School of Pop: Thomas Crow on the class of '57

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Thomas Crow

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To pursue both aspects of vernacular-culture expertise in an educated and self-conscious project may well be to negate the category of fine art altogether. This at least was the line taken by members of the Independent Group within the London Institute of Contemporary Arts during the 1950s. Its dominant figures distributed their expertise away from fine-art competencies toward mastery of the source. They were at pains to say that they were not in fact much interested in making art. One principal, Toni del Renzio, remembers their riposte to the popularity of Herbert Read's earnest handbook of modern art history, Art Now: They wanted a new book in its place called Not Art Not Now. Their claims to expertise lay instead in comprehending their subject matter on its own terms, in mapping and analyzing the media and design culture of the 1950s, particularly as these emerged from the world's engine of consumer prosperity in the United States.

The story of the Independent Group has become familiar and celebrated. Protest against a genteel culture based in the ancient universities gave rise to the first recorded uses of the term "Pop art" (by artist Richard Hamilton and critic Lawrence Alloway) to name the aesthetic challenge to Europe posed by American industrial culture, dramatized in the flamboyance of Detroit automobiles and in the engineer's eroticized utopias found in science-fiction illustrations and films. This vision united an innovative group of artists, architects, and writers who thereby set themselves against both the aesthetic of neo-Romantic longing and the domesticated nature cult of British Surrealism.

"This Is Tomorrow," the 1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition joined by many of the IG's members, looms large in conventional art-historical memory, but the Saul Bass style of the catalogue's cinematic title pages can be misleading in its advanced look. The sensibility of the Independent Group could in fact be a pretty rugged affair, setting its face against the slick standards of contemporary commercial communication. The style of the installation designed by the architects Peter and Alison Smithson with the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi--they entitled it "Patio and Pavilion"--offered the visitor a future as stripped-down, rough-hewn primitivism: "the fundamental necessities of the human habitat in a series of symbols."

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This theme of high technology returning humanity to its primitive origins is common in pulp science-fiction of the classic period, and it unites the Smithson-Paolozzi effort with the outwardly contrasting message offered by Hamilton and his collaborators in the same venue. Though painter John McHale had returned from a year at the Yale School of Art bearing his famous crate of glossy color magazines, comics, and other American exotica, their transformation by Hamilton--into the notorious Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?--proves to be yet another primitivizing fantasy of humankind beginning again, with naked Adam and Eve camped on a sandy satellite of the earth seen looming above them, surrounded by a clutter of alien artifacts they cannot comprehend. Though the outsize (Tootsie) Pop in the foreground arguably put the seal on the term forevermore, there is nothing in the manner or message of Hamilton's collage that would have surprised Max Ernst or John Heartfield.