‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection

The Invisible Ever-Presence of the Institution

The members of the Independent Group (IG) are the most famous children of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA). More accurately, the ICA’s most important historic function, its most enduring image, is as the foundational site of the IG. ¹ Beyond mentioning the ICA as the location of its meetings, many accounts of the IG have seen no need to say any more about the empty space that was filled by their dynamic activities, despite the fact that it was only its, supposed, independence from the ICA’s managerial team that gave the ‘group’ its nominal coherency (for example see Foster, 2003; Hebdige, 1983; Myers, 2000). ² In contrast, Anne Massey’s (1995) definitive investigation of the development of the IG at the ICA in the 1950s argued for an understanding of their activities as fundamentally framed by their relation to the Institute, as benevolent host and point of departure. Massey’s conception of the IG’s positioning, as a dialogue between the ICA establishment’s universal version of modernism, especially its commitment to pre-war abstraction and surrealism, and an urban, Dada influenced, media-orientated modernism, helped develop a sense of the ICA as a substantive proposition, rather than as a mere platform.

The myth of the IG, as constituted by complete separation and difference from the values of its hosting organisation, has been integral to the IG’s historical coherency (Alloway, 1957; Banham, 1981[1963]). Like all myths, this one was underpinned by a reality. The rupture of war and the after effects of its vicissitudes, the anxiety generated by the Cold War and the shifting position of Britain on the world stage, together with new consumerist possibilities, all created particular circumstances that precipitated an exceptional degree of questioning of inherited cultural values, forms, standards and tastes (Garlake, 1998; Harrison, 2002; Hewison, 1981; Sinfield, 1997). ‘Opposing forces’ ³ of fear and possibility were manifested in artistic representations that exhibited a fracturing of subjectivity in the formation of an anxious pluralism, evident, for example, in Richard Hamilton’s ghostly fragments of consumerist desire in pieces such as $he (1958–1961) and Eduardo Paolozzi’s roughly hewn sculptures of monstrous rejectamenta (Harrison, 2002: 109, 115). The infiltration of a ‘pop’ sensibility and distinctly urban imagery into the work of a new generation of artists can be understood as a reaction to a certain set of pre-war values of universal humanism, unconscious exploration and neo-romanticism that were present, if contested, in the ICA’s make-up (Garlake, 1998: 17–21; Massey, 1995: 19; Whiteley, 2002: 80). Generational rupture, as a kind of institutionalised form of modernist revolution, became the glue that held the IG together in its post-rationalisation and programmatic challenge, most apparent in their rhetorical dislike of the ICA’s first chairman, Herbert Read (Bass, 1990: 8; Morland, 1990: 191; Whiteley, 2002: 80). In 1957, ICA assistant director (1954–1959) Lawrence Alloway (1957: 52) declared, with a bombastic force that was to become characteristic of the IG myth: ‘The popular arts reached, soon after the war, a new level of skill and imagination. Berenson, Fry, Read and the others gave me no guidance on how to read, how to see, the mass media.’ The use of Read as a straw man for members of the group spoke of both an understandable frustration with his establishment status, his ubiquity in British cultural life and his romantic ideals and a need to wrestle with the contradictions that Read had laid bare in his writing and had helped institutionalise in the equivocation of the ICA’s foundational proposition.

Alloway’s post-rationalisation of IG practice, as radical departure from modernist humanism and arrival at, what might be termed, a media savvy sensibility, has been troubled by more nuanced accounts, starting with Massey’s, which have sought to put back complexity and specificity into the work of individual members of the IG and have mapped the connections between members of the group and pre-war modernisms (for example see Kitnick and Foster, 2011). Attention given to individual members suggests that not only were the IG not so very independent, with roots firmly bedded in existing networks of galleries, artists and forums, but that they were hardly a group at all (for example see Colomina and Smithson, 2000; Walsh, 2001: 13–19). What purpose does it then serve to look at the IG as an entity with particular coherency now? Why prioritise this grouping over the various relationships that existed between members of the IG and other artists and non-artists or, indeed, other configurations and networks? I would argue that the only reason for singling out the IG in this way is to help understand the discursive interruption and contribution that such a notional independent grouping might have constituted within the context of its mythic institutional home. Otherwise, the work of expanding, rather than reducing, the historical complexity should continue. Consideration of the IG as a ‘group’ is only helpful when one wishes, as here, to uncover the discursive conditions that demanded the formation of the IG as programmatic intervention and rhetorical formulation. Underlying this enquiry is a broader methodological question. How might we understand, rhetorically and structurally, programmatic and curatorial groupings of discontinuous positions that emerge in spaces that are not concerned with posterity? To begin to address these concerns, I do not propose a re-examination of the work of the IG to look for consistency, homologies, general principles or conceptual sympathies, but, rather, an examination of the ICA as the invisible and empty frame that called forth the abundance of statements that flowed through, from and around the practitioners who became known as the IG. By examining the institutionalisation of the discursive possibilities and contradictions that demanded the positions taken by members of the IG and, more broadly, ‘contemporary’ practice, I aim to show how contradiction and tension became the condition and concern of the contemporary, as an inchoate bracketing of interrelated and often incompatible desires for relevancy, technocracy and criticality. Such a prefix for artistic practice could only produce negations and deferments of the consensual forms that the ICA had been set up to find.

