Independent Group

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Independent Group met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London from 1952-55. The Group consisted of artists, architects, desingers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. The Group introduced mass culture into debates about high culture, re-evaluated modernism and created the 'As Found' aesthetic. The Group is currently the subject of renewed interest in our postdisciplinary age, and was the subject of a two day, international conference at the Tate Britain in March 2007.

The Independent Group had its first meeting early in 1952 which consisted of Eduardo Paolozzi feeding a mass of colourful images from American magazines through an epidiascope. There images, collected when Paolozzi was resident in Paris during the late 1940s formed the basis of his BUNK series of Screenprints (1972) and the Krazy Kat Archives now held at the V & A Museum, London. The rest of the first Independent Group session concentrated on philosophy and technology during September 1952 to June 1953, and was chaired by design critic and historian, Reyner Banham. Key members at this stage included the artist Richard Hamilton, Surrealist and magazine art director, Toni del Renzio, sculptor William Turnbull and the photographer Nigel Henderson. The Group did not meet during late 1953 or early 1954, as they were concentrating on delivering a public programme of lectures at the ICA, Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art. New members joined the Independent Group for its second full session, including the architects Alison and Peter Smithson who had staged the highly significant exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA in the autumn of 1953. Reyner Banham stood down as chair of the Independent Group, as he was busy with his PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and in late 1954 Dorothy Morland asked the art critic Lawrence Alloway and fine artist John McHale to reconvene the Independent Group for its second session. The painter Magda Cordell and her husband, music producer Frank Cordell joined the Independent Group at this point.

The second session focused on American mass culture such as Western movies, science fiction, billboards, car design and popular music. In having such discussions they drew upon Futurist, Surrealist, the Bauhaus, and Dada concepts. Richard Hamilton organised an exhibition, Man, Machine and Motion in late 1955 at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle and the ICA, which focussed on many Independent Group concerns.

In 1956 the group came to wider public attention with its participation in the exhibition This is Tomorrow. The Group ceased to meet in 1955, but the connections between the various members continued to bear fruit in the subsequent years of their creative practice.

Sources

[1]

Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59, Manchester University Press, 1995.

David Robins (Ed) The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and The Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT Press, 1990.