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Description |
Photograph of exhibition installation, ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), London, September-October 1953; "In this early Independent Group exhibition photographs of varying sizes were attached to the gallery walls. Others were suspended by wires from the ceiling. Analogies were set up between various structures deriving from technology, science, art, and the natural world. Revisiting the spirit of the 'New Vision' photography of the 1930s, which had been associated pre-eminently with the Bauhaus teacher László Moholy Nagy, the exhibition helped broaden attitudes towards visual culture in Britain." (Caption, p.97); "The IG came together in London through the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts). Founded in 1946 by British advocates of Surrealism such as Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, this institution was identified with mainland European experimentation as opposed to the Neo-Romantic and realist currents in 1950s British art. The IG constituted a loose alliance of artists, architects, photographers, and art and design historians who, with the ICA's encouragement, organized a highly eclectic program of lectures in 1952-5 on topics such as helicopter design, science fiction, car styling, advertising, and recent scientific and philosophical thought. […] The IG's academic latitude was underpinned by a radical belief that 'culture' should connote not the heights of artistic excellence but rather a plurality of social practices. They therefore identified themselves with capitalism's cultural consumers. The main critic in the group, Lawrence Alloway, argued against humanist-led values of uniqueness in favor of a 'long front of culture' characterized by a continuum of artefacts from oil paintings to 'mass-distributed film and group-oriented magazines'. This openness to culture at large informed the first IG usages of the term 'Pop' around 1955. […] The IG's breadth of reference was dramatized in two early events. The first, now accorded an originary mythic status, was a Surrealistic epidiascope lecture delivered in 1952 by the Scottish-born sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi which galvanized colleagues with its flood of heterogeneous imagery from pulp and commercial sources. The materials shown, a set of collages with the generic title 'Bunk', were not even considered 'art' by Paolozzi until 1972 when they were incorporated into silkscreen designs. The second event was the exhibition 'Parallel of Life and Art', the beginning of an important sequence conceived by IG members, installed at the ICA in 1953 by Paolozzi in collaboration with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson and the photographer Nigel Henderson. This consisted of dramatic non-hierarchical juxtapositions of photographs from sources as diverse as photo-journalism and microscopy. Although Fine Art images were included (Pollock, Dubuffet, Klee), they were clearly reproductions, submitted to a form of cultural leveling by means of a common grainy texture. […] This exhibition subordinated the authentic artistic gesture to the principle of reproducibility. It therefore dramatically expanded art's parameters while fuelling the destabilizing of authorial agency […]. The IG's immediate inspirations were books such as Amedée Ozenfant's Foundations of Modern Art (1928) or Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1947) which were prized for their photographic juxtapositions of art and technology rather than their modernist rhetoric. However, the IG's acknowledgement of photography's ubiquity brought them close to the conclusions of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, who, in the 1930s, had analyzed photography's societal role in undermining authorial 'origins'. In his seminal essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Benjamin argued that the 'auras' art objects once possessed by virtue of their specific locations or 'cult value' had 'withered away' in mass society at the hands of reproductive technologies." (Excerpt, pp.95-98) |
