9.Two tribes, two cultures (in-between with the Independent Group)

The Sgt. Pepper album cover describes a circuit; we can trace the pathways of a new kind of currency within the image, handed off from one celebrity to the next, gaining steadily in momentum and impact, until it begins issuing outward, igniting the fingertips of the record-buying public. The album’s contents require interpretation, decoding, and this process begins with the sleeve; its literal fullness and complexity announces the band’s enormous ambitions from a distance. It suggests a certain difficulty; its references are numerous and intricately interwoven. At the same time, though, they are not at all obscure. These references are pulled from the same mass-media archive that The Beatles effectively share with the general public, their audience. Name the faces, connect the dots, decipher and decode the underlying systems of association, and you too will be well on your way…

The Beatles, our guides in this undertaking, are themselves flickering precariously on the threshold of absorption. It is a figure-ground problem, as is always the case with the media. How does one retain one’s individual outline as an image among other images? How does one keep from getting swallowed whole? Peter Blake’s cover for Sgt. Pepper describes a moment when all the conventional markers of the British character have been destabilized, subjected to a ground-up overhaul. It is a record of a process already well underway, but it also participates in this process, accelerates it. Blake’s cover is partly proactive and partly reactive, and the same can be claimed for his practice overall: it is simultaneously critical of and perfectly complicit with mainstream values—it just depends what sort of a mainstream we are discussing.

If only because Blake has chosen the fine arts as the ultimate, if inhospitable, site of his pop-cultural excavations, the outcome will necessarily carry an undertone of irony. As a compromise solution to an impossible ambivalence, a desire that pulls the subject in two directions, irony is even more evident among the loose coalition of artists, designers, architects and critics that takes shape, between 1952 and 1955, under the banner of the Independent Group (IG). While not in itself a novel posture—in years to come, it would become almost de rigueur among artists—what is virtually unprecedented, in this case, is the fact that it partly mirrors its larger psychic context—that of postwar Britain. If Peter Blake and the IG beg description as both an assault on the “powers-that-be” and a symptom of them, it is because these two postures are no longer so diametrically opposed. Increasingly, they enable and produce each other, and they do so precisely because their object—the establishment and the mainstream—is itself just as ironic and ambivalent as they are.

Following the scarcity, deprivation and rationing that characterizes the war years and their immediate aftermath, the fifties are witness to an economic “take-off” of seemingly limitless proportions. “A voracious consumption of products and signs had commenced in the early and middle years of the decade,” writes David Mellor, “once the Conservative government accelerated policies of military industrial growth and a consumer economy.”¹ After years of “getting by” and “making do,” a more promising vision of the future appears on the horizon. This newly revitalized social mood occasions the resumption of certain themes and motifs from the past, which in turn serve to buoy it up even further. Of particular significance, notes Mellor, is the emergence of the “period cult of the renovated, electronicised New Elizabethan Age.” This “Tory Futurism,” as it comes to be known, is itself pointedly conflicted. “That the styles of political power might masquerade as archaic is unarguably the case,” he writes, “since they were as ambivalent as that meeting of the monarchic, adventuring past and the nuclear, space-exploring future which was the essential component of the New Elizabethan mythology.”

Mellor points to the reemergence of “(t)he portentous Edwardian face of Lord Kitchener, traditional icon of the British martial spirit,” within the works of IG coremembers Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi; it is a presence, at once fearful and zany, that will become evermore ubiquitous as we drift toward the Psychedelic Era of “Swinging London.”The “Edwardian resonances of vulgarity and cultural confidence” implicit in Lord Kitchener’s bust, as well as the teddy boy fashions ruling the street, “were acute for the diagnosticians of the fifties,” suggests Mellor, and we can add to this the sixties, the myths of one age authorizing the next, and the next.

The Beatles are themselves devout followers of teddy boy fashion, as are Peter Blake and the members of the IG, although theirs is a somewhat more toned-down (ambivalent and ironic) art school variant. All are united by sartorial inclination and the attitudes that attend their clothes: the working-class rock and roll appropriation of Edwardian style. Blake’s paintings echo the tone of nationalist pride and aspiring optimism that resounds throughout The Beatles’ music, whatever their underlying reservations and criticisms might be. Forged from the materials of an industrial mass-culture launched into overdrive, they share a sense of starting-over, a DIY brashness that sometimes verges on outright primitivism, but is built on an ingeniously dissembled foundation of cultural super-sophistication.

