-1FATHERS [AND MOTHERS] OF POP

A review of the exhibition ‘The Independent Group: Post-War Britain and the

Aesthetics of Plenty’, ICA, London, February-April 1990.

Poster for This is Tomorrow (1956) exhibition with collage by Richard Hamilton.

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JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

Britain in the early 1950s was still suffering from the adverse effects of the Second

World War and adjusting to the loss of empire. Atomic bombs and the Korean
War added to the gloom which national celebrations like the Festival of Britain

and the Coronation could only temporarily alleviate. The affluent consumer

society with its pop and teenage cultures that flowered in the late 1950s and 1960s

was still at an embryonic stage. While some Britishers looked enviously across the

Atlantic to the United States, where, according to the movies and adverts, there

was a paradise of material comfort, others resented the impact of ‘admass’ upon

the nation. It was at this historical juncture that various younger members of the

ICA, Dover Street, London, organised an informal discussion group first named

the ‘Young Group’ and then the ‘Independent Group’ (IG). It met intermittently

between 1952 and 1955. At the time, the participants had no inkling that their

small gatherings would later become famous or that they would be dubbed

‘Fathers of Pop’.

Think - tank extraordinaire

The word ‘independent’ signified a degree of autonomy from the mother institution

and in particular marked a break with the aesthetic preferences of members of the

old guard such as Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, founders of the ICA, whose

tastes had been formed in the 1930s. Surrealism was crucial to Penrose, while Read

was receptive to most varieties of modern art. Both believed the arts formed the

apex of a pyramid, at the bottom of which was the mass media; both considered

artistic values to be eternal and absolute. The IG also opposed, or were indifferent

to, the several strands of British art of the time, namely, ‘Moore-ish yokelry’, neo-

romanticism and kitchen sink realism. They preferred the Dadaists and Futurists,
Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock and European neo-Brutalism.

Four members of the IG: Peter Smithson, Paolozzi, Alison Smithson, Henderson.
Photo Nigel Henderson, 1956. Courtesy of the Mayor Gallery.
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Participants in IG meetings and projects included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner

Banham, Magda and Frank Cordell, Theo Crosby, Toni del Renzio, Richard and

Terry Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Geoffrey Holroyd, John McHale, Eduardo

Paolozzi, Colin St John Wilson, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, William

Turnbull and John Voelcker. Thus the IG encompassed art and design critics,

architects, artists and people working in popular culture (Frank Cordell in pop

music and del Renzio in women's fashion magazines). As the list of names reveals,
the IG was very much a male-dominated institution and the contributions of its

female participants have yet to be properly evaluated.

Art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1961.

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Reyner Banham

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In effect, the IG was a cultural research centre, a think-tank extraordinaire. Its

ambitious aim was to consider the implications for art and society of new

developments in science, technology, industrial design and the mass media at the

mid~point of the twentieth century. A wide range of topics were examined: the

machine aesthetic, the architecture of Le Corbusier, action painting, car styling,

cybernetics, crystallography, helicopter design, philosophy, science fiction,

Western movies, fashion, pop music, and communication theory.

Picasso and Presley

Images from US mass circulation magazines, advertising and the cinema were

viewed and the term ‘pop art’ was introduced to refer to contemporary popular or

mass culture. (It was only later, after the IG had ceased to meet, that Hamilton

and Paolozzi began to make pop art from the raw material of popular culture.)

Curiously the biggest, most popular media event in Britain in the early 1950s - the

televising of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II - seems to have been ignored by

the IG intellectuals. What was exhilerating about the IG was its orientation to the

present and the future, its openness to new experience, its acceptance of change, its

intellectual curiosity, its serious treatment of commercial entertainment, its

interdisciplinary programme, its anthropological, non-hierarchical view of culture

(distinctions between high and low, good and bad were suspended; there was to be

a fine art/pop culture continuum; Picasso and Presley were different but, in their

respective spheres, equal), its acceptance of an aesthetic of expendability and

currency rather than an aesthetic of permanence, its rejection of absolutes in

favour of relativistic, historical assessments. Its members recognised, and wished

to point out to others, the astonishing heterogeneity of humanity's material culture

and the multiplicity of media which confronted people in the mid-twentieth

century. This implied the development of a sensibility that was eclectic, catholic,

flexible and pragmatic. The IG seems to have been describing the pluralism of the

1980s and so it is no wonder that its participants are now considered among the

first post-modernists.

