The Independent

Group~

Postwar, Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty

1,
Edited by David Robbuis

Exhibition Organized by
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
In'Stitute ofContemporary Arts, London
The Museum ofContemporary Art, Los Angeles
University Art Museum, University ofCalifornia at Berkeley

I
I

Introduction by
.Jacquelynn Baas
Chronology by
Graham Whitham

Essays by
Lawrence Alloway
TheoCrosby
BarrY, Curtis
Diane Kirkpatrick
David Mellor
David Robbins .
Denise Scott Brown
Alison and Peter Smithson
David Thisdewood
Retrospective Statements by
Lawrence AlloWay
MaryBanham
Richard Harriilton
Geoffrey Holroyd
~ Magda Cordell McHale
Dorothy Morl~d
Eduardo PaolozZi
Toni del Renzi)
Alison and Peter Smithson
James Stirling
William Turnbull
Colin St. John Wilson

I
I'

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts,.,a~d Landon, EngJand

This publication accompanies the exhibi hon.

The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty

February 1- April 1 ..1990

Institute of Contemporary Arts. London

May 16 - September 16. 1990

Insh tuto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM). Centro Julio Gonzalez. Valencia

November 4. 1990 -January 13. 1991

,The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles.

February6-April2l.1991

Uni versi ty Art Museum. Uni v.ersi ty of Califorriia at Berkeley

June 8 - August 18. 1991

Hood Museum of Art. Dartmouth College. Hanover. New Hampshire

Organize'!. by the Hood Museum of Art. Dartmouth College. Hanover. New Hampshire;
the lnsti tute of Contemporary Arts. London. The Museum 0 f Contemporary Art. Los Angeles;
the Uni versi ty Art Museum, Uni versi ty of Cali fornia at Berkeley.
Organizing commi t tee for the catalogue and exhibi tion: Jacquelynn Baas (Director. UAM, Berkeley). Mary Jane Jacob.
James Lingwood (Adjunct Curator. ICA,. London). David Robbins, Timothy Rub (Assistant Director, HMA, Hanover),
Elizabeth Smith (Associate Curator. MOCA. Lps Angeles), and Graham Whitham.
Edi ted by David Robbins wi th Barbara Anderman. Brenda Gilchrist, and Sheila Schwartz
Designedby Lorraine Wild; Los Angeles
Typeset in Clarinda and Joanna by Continental Typographics. Chatsworth. Cali fornia
Printed by Donahue Printing Co. , Inc. , Los Angeles
Copyright It> 1990 The Regents of The Uni versi ty o'f California .

Richard Hamil ton retrospective statement' . Copyright It> Richard Hamiiton;

, Learning from Brutalism' . Copyright It> 1990. Denise Scott Brown.

The Independent Group is made possible by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humani ties and the National Endowment
for the Arts, Federal Agencies. Support for this proj ect was also provided by David Hockney and by The Bri tish Council.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The.lndependent Group: postw.ar Britain and the aesth~tics of plenty / edi ted by David Robbins
p. cm.
Exhibition organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth'College ... [et a1.) held between February 1. 1990
and August 16. 1991 at var;ious locations.
'.~il~:;:t~ "'1..(;:\ ~~,~.l.1,;,,r:j={:::lt} Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-262-18139-8 (MIT Hardcover Edi tion )

l! t ~ ,t-:-;b. 1.10rc..I"f
1. Independent Group (Association: Great Britain)-Exhibitions. 2 Art. Modern-20th century-Great Britain-Exhibitions.

at.lnuilTg BfiU
II Hood Museum of Art

It. toulf1, Wo. etnWO I. Robbins. David. 1937N6766.5.153153 1990

709' .4l'074-dc20
89-43668 CIp

Table of contents

Foreword and acknowledgments

10'

Iiltroduction by Jacquelynn Baas

12'

ChrO!1ology by Graham Whitham

49

The Independent Group and the Aesthetics ofPlenty

by Lawrence Alloway

'55

Sources
Modernist Sources
American Ads
Science Fiction

63

123

162

Works in This Exhibil10n

Magda Cordell by lacquelynn Baas
Richard Hamilton by Gra~am Whitham
Nigel Henderson by James Lingwood
John McHale by Jacquelynn Baas
Eduardo Paolozzi by David Robbins
Alison and Peter Smithson by David Robbins
William Turnbull by Graham Whitham
Exhibitions by Gwham Whitham
Parallel of Life Olld Art (1953)
Man. Machine and Motion (1955)
This Is Tomorrow (1956)
an Exhibit (1957)
Selections from Critical Writings
Lawrence Alloway
Reyner Banharn
Toni del Renzio
Richard Hamilton
John McHale
Eduardo Paolozzi
Alison and Peter Smithson

18 7

Retrospective Statements
Lawrence Alloway
Mary Banham '
Richard Hamilton
Geoffrey Holfoyd
Magda Cordell 11cHale
Dorothy Nforland
Edpardo Paolozzi
Toni del Renzio
Alison and Peter Smithson
James Stirling
William Turnbull
Colin St. John Wilson

197.

Night Thoughts ofa Faded Utopia

by Theo Crosby

201

The "As Found" and the "Found"

by Alison and Peter Smithson

203

Learning from Brutalism

by Denise Scott Brown

207

The Artists ofthe IG: Backgrounds and Continuities

by Diane Kirkpatrick

21 3

The Independent Group and Art Education in Britain ,1950-1965 by David Thistlewood

221

From Ivory To;wer

229

A "Glorious Techniculture" in Nineteen-Fifties Britain:

The Many Cultural Contexts of the Independent Group by David Mellor

237

The Independent Group: Forerunners ofPostrnodernism? by David Robbins

247

AppendiX: An Account of the 1955 IG Meetings

249

Bibliography

to Control Tower by Barry Curds

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A 'Glorious Techniculture'
in Nineteen-Fifties Britain: The Many Cultural
Contexts of the Independent Group
by David Mellor
In the middle 19505. the Independent Group was the standard-bearer ofa
burgeoning, spectacular. technidst culture. To recover the full density ofthat
moment enta.ils a patient remapping ofthe textual sites of the period. beyond
the simplidties ofreceived political and sodal histories. This essay, then, will
trace the regiSters. surfaces, and texts which were the cultural ground for
Eduardo Paolozzi. Nigel Henderson. and Richard Hamilton from 1952 until
the close ofthe fifties. It will be within the turbulent spaces ofresistance to
and complidty with these discourses - the discourse ofatomic catastrophe.
the multitude ofattitudes about consumption, the new regimes ofcommer
dal spectatorship. the meptai regions ofaviation and space as technidst leg
ends - that we discover the authorising texts ofPaolozzi. Hamilton. and
Henderson. Once an intertextual franIe is placed around the various posi
tions and productions ofthese artists, the structuring relationship with the
encompassing culture becomes apparent.
A voradous consumption ofproducts and signs had commenced in
the early and middle years of the decade, once the Conservative government
accelerated polides ofmilitary-industrial growth and a consumer economy.
This economic "takeoff" for a limirless expansion was enshrined in the
period cult of the renovated. electronidsed New Elizabethan Age. The pros
perous economic underpinning of the era runs directly counter to recent
Simplistic representations ofBIitish culture and the Independent Group. such
as that by Thomas Lawson,' Mistaking received historical myths. Lawson pre
sents a culture which had lost its confidence. "Control ofthe future seemed
no longer so certain ... A nearly senile Churchill was returned [1952]. usher
ing in a decade ofcultural enervation and decline ..." The "ruling elite,"
Lawson declares. had a "reluctance to modernize anything."2 An opposite
reading is possible and necessary. The "S1Iper-priOrity" rearmament progratn,
first initiated to cope with Britain's role in the Korean War, transformed the
"technoscape." the universe ofelectronic and aerospace technologies already
well advanced by World War n. while from 1952 onward consumer demand
entailed a dOOte period offorced economic expansion and sodal modem
isation; so much so that by 1960 many sectors ofBIitish industry - for exam
ple. communications, construction. and food processing - had been
rationalised and were in a state ofseemingly boundless growth. That the
styles ofpolitical power might masquerade as archaic is unarguably the case.
since they were as ambivalent as that meeting ofthe monarchic. adventuring
past and the nuclear. space-exploring future which was the essential compo
nent ofthe New Elizabethan mythology.
We can name the functional mentality which managed the fifties
epoch oftechnological innovation and inaugurated a British sodety ofthe
spectacle: it was Tory Futurism. This renovating style ofpower was dissemi
nated and diffused through the body ofBritish culture, multiplying a utopian
technidsm to be enjoyed by sovereign consumers - by the British people.
who were joined at this moment with the peoples ofthe United States and
the British Commonwealth of Nations into a new polity. A conflicted ambiva

