 Welcome everyone to the second day of Cutting Edge Collage in Britain 1945 to now. I can just see the participant numbers climbing up so make yourself at home and you probably are at home anyway. Get a cup of tea, get lunch and we'll just wait another second or two just to make sure that people are logging in okay. And then we'll begin formally with this session, so it's great we already have over 70 people with us. It's fantastic that so many people can join us for this session. Okay well I think I will make a start because we've got a lot to fit into two hours. My name is Sarah Turner, I'm the Deputy Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. And welcome back if you joined us yesterday for the first session of the conference. And to those of you who are joining us for the first time, a special welcome to this session on cuts, copies, clips and the curatorial for all the seas there. This session is going to be full of ideas, innovative research and experimental thinking and it's a great pleasure to welcome all our speakers who have joined us for this panel as well as our chairs. Before we get any further, I'm just going to run you through the housekeeping rules and guidelines that we have for the Paul Mellon Centre webinars. So this session will consist of two panels, each comprises of two 15 minute papers and there will be a Q&A session. That's where we rely on you, the audience to engage with us and the ideas that you've heard in the presentations. And we ask you to put your questions into the Q&A function and you find that at the bottom of your screen. We also like to have lots of chat during the sessions. Please use the chat box to get in touch with us. Danny, our events assistant hosts that and I'm also here with Shauna Blanchfield, our events manager. You've got any questions about the session, any feedback, any ideas you want to contribute from the floor of the conference as it were. Please do pop that in the chat box as well. We'll have a multi panel discussion at the end of the session, so there will hopefully be plenty of time for conversation. The session will be recorded and it will be made available afterwards via the Paul Mellon website. And you can find lots of recordings of our previous events, including the one yesterday. And so if you can't join the particular sessions of the conference, please look back onto the recordings page of the Paul Mellon website. And you can catch up later on. We've also got closed captioning available for this session and click the CC button at the bottom of the webinar screen. And you can enable captions and they are an amazing collage in their own right. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce our chair for this session, who is Professor Lynn Mead. And she is in the history of art department at Birkbeck University of London. She's published widely on a range of our historical subjects, particularly the history of British visual culture in the 19th and 20th century. And most her most recent book is the tiger in the smoke art and culture in post war Britain. And we were delighted to publish that via the Paul Mellon Centre. So, Lynn, I'm going to hand over to you now to introduce the two speakers who are forming the first part of this panel. Thanks so much. Thanks very much, Sarah. And welcome to everyone, wonderful numbers who are participating in this online event. So as Sarah said, this is the first panel in this kind of group of events around collage. And I think we should take a moment to admire the eliteration of cuts, copies, clips and the curatorial, which explores the ways in which collage can be used to unsettle disciplines and media and materials. What I'm going to do is introduce our two speakers first of all. They will both present one after the other 15 minute papers and then we'll have time for questions for both papers. From you and perhaps from me. So our first speaker is Ben Crownfield and I can see that Ben has managed to finish his teaching and get here now. And he is a senior tutor on the curatorial theory and history course at the Royal College of Arts. And his paper is called Fragmenting the Contemporary, the Queer Timeliness of Collage and the Curatorial in Post-War Britain. So Ben is, as I said, at the Royal College of Art. His research is focused on the relationship of the curatorial to notions of the contemporary and the archive, asking what it is to be with one's time. And this stems from his ongoing work into the history of art institutions, the theory of archives and shifting ideas of art and culture in post-war Britain. And some of his recent articles include on not being with time clearly in post-war Britain, which was published in performance research in 2018, mind the gap unfolding the proximities of the curatorial, which was also published in performance research, all play and no work, a ludistry. These are difficult titles to speak, Ben, of the curatorial as transitional objects at the early ICA, which was published in tape papers. And there are many others around this little hub of themes that Ben works on. And in 2007 and 2008, he curated the year-long series, 60 Years of Curating at London's ICA. So I'm going to hand over to you now, Ben, and we look forward to hearing your paper. