RIChard HamiLton 2 ber 2011 was a British painter exhibition Man, Machine and M Just what is it that makes so appealing, produced fo tion of the Independent Group in Lo historians to be among the earlie
1922 – 13 Septemand collage artist. His 1955 Motion and his 1956 collage, s today’s homes so different, or the This Is Tomorrow exhibiondon, are considered by critics and est works of pop art.
24 February
RIChard HamiLton
Gropius wrote a book on grain silos, Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes, and Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office every morning; but today we collect ads.” 1 This little prose poem appeared in an essay by the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson in November 1956, three months after the landmark exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which included members of the Independent Group (IG), an energetic crew of young British architects, artists, and critics. Forget that Gropius, Le Corbusier, Perriand, and others were also media savvy; the point here is polemical: they, Gropius and company, the
The First Pop Age – Richard Hamilton – 5
protagonists of modernist design, were inspired by functional s~ructures, modern transport, and refined products, whereas we, the Smithsons and friends, the celebrants of popular culture, look to “the throw-away object and the pop-package” for our models. This was done partly in delight, the Smithsons suggest, and partly in desperation: “Today we are being edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomenon of the popular arts-advertising. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.” Others in the IG, such as Richard Hamilton and Reyner Banham, shared this urgency. Who were the prophets of this epic shift? Perhaps the first artist in the group “to collect ads” was Eduardo Paolozzi, who called the collages made from his collection “Bunk” (fig. 1.1). Although this tackboard aesthetic was also practiced by Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, and John McHale, it was Paolozzi who, one night in April 1952, projected his ads, magazine clippings, postcards, and diagrams at the new Institute of Contemporary Art, in a celebrated demonstration that underwrote the distinctive method of the IG, an
antihierarchical juxtaposition of select archival images that appear disparate, connected, or both at once. Performed in early collages by the aforementioned artists, this mode of presentation was first proposed as a curatorial strategy by Hamilton in his 1951 exhibition, “Growth and Form,” inspired by On Growth and Form (1917), the classic book by the Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and then developed in such shows as “Parallel of Life and Art,” directed by Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and Henderson in 1953; “Man, Machine & Motion,” produced by Hamilton in 1955; and “This is Tomorrow,” which grouped artists, architects, and designers in twelve teams in 1956. As an artistic strategy, however, it is elaborated most significantly in the “tabular” images of Hamilton. If Paolozzi and Hamilton suggested an aesthetic paradigm that served both collage and curatorial practices, it was Banham who provided the theoretical argument for a Pop Age. “We have already entered the Second Machine Age,” he writes in lheory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), “and can look back on the First as a period of the past.” Banham conceived this dissertation in the midst of the IG, which reinforced his ideological distance from the initial
The First Pop Age – Richard Hamilton – 6
historians of modern architecture (including Nikolaus Pevsner, his advisor at the Courtauld Institute, who authored Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936). Committed though he was to modern architecture, Banham was skeptical of the rationalist canon of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe as laid down by Pevsner, Siegfried Giedion, and others, which is to say that he challenged this version of modern architecture according to the criterion of how best to express the Machine Age, and so advanced the imaging of technology as the principal criterion for modern design-for design in the second Machine Age, or first Pop Age, too. According to Banham, Gropius and company imitated only the superficial look of the machine, not its dynamic principles: they mistook the simple forms and smooth surfaces of the machine for the kinetic operations of technology. This vision was too “selective”; it was also too orderly-a “classicizing” aesthetic dressed up in the guise of the machine. Le Corbusier acknowledged this classicism-through-the machine when he juxtaposed a 1921 Delage sports car with the Parthenon in his vers une architecture (1923).
For Banham, this comparison was absurd: cars are Futurist “vehicles of desire,” not Platonic type-objects, and only a subject who thrilled to the machine as “a source of personal fulfillment and gratification” could truly embody its modern spirit.7 In this regard, Banham the pop prophet was not at odds with Banham the revisionary modernist. Like others in the IG, he was raised on the popular culture of American magazines, comics, and movies before the war. This is what “pop” meant after the war, not “folk” in the old sense of native culture, or “Pop” in the current sense of Pop art (the former no longer existed for them, the latter did not yet exist for anyone). As magazine and movie buffs, IG members were near enough to this American culture to know it well, but far away enough to desire it still, especially in an impoverished Britain short on attractive alternatives. The result was that the IG did not question this popular culture much; hence the apparent paradox of a youthful group in the 1950s that was at once pro-American and
fig. 1.0
fig. 1.1
Hommage a Chrysler Corp
Here is a lush situation
1957. Oil and collage on panel,
1958. Oil, cellulose, metal foil,
48 x 32 in.
and collage on panel, 32 x 48 in.
fig. 1.2
fig. 1.3
Collage 1
Collage 2z
1957. Oil and collage on panel,
1957. Oil and collage on panel,
48 x 32 in.