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lence marked the relationship of Hamilton, Henderson, and Paolozzi to this

enveloping discourse ofsodal modernisation, experienced within the con
str.tints ofa British culture that was Conservative in its politics and equally
conservative in its psychology. On the one hand, there was a celebration of
the FD2 an experimental British military ai.rcrafi: which gained the world's
air speed record in 1956 - by incorporating it as part ofthe WE LOVE slogans
one ofthe walls of This Is Tomorrow ("...1.132 M.P.H."); on the other hand. the
the rapid development of air- and rocket-borne thermonuclear weaponry by
the reconstituted Grand Alliance of the West seemed to Richard Hamilton to
be "leading us steadily to perdition:'] Contrasting, conflicting fantasies of
catastrophe or cornucopia. ofloss or compensation, structure their pictorial
works and make manifest their negotiation of the acute tensions - spec
tacular. deterrent. and military-industrial- of this moment ofsodal modem
isation. Perhaps these thematics are most legible in the contrast between the
pavilions ofthe SmithsonJHenderson/ Paolozzi team and the Hamiltonl
McHaleJVoelcker team at lTI. It is manifest in the tension between the semi
domestic figures of the former group's post-apocalyptic shed, and the "fun
house" ofthe latteI; with its emphasis on stimuli and pleasures - death and a
carnival moment within and against high British culture.
The Independent Group developed a patriarchal model ofmodem
ism, which meant that belatedness and loss were inscribed as the unsettling,
paradoxical obverse of This Is Tomorrow. "The show is pervaded by nostalgia.
like those current writings about jazz." wrote Basi11l1.ylor in the Spectator.
referring to the revival and dtation of the signs of heroic modernism within
the exhibition and aligning it with the revivalist "fud" jazz boom." A sense
of the belated can be identified here, that is, ofhaving arrived at a late
moment in the narrative of the fathers ofmodernism. But it was something
that might be overcome by simulating. by mimicking through photography,
the postures and scenes of the authentic cultural heroism of a Europe that
was being contemporaneously excavated by Reyner Banham in his studies
with Nikolaus Pevsner. Basil1ll.yloI; looking upon the estranged photograph
by Nigel Henderson ofthe SrnithsonJHendersonlPaolozzi tearn, suspected
that" one ofthe portrait group photographs .. seems to emulate those pho
tographic documents ofthe beginning ofthe Modem Movement. ... The
exhibition is typical ofthe historical bias ofour post-war period."s Thus
would other "groups" stand for their publicity photographs in archaic. Orca
1910 poses: art college satellites or "1lad" bands like the Temperance Seven,
which had emerged in 1955 (or, seven years later, the Bearles).
The portentous Edwardian face ofLord Kitchener. traditional icon
ofthe British martial spirit. appears and reappears in Nigel Henderson's col
lages (a link, peIhaps. with the British Surrealist practice ofHumphrey Jen
nings. who figuratively abused Kitchener's face in his 1936 montage, The
Minotaur). Twenty years lateI; Henderson's photomontage ofa glaring Kitch
ener sat in Paolozzi's studio. From this image we might reconstruct a fasdna
tion with the order ofthe past, the Law incarnate, the fathers ofthe era of
military-industrial modernisation and modernism. Such neo-Edwardianism
was, ofcourse, a salient part ofBritish culture at all levels: in Jimmy Porter's
grudging admiration in John Osborne's important play Look Back in Anger
(19.)6); in the delinquent "Teddy Boys." with their Edwardian-revival dress,
over whom a moral panic developed in the late spring of 1955; in Genevieve
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Bernard Myers. writing on current mililary aircraft design for the Royal Col
lege ofArts magazine Ark in 1956. led his essay with an epigraph quolation
from the just-released British RAP film, Reach for the Sky, and illustrated it with
a silhouette of the new RAP Victor V-Bomber. truly visceral sublimity seemed
only to be possessed by the USAF. "Aesthetically." Myers wrote, "some ofthe
new American machines hit me in the solar plexus with their impression of
power and purpose, comparable to the eighteenth century gentleman's emo
tions ofthe 'Sublime' on beholding a cyclopean-beam engine.""
But the aspect of a fetishistic archaism oftechnology. viewing the
spidery wing webs ofcirca 1910 from the year 19S5. had its counterpan in the
patriarchal world ofcontemporary British aerospace. Here the most
advanced "supersonic" jets were being produced by tribal companies pre
sided over by the likes ofLord Brabazon ofma, Sir Thomas Sopwith. and Sir
Cover 0 f F'li IIh t and
Sidney Camm - the elderly veterans ofthe first, heroic age of powered flight
Aircraft Engineer.
who were still. spectacularly. in the public gaze. For example, Lord Brabazon.
June 1953
age eighty, tobogganed down the Cresla Run as a publidty stunt in the early
fifties. This sort offetishistic archaism was also present in the film Genevieve.
But the sublime power ofsdence and technology was not the prerogative of
the IG'S fathers. The protagonists ofthe IG were often drawn from skilled
working- or lower-middle-class technical cadres; they were ex-servicemen or
industrially trained "profesSionals" who territorialised their Slarus by setting
themselves in opposition to the ubiquitous upper-middle-da.ss British art
amateur and his milieu. '3 In line with this assertion ofa "tough-minded"
technidst persona, Reyner Banham was described as an "aero-eng:ine
Airr:raft Limited.
Brough. E. Yorks
mechanic turned art-historian."'4 The career pattems ofBanham. Henderson
(I9S3), the popular colour film centered around vinlage cars, directed by
(an ex-RAP Bomber Command pilot). and Hamilton were symptomatic ofthe
Henry Cornelius; or. finally. in the political persom which. beginning in 1957, sodal restructuring ofa modernising Britain. "New groupings ofskilled and
Harold Macrni1lan cultivated as prime minister. 6 The Edwardian resonances
sdentific workers complicated the traditional picture ofBritish sodety.
Polarisation between workers and management was dissolving in the subtle
ofvulgarity and cultural confidence 7 were acute for the diagnosticians ofthe
hierarchies ofa world based upon Slatus symbols as measured by consumer
fifties. Kenneth Allsop acknowledged a parallel belatedness to that which
possessed IG members in his 19S8 survey ofthe "dissentient." the "delinks" goods badges ofthe new affluence."!, Hamilton's career is an emblem of
just this process: the accession to power ofthe skilled. sOdally mobile con
the literary Angry Young Men - in The Angry Decade. For him and for the
dissentien1:s there was an "intense noslalgic longing for the security and inno sumer (albeit in the sector ofhigh culture) and the manipulation of the signs
cence" ofthe moment before 1914, which he admits to be a risible myth. yet
ofaffluence. Crucially. he was a carrier ofits systems ofpublidty and repre
had "an inner confidence that we shall never know."s For the IG the same
senlation and a paragon ofthe new technidst culture. His biography spells it
structures ofassimilation to a confident. mythical. media-celebrated cultural
out. At fourteen. in 1936. Hamilton was working in the advertising depart
paradigm (whether contemporary American or heroic European modernist)
ment of an electrical engineering firm; from 1937 he worked in the display
seems to have been operative and was a vilal defense for these "latecomers"
department ofan advertising studio. then trained as an engineering draughts
against "the anxiety ofinfluence."9
man. Between 1942 and 1945. he was a jig and tool draughtsman with the
giant electronics company. EMl. This kind oftechnical milieu - a world of
The IG'S identification with the sublimity of paternal power'" found
its object in the distanced fetish of photographed technology. It was the
engineers and technocrats - was the basis of Nevil Shute's best selling post
pathos ofhalf.-century old photographs ofmen and aeroplanes which had
war novels. It was certainly not the muscular heroics ofheavy industry
engaged Richard Hamilton in his Man. Machine and Motion exhibition of 19S5.
embraced in the fantasy mmtives oflabour for Sodal Realists in the thirties
"There is something fabulous in this aspect ofmodern history, the men are
or by the neo-Romantic artists ofthe forties. but instead a projection of
acclaimed heroes." I, he wrote in the calalogue together with Lawrence Gow something mathematic and cerebral. In a way. this situates the elective a!in.ity
ing. in a panegyric to what we might define as a genre closely identified with
ofHamilton and Henderson to their most preferred imaginary father, the
the IG: the technological-sublime. the "terrible" and awe-inspiring aspect of
draughtsman Marcel Duchamp.
The polemical advocacy ofa sdentific techno-culture over and
man and machine. Man inunersed in a technological fantasy had mythical
connOlations. This sublimity was also to be assodated with the technidsm of against an established traditional culture was a standard frame ofreference in
the u.s . incarnated in the latest USAF bombers. the B-47 and B-S2. Although
the mid-fifties. C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" argument, published in the

