John McHale’s participatory art: the Constructivist Kit series

Abstract

Known only through published and archival documents, John McHale’s Constructivist Kit series (1954) captures the artist’s conceptual concerns in the mid-1950s with the creative potential of the machine, the supposedly democratizing value of mass production, and the need for British society to acclimatize to the materials and systems of the post Second World War environment. In requiring audience participation, the do-it-yourself artworks undermined conventional viewing practices and challenged the hegemony of visual perception, tapping in to discourses coming out of sculptural aesthetics about haptic and visual modes of engagement and the educational function of art.