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Lynn. Can you hear him? Is my sound okay? So we can hear you, good. Thanks, Ben. Great. And I'm just going to share my screen, and I'm very sorry for those ridiculously complicated paper titles. There's another one to entertain you with. Sorry, just going to... So in 1954, Lawrence Allaway curated the exhibition Collages and Objects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. More than just a museological overview of the relation between pre-war surrealist and post-war collage. The exhibition showed signs of another continued preoccupation of pre-war surrealism that had migrated into post-war Britain via the ICA, a concern with the mechanisms of display and presentation, the apparatus of the curatorial. In the pamphlets scattered throughout the conventional list of artworks on display, were a series of quotes from the exhibiting artists on collage, assuring a simpler exhibition narrative of historical progression for a collage of textual fragments. The exhibition itself was a designed environment created by exhibiting artist John McHale, who would be one of the three collages in the ICA 1957 exhibition of that name. The curatorial, as a practice of presenting fragmented spaces of not-quite connections, worked in dialogue with the overlaps cuts and jarring juxtapositions of collage to extend the picture plane towards a wider cultural sphere. Collage brought into the early ICA a set of unresolved tensions and problematics, were the surrealist modes of montage and collage, performed by those who took pictures by day for the very publications they cut up at night, a critical undoing or a furtherance of the burgeoning consumer culture. More troubling still, were the decontextualised mash-ups of images of objects and people from ethnographic collections and magazines that they utilized a challenge to forms of colonial extraction or a furtherance of the exploitative regime that made such images available. As Lauren Walden has shown, although ostensibly anti-colonial, pre-war European surrealists exhibited more than just a fascination with the decontextualised images and objects of colonial ethnographic collections. And as Lisa Madigan-Newby has argued, far from solving this antinomy between critical visual culture and fetishistic extraction appropriation, the post-war ICA continued both the avant-gardist move to destabilise regimes of cultural value, whilst reinvesting in colonial essentialising discourses of primitivism. Although collage created a direct link between pre-war European modernism and the post-war ICA, the ICA, as a conceptual as well as historical space, did inflect these pre-war concerns in particular ways through the question that its titular formation begged, how to be contemporary, that is, how to be with or not with one's time. This question never formally posed or answered became a kind of lurking anxiety that haunted the early discussions at the ICA. In one such discussion, Sir Philip Hendy, then director of the National Gallery, commented that he had encountered a janitor's cupboard on his way to the talk, held at the newly minted Arts Council's premises. He noted that he'd found, quote, the walls covered with pin-ups, and he went on to muse that, quote, 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 and democracy. Hendy's aside reflected a grand crisis in post-war Britain around the idea of culture. This crisis is best captured perhaps by Raymond Williams' 1958 text, Culture is Ordinary. Williams ends the essay by asserting that his lived experience amongst friends and family taught him that he couldn't accept the notion that ordinary people were dupes of a cultural industry. Just as much as he couldn't accept the culture of any sort, had to be given to people as something exceptional that they lacked. As Williams was developing his questions concerning a redefinition of a materialist understanding of culture, the loose network of practitioners circulating around the ICA, who were usually referred to as the independent group, were in different and various ways challenging some of the essentialisms of the previous generation. Here, collage worked hand in hand with its counterpart, the curatorial. Whilst the former was concerned with turning the fragment in collecting and extracting gaze of the ethnographer on to the forms of Western capitalist production to produce hyper-composite images that mocked and venerated the source material it redeployed, the latter, the curatorial, assembled ready-made images as much to perform a brekti and exposure of the mechanisms of cultural display as to exploit those mechanisms to produce a decidedly post-humanist and anti-musiological exhibitionary position. For example, as Ben Heimaw has noted, the pamphlet accompanying the 1953 exhibition Parallel of Life and Art played with the conventions of categorisation to destabilise not just art, non-art distinctions, but the very indexical and evidentiary assumptions of photography. I would claim that Parallel, knowingly and importantly, undid many of the categorical assumptions that attended the ICA's more ethnographically minded displays such as the exhibition Wondren Horror of the Human Head in the same year. However, there is also evident in Parallel a sheer, a critical pleasure in the possibilities of technological reproduction to produce homologies and seductive juxtapositions that feeds into a wider sense of unresolved ambivalence that has been frequently noted in the work of the IG, brutalism and pop art more broadly, namely whether the work should be read as a critical engagement with or exuberant take-up of contemporary mass-produced culture and its attendant technologies. I would suggest that