the National Tuberculosis Association, which urged his present visit
to the United States under the auspices of the Oberlander Trust. Each
special assignment becomes his pet. One devoted to social insurance once
packed to capacity for a week a small room in Dresden, when much more
spacious exhibits by others went almost neglected. But as a generous
teacher he does not think in terms of competing with the work of others.
Indeed, he has welcomed and encouraged others to utilize his own
technique.
- Only in initiated circles in the United States, Sweden Holland,
England, the USSR and half a dozen other countries, is he a celebrity.
He, the complete showman, is a world figure, a name that the little men
themselves scarcely know.
- In harness, he is like the elephant that is his whimsical
personal signature (as characteristic as Whistler's butterfly!) patient,
persistent, a tower of strength and a respecter of tradition, a man who
can work with others, yet who contributes something uniquely his own.
Neurath's great body and broad brow and surprising adaptability suggest
a good-humored socially-minded pachyderm. Yet it is notable that a man
of his dynamic and brilliant originality has recruited and worked with a
permanent, well-trained and harmonious staff. Although not an artist he
has inspired and formulated the most extraordinary designs ever used to
give life to statistics, geography, natural resources and social forces.
All because he knows that "a simple picture remembered is better than
accurate figures forgotten," by young and old, by people of all levels
of intelligence, by scholars and illiterates. Likewise a dynamic
exposition. Even a lantern-slide lecture or movie, which he uses when no
other medium seems portable enough, can not be seen or felt except
during the course of a performance. A picture chart can be turned to, an
exposition can be visited, time and time again. They have a permanent
theatrical effect; they are continuous social shows. A show's a show,
anywhere, and Neurath is a showman—his theater the world, and all of us
the actors. Few men of our time have laid their hands so close to the
dramatic plot, elusive as a gypsy trail, that marks our destiny on this
planet.
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