How did the ICA’s formation embody and manifest the contradictions of extant institutional and discursive possibilities, articulating the specific potentialities of ‘culture’ in post-war Britain? Why was the ICA brought into fruition in its particular form and what might this form tell us about the discursive spaces and categorical parameters that made contemporary artistic practice visible? To begin to answer these questions, it is necessary to attend to a moment of specific exchange, where the limits and gaps of the discourse can be observed close-up. The activity of naming, that is, the act of compromising between different positions, desiderata and contemporaneously apprehensible forms and categories, provides such an archival moment. The attempt to find words and forms that not only expressed the aspirations of the venture, but also institutionalised the gaps between previous propositions, reveals the interplay of ideals and pragmatic considerations that I would argue constitute the particular level of the institutional.

Naming the Equivocal: Not a Museum ⁴

In 1949, the ICA commissioned eight architecture schools, acting as a ‘ghost’ client, to produce speculative designs for a polyvalent space to contain the plurality of the arts. Gathering to discuss the resulting projects at the Architectural Association in 1950, Read and Roland Penrose critiqued the student projects. Penrose informed the students, as a response to their projects that:

There was a real need for such a place, where all the arts could exist together under one roof and artists of all kinds could meet each other and the public, and could show their work without it being forced into a commercial form. It should be both a meeting place and a workshop. It should not be thought of as a museum – there was plenty of provision already for museums in London. Not as a static place, but as a creative place – full of activity … There should be lighting from the side if one wanted to avoid the rather religious atmosphere of, for example, the Tate and the National Gallery, where the pictures took the place of windows. He would like to glance outside as well and see trees and glimpses of the outside world. (Architectural Association, 1950)

Penrose’s negative conceptualisation, to think of the space as not a museum, pointed to a lack in institutional thinking. He disliked what he perceived as the ‘religious atmosphere’ of the art museum, preferring a place, not of awe, but of ‘meeting’, of interrelation, not only between different art forms, but between art and the world beyond the gallery. The wish to move outside of the given and to venture into the realm of the institutionally unknown was expressed by Read in his evocation of the organic, a metaphor he used to connote the non-authoritarian self-organisation of things. An appeal to the organic revealed the purpose of the scheme: to instigate a reconnection with some kind of ‘natural’ harmony that would establish a relationship between art and society beyond the commercial, outside of sites, such as the London Gallery, ⁵ in the pre-commercial form of the ‘workshop’. Rallying against the static, Read asked for a building that was alive to its contents, possessing the ability to morph to the demands of emergent forms of cross-media confrontation like a living ‘organism’.

The lamentation of the student’s designs, as rectilinear and static reproductions of existing spaces of display, revealed the centrality of the word ‘museum’ to the Institute’s uncertain formation. In 1946, when the first officially documented meeting of the, about to become, ICA took place, the group met under the banner of the ‘Museum of Modern Art Scheme’. Within the first meeting, the word ‘museum’ was contested by, actor, film maker and surrealist group member, Jacques Brunius, who wished that a less ‘mausoleumesque’ term be found (ICA, 1946–1947: 5). Despite the plea, the word ‘museum’ was not immediately replaced. Why was the word ‘museum’ both so resilient and problematic for the ICA and how did its rejection, but ever-presence, shape the nature of the ‘scheme’? To reject the word ‘museum’ was not simply to refuse a set of values related to conventions of display, but to attempt to overcome the equivocation present in the museum itself as a cultural form.