The Beatles’, Blake’s and the IG’s celebration of “techniculture,” the so-called “Society of the Spectacle,” and “The New,” is anathema to the prior generation of artists whose verdict on all of the above is consistently grim. This “old school” has drawn a series of direct connections between technology and disaster, popular culture and intellectual debasement, novelty and evil, and accordingly has retreated toward the Arcadian never-never lands of Neo- Romanticism. In the late forties and fifties, under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Culture, the art establishment in Britain reverts to the sort of small-scale, craft-based production that was championed by William Morris a century before. This means either a widespread return to landscape painting or, at the other extreme, the humanistic semi-abstract sculpture exemplified by Henry Moore. A diffident, recalcitrant “Soft-Modernism” is promoted partly out of anxiety, a fear of losing touch with the past and, by extension, one’s national identity.

“Hard-Modernism,” on the other hand, is largely understood by this “old school” as an American export, and potential contagion. The IG adopts a wholly different stance on the subject, enthusiastically welcoming the influx of US culture, both “high” and “low.”The ribbon is cut, most would agree, at the close of the summer of 1952, when some of the junior members of the recently established Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London begin meeting to discuss the “issues” they have with their seniors, whom they have pegged as dead weight, curmudgeonly obstacles to any hope for an authentically progressive program. It is from this loose coalition of seditionists that the IG is forged, their initial mandate being to override the Institute’s most inflexible, conservative elements and, in turn, to broaden its general purview to include both US art and the general field of the non-art— that is, urbanism, architecture, industrial design, information technology and entertainment.

A pivotal blow, in this regard, is credited to the artist Edouardo Paolozzi, whose notoriously unsettling slideshow “Bunk!” is presented at one of these early sessions. Composed mainly of the sort of hyperbolic, over-sexed imagery common to American magazines of the day— Paolozzi began collecting the stuff in 1947, while sifting through the discarded reading materials of GIs stationed in Britain—it is specifically designed to challenge any lingering sense of complacency among those attending. In this, by most accounts, “Bunk!” is entirely successful, perhaps too much so. Subjected, like the figure of Alex undergoing aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange, to a seemingly random succession of images, one more provocative than the last, and all delivered without the slightest trace of narrative guidance or commentary, the audience is nearly unanimous in their ensuing condemnation of the project. Criticizing its lack of structure, its cryptic, obscurantist or wholly absent “message,” they go on to charge Paolozzi with the crime of glib sensationalism. However, as Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway, the principal theorists of the IG’s activities and the artist’s key supporters, have pointed out, this response is itself already largely redundant and only gets in the way of grasping what is actually at stake in the work.The evaluative criteria of one age may not only not suit, but effectively hinder, the next.Trained in the ways of textual literacy, the audience fails to recognize the structure of “Bunk!” as any kind of structure at all precisely because it conforms to what is, for them, a still emerging and as yet unfathomable logic—that of media, “secondary orality” and the mechanically/electronically reproducible image.

Playing on Lawrence Alloway’s notorious characterization of the period style in terms of an “aesthetic of plenty,” the critic Julian Myers suggests that the particular shock perpetrated by Paolozzi’s slide-show consists in its seemingly freeform dissemination of “the detritus of plenty in a culture of scarcity.”² Ultimately, it will transpire that it is not the work, but the audience, that requires remedial attention. As Alloway elsewhere points out, “The efforts of poets to come to terms with industry in the nineteenth century … are unmemorable, that is to say, hard-to-learn, uninfluential in image forming. The media, however, whether dealing with war or the home, Mars or the suburbs, are an inventory of pop technology … a treasury of orientation, a manual of one’s occupancy of the twentieth century.”³ The paradigm shift is well underway, he appears to be saying; it is precisely the cause of these defensive postures of artistic retrenchment. What art demotes as meaningless kitsch is in fact steadily gaining precedence. Commercial films, television, newspapers and glossy magazines—these are the dominant forms of the twentieth century, and it is they, and no longer art, that now dictate the terms of our experience, our contemporary reality. It is a lesson clearly not lost on Paolozzi, whom Alloway later cites as being “very influential … in setting up this notion of the fine art—pop art continuum….”⁴Ultimately, his much-maligned slide-show wins out: “Bunk!” will come to be seen as a kind of crash course in what we presently know as “visual literacy.”