48 x 32 in.
fig. 1.4 Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1957. Oil, metal, foil, and collage on panel, 10 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.
fig. 1.5 – 1.6 Installation view of Man, Machine & Motion at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 1955
Phloo Gropius wrote a book on grain silos, Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes, and Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office every morning; but today we collect ads.” 1 This little prose poem appeared in an essay by the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson in November 1956, three months after the landmark exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which included members of the Independent Group (IG), an energetic crew of young British architects, artists, and critics. Forget that Gropius, Le Corbusier, Perriand, and others were also
The First Pop Age – Richard Hamilton – 11
media savvy; the point here is polemical: they, Gropius and company, the protagonists of modernist design, were inspired by functional s~ructures, modern transport, and refined products, whereas we, the Smithsons and friends, the celebrants of popular culture, look to “the throw-away object and the pop-package” for our models.2 This was done partly in delight, the Smithsons suggest, and partly in desperation: “Today we are being edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomenon of the popular arts-advertising. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.”3 Others in the IG, such as Richard Hamilton and Reyner Banham, shared this urgency. Who were the prophets of this epic shift? Perhaps the first artist in the group “to collect ads” was Eduardo Paolozzi, who called the collages made from his collection “Bunk” (fig. 1.1). Although this tackboard aesthetic was also practiced by Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, and John McHale, it was Paolozzi who, one night in April 1952, projected his ads, magazine clippings, postcards, and diagrams at the new Institute of Contemporary Art, in a celebrated demon-
stration that underwrote the distinctive method of the IG, an antihierarchical juxtaposition of select archival images that appear disparate, connected, or both at once. Performed in early collages by the aforementioned artists, this mode of presentation was first proposed as a curatorial strategy by Hamilton in his 1951 exhibition, “Growth and Form,” inspired by On Growth and Form (1917), the classic book by the Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and then developed in such shows as “Parallel of Life and Art,” directed by Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and Henderson in 1953; “Man, Machine & Motion,” produced by Hamilton in 1955; and “This is Tomorrow,” which grouped artists, architects, and designers in twelve teams in 1956. As an artistic strategy, however, it is elaborated most significantly in the “tabular” images of Hamilton. If Paolozzi and Hamilton suggested an aesthetic paradigm that served both collage and curatorial practices, it was Banham who provided the theoretical argument for a Pop Age. “We have already entered the Second Machine Age,” he writes in lheory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), “and can look back on the First as a period of the past.”5 Banham conceived this dissertation in the midst of
fig. 1.7 Original version of Glorious Techniculture 1955. Oil, cellulose, metal foil, and collage on panel, 36 x 24 in.
the IG, which reinforced his ideological distance from the initial historians of modern architecture (including Nikolaus Pevsner, his advisor at the Courtauld Institute, who authored Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936). Committed though he was to modern architecture, Banham was skeptical of the rationalist canon of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe as laid down by Pevsner, Siegfried Giedion, and others, which is to say that he challenged this version of modern architecture according to the criterion of how best to express the Machine Age, and so advanced the imaging of technology as the principal criterion for modern design-for design in the second Machine Age, or first Pop Age, too. According to Banham, Gropius and company imitated only the superficial look of the machine, not its dynamic principles: they mistook the simple forms and smooth surfaces of the machine for the kinetic operations of technology. This vision was too “selective”; it was also too orderly-a “classicizing” aesthetic dressed up in the guise of the machine.6 Le Corbusier acknowledged this classicism-through-the machine when he juxtaposed a 1921 Delage sports car with the Parthenon in his vers une
fig. 1.8
fig. 1.9
AHH!
Pin-up
1962. Oil on panel,
1961. Oil, cellulose,
32 x 48 in.
and collage on panel, 48 x 32 in.
The First Pop Age – Richard Hamilton – 14
architecture (1923). For Banham, this comparison was absurd: cars are Futurist “vehicles of desire,” not Platonic type-objects, and only a subject who thrilled to the machine as “a source of personal fulfillment and gratification” could truly embody its modern spirit. In this regard, Banham the pop prophet was not at odds with Banham the revisionary modernist. Like others in the IG, he was raised on the popular culture of American magazines, comics, and movies before the war. This is what “pop” meant after the war, not “folk” in the old sense of native culture, or “Pop” in the current sense of Pop art (the former no longer existed for them, the latter did not yet exist for anyone). As magazine and movie buffs, IG members were near enough to this American culture to know it well, but far away enough to desire it still, especially in an impoverished Britain short on attractive alternatives (such as the elite civilization represented by Kenneth Clark, the academic modernism championed by Herbert Read, and the working-class tradition studied by Richard Hoggart). The result was that the IG did not question this popular culture much; hence the apparent paradox of a youthful
group in the 1950s that was at once pro-American and pro-Left. At this time, then, a first, Fordist “Americanism,” one of mass production, which swept through Europe in the 1920s with important effects on Gropius and company, was supplanted by a second, consumerist ‘’Americanism,” one of imagistic impact, sexy packaging, and speedy turnover of products. These values became the design criteria of the first Pop Age. This revision of modern design was thus not only an academic matter; it was also a way to reclaim an “aesthetic of expendability,” first proposed in Futurism, for art and architecture in the Pop period, one in which “standards hitched to permanency” were no longer relevant. In this experiment, Banham had two laboratories: IG activities (discussions, lectures, and exhibitions) and his own many essays, in which he applied to commercial products the iconographic methods developed for high culture at the Courtauld Institute. More than any other figure, Banham guided design theory away from a modernist concern with abstract forms to a pop semiotics of cultural images, in a way that followed the shift from the master architect as
fig. 1.10 Epiphany 1964. Cellulose on panel, 48 in. diameter.
arbiter of industrial production to the advertising stylist as instigator of consumerist desire. “The foundation stone of the previous intellectual structure of Design Theory has crumbled,” Banham writes in 1961; “there is no longer universal acceptance of Architecture as the universal analogy of design.”10 In this account, it is not the book that killed architecture, as Victor Hugo prophesied in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831); it is the chrome fender and the plastic gizmo that displaced it as the center of design. In different ways,
the Smithsons took “the measure of this intervention” in architecture; Hamilton did the same II mart. Hamilton shared many of these enthusiasms with Banham. He, too, delighted in the machine by dint not of its functional fitness but of its affective power, its mythic force. In the introduction to his 1955 exhibition, “Man, Machine & Motion,” a gridded