BJ.."kburn
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230

and

General

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autumn of 1956. enunciated the same discourse. The patriarchal moti1S of

confidence. "frontier qualities." and nonnative. heterosexual affiliations were
brought to the fore. 6 "The traditional culture. which of course is mainly lit
erary. is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining," Snow
declared. "whereas the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive, confi
dent at the roots. "'7 Here was the re-emergence ofa histOrical narrative of
long duration - to be exact. the late Victorian and Edwardian discourse of
crisis around national efficiency and industrial modernisation. 8 But at this
juncture. it was the successful advent ofa technocratic New Elizabethan cul
ture which was the project at issue within a cultural crisis that erupted in
1956 in concert with another - the scandal ofmass culture. The diverse con
cems of the IG and TIT, in all their spedficities, might. in this perspective. be
mapped over positions within a programme ofTory Futurist national
renewal. The general terms of that programme are manifest in schemes drcu
lated by figures such as Sir Edward Hulton. with his mOrallsation of a con
sumer technocracy by his press empire. in publications such as Picture Post in
the mid-fifties. and in the schooling ofthe male children ofNew Elizabethan
Britain through the comic The Eagle from 1950 on. A set of discourses prepar
ing an already economically and industrially expansive Britain for mutation
into a complex. scientific state "on the threshold of space" 19 would. in order
to rediscipline the body for new skills and accustom it to new consumer
pleasures and terrors.lO entail a corresponding devaluation of traditional
"established" cultural values.
With this overlay. the IG and British proto-Pop might cease to be
perceived as essentially transgresSive (except irl terms ofsurface effects) in
relation to the thrust of British culture. as it has previously been presented by
Dick Hebdidge.21 The resistance on the part ofthe New Brutalist (Paolozz.iJ
Henderson! Smithson) group to complicity with versions ofconsumer "sov
ereignty" and the disciplinary powers ofindustrial modernisation becomes
distinct and conspiCUOUS. with their TIT pavilion as locus. Any unitary view of
TIT or the IG is. therefore. untenable: in the contrast oftheir pavilion and its
ruination ofsurfaces with the Ha:mil.tonIMcHaleIVoelcker "fun house." there
is a fissurmg ofprojected intents and cultural destinations. The architectural
historian Kenneth Frampton has epitomised the situation: "This is the
moment [19561 in which the incipient consumerism ofthe so-called Open
Society confronts the Brutalist spirit ofresistance."2>
The consensus vision ofa new tomorrow for Britain was shaped in
authoritative statements by individuals such as Sir Harry Pilkington. president
ofthe British Federation ofIndustrialists. irl Hulton's Picture Post: "We are
undergoing a new industrial revolution ... [with] peaceful atomic power.
electronics. marvelous new machines, automatic processes on a new scale.">!
This was the Tory Futurist precondition for the sanctioned utopia of "The
Leisure State." In the foreground, along with the exponential growth of
atomic power and a booming electronics industry,14 was automation, and its
universal sign and anthropomorphic personification was the robot. It had
been a part ofhigh and low culture iconography from the period ofinterwar
modernism and social modernisation - a puppet, a mannequin ofthe "mod
ern" which meJodranIatised automatic functioning and regulation ofproduc
tion. Through 1955 and 1956 the robot was remobilised irl the press and on
TV as a sign ofthe irlurJinent arrival of automated industrial processes. In 1956