In the beginning IG meetings were exclusive (by invitation only); later they

became public and a wider audience was reached via exhibitions which combined

pleasure with instruction. IG participants were involved in mounting shows at

several London venues in the 1950s: ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (ICA, 1953); ‘Man,

Machine and Motion’ (ICA, 1955); ‘This is Tomorrow’ (Whitechapel, 1956); ‘House

of the Future’ (Ideal Home Exhibition, Olympia, 1956).

‘This is Tomorrow’ - a collaboration between artists and architects which

consisted of twelve teams co-ordinated by Theo Crosby - is chiefly remembered for

the popular imagery/perception display designed by Hamilton, McHale and

Voelcker, but it also featured a mixed-media installation by Paolozzi, Henderson

and the Smithsons which was a ‘symbolic dwelling’, a primitivistic patio and

pavilion based on working-class backyards and sheds in Bethnal Green, which

alluded to people's culture of a different, more vernacular kind.

Magazine feature about House of the Future designed by the Smithsons.

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Creative friction
Design played an important role within the IG and its aftermath, especially in the

case of Banham, Hamilton and the Smithsons. It was both a subject to be analysed

and a practice to be engaged in: modern architecture, industrial design and

advertising were scrutinised and exhibitions, posters, catalogues and houses of the

future designed. Banham's and Hamilton's essays of the late 1950s - ‘A Throwaway

Aesthetic’, ‘Hommage a Chrysler Corp’, ‘Persuading Image’ - were design

journalism of a high order; they paralleled the work of Roland Barthes in France

and the semiotic studies of communications undertaken at Ulm in Germany. In

terms of exhibition design, the IG's ideas were influenced by Alexander Dorner, a

radical German museum director of the 1920s and 1930s whose book, The Way

Beyond Art, appeared in 1947. Their aim was to create environments that would

stimulate participation. However, a montage of images and a mix of media were

used to produce not an integrated Gesamtkunstwerk, but a multifaceted, intertextual

display. As Alloway later put it: ‘The maze form made it possible to create a non-

hierarchic profusion of images from all sources.’

A complex history of critical reception ensued once the IG ceased to function.

During the 1960s, the group was written up by Alloway as the prelude to British

pop art, a view re-iterated by Banham and others in the 1979 Arts Council film

Fathers of Pop. In the 1980s the design historians Penny Sparke and Anne Massey

undertook detailed research work in order to criticise this over-simplistic

conception, puncturing several of the myths that had grown up around the group

and arguing that it owed much to the ICA, its host institution, and that a prime

concern was not so much mass culture as European modernism. Certainly the
sculptures and paintings Paolozzi and Hamilton made between 1952 and 1955 were

indebted more to the modern art of Paris than to pop culture, though Paolozzi was

obsessed with the man/machine interface and with his ‘Krazy Kat’ archive. And

people like Banham and Hamilton were similarly steeped in the modern movement,

though they believed that technology and business had changed, hence it was vital

to challenge modernism's values and assumptions.

It does seem to be the case that the IG's significance remains fluid and

contentious because the range and complexity of its activities make possible a

variety of interpretations. While the project involved intensive collaboration and

teamwork, the IG was nevertheless composed of diverse individuals with varying

enthusiasms whose activities were marked, as curator James Lingwood puts it, by

‘creative friction’; even their collaborations were characterised by Hamilton as

‘antagonistic’. After 1956 their careers evolved in many directions, but virtually all

continued to elaborate issues broached at IG meetings and exhibitions. The ICA's

decision to illustrate the work of key figures as individuals is to be welcomed

because it highlights the issues of difference and divergence within the group.