The Exemplary Museum

Caught between ideas of timeless universality and technological progress, the museum of fine and decorative arts had a steady, if ideologically uncertain, rise to prominence from the mid-18th century to the Second World War (Duncan, 1995: 1; McClellan, 2008: 20–52). In Britain, the particular importance and ambiguity of the museum’s function was constituted by a wider debate regarding the place of culture, as an autonomous agent, in the process of civilisation. What Matthew Arnold termed, borrowing from Swift’s parable, ‘sweetness and light’, although not explicitly discussed by Arnold in relation to museums, usefully framed the perceived value of fine and decorative art in the public domain (McClellan, 2008: 24–27). Pleasure and enlightenment were the twin motivations of Christian Socialists and philanthropic industrialists alike: the functions of improving living conditions for the urban poor and improving behaviour were often indistinguishable from each other within the discourse of the 19th and early 20th century art museum and gallery (Bennett, 1995: 17–102; Koven, 1994). In distinction to this moral enlightenment model and its alignment with Arnold’s definition of culture, the South Kensington Museum, emerging out of the 1851 Great Exhibition, had been initially founded to inspire British industry and a technologically progressive version of civilisation predicated on productivity. The founding of the South Kensington Museum was in part a consequence of the failure of its predecessor, The Museum of Ornamental Art, to instigate a transformation in public taste that was meant to stimulate the demand for higher quality goods. Instead, the larger South Kensington Museum formed part of a hub of discursive and display institutions that aimed at no less than an entire re-orientation of British manufacturing towards new standards in design (Kriegel, 2007: 159–164). However, by the time of its founding, the value of mimetic design training was already being questioned, leaving aesthetic and display value as the primary foci of the museum. The perceived utility of the art and design museum swayed between what Arnold (1869: 30–40) would have called, civilisation, the progressive technical development of the nation, and culture, the spiritual enrichment of its people through the inculcation of an aesthetic order. Providing a space that sat outside the productive needs of contemporary society, but was essential to it, the art and design museum promised to improve through mere presence and example. By preserving the ‘best’, it hoped to inspire the ‘best’ in people and in industry.

In search of a universal ideal, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA), New York, first director Alfred H Barr Jnr, had embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe in the mid-20s, looking for the varied, but interconnected, threads of a modern sensibility. On the way, he gathered examples of public museum practice from Britain, Russia and Germany (Kantor, 2002: 145–154, 212). Extending out from the discipline of Art History and a collector’s sensibility of connoisseurship, Barr’s modernism was not a matter of social utility, but of formal exceptionality, using the structure of the museum to delineate what Sybil Kantor describes as ‘a narrative of synchronic movements in an effort to impose order on recent artistic developments’ (p. 124). It was not that Barr wished to use MoMA to separate art from modern life. Rather, Barr’s formulation of the modern art museum exalted the possibility of magical transformation on an individual basis through engagement with the products of an advanced sensibility. Taking an idea of social improvement from the public museum, but the desirability of individual transformation from the department store, MoMA made a direct link between the commercial spaces of consumer culture and the transformative spaces of the aesthetic museum (Grunenberg, 1994).

The muséal forms, discourses and structures of South Kensington and MoMA were central to the ICA’s conceptualisation. Read had started his career at the South Kensington’s successor, the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A), and, whilst there, had used the collection to develop his thoughts concerning the complex relationship between form, material and the context of production that were to underpin much of his future writing on art and design (King, 1990: 89). Read’s preoccupation with the objects of the V&A concerned the relationship between aesthetic values and social organisation, concerns that had preoccupied Henry Cole, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whilst the V&A was exemplary of a metonymic collection, with each piece referring to a particular complex of social and economic relations, traditions and methods, MoMA was exemplary of an interweaving aestheticised modernist project, each piece of the collection strengthening the case for the whole. For the ICA, MoMA was the model of modern art presentation and patronage. Of particular importance to the ICA was the role of the Museum in offering a series of resources for the contemporary artist – a place for the study of an alternative history of a repressed and marginalised ‘advanced’ sensibility (ICA, 1946–1947: 2, 26). For the 1946 committee, it seems that a structured and formal notion of modern art and its display jarred with their desire for an active relationship with contemporary industrial reality. Read summed up this position in the first committee meeting when he stated that their scheme would differ from existing projects because it would ‘be concerned not with the achievements of art, but with the stimulation of production’ (p. 3). However, Read also believed, with Barr, that the historic project of a ‘progressive’ modern art needed to be defended as a coherent and collectable object, so that it could lie ‘inviolate’ until such a time that society could make use of the values embedded within the work (Read, 1998[1935]: 528). Unsure how to address the entangled discourses of productivity and aesthetic separation, Read made a volte face in the second meeting of the committee, when he verbally drafted a policy statement for the scheme, declaring that:

For some time it has been obvious that a serious gap exists in the national institutions which present the arts to the public. No institution exists which offers any coherent programme of exhibitions and other educational facilities designed to give a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the arts during the present century. (ICA, 1946–1947: 12)

The tension present in these statements was mirrored in Read’s writings on the philosophy of art. In his early writing he had suggested that there should be a relationship between the ‘permanent element in mankind’, relating to a universal ‘aesthetic sensibility’ that was ‘static’, and an ‘interpretative’ element that was ‘variable’ (Read, 1972[1931]: 19). As time went on, Read became increasingly doubtful about the possibility of connecting with a universal aesthetic and, by the time of the ICA’s formation, the variable expression of private experience was seen, by Read, as the only achievable goal, given present political conditions (King, 1990: 228). At the Seventh meeting, the word ‘museum’ was finally banished and replaced with the word ‘institute’ (ICA, 1946–1947: 42).

The ICA was to be, then, ‘not a museum’, crucially defined in negative, though dialectical, relation. The art museum, as a site for the inspiration of producers, the incubation of a modernist impulse and the cultivation of an ‘advanced’ taste in an imagined public, provided the referent points for the ICA’s ideological configuration. Driven by a fear of death in preservation and of religious separation in display, both suggestive of resignation from economic and social life and out of keeping with a commitment to varying technocratic demands for productivity and innovation, the committee replaced a language of tradition and judgment with one of experiment and risk-taking. In fact, when it came to taking risks, the committee was not able to leave behind the realm of historic judgment, uncertain of how they were to measure the quality of artists whose metal had not been tested in the sphere of collection, display and criticism. Brunius reminded the committee that such risk taking was the activity of the commercial gallery, whose reliance on the new demanded the backing of the unknown and untested (ICA, 1946–1947: 75). The committee seemed to be overlooking the obvious relationship between their desire to support young artists and the already existing forms of the commercial gallery, the independent exhibition, salon and art fair. However, reference to the museum, even in its rejection, was a conscious turn away from consumer capitalism, to an alternative value system. After six meetings, disdaining the speculations of the market and the judgments of tradition, the committee floundered: without documented discussion, the word ‘institute’ was suddenly inserted into the title as a cipher, an empty and negative institutional positioning.

The Emptiness of the Institute

Beyond negation, ‘institute’ implied research, education and professionalisation. Whilst it had been used in the titles of American art institutions, in Britain, ‘institute’ had taken on the particular significations of re-skilling for industry and democratic education, with the formation of Mechanics’ Institutes from the 1820s and RIBA in 1834 (Kelly, 1992: 117–126). It became further ingrained in British cultural life in the 1920s with the founding of the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE). The BIAE emerged out of need for and fear of democratic participation following the 1918 Representation of the People Act (Bailey, 2009: 1). Important for its re-orientation of cultural appreciation away from aristocratic tastes towards a publicly accessible and instrumental form of culture, the BIAE was not only associated with the development of extra-mural English studies, but was also involved in the inter-war development of the cultural and educational programmes of the BBC, the development of state sponsorship of the arts through its ‘art for all’ campaign, a precursor to the Arts Council, and the formation of the BFI (Kelly, 1992: 317–323).

The ICA positioned itself tentatively and in distinction to this history of the expanding culture of public education, stating that it was not to be like the BBC and the Arts Council who made public information their primary concern (Read, 1949). However, in its early years, the ICA was to rely upon, mirror and emulate this culture. Its film and music departments had an entirely symbiotic relationship with the BFI and the BBC respectively. ⁶ Early discussions at the ICA on the future value of television and on new architectural developments promulgated the BIAE’s philosophy that democracy was not just a matter of suffrage, but involved the active engagement of the public in the evaluation of cultural developments. The ICA’s primary concern, however, was for the producers of culture, to create a place for professional discussion and promotion. Unlike the South Kensington Museum, the aim was not to display work to inspire producers, but to open up a space in between multiple forms of media, where producers could innovate, using the language of the laboratory and the idea of experimentation – something that Read felt MoMA had promised but had failed to deliver (ICA, 1946–1947: 42). The word ‘institute’ within the title of the ICA articulated the gap between the activity of display and the desire for productivity present in the discourse of the museum, whilst promoting the value of cultural criticism for democracy and the importance of professional bodies for the reformation of industrial processes. Declaring its autonomy simultaneously with its instrumentality, the Institute, as ‘not-museum’, made its concern no less than the entire rethinking of the relationship between culture and society.