_ _'''''_._ _... _ . ,_ _ _ _ ...,,'"'"'"'"'"_,.. ~_

the Conservative government's new Department ofScientific and Industrial

Research established a research council with wide-ranging powers. Their
report, Automation. published the same year, gained immense publicity as a
forecast ofwhat was being dubbed. in the title ofPollock and Weber's current
book. The Revolution of the Robots.
But the robot had not returned as threat. as the omirlous unheimlich
sign ofdehumanisation; instead, it now connoted consumption - it was a
homely. heimlich. domesticated sign for automation. It was given a consumer
gloss by Leonard Bertin. science correspondent ofthe Daily Tele8raph. in his
book Atom Harvest (195.5"): "Many ofus have seen eXaIllples of this already.
Many ofus have gas or electric stoves ... that are controlled by thermostats.
... We may have seen fruit canning carried out by extensions ofthe same
principle."2s The populist cartoonist "Giles" ofthe Daily Express repeatedly
returned to the irllage ofthe robot through May and June 1956.'6 Harold
Macmillan. as chancellor, introduced the British public to ERNIE. a genial
robot who in June 1957 chose bond numbers for an immense, automated
public lottery, the Premium Bond.
It was into this field ofrepresentations that Robbie the Robot came,
along with the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet, which opened in London
in the middle ofjune 1956; and it was from here that he would be appropri
ated by Ha:mil.ton for TIT. In the film. he was predictably amiable and domes
tic. producing and synthesising food and drink, although in the publicity
poster used at the entrance to TIT at the Whitechapel Gallery. Robbie
appeared as a castrating threat and rival, carrying off the blonde starlet
Robbie's significance for TIT's narrative lay in his public currency. his recogni
tion factor as a highly condensed, embodied, electronically speaking frag
ment of the popular iconography ofautomation. Modernisation as
incarnation ofthe Law. and that Word made electronic. The speaking (and
writing) voice possessed by cybernetics had primacy. Already. in the year
before Robbie's arrival, the specialist jargon ofcybernetics - which the IG and
Alloway irl particular wished. scientistically. to annex as a lexicon oftechnicism
- had irl fact become common journalistic property. popularising terms such
as "feedback" in an effort to accustom general readers to the imminent onset
of"Leisure Unlimited."27
Robbie's arrival was the arrival ofthe future. the SF metaphor for the
jetttzeit. the apocalyptic advent oftomorrow, manifested and located in the
very title ofthe TIT exhibition. The exploration ofspace provided a scenogra
phy for the imaginary tomorrow. In the Festival ofBritain Guide of 1951. a
spread oftwo advertisements juxtaposed perspective destinations, two pro
jects of "Englishness" - one pointing to the past and "tradition," the other to
the future.28 On the left page was a photograph ofa pastoral scene, an avenue
ofbeech trees. captioned "This tradition ofa thing well made ..."; it was an
advertisement for the BasslWorthington brewery conglomerate. The right
hand page showed a colour reproduction ofone ofthe American artist
Chesley Bonnestall's "ExploIiltion ofSpace" series. an utterly alien scene. with
the planet Saturn seen from "an outer moon." advertising Sperry navigational
equipment: "These instruments will, no doubt, make possible the spanning
ofthe Universe and the navigation ofouter space." Here, at the beginning of
the fifties. the familiar, pastoral scenography was defined against an alien
scenography. By the mid-fifties this opposition was dissolved and the alien

23

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future was reterritorialised (as we noticed with Robbie and J!RNlE) to a seem
ingly domesticated terrain. Much sdence fiction was intimate chamber work,
such as the hugely successful BBC radio series ''Joumey into Space" (1954),
broadcast to family drcles. It was the terrain ofthe Hulton press's Ell(Ile comic
hero. Dan Dare, who successfully imposed a British Commonwealth of
Nations-United Nations-Westem Alliance policy on the recaldtrant colonials
of Venus. with the aid ofRAF Air Marshal-type patriarch. Sir Hubert Guest.
and whose spacecrafi were mocked-up for the Ea81e's team ofgraphic artists
out ofhousehold vacuum cleaner casings.
Inside the HamiltonIMcHale!Voelcker pavilion was the cabin ofa
space ship. with a BEM (Bug Eyed Monster) on the exterior. The allusion was
not to aben othemess so much as to the disorienting stimuli ofthe good
humoured. populist. crafted world ofthe British fairground - the imaginary
locale ofso many ofFeter Blake's contemporary pop paintings and an area
exempt from rationalised modernisation. One foot, then, was uneasily still in
the frame ofthat urban follcishrtess surveyed in the thirties by Humphrey Jen
nings and Humphrey Spender for the Mass Observation project - an organ
isation Nigel Henderson was assodated with in the late forties in Bethnel
Green. The other. though, was edging toward a sdentistic play ofredisdplin
ing the body according to the languages ofmarketing. This latter tendency
was emblazoned across the front ofthe pavilion. where the screened and
blown-up head ofTito was beset by behavioural stimuli in the form offrag
ments of advertising discourse beguiling his five senses, through ad-debased
Klee-Iike arrows. In the Tito blowup. the body (or rather the head) is a field
crisscrossed by apparently capridons marketing versions ofthose "routinised
rhythms ofthe industrial organisation ofsodal reproduction. "29 Tito's head
becomes a zone for the suddenly visible. distracting and interrogating new
disdplinary powers that are welcomed as pleasures. From side to side ofthis
human head under siege. the spectator reads an astounding coded version of
the reterritortalised body ofthe consumer which figuratively rivals Zygmunt
Bauman's Foucaultian analysis ofthe consumer body ofnearly thirty years
later: "[The body) must be made fit to absorb an ever growing number of
sensations the commodities offer or promise .... Its capadty as a 'receptacle
ofsensations' is the training target, it is the condition sine qua non ofconsum
erism that the body becomes richer and life is fuller depending on the ubiq
uity of the training."30
Alloway. along with Hamilton. emerges as most persistent in his
emphasis on the schooling, training, and drilling function of popular culture
as a means ofeasing the spectator into modernised patterns ofexistence in
the world. In his essay "The Long From ofCulture" (1959) he announces this,
disavows it. represses it, but finally is enraptured with the lesson-making
capadty ofHollywood films - "lessons in the acquisition ofobjects."3 1 Paral
leling C. P. Snow's argument concerning the impotence ofthe literary.
humanist, established culture in the face ofsdentific advance, Alloway por
trays the humanist intellectual as incompetent to act as "taste giver and opin
ion leader" because ofthe "failure to handle technology." The torch has been
passed to the mass media: "the media ... whether dealing with war or the
home. Mars or the suburbs, are an inventory ofpop technology ... a treas
ury of oriemation, a manual ofone's occupancy ofthe rwentieth century."32
Mars and the suburbs were adjacent in this discourse of accommodation. SF

was hailed by Alloway. in 1956. for its operational capacity to "orient its
readers in a technolOgical and fast moving culture." As he described the SF
magazines that were putting into drculation the elements of this new regime
oftechnolOgical rationility and consumer diversity. he was also disclosing the
tactics and wished-for goal ofsome ofthe IG members: "the currency of such
symbols, drawn easily from a wide range ofsoda! and technical sdences. is
an index ofthe acceptance oftechnological change by the public in the
United States."33
Hamilton and Gowing's 1955 eulogy ofsublime technology in the
air, underwater. on land. and in interplanetary space in Man, Machine, and
Motion was qualified by an invocation ofcatastrophe. l4 It is as though some
Mazeppa-like (or]ames Deanian) figure of energy and destruction counter
signing for man and machine had intruded itself into their argunIent. In the
sculpture ofEduardo Paolozzi during the second half ofthe fifties and in the
entire oeuvre ofHenderson in this decade, we may find this important coun
tervailing force ofthe apocalyptic sublime, the ruination ofthe utopian disd
plines of technicism. at the very momem oftheir apogee. The New
Elizabethan project banked on Britain taking the lead in the new field of
aerospace. a notion which in 1952-53 appeared to be vindicated with the
inauguration ofthe world's first regular jet passenger service, the BOAC De
Haviland Comet. Its prestige in dvilian jet flight was as enonnous as the first
glimpse ofthe RAP's Delta-winged jet bombers and fighters at the Sodety of
British Aircraft Constructors Famborough Air Display in September 1952. But
in a hubris ofhigh technology. first the De Haviland DB 110 "disintegrated" at
Famborough,u and berween late 1953 and early 1954 three Comets similarly
broke up in flight due to metal fatigue. "Stress" - the fatalism ofmachines, the
nemesis oftechnology - operated as a strong metaphor in early fifties British
culture. Henderson's anamorphic photographs of dismantled. blackened,
shattered pieces ofhuman culture - bottles, machine parts, or the body itself
- were described by him as "stressed": "stretching or distorting the printing
paper,"3 6 The disintegrative metaphor was loose. like a virus in the culture.
Nevil Shute. in his novel No Hi8hway (1948), had prophesied such stress disas
ters (the book is the great ancestor of the aircraft disaster genre in novels).
In this "imagination ofdisaster"37 that was active in Britain during
the fifties, there is a repressed element - the atomic future. It is absent. too,
from the art histOrical accounts ofHenderson and from the existing critical
readings ofPaolozz.i. But this comemporary cultural metaphor is legible in
their New Brutalist works, in the scarred evidence ofdetritus fonowing the
release ofhideous energy, the motif ofthe apocalyptic sublime. Henderson's
photogrammed bottle recollects the lacerated glass ofHiroshima. while bear
ing analogy to the irradiated "squashed ... litter of small objects"3B which Sir
William Penney, the chief ofBritain's nuclear weapons program. collected
from the aftermath of Operation Havoc (the detonation ofBritain's first
A-Bomb, October 1952). For domestic readers and viewers. Operation Havoc
was represemed as being essentially in alignment with the New Elizabethan
agenda: "It would seem that Britain has taken the world's lead in atomic
weapons ... a blast which revises Britain's place in the hierarchy of
nations."39 There was a common denominator for Henderson and Penney in
the impacted indexical sign of energy released to a smoky violence upon the
discarded, abject object. Penney was perceived at the time as a D-I-Y. a D0-1t