The “fine art—pop art continuum,” as Alloway sees it, is non-hierarchical, a product of the leveling out of a formerly vertical, and implicitly elitist, system. Reconfigured in this way, culture becomes a vast combinatory matrix; Alloway mentions “the touchability of all the bases in the continuum,” each part accessible to every other. The exemplary IG exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art (1953),” held at the ICA in London, can in this way reflect both on the groundbreaking painting of Jackson Pollock and on its cultural context in commercial pop, Hollywood cinema and advertising photography. In the US, thanks mainly to Clement Greenberg, Pollock is known as a purveyor of painterly essence, purity, flatness. Everything else has supposedly been purged from his work: it is perfectly autonomous, bearing no relation to anything outside itself. However in Britain, for the IG, none of this matters; instead, Pollock is important as a maker of images.

“This concept of Image is common to all aspects of The New Brutalism in England,” writes Banham in an article related to the above exhibition, aligning Jackson Pollock’s paintings with one of the central stylistic cues of the IG’s own production.⁵ “Where Thomas Aquinas supposed beauty to be quod visum placet (that which is seen, pleases), image may be defined as quod visum perturbat—that which is seen, affects the emotions, a situation which could subsume the pleasure caused by beauty, but is not normally taken to do so, for the New Brutalists’ interests in image are commonly regarded, by many of themselves as well as their critics, as being anti-art, or at any rate antibeauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word.”

Greenberg employs the example of Pollock to raise his neo- Kantian aestheticism to a canonical status within modernist theory, while Banham and the IG perform the exact opposite operation: Pollock is for them an open sign that can just as well be used to further a radical revision of the “Classical” modernist aesthetic. Again, for Greenberg, the aims of art are ultimately reductive: art reduces down to its individual mediums, and the artist does not necessarily invent or add anything to the mix; rather, s/he strips away the layers of excessive, inessential and impure matter that have accrued simply as a consequence of history. On the other hand, the image is by nature excessive, inessential and impure. As that part of the work that can in effect travel between media—between the paintings of Jackson Pollock and the IG’s New Brutalist architecture, for instance—it is precisely non-autonomous.

This theorization of the image provides the crucial nexus enabling the IG’s avant-garde program of categorical transgression and aesthetic maximalism. Comprised, in the main, of a group of creative couples—architects Alison and Peter Smithson; artists Terry and Richard Hamilton, artist Eduardo Paolozzi and his wife Freda, an employee of the ICA; anthropologist Judith Henderson and her husband, photographer Nigel Henderson; critic Reyner Banham and his wife, art historian Mary Banham; critic Lawrence Alloway and his wife, painter Sylvia Sleigh—the IG would recognize neither the boundaries of medium nor those of gender, nationality, culture, taste or, by extension, class. Boy and girl culture, US and UK culture, “high” and “low” culture—all are recklessly conflated, not only to make a statement or create a sensation, but effectively to move production to the next level—to find uses within art and culture for those materials and media conventionally excluded from its midst, and vice-versa. Equally distressing, from an orthodox Greenbergian point of view, is the IG’s open disregard for any given measure of aesthetic correctness or, basically, beauty. Introducing the “Parallel of Life and Art” exhibition to a group of students, Peter Smithson brashly declared: “We are not going to talk about proportion and symmetry.”⁶ Rather, here again, it is the force of the image, its ability to affect the emotions, that counts here—quod visum perturbat. Likewise, the example of Pollock is no longer one of wholesome grace or elegance, as Greenberg might want; for the IG, he is a producer of pictorial problems over and above solutions. Reyner Banham claims Pollock’s influence is “not so much as a painter but for his images … because the drip paintings appeared to be examples of disorder and yet contained as works of art. I think that meant quite a lot … ideologically to a lot of us.”⁷ The gestalt, in this case, coheres around a consistent sense of de-composition. It is an-aesthetic and a-formal “all over.”