Confronting the Contemporary

The use of ‘contemporary’, as a replacement for ‘modern’, was recommended by Read merely to distinguish the scheme from MoMA (ICA, 1946–1947: 4). As banal as the choice to substitute ‘modern’ for ‘contemporary’ may appear to have been, there were two particular institutional adoptions of the term that had already established the contemporary, within the discourse of art display, as a signifier of a temporality that lay beyond the timeless permanence of the museum and the neophilism of the commercial gallery. In 1929, less than a year before the founding of MoMA, a group of students at Harvard, including Barr, had established the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, with the financial backing and leadership of Lincoln Kirstein. The Society, during its brief lifespan, put on exhibitions that exceeded MoMA’s early shows in terms of ambition and commitment to a radical conception of modern art and design (Kantor, 2002: 197). As well as attempting to take stock of current art practice in America, the society mounted an exhibition of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and, in so doing, declared its interest beyond the fine arts in the realms of design and technology. Kirstein’s choice of the word ‘contemporary’ reflected his interest in the multiplicity of connections between different types, styles and modes of creative activity, over an interest in the particular sensibility of a particular movement, or the lineage of movements. As Kantor (2002: 197) explains:

Rather than the promotion of ‘modern’ art – which, for Barr, connoted a disciplined sense of history – Kirstein’s stated focus was on ‘contemporary’ art, which satisfied his own curiosity about ‘the difference between “originality,” “personality,” and “quality,” and whatever connected these in the present context’.

Barr’s interest in art of the 20th century may have been no less encyclopaedic in its scope or various in its embrace of media than Kirstein’s, but his mode of scholarship was orientated towards a mapped version of modernist interconnection, rather than the fluid connections of the contemporary (Kantor, 2002: 214). Barr’s teleological and assiduously formal, rather than associative, exploration of modernism in art moved inexorably towards abstraction, whereas Kirstein saw no need for such a singularly progressive story.

Kirstein’s ‘contemporary’ proposed a poetic free-play between elements within the here and now of the exhibition, whereas the founders of the Contemporary Arts Society (CAS) in London in 1909 used ‘contemporary’ to avoid the controversies of an explicitly modern art agenda and to make clear their specific purpose: to provide a space for the support of living artists, whose excess of contemporaneity, paradoxically, put them at odds with their own time. What was needed, according to CAS, was a

half-way house, some place of suspense, which the more courageous lovers of the arts, admirers of living as well as dead artists, might fill with their works, and hold them until a more timid people were sure of their ground. (MacColl quoted in Collins, 1991: 20)

Just like the ICA after it, CAS did not work explicitly against the art establishment, but in ‘friendly cooperation’. Despite this friendly cooperation, they operated in contrast to the natural conservatism present in the Royal Academy’s reactionary management of the Chantry Bequest, in the same way as the ICA was to seek to redress the perceived narrow-mindedness of a previous generation of public patrons and the outdated collections and exhibitions policies at the Tate (ICA, 1946–1947: 27).

Both the Harvard Society and CAS used the contemporary as a statement of radical institutional departure from the conservatism of historical certainty and scholarly judgement. Unlike the totality of the modern, where each work designated as such made its claim, synecdochally, to modernity, the contemporary suggested a more ambiguous relationship between those objects designated as such. It was not replete with values, but rather overflowed with a relevance and immediacy that transcended the historical and exalted the momentary. To display a model of the Dymaxion House as a contemporary work was to render it at once an image of its time, a utopian proposition of temporal connectivity and a fragmentary artefact of the present. Indeed, Fuller’s house was to become a model of the contemporary – its pod-like form suggestive of nomadic living and the promise of constant adaptation, keeping in tension an idea of ahistorical humanism and the demands of present technological innovation in an emergent idea of ecology. ⁷ The most particular effect of the insertion of ‘contemporary’, as a descriptor of creative practice, was to displace the modern, as a place to be arrived at, a utopia of progress achieved, and substitute a direct concern with spaces of uncertain temporality.