"""",r

Yourself scientist. a kind ofnuclear brimleur with a "genius for improvisa

tion....., - he constructed measurement devices to record the load ofan
atomic blast from odds and ends ofold pipes. tin cans. and oil drums. Just so
appeared the abject. lost wax metal agglomerates ofPaolozzi, such as Kro
kodeel (1956) and the St. Sebastian series of 1957-59. These desolate figures may
be read as Paolozzi's mobilisation ofthe grotesque and abject as Brutalist
visual strategies. These are the apocalyptic sublime bum-outs offission, a
scarring and vapourising ofthe pristine surfaces ofthe electronic and
mechanical cores of consoling consumer objects - those things which Ham
ilton was currently displaying in Just: what is it that makes todayl homes so differ
eD!. so appeolin9? (1956).
The BrutaUst grotesque. in resisting pristine commodification, took
as its point ofdeparture an aformal raw "image" often drawn from media
superimpositions. At the end of 1955, Reyner Banham theorized New Brutal
ism around a definition of"the image." It was something sUpeI'"sensible and
exceeding conventional emotions. It was, by his definition, dislocatingly sub
bme: "that which seen affects the emotions."4 1 It was a program for resis
tance to and devaluation ofthe coded frames ofthe aesthetic world
particularly the liberal humanism evident in such architecture as the then
current neo-Palladiartism - dissolving them in favour ofthe gross material
fragment ofmanufacture or the directly indexical mass-media Sign.
The brute factuality ofFrancis Bacon's news photo-based indexical
paintings were at this moment praised in BrutaUst parlance by Robert
Melville, a critic linked to the IG, when he admired Bacon's exhibition at the
Beaux-Arts Gallery late in 1953 for its "uninhibited conduct," specifying "the
take it or leave it "newsprint" technique. "42 There were regular contacts
between Paolozzi and Bacon at this time, centred upon their shared interest
in a grotesque shaping ofnews and magazine photos. But Bacon's appearance
in this context again raises the wider, generic issues ofabjection and horror
as modes ofrepresentation within British Culture at this time. There are Bru
taUst traces in the news reports ofthe ''Angries'' - o( for example, Colin
Wilson the young author, who was an instant media success in the spring of
1956 with his novel The Outsida. The following year he was assailed by news
paper articles that drew attention to his sordid habit ofliving in squalor.
Bacon-like, with "a shelfofbooks including volumes offorensic medicine
containing some lurid coloured pictures of cadavers."43
The macabre had now returned in the genteS ofpopular culture
that the IG members were drawn to, especially horror-SF films ofthe mid
fifties. Again the "supeI'"priority" was that Britain should lead with modem
ised products. InJune 1955 the Hulton film commentator Robert Muller
wrote an article entitled "Why People Enjoy Horror Filins": "Britain has
lagged behind America in satisfYing the demand for horror films. Now comes
a British 'x' film worth the old 'H' certilicate."* The film in question was The
Quatermass EXperiment produced by Hammer (that same indexical, Brutalist
name adopted by Henderson and Paolozzi for their prinnnaking company
the year before). The ruling assumption of the film rested on catastrophic
mutation: a British space scientist, returning from the first manned orbit of
the earth, has come into contact with spores which devolve him back to a
primeval plant form. The transformation is gradual and disgusting, as a leath
ery fungal beirJg with leaves for hands, but still man-shaped makes his

way through London. This abjection4s ofthe modernised rationality embod

ied in the scientist, this downfall into a set-apart accretion ofthe organic, has
a powerful analogic link with the inhabitant ofthe HendersanlPaolozzii
Smithson shed in the rrr pavilion the following year. Henderson described
his grotesque. Brutalist photo-collage Head orMan (cat. no. 33) as a "head
worker"; "The face was heavily textured to underline the association with
hide or bark and the busts/shoulders were adumbrated with bits ofphoto
material like stone or leaf to further this association with nature.""'" It was a
new macabre pastoral. a landscape ofthe body like the diverse SUperimposi
tions ofbrute nature which had been in formation since Parallel of Life and Art,
the 1953 exhibition by Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons. Here, at This
Is Tomorrow, the macabre pastoral appears as the shattering and dispersal back
into nature ofthat orthopedic unity found in the whole, immaculate, com
modified body that was carnivalised by Hamilton in his representation ofthe
man and woman inhabiting Just what is it tbat makes todays homes so different, so
appealing?
Catastrophe was, then. widely held as the other grand assumption,
the obverse face ofthe prosperity and technicist modernisation ofthe New
Elizabethan universe; it was the otha ofthe future, the potential realisation of
the theory ofnudear deterrence, which was established between 1954 and
1958. (There was, of course, also the grotesque racial otha of the usurping
colonial subject - the loathsome, "feelthy" Colonel Nasser, whose mon
strousness was represented in the British media in the summer of 19s6 as
part of the prelude to the Suez crisis. 47) The anamorphic form offilm tech
nology and spectatorship, Cinemascope. which was introduced in 1953. was
continually cited in rrr in distended - "stressed" - formats, and frames and in
WE LOVE affirmations. But its all-inclusiveness, its awe-inspiring poSitioning of
the viewer, linked it to the imaginary Structures ofsubbme, apocalyptic spec
tacle. Film entertainment was catastrophised. A hysterical 1954 Picture Post arti
cle entitled "Has Hollywood Gone Mad?" captures the mood: "Is it yet
another coincidence that the ages revived by Cinemascope tremble on the
brink ofoblivion; that the futuristic horrors ofthe Science Fiction film are
either caused or ended by the Atom Bomb? The common denominator of
both types offUrn is the feeling oflife lived on the edge ofdoom."4li
The grotesqueries ofmodem technology might also be less apoca
lyptic and more eccentric in significance, yet still remain a locus for phan
tasmic identification and cathection. Paolozzi's screenprint Automobile Head
(1954; cat. no. 65) showed a monumental head, figuratively self.inscribed by
punning, maplike, upon the outline ofms native Scotland. Here is a motley
body - a display ofmotor car chassis and engine parts, carburetors, and
dynamos, partly within the head's outline and partly breaking beyond it. This
bristling exposure of(metaphOriC) mechanical insides resembles that eccen
tric monster ofthe SBAC Famborough Display of 1954. the Rolls Royce "Flying
Bedstead," which was a paradigm ofBrutalist design, exposing all its motors,
pipes, circuitry and parts on a crude, bedstead-like rig which took off ver
tically. Bizarre techno-eccentricity was a paradigm of the Goon Sbow mentality
oflevitating, cumbersome Imperial machinery.19 But eccentricity aside,
Paolozzi's body is permeable to technicism and crammed with products. the
promised prizes, which dissolve into a simulation oforganic patterning. The
head bursting with motor cars was Ardmboldo rewritten for the age ofconII Ii: L LOR

Nigel Kneale, Quater

mass and the Pi t.
(1960). Illustration
by Bryan Kneale.

