How a group of artists and theorists turned to exhibition design as
the only medium capable of synthesizing high and low in postwar
culture.
In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular
culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together
for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble goal: to reimagine the
structure of postwar culture by situating art in the midst of
military-industrial technologies and pop pleasures. In this book, Kevin
Lotery argues that the IG turned to the cross-disciplinary form of
exhibition design as the only medium capable of getting the measure of
these forces, the only technique that could integrate high and low,
aesthetic and scientific, and redesign them in turn.
At the heart of this story are the IG's most unruly members, including
artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi;
architects Alison and Peter Smithson; and critics Lawrence Alloway and
Reyner Banham. To these upstarts, art was no more privileged an activity
than the streamlining of a helicopter blade or the screening of the
latest cinema spectacle. In place of the old cultural hierarchies, they
saw a continuum that Alloway termed "the long front of culture." Only
exhibition making could redirect this "long front" toward something
genuinely, startlingly new.
Lotery shows that the IG's exhibitions sought out temporary interfaces
with technological invention and scientific research in a search for the
form of the new itself. The IG exhibitions he examines drew on
biological morphogenesis, anthropology and photography, human-machine
prosthetics, American pop, abstraction, and theories of play. The IG is
often described as the precursor to the pop art of the 1960s. Lotery
shows that it was much more, as entangled with the histories of science,
technology, and design as with the dialectics of modern art and mass
culture