The Janitor’s Cupboard

Questioning the extent to which an object was of its time was central to Read’s critical methodology in his 1934 book Art and Industry. Starting with Morris’s rejection of industrial process and using Ruskin’s notions of material specificity as a guide to aesthetic purity, he challenged the historic split between art and industry, ornament and function, through a direct quotation from Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus vision:

Our object was to permeate both types of mind; to liberate the creative artist from his otherworldliness and reintegrate him into the workaday world of realities; and at the same time to broaden and humanise the rigid, almost exclusively material mind of the business man. Our governing conception of the basic unity of all design in its relation to life, which informed all our work, was therefore in diametrical opposition to that of ‘art for art’s sake’, and the even more dangerous philosophy it sprang from: business as an end in itself. (Gropius quoted by Read, 1934: 55)

Read believed that maintaining a constant ‘relation with life’ meant prioritising present demands over traditions of practice: ‘for the real problem is not to adapt machine production to the aesthetic standards of handicraft, but to think out new aesthetic standards for new methods of production’ (p. 7). Not only was art to end its splendid isolation in the academy because the art school and the factory were to become one, but industry was to be humanised by a reintegration of aesthetic considerations. To be ‘contemporary’, to be with one’s time, necessitated a connection between different modalities and demands, but it also suggested the fantasy of a desired unity, expressed by Read, influenced by the early Bauhaus, in his celebration of the guild structure, in which, he felt, an ideal synthesis of form and function had been achieved (Read, 2002[1963]: 44–45). Consequently, he believed that design would only advance when ‘industrialists [were] willing to consult the expert in the theory of art as willingly as they consult the expert in chemistry or physics’ (Read, 1934: 8). The intrinsic failure that was encapsulated in Read’s modest plea for consultation was underscored by his assertion that in times of harmony between art and modes of production the aesthetic, in fact, disappeared: ‘There is one significant fact about such periods: they are without an aesthetic. What they did, they did as the solution of practical problems, without taste, without academic tradition’ (p. 9).

Five years prior to the formation of the ICA, Read had had the chance to put the ideas from Art and Industry into practice when he was invited to become director of the Design Research Unit (DRU) (Kinross, 1998: 151). Although DRU provided gainful employment for artists and designers on public information projects of significance, modernising the image of British public design, its failure to integrate artists within the industrial process revealed an unresolved question at the heart of Read’s Art and Industry thesis: namely, whether ‘good’ design was a question of producing form in sympathy with modern industry or whether it was an ethics of practice that demanded the reorganisation of industry. As a professional entity, DRU was undoubtedly a success, but in terms of reorganisation, it did little to suggest an alternative productive reality (pp. 150–154). The invocation of the contemporary within the titular proposition of the ICA can be seen as a response to and an institutionalisation of this failure. Rather than taking an active role in working for industry, as DRU had done, the ICA made its concern the question of how art and design should function in the modern world. ⁸ For the artists and designers gathering at the ICA under the banner of the contemporary, the question of how to bring post-war British culture into time with itself was of paramount concern. Future ICA Cinema programmer, Brenda Poole, suggested that market research might assist in this dilemma, whereas committee member Jack Beddington perceived American manufacturers to have solved the problem by successfully re-designing ‘common objects’ in a way that still appealed to the public (ICA, 1950). None, however, asked why good design was so important and how such quality was to be judged. Indeed, the provocation of the contemporary obviated the question of value, in absolute terms, in favour of relevance within specific contexts.

That a categorical absence had been identified, through the decoupling of art from its muséal narrative of universal claim, was not lost on Director of the National Gallery, Philip Hendy, who began his address to an ICA audience in 1949 with an anecdote regarding his discovery of a janitor’s cupboard on his way to the discussion. He noted that he had found ‘the walls covered with pin-ups’. Rather than passing judgment on the janitor’s choice of decoration, Hendy mused that ‘it was interesting to discover that the one permanent representative of the Arts Council on their premises had to have his own private gallery’ and ‘that was perhaps symbolic of art in democracy’ (ICA, 1949). Why had Hendy chosen to begin his enquiry into the relevance of art to society with an observation regarding ‘popular culture’ and personal choice? Hendy’s anecdote recognised the strangeness in the question posted for discussion, ‘Is Art an Essential or an Accessory to Society. Or What Is the Social Function of Art?’ The essential nature of art, as it was conceived by the professional discourse of critics, curators, collectors and artists, was not predicated on art’s constant and changing relationship to society, but rather upon the institutions that served to keep it mythically away from society. To ask the question of art’s relevance to society, within an institute concerned with the condition of the contemporary, required more than thinking through the nature of the relationship. It demanded the conceptualisation of a practice that constantly declared its own relevance. The janitor’s cupboard spoke directly to the provocation of the contemporary: if art was to be remade in each moment as a thing of relevance in relation to the present, then how could one be sure that the art of the present moment looked anything like the art of the past, or was even to be found in the same place by the same people? It was to be the mission of an Institute of Contemporary Arts to locate such a practice. However, if all that could be looked for was the contingent and the transient, without tradition or manifesto, then the contextual and inter-textual stories of the temporary exhibition, even if they were to be as individuated and ephemeral as the janitor’s cupboard, seemed to be all that was available.