The present ICA show is a meta-exhibit: an exhibition about exhibitions. It is

also incestuous: the ICA celebrates its own past. In these circumstances critical

objectivity may be at a premium and the recreation of past shows could be viewed

as an exercise in nostalgia at odds with the forward momentum of the IG itself. IG

exhibitions were temporary phenomena, showing the transience of pop culture

itself. In photographs they achieve a permanence that contradicts their short-term

nature. Furthermore, the current show poses a historical comparison - the 1950s
versus the 1990s - whereby those artists of today who struggle with questions of art

and mass culture, commerce and complicity, can draw lessons from the British ex-

perience of the 19505. The danger is that a reading of the IG emphasising the

art/mass culture dimension will result in a partial understanding of the group's

concerns.

Agent of big business

What impelled the I G to engage in their analysis of mass culture and design?

Obviously, enjoyment: analysis results in a deeper involvement with the object of

study. Obviously, a desire to comprehend the new, post-war world in which they

found themselves. But there were also instrumental reasons. Banham, for

instance, conceived of the design critic as the partner of the designer helping

industry to decide what will sell. In 1955 he wrote: ‘The critic ... must have the

ability to sell the public to the manufacturer ... he must project the future dreams

and desires of people as one who speaks from within their ranks. It is only thus

that he can participate in the extraordinary adventure of mass production ... ’ Is

Banham's design critic, one wonders, a spokesman for the people or a gullible,

unpaid agent of big business?

Certain members of the IG - Hamilton, for example - saw themselves as

the prototypes for a new kind of knowing consumer. To consume goods and

services, to welcome a rapid turnover of goods and styles, and to demand new,

ever more sophisticated products was a social duty because it was in this way

that production could be expanded, a society of abundance created, and living

 standards continually raised. The fine artist/intellectual, in Hamilton's case

both an analyst and maker of culture, had to find a way to become socially

relevant again; ultimately, his efforts were motivated by a desire to serve ‘the

needs of society’. But this generalised expression obscured vital distinctions:

what needs, whose needs? Are the needs of women and men, workers and

bosses, black and white, rich and poor all the same?

Class and politics

Class and politics were vexed, unresolved questions for the IG. The idea that

their project represented ‘the revenge of elementary school boys’ was only partly

true because some participants came from upper- and middle-class backgrounds.

Most were upwardly mobile in the sense that they benefited from university or art

school educations. They cut across social divisions by appreciating both high art

and mass culture. Yet their affirmation of pop culture and consumerism aligned

them with the majority to whom high art was a closed book. They themselves

realised there was a contradiction between their admiration for US industrial

design, movies, and so on, and their political objections to the capitalist system

responsible for their existence. (Some of the IG were socialists and voted Labour.)

This contradiction still exists on the Left in Britain: witness the problems the

Labour movement has had in coming to terms with the market and consumerism,

and indeed with the image, packaging and advertising of the Labour Party itself.

The IG's optimism about the future was based on faith in technological progress

and in the growing power of consumers; its participants' analysis of the icono-

graphy and styling of mass culture artefacts was brilliant, but the principal
weakness of the project was the failure to address the side of production, economics

and the ownership of cultural industries, the long-term negative effects of

industrialisation and ‘the commodification of everything’. One has only to think of

the ecological consequences of the expendable aesthetic vaunted by the IG to realise

the naivety of some of their thinking. They were mesmerised by the promises of

industry and the ecstasy of mass communications. When the Leftists among the IG

met at the ICA they seem to have left their scepticism and politics at home.

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David Robbins (ed), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of

Plenty, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). Book/Catalogue.

Update, see:

Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain

1945-59, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2002).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyner_Banham

http://www.thisistomorrow2.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Tomorrow

http://www.independentgroup.org.uk

http://killerbeesting.blogspot.com/2008/03/magda-cordell-mchale.html

http://www.warholstars.org/articles/johnmchale/johnmchale.html

http://www.warholstars.org/articles/richardhamilton/richardhamilton.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_del_Renzio
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2434

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This review was first published in the design magazine Blueprint, no 64, Feb 1990,

pp. 24-26.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. In the late 1950s he was an art

student taught by Hamilton. He is the author of many books and articles on

contemporary art and mass media. He is also an editorial advisor for the website:

"http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com</a>