23

234

sumer afiluence. where the body is the site for the absorption of commodi
ties. Automobile Head is a Brutalist counterpart to the head ofTito on the m
pavilion entrance. Both depict the sovereign consumer's head; ironically. that
fonner seat ofnoble rationality is now "trained into a capacity to will and
absorb more marketable goods. "so Yet, transfOrming Automobile Head is the
saving grace ofthe figural. For the body is redefined by the Brutalists within
the IG as teJttured by the flows oftechnicism. which are themselves mutated
into an anti-functionalist organic condition. A constructed product - a house.
for example - eludes. in Brutalist theory. Le Corbusier's machinist dictum.
Thus D. E. Harding. in his essay "Embodiment" for the February 1955 Archi
tectural Review. challenges Corbusier: "No. the house is not a machine for liv
ing in. but an organ for living throUgh:'Sl
The gendered. phenomenal body spreads and moves. bounded by
technictst metaphors of specular engagement, by photomechanical informa
tion and entertainment, in Richard Hamilton's paintings and drawings ofthe
mid-fifties.S'l re Nude (195"4). may be read as caught in a tissue ofsuch vectors.
where the issues ofsexuality. enmeshed in new fonns ofpromotional repre
sentation, might be glimpsed. Hamilton has perpetually narrated himself as
an enchanted child oftwentieth-century mass media. He remembers a visit,
at age eight. to the first talkie. The Singing Fool.53 which he later incorporated
as a scene beyond that island room ofcommodities in Just what is it ... ?
(19s6). His citation ofTheJazz SiDgfl as a paradigm ofnew technolOgical
modes implicates the incremental changes in entertainment technologies
which compose, construct, and border upon the world oOust what is it ... ?
In the early and mid-fifties, "some film men [said! 3-0 will revolutionise pro
duction as the talkies did in 1929... 54 3-0 entertainment offered a utopia of
plentitude and volume and fullness in space to the spectator.
To Hamilton such new technolOgies were a point of deep libidinal
investment. as he admitted in 1960: "We must all have found that Contact
with the fantasy world is made all the more memorable when the bridge is a
newly experienced technolOgical marvel... ."ss 3-D, arriving in London in
March 195'3 with the colonial-melodrama Bwana Devil. held the promise ofa
more complete specular identification. But it was the advent ofthe Cinema
scope process - through the anamorphic "squeezing" and (Henderson-like)
"stressing" of th~ framed picture - which actually effected the illusion more
successfully. when it came to London at the close of 195'3. ~ acceptable
true 3-0 was one ofthe Wed objectives ofthe fifties." wrote Hamilton.5o
This was, to be sure. generally true ofcinematic experiments. but still 3-0
photography was an immensely successful novelty, a "newly experienced
technolOgical marvel," widely circulating at the most popular magazine and
pulp publishing level in 195'3. Its gaze was an aggresSive, erotic one. with
female pin-ups predominating: nightclub dancers kicking and shocking the
eye.17 and wrestling girls as well as "art photography" nudes. Hamilton is
silent on the topiC ofstill 3-0 as a commercial regime ofsight. but re Nude.
which he presented in terms ofconcerns with spectatorship mobility and the
passage oftime. might also be read as an appropriation of this form. The
nude is. in the bureaucratic Signifier ofthe title. the object oftechnicist inves
tigation; it is, in the pun. renewed. renovated. It could be read as a version of
the most recent form ofrenovating the nude body: the multiple. purple con
tours registering the body could be detached from their <:ezannesque cita

tion and relocated among the photomechanical purple, pink and green
laminations ofbody edges which define "glamour girls" in PictuIe Post photo
stories like "'JlNo Girls in 3-D."S8
Henderson. Hamilton. and Paolozzi traded in such spectacular,
hyperbolic versions ofthe gendered and "sexualised" commercial body. F
ticulariy those with American sources - the polar types ofpinup and muscle
man. Charles Atlas, the Big Brother ofthe male body. proliferates through
Henderson's early photo-collages and appears in Paolozzi's "seminal" Pop
montage Bunk! (cat. no. 59). Here Atlas. a paternal ego-ideal, swells up his
muscular body. like the crude medical diagram ofthe erect penis collaged
next to him. This is a literally phallocentric representation. supporting a
shrunken female pin-up and u.s. consumer products (motor car, cherry
pies). Potency is the thematic. maintained against all the cuts and sectionings
running through the picture. which is metaphorically "seminal" indeed. in
the gouts and drops ofglue. They secure the paper-carrying Charles Atlas,
overlaying and overwhelming another picture whose caption and border can
be seen: a genteel British "art photography" pinup titled "Evadne in Green
Dimension." This occupation ofthe place ofthe genteel British body is
important, yet all importance. all swelling is deflated in the scornful riposte
ofthe lettering, "BUNId," and identification with an (Americanised) paternal
power is momentarily punctured and broken.
The translation of this phantasmic American body into a British cul
tural frame was, as has been noted by Dick Hebdidge. a component part of
the scandal and phobias around '~ericanisation" in the period.59 Paolozzi
in particular chose to represent the unconstrained, wild body ofAmerican
provenance - a dancing. grimacing. enraptured body. in its postures other
than received British social configurations ofpose and decorum. This was
often a body subjected to the catasttophes oftechnology. a body in violent
display: facial flesh distended in wind-tunnel photographs or a stripper
dancer jUlCtaposed with a crashing us Navy jet.<io Such bodies can be seen in
the photographs Paolozzi culled from magazines like u.s. Camera Annual and
presented in his epidiascope lecture to the IG in 1951, which has since
attained the mythic status ofa foundational moment. as an origin ofPop Art.
The aggressive combinatory topoi ofpinups and advanced technology was
the concern ofAlloway in his 1956 essay, for the assumed male gaze, "Tech
nology and Sex in Science Fiction." In this he foregrounded the Ziegfeld
Irving Klaw s&:M costumes ofthe female pinups as behaviOurally "orienting"
devices which would have "a social function, that ofentertaining our erotic
appetites."6, These were shock stimuli. convulsive remedies for a culture
which some in the IG reckoned to be suffering from "a poverty ofdesire"62
and which was in the course ofa phantasmic forced modernisation by the IG.
In the mid-fifties there were other instances ofmodernist art being
enrolled by the developing commercial struetures ofconsumer entertain
ment to ratify the multiplying versions of the feminine coded as pin-up. The
sculptor Reg Butler, an "engineer ofemotional stresses" and the prime focus
ofthe geometric-expresSionist "Geometry ofFear" style. made a Brutalist tro
phy for a magazine beauty contest early in 195.5'.63 Perhaps the very term Bru
talism. like the male aggresSiveness ofthe '~gries," needs unsettling and
contextual amplification in the regions ofsexuality, gender, and representa
tion. We might then see how notions ofsexuality and representation in the