Arts: The Organisation of Plurality

As with ‘contemporary’ and ‘modern’, ‘art’ and ‘arts’ were interchangeably used within the 1946 discussions. But, despite this, they were not without their different genealogies and connotations. The fantasy of the modern movement did away with the idea of differentiation between ‘the arts’, as the modern was already a synthesis of media into a progressive singularity. The modern art museum was founded on the idea of representative totality: not only was it possible to build a collection that aspired to the complete representation of modern movements, but its relative completeness could be compared with other such collections. However, the edifice of modernism, especially in the furthest recesses of an ‘arts for art’s sake’ philosophy, was built on distinct institutional networks that made their separation a condition of their authority (Rainey, 1998). Just as the idea of the contemporary addressed an aspiration for connectivity, whilst suggesting that connectivity was, in fact, the fantasy of a dislocated age, so the declaration of plurality spoke at once of a utopia of categorical synthesis and the material conditions that made such synthesis impossible and, even, professionally, undesirable.

Read was greatly occupied by the idea of synthesis, as a process of critical engagement and of resolution between the organic and abstract. In an article written in 1949, but delivered as a lecture in America during one of the international trips he took during the formation of the ICA, Read preached the value of such a dialectical approach:

Synthesis is merely the meeting place of two ideas and from their conjunction arises a new idea. But each new idea is in its turn a thesis which merges into an endless dialectical chain, and the only finality is something we agree to call Truth, which seems to recede with every step we take towards it. (Read quoted in Thistlewood, 1993: 91)

It is, therefore, unsurprising that the ICA invited Julian Huxley, the main proponent of evolutionary synthesis, to chair its enquiry into the function of art. Huxley asked ‘can we through art synthesise all sorts of processes which we at present approach separately?’ (ICA, 1949). Beyond the sphere of biology, Huxley’s approach offered the hope for a resolution between theories of historic cultural development and individual creativity, Read’s ‘static’ and ‘variable’ elements. Perhaps filled with uncertainty over the nature of the ICA venture, Read wrestled between a fear of synthesis, as it was ‘commonly understood’ as a ‘static’ thing, softening the revolutionary potential of modern art, and synthesis as a dialectical process that allowed development towards, an ever receding, truth. He saw the artist as a mediator, never turning away from reality, but turning reality inwards in order to create new forms of expression. Although conceiving of the art in terms of individual expression, he refused the conclusion that the artist (and hence the practice of art) was fundamentally individualistic: asserting that ‘his whole effort is directed towards a reconciliation with society’ (Read, 1952: 109).

More than Huxley’s evolutionary biology, it was psychologist and art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig’s (1949: 3) theory of art’s temporal and spatial connectivity to an ‘internal’ world of forms springing from the ‘depths of our mind’ that provided the ICA with a model for synthesis. Speaking at the ICA in September 1949, following its second exhibition, 40,000 years of Modern Art, Ehrenzweig decried ‘style research’ and the traditional formal congruities of art analysis and promulgated an approach that focused on creativity as the interplay between conscious perception and unconscious apprehension. Ehrenzweig imbued art with the magical potential for synthesis, where the gestalt of human perception could encounter the gestalt-free elements of reality that troubled the unconscious. It was in ‘gaps’ – transitional states between unconscious intention and the conscious intentional statement – that Ehrenzweig located the activity of creativity (Ehrenzweig, 1973[1967]). Much like Read’s idea of creativity, that sat in relation to, but beyond, the ‘unconscious’ forces of society (as a complexity of social, political, economic and cultural realities), Ehrenzweig’s theory gave a place to art that could be both personally and socially relevant, where creativity, recovered as transitional site, became a space of dialogue and association – a place of mediation.