Distinguished by their “different sorts of plunder,” as Simon Frith describes their respective modes of popappropriation, both Peter Blake and the IG not only take up the challenge of new information technologies, but make this their platform to set Modernism back on the right track.⁸ These artists adopt an American model of action: brash, selfish, entrepreneurial and, above all, indifferent to class assignment. They seize upon US culture not because it is “better,” nor even necessarily “good”— neither quality nor its judgment play a part in their decision, except in a negative sense. It is precisely as a polluting force that they take it in. The impact of this culture clash is expected to exert a leveling effect: the hierarchical ladder of British class is to be toppled in this way, but so too, reciprocally, are the high-, middle- and low-brow registers of American taste. Neither “good” nor “bad,” but implicitly inhospitable to evaluation on these terms, US pop culture demands the formation of new criteria. “Acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our notion of ‘what culture is,’” writes Lawrence Alloway. “Instead of reserving the word for the highest artifacts and the noblest thoughts of history’s top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of ‘what a society does.’”⁹ Aesthetics, formalism, beauty— again, these are not the relevant measures any longer. This new Modernism will be affective or not at all.

As it happens, Jackson Pollock himself initially appears before the IG in the form of magazine articles and reproductions: a pop phenomenon first and painter second. Accordingly, he is at once stripped of his Greenbergian aura of painterly purity and autonomy. A purveyor of “Image,” in Reyner Banham’s “New Brutalist” sense, he also is literally an image, a celebrity that could find his place among the other celebrities on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve.¹⁰ For the IG, the interest lies as much in the media construct as the work per se—the clothes, pose, expression, and so on. Theirs is the conflated maximalist view: the photomechanical documentation that trails Pollock’s practice is seen as integral to his overall contribution. A system of relations, this cannot be reduced down to any single thing, a commodity fetish. “Image” is instead an attitude, a way of being; it is precisely “what a society does.”

10.The portentous Edwardian face returns

The IG’s enthusiasm for Pop culture is largely unprecedented and transgressive. As Lawrence Alloway tells it: “The area of contact was mass-produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science-fiction, pop music.We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism,’ ‘sheer entertainment,’ ‘relaxation,’ and to treat it with the seriousness of art.”¹¹

The critic is here obviously responding to the traditional and covertly elitist arguments of such figures as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis against the so-called “low-pop” of industrial culture. For the Leavisites, for instance, industrial culture is wholly unlike art in that it merely fulfills needs —for “escapism,” “sheer entertainment,” “relaxation”— and is incapable of challenging, instructing or in any way elevating its audiences. Industrial culture can only be consumed, a zero-sum process that necessarily turns entropic in the long-run. All flavor, no fiber—its products fill us with filler, a temporary solution that ultimately only exacerbates the problem. Because there is no vital remainder, nothing to pass down or build upon, they leave us more dazed, more dumb, more alienated, not less. Alloway’s suggestion of “seriousness” in regard to this same process of cultural consumption must be understood, in this sense, as a tactical transposition of terms from the context of art into pop. In this way, he makes the point that, here especially, reception is always also a mode of production, and accordingly puts forth the still-novel figure of the “creative consumer.”

This shift in attitudes will seem that much more radical when it is measured against the context of the new welfare society taking shape around Alloway and the IG in the postwar years. The ideology of redemptive soft-socialism that subtends it would appear to be wholly out of synch with the group’s crypto-capitalist ambitions, but this divergence can again be explained by the fact that most of their members actually come from “the other side of the tracks” in regard to the established culture of art, as well as the establishment tout court. Underlying their production overall is a pointed critique of establishment values, and yet, here also, an element of complicity is at once registered. Even here we encounter ambivalence because, right from the outset, this opposition to mainstream values allows for the resumption of an older, and perhaps even more “authentic,” form of the national character. As the field of cultural studies would proceed to show, such attitudes tend to trail a long and complexly conflicted gestation, one that originates, typically, in the act of compensation. If “the Edwardian resonances of vulgarity and cultural confidence were acute for the diagnosticians of the fifties,” as David Mellor points out, it is because the onset of welfare protectionism promises to dilute, if not wholly reverse, those same qualities. Old world machismo is reenacted as a defense mechanism by those most threatened by castration: a whole class, in this case, economically infantilized as wards of the state.