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J1-

. . . . . """",,..,..,.----,--___
~

""'~~"T>'_"""",_""", _ _ _ _ ."""""''''''''''."'_'''''W_'~'"''''''."'~''_.,

.. ,

19SOS - an age ofa seemingly reintegrated ideal of(American) maleness

decisive budgets of1953-5+. "H.P. is a social safety valve amid rising material
were still maIked and scored in Britain along the lines ofa spectacular "bru
plenty:' the caption runs, "a potent stinlulus ofthe mass consumption
tality" and grotesquerie, We might look. for example, at Raymond Dmgnat's
needed for mass production...."
observation on the British cinema ofthe mid-fifties: "Maleness and brutality
But catastrophe enters in. The article goes on to imagine a change
revive together. The year before Look Back in Anger, Hammer movies began to
in drcumstances, with the removal ofeasy credit and the subsequent depri
penetrate the American market." Here Durgnat appears to be establishing a
vation ofthe tabulated consumer durables from each household. A hypo
British counter to American masculinity through the post-genteel brutalism of
thetical "Mr. C" is foregrounded: "a graduate teacher, 28, married but Withol,;
Hammer and the ''AngIies.''6.t The promotion ofnew imaginary models of
(yet) a child. He has (above) a home, furniture, a radio. T.V. If you imagine
the gendered body, fonned in the productivity and oblitetations of this emer Mr. C left only With what he's paid for, retaining only the T.V. set, you have
gent moment oftechnicism, were central to the project ofthose IG members (below) a melancholy and absurd situation." The a.fi:ermath of this small
apocalypse for the consumer is melancholic: the consumer slips into a bar
we are discussing.
If male protagonists like Paolozzi, McHale and Henderson had colo ren site. the screening walls ofhis house are gone and all around Mr. C and
nised representations ofthe ruined yet still technidsed head, a male locus of
his wife is dreary. grey. broken earth - a raw. inchoate Brutalist metaphor
instrumental rationality under siege. then a more otherly, choIic and semiotic With an awkwardly perspectivised table holding a set. The zone of the
domestic is left unhcimlich once more. But as Hatnilton's Just what is it ... ?
- and specifically fentale - representation ofthe body was being constructed
suggests. it was already an uncanny place in the society ofthe spectacle,
by Magda Cordell from within the IG. Her large, untitled polymer paintings
"where the tangible world is replaced by a selection ofimages"67: a place of
from 1957 to the end ofthe decade have atnbitious European affiliations and
dwell between the ragged red canvases of1apies, the Spanish !OcOOle, and
commodity fetishism. 68
Dubuffet's shatnbling organic heaps ofthe human. But what is exceptional
On this figurative site offetishism, where do we locate Hatnilton a:;
subject-artist? There is no paternal struggle here; and issues and differences 0
about them lies in their aspect offemale signs; that is, they act as signs for an
gender in Just what is it ... ? are probably a deflection, a feint away from the
internal and - crucially - maternal body. unrepresented elsewhere in British
flattened stereometries ofthe selection ofcommodities. Looking again, we
art ofthis moment. They resemble Munch's undulating and Sickly accounts
ofwomen and otherness, but shorn ofhis misogynies and fears. However, a
may discover Hamilton at the moment ofatnbiguously subSuming himself
into such a conunodity. On the table in front ofthe television set, a large tin
new fear - a new hysteria - is present here: the paintings radiate another sick
ofham is sitting: its social connotation in post-ratiOning Britain was still that
ness in their red womb/x-ray connotations. Here is the hellish terror of
"atomic dust," ofthe cancerous glows vented at the heart ofthe nuclear pile,
ofa special treat, a sign ofrelative aflluence for the lower middle classes, and
ofcourse it directed the consumer back to American origins, to cornucopias
as at Windscale in NonhumbIia in 1958. These nunours swell and wither on
and satiation. For Hami1ton. we might think. it is a product which ertables
the painted ground ofan imaginary body which resists oveN:oding by con
him, as Hami1ton. to be transfonned by self-inscription into a commercial
sumption. In Magda Cordell's pictures, woman is threatened both as ground
label, a brand marked "HAMilton." This was a masquetade he would perfom
and as body, on the plane oforganic existence.
again.69 Here is the modernist gesture ofself-inscription at the dawn ofthe
Hamilton, on the other hand, succeeded in relocating that over
epoch ofconsumerism. Thus HAMilton is sealed up in a circuit ofcom
coded masculine or feminine body to the territories ofthe conunodity. jan
modillcation, the "splendid bargain" role he was to announce in 1960 ofthe
ice WOrsnip has observed the essential scenario ofJust what is it ... ? in the
British advertisements ofthe tinle: "Femininity is 'penetrated' in this double
artist-as-consumer. 70 Yet here, in 1956, the artist is already written into the
sense by masculinity [which] constructs femininity in its own image, for itself scene as product and self-consumer.
. . . and [is] contained within the capitalist commodity fonn .... Finally the
I, Thomas Lawson. "Bunk: &luardo Poolozzi CIIId th. USacy of the Ind"J'Clldent Group." Thi:
relation between femininity and masculinity takes the fetishistic fonn ofa
Is Tomorrow Today (NIM' York. 1987). pp. 19-29.
relation between commodities."6> The interior room ofJust what is it ... ?
20.21,
carries the trace ofthe many graphic and illustrative representations that
"Portrait of HUSh Gllitskdl as a Famous MollSla of FilmlCllld." type
itemised consumer durables within the home and that were in common
script. 1964. published in Richard Hamilton. Collected Words 19S1-19Bl (London. 1983)
place media circulation. Photomontage sets of domestic interiors, for eXatll
pp.56-59.
4. Basil Taylo~ ''Yeslerday Cmainly: Tomorrow Pahaps," Spectator, 17 Ausust. 1956.
pIe, were commissioned by Sir Edward Hulton for Picture Post in ApIilI9S6.
p.234.
Married couples were shown lodged in surreal domestic spaces, surrounded
5. Ibid_
by aggregates ofvacuum cleaners and electronic appliances that appear
6. Su 1. A. Seidmtop. "Mt Macmillan CIIId the Edwardian Styl " in The Age ofAfflu
slightly out ofperspectival kilter. The article's title, ':Are We Enjoying Too
encetIs. Vernon Bogdanoy and Robert Skiddsky (London. 1970).
Much ofTomorrow Today?"(;6 makes explicit a joumalistically prurient variant
7. Ibid. pp. 39. 52.
8. Kenneth Allsop. The Angry Decade: A Survey ofthe Cultural Revolt ofthe Fiftil
on the TIT slogan. Once again the future has impacted amid the anxious plea
(LondoD. 1958), p. 18. This is also the historical territory plundered by The GooDS. the IODfl
sures ofthe present. The scene ofconsumption is spread before the reader,
running BBC Radio comedians of the 1950s. who ceasdessly exploited an mcbllic British Imp.
legislated by a Tory Futurism which. under the chancellorship of R. A. Butler,
rial wonderland.
loosened credit and installment plan. Hire Purchase (H.P.) controls in the
liE L L 0