The Constant Questioning of the Independent Group

The ICA, as a titular statement, was such a place of mediation, existing in relation and distinction to a notion of the totality of modern art, represented by the particular institutionalisation of modern art at MoMA, and the demands for industrial innovation, redolent of the South Kensington Museum. However, it was more than a reiteration or combination of these divergent muséal functions. Contemporary relevance, in relation to the plurality of the arts, meant the possibility of continual innovation for industry on the one hand, and a radical questioning of the given values of static form on the other. The postulation of the need for immanent relevance contradicted the necessarily historic notion of the arts. Read’s proposed dialectics suggested the way in which the contradictory elements in each of the terms that comprised the ICA’s name (separation/productivity, professionalisation/experimentation, plurality/synthesis) were to relate to each other in the pursuit of a truth, as an ideal merger of art and society that was, in fact, an ever-retreating utopia. In reality, the emergent structure of the ICA mirrored the separation of specialism and expertise that existed within dominant cultural institutions, such as universities, museums and the BBC. Expertise, as an idea of delineated knowledge that resisted interstitial exploration, was central to the authority of the constitution of the ICA as a place of selection and education, but inimical to Read’s anarchic aspirations for organic interrelation and psychological synthesis.

It is into this institutional cleavage that the IG can be reinserted. Not as opposition, trail blazers or enfant terribles (although they may have been all those things), but as a rhetorical and structural response to the question of the contemporary, as a statement of lack within the structure of an art discourse centred upon the museum, but with that centre now removed: a ‘delirious museum’ repressed and denied. ⁹ With answers as various as they were contradictory, the idea of an independent group rhetorically converged around a desire to associate, relate and connect in relation to and within the conditions of a discontinuous immediacy – replete, at once, with the homes of tomorrow and the ruins of a lost present (Highmore, 2006, 2007). As I have argued elsewhere, the need for a constant state of association between disparate elements of culture produced a curatorial imperative, with its divergent experimental and promotional possibilities (Cranfield, 2011). The ICA was not the point of origin for this equivocal state of being, but it did name, and open, an institutional absence. As it failed to find alternative structures and modes, it widened the inherent gap between productive modernism, represented by the Bauhaus, and a rarefied modernism, institutionalised by the modern art museum and the private gallery. The IG’s statements can be seen as varied, discontinuous and contradictory attempts to speak into this gap, resolve it, or, at least, make the gap itself visible.

Banham’s (1955) famous explication of New Brutalism as a combination of image, structure and the ‘as found’, Alloway’s ‘The long front of culture’ (1959), Alison Smithson’s idea of the ‘sensibility primer’ (see Highmore, 2007: 3, 4, 11) or the notion of a parallel structuring of art and life through the technological lens (Banham, 1953), are inadequate as ways of understanding the IG’s practice as a distinct coherency, too limiting and too general as they are. However, as critical theorisations of the uncertain space of the contemporary, they operate to expose the condition of its unresolved, contradictory and problematic form. Most particular to the provocation inherent in the tensions institutionalised by the ICA was the development of exhibitions, by members of the IG, that made the possibility and the impossibility of connection manifest. Displays at the ICA, such as Growth and Form (1951), Parallel of Life and Art (1953) and Man, Machine Art and Motion (1955), offered anti-institutions of constant connection within an institution that had presented the contemporary as an absence and deferment of the modern.

Through this institution/anti-institution formulation it is possible to see connections between not just the various exhibitions and statements of those who became known as the IG, but many others who flowed through the ICA’s conceptual and physical spaces. When viewed as explorations of the condition of the contemporary – as an untenable state of integration with and critical distance from the present – discontinuous moments that made up the aleatory programme of the ICA, from the lingering shot of a starlet’s gown in Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949), to a talk on science fiction (1954), or the re-presentation of Brassai’s photographs of Parisian graffiti (Language of the Wall, ICA, 1958), can be seen to speak to each other, both affirming and undermining the potentiality of a meaningful practice of the present. These moments do not need to be claimed as steps on the path towards pop art or other art-historical movements or following those of pre-war avant-gardes, but, instead, can be viewed as attempts to make manifest the tension between the rough texture of gestalt-free reality (be it the scratches of a film, the drips of paint, the noise of an epidiascope or the rubble of a bomb site) and the elusive promises of formal unity and post-war consensus. In turn, these manifested tensions created a type of institution that gave coherency to the inconsistency of proliferating experiments in connection. As Jacob Bronowski stated, at the ICA in 1951, in relation to the project of contemporary science, they had ‘come to a stage in structure where [they thought] it more interesting to look for the relations between objects than [at] the objects themselves’.