A crucial insight follows from the famous quote that opens Karl Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great,world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”¹² How else to explain the return of the “portentous Edwardian face of Lord Kitchener,” as Mellor puts it, this “traditional icon of the British martial spirit,” this emblem of “The Law, incarnate,” within the oeuvre of the IG? It is precisely as farce that this image can be resumed, but this farce is in turn founded on tragedy, on a more earnest and intense bedrock of historical longing. The IG are no doubt having a laugh at the “great man’s” expense, but then they also want to be him. If Lord Kitchener’s face has turned “portentous,” it is because it effectively sums up the worst aspects of military/industrial modernization—our ability to blow the planet to smithereens at the touch of a button—but it also commands an imposing virility, a deep-seated confidence that has already become mythic. And yet not impossible. As that part of the WWI past that is reanimated in the post-WWII present, Lord Kitchener can both be ridiculed and enshrined in their works. The IG shares a number of attributes with the Edwardian teddy boys, and these instantly suggest a more general range of comparisons between this artistic avant-garde and those avatars of subcultural style. In their mutual opposition to the status-quo, both the IG and the teddy boys are conducting their own private revolutions in the literal sense of a recirculation: they are effectively returning the past, and they are doing so in a manner that both counters and conforms to the status-quo’s own historical revival. In the covert desire to side with the oppressor, to become the “portentous face of Lord Kitchener” rather than the one caught cowering in his gaze, both the IG and the teddy boys have appropriated some part of the aesthetic of their fathers as a talisman. Dick Hebdige describes such maneuvers as bricolage, a term borrowed from Levi-Strauss’ study, The Savage Mind. Bricolage has been described as a “science of the concrete” in that it is not concerned with the making of objects so much as their canny repositioning.¹³ Accordingly, a connection is drawn between the actions of “primitive peoples”—who face a world that is whole and full because it has not yet been explained or made subservient to men—and those of the modern consumer. The “old nature” of rocks, fields and streams was given to us in much the same way that the “new nature” of massproduced commodities is presently given: as a largely unfathomable, and hence oppressive, system. The bricoleur is thereby one who takes action, regaining power over this system by simply reconfiguring its parts.

Dick Hebdige makes the point that the teddy boys, as well as any other subculture one might want to mention, are characterized by a high degree of “visual literacy,” and the same holds true for the IG. What they share is not a matter of aesthetics or “good taste,” so much as an intuitive grasp of the relationship between the appearance of things and their meaning. In itself, the awareness that things, or commodities, “mean,” and that they do so relative to their placement within a larger system of things or commodities, is remarkable. Already,we have shifted our perspective from “what culture is” to “what a society does.”

To recognize the culture as a system of meaning is potentially the first step in its dismantling and reconfiguration as a whole other system. This is precisely what Lawrence Alloway is suggesting in regard to treating pop culture “with the seriousness of art.”

Both the IG and the teddy boys want to revolutionize society, to dismantle and reconfigure the system according to their own terms, but as Marx has shown, it is precisely at such moments of accelerated change and innovation that the age-old comes rushing back in. “Men make their own history,” writes Marx, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.”¹⁴ The fathers that had to be slaughtered on the way to this more dynamic society will not be silenced; even, or especially, as ghosts, they retain their dominion. The area of relations between youth-cultures and their parent-cultures is the specialty of the activist/anthropologist Phil Cohen, who advances a highly nuanced concept of subcultural style in his trail blazing study of British skinheads from the seventies. According to him, there is always an attempt to work out a “compromise solution between two contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents… and the need to maintain the parental identification.”¹⁵How to assert one’s independence and autonomy within a world that is increasingly built, full of things? The imperative of bricolage is that the parts be rearranged differently, in a manner that is authentically novel and surprising. But how exactly is this accomplished when “The New” is already the imperative of the commodity? Both the avant-garde artist and the subcultural stylist respond by covertly reviving “The Old,” the parent-culture, but in a way that partly strips it of its mythic allure. Revived as style, as pose, as an always over-determined way of being, this “generative set” of cultural referents will be shown to be just as flimsy and frivolous as its latest commodity incarnation. Moreover, it will be seen as equally complex and conflicted; in fact, it will not be seen as a “generative set” at all, there being no stable source for this signifying chain. The “portentous” face of Lord Kitchener can, in this way, be pushed all the way back into the deep occult past of Britain as well as its psychedelic future. After all, isn’t he also the model for Sgt. Pepper?

Jan Tumlir is an art-writer based in Los Angeles. One of the original editors of X-TRA, he also contributes regularly to Artforum, Frieze, and Flash Art.

Frances Stark is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. She is represented by Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles; CRG, New York; greengrassi, London; and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne. Her book Collected Writing: 1993-2003 was recently published by Book Works, London. A solo exhibition of new work is slated for March 2005, at CRG.