23 6

9. Harold Bloom has set out the various ddmct mechanisms d"Ployed by "Iate-cominf/" poets
within the nar",tive sequence of English Iita.lUre in The Anxiety ofInfluence (N.... ~rk.
1973).
10. See Michael Fried~ use ofThomas Weiskd~ The Romantic Sublime (Baltimor 1976).
in Realism. Writing. Disfiguntion: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chi
<dgo. 1987). p. 66.
11. IUchard Hamilton and Lowrence Gowing. ilItroduction. Man, Machine and Motion.
.xh. cat. (London. 1956). R"Printed in Hamilton. Collected Words. p. 19.
12. Bernard S. Myers. "n.lnclined Plane," Ark. 18 (1956), p. 35.
13. All the memoirs .f IG participant< adamantly make a point of this antipathy to the prevail
ing styles of art behaviour Notice that the word "amateur" is twice stigmotistd in the WE
HATE section of TIT.
14. "Contributors," Ark. 16 (1956). p. 10.
15. Bogdan.. and Skiddsky. "ilIrroduction." The Age ofAflluence. p. 11.
16. C. P. Snow. "The Two CuJlUres." New Statesman. 6 October. 1956. p. 414.
17. Ibid.

18. See E. J Hobshowm. Industry and Empire (London. 1968). p.:ru:.

19. The title of on. of the many SF films seen in Britain in the naid-filiies.

20. See ZygmUllt Bauman. "Industrialism. Consumerism and Po~" Theory. Culture and

Society. 1 (1983). pp. 32-43. esp. p. 40.

21. Dick Hebdidge, "ill Poor Tast<: Notes on Pop." Block. 8 (1983). pp. 5+68.

22. Kenneth Frampton. "New Brutalism and the Welfare State: 1949-59," in This Is

Tomorrow Today. p. 51_

23'. Sir Harry Pilkington. "Ptosperu." Picrure Post. 1 J""uary. 1955. p. 7.

24. The British electronics industry. which hod employed ninery"";ght thousand in 1943-44
with Hamilton counted among them - employed on. hundred ninety thousand in 1955.

25. ILonard Batin. Atom Harvest (lond"". 1955). pp. 32-33.

26. See Daily Express. May 5. 6. 10. and June 3. 1956. commmting on the government
report Automation.
27. See. for example. Fyffe RoberlSOn. "Leisure Unlinaited." Picture Post. 2April 1955.
pp.15-18.
28. Official Guide to the Festival ofBritairl (London. 1951). pp. lviii-bu.

29. Bauman. "ilIdUSaialism. Consumerism ""d PoWet" p. 42.

30. Ibid. p. I.

31. Lowrence Alloway. "The Long Front of Cultur." Cambridge Opinion. 17 (1959);

r"Prinled in This Is Tomorrow Today. p. 32.

32. Ibid. p. 33.

33. Lowrc:nceAlloway. "Technolosy and Sex in Science Fiction." Ark. 17 (1956). pp. 19-23'.

20.

34. In their inrroduction to Man. Machine and Motion. Hanailton and Gowing SU88est

that the union of man and machine "liberates a deepet more fearsome human impul"," than

even"the mythiC c.ntaw; "evokins ... much that is tmibl.... See Hamilton. Collected

Words. p. 19.

35. See nlustrated London News. 13 S"Ptember 1952, p. II.

36. Nigel Henderson. "Italy." Architecrural Review. 111 (February 1952). p. 83.

37. s.. Susan Sonto9~ essay of this tille on the topic of SF in Against Interpretation (New

li>rk. 1966). pp. 209-225.

38. Bertin. Atom Harvest. p. 145.

39. Illustrated London News, 11 October 1952, p. 58.

40. Bertin. Atom Harvest. p. 147.

41. Reyner Banham. "The New Brutolism," The Architecrural Review. 118 (December

1955). p. 358.

42. Robert Melville. "Exhibitions." Architectural Review. 115 (February 1954). p. 133.

43. See Allsop. The Angry Decade. for along account of the media rise and fall of Colin

Wilson.

#. Robert Mullet "Why People Enjoy Horror Films." Picture Post. 21 June 1955. p. 27.

45. Here, lIS at earlier point< in this essay. my use of the word "abject" refers and is indebted

10 the concq>tual stnIClUfe set out in Julia Krist..a. Powers ofHorror (New ~rk. 1982).

46. The 'late Gallery 197+6. Illustrated Catalogue ofAcquisitions (London. 1978),

pp.10+5.

47. See, for example. Ronold Seor!e~ shift from the domestic comic grotesljue of the St. '!lin
lan~ Girls School cartoons to his d.monio, ClIricalUres of Nasser in Punch in the summer of
1956.
48. Robert Mullet Picture Post, 16 October 1954. pp. 27-31. 50.
49. E.g. Goon Show no. 11. broodCllSt 27 December 1955. "The Mighry Wurbtze~" in
which a giant Wurlitza is "driven" across the Sahar. to the "Hotel des Vlqrs"!sicj and then
g... an to win the world~ land speed record; 0 narrotive rich in the obmrditles of post-Imperial
posturing. rocism. and ICChnicism.
50. Bouman. "ilIdusaialism. Consumerism and Po~" p. I.
51. D. E. Harding. "Embodiment." Architectural Review. 117 (Februory 1955). p. 96.
52. E.g., Hamilton~ versions of Muybridge and aIsa the car-rrain film melodrama basis for the
Train.sition works.
53. Hamilton. Collected Words. p. 113.
54. Jack Wmocour "Hollywood 3-D Circus." Picture Post. 14 March. 1953. p. 10.
55. Hamilton. Collected Words. p. 113.
56. Hamilton. Collected Words. p. 120.
57. Picture Post. 27 June 1953. p. 32. See aIsa Fried. Realism. Writing. Disfiguration.
pp. 6+65. on the recoding of r"PrueDlations of the body through violent optical distortions.
58. Picrure Post. "Two Girls in 3-D." 20 June 1953. p. 17.
59. Dick Hebdige. "Towards 0 Cartography of Toste. 1935-1962." Block. 4 (1981).
pp.39-56.
60. See Jlqolom~ WindlUllnel Test (1950) and Yours Till the Boys Come Home
(1951). illustrated in this <otol"8"e. nos. 55 and 56.
61. Alloway, '7echnology and Sex in Science Fiction." p. 23'.
62. This phrase. used to diagnose whot was lac:king in the British. was firn attributt4 to Brnest
Bel'in. the British foreign seaetary (1941-51).
63. See "Our Personaliry GIII Symbolised." Picrure Post, 5 March 1955. pp. 2+27.
64. Royntond Durgnot. A Mirror for England (London. 1970). p. 1#.
65. Janice 'Mlrmip. Advertising in Women's Magazines. 19,6-74 (Bil1llingham. 1980). p. 9.
66. "Are We Enjoyinfl Too Much of Tomorrow Today?" Picture Post. 28.4priI1956.
pp. 13-15.
67. Guy Debord. The Society ofthe Spectacle (Derroit. 1983). Thesis 37. unpaginottd.
68. See Lowson. "Bunk," p. 25. for this characterisation.
69. See the front jocket <dyer of his Tate GoIJety rwospecr:ive exhibition in 1969. which dou
bles as artifact illustration and as monogroph tille. since the flat German-designed toasttr is
brandnamed "hamilton."
70. See Hamilron~ "Selected Bibliography," item 13. in Collected Words. p. 273.