this question can be usefully recast in the light of the ICA's uncertain mandate as a concern about being in or with time. In the 1964 issue of the ICA's short-lived Living Arts magazine, Rainer Bannum published his own essay on timeliness, the activism of the short-distance minicyclist. Musing on the moment of the Cold War and the shared sensibility amongst those advocates of taking popular culture seriously, he noted that, quote, suddenly there came a moment when it was very difficult to read time or any American magazine at all simply because of one's political loyalties. In that period, there arose a situation where one's natural leanings in the world of entertainment and so on were to the states, but one's political philosophy seemed to require one to turn one's back on the states, end quote. The possibility of enjoying that which was at odds with one's politics or perhaps with one's class-gender or background put light to the notion that identity might be considered singular and constructed through a predetermined set of signifiers that were located in time and place. This posed a problem for both the avant-gardist assumptions of the ICA's founding modernists as much as it did Hogartian cultural studies and the emerging marketeers of a state-backed Britain can make it consumption. What if people's relationship to culture was collagic and contradictory rather than causal? The efforts of public exhibitions such as Britain can make it the festival of Britain and perhaps the quirkiest at home with Bill and Betty attempted to straighten out any such relationship between culture, lifestyle and productive consumption within the demands of a post-war state-sponsored capitalism. The notion of the contemporary, thus deployed in such context, was about to lining a general public with the requirements of post-war reconstruction and the aspirant values of emerging consumer capitalism. Richard Hamilton's scathing response to the Council of Industrial Design and Festival of Britain's form of contemporary design was that it was just a way of keeping out of date with American culture. Such a position suggests that perhaps arguably the most famous collage of the period, just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing, produced by Hamilton with Terry O'Reilly, Magda Cordellan, John McHale was little more than a straight homage to the more advanced consumer culture of America expressing a desire not to be left behind in grey, rationed post-war Britain. However, as significant as the final image informing the collagic relationship to the contemporary was the practice that preceded its creation, the obsessive collecting of the detritus of mass media. Although reveling in the offer of contemporary media, the collagist as collector and archivist of the already fading present does not so much produce a semi-factive capturing of the now, it's not the decisive moment of photography. Rather, there is a dragging of the present. The scrapbook renders the fragments of the once contemporary a part of an expanding archive of the contemporary. Not so much an archive of a particular historic moment, but an exhaustive... Whoops, OK, I've gone ahead a bit. Not so much an archive of a particular historic moment, but of those exhaustive and exhausting attempts to be contemporary, to be in time, such an archival practice, what how Foster called the independent groups pinboard aesthetic, reverses Foster's atherism for archival art of the 2000s, that it turns belatedness into becomingness and rather turns the perpetual becoming of the contemporary into a belatedness, an image bank of failures to lay claim to the present moment. Above, I use the word dragging specifically to invoke Elizabeth Freeman's notion of temporal drag, a queer out of timeliness that allows one to be simultaneously with and not with one's time, or closer still to be part of one's time through an untimeliness, to be queerly with time. Drag here operates differently from nostalgia or historic pastiche. Drag is about retrogression, delay and the pull of the past on the present. Dominic James reprises Jonathan Katz's argument that just what is it is queer in its hyperbolic recreation of Adam and Eve as bodybuilder and pinup. James also drags just what is it by creating a suggestive queer lineage between this pop collage and the scrapbook's obsessive beaten. James specifically understands beaten scrapbook to offer a reorientation of dominant heterosexualized images into queer configurations, the cut and overlap of collage into playing with the not quite alignments of the gaps in the mechanism display. But James also employs the same process of reorientation by collaging beaten next to just what is it to queer the latter with the former. Here I think that Jose Esteban Munoz's notion of disidentification is helpful. Munoz asserts that disidentification is about, quote, recycling and rethinking encoded meaning, but that it is, quote, a step further than cracking up the code of the majority. It proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. Such a disidentified reading I think can also be applied to the image that Hamilton produced with Richard Freeman for the second issue of Living Arts magazine. When I first discovered that Hamilton called this, had laterally called this piece self-portrait, I got a queer thrill. Part pin-up, part football, a part machine, part space age pod, how queer could have self-portrait be. I was somewhat deflated when I learned that it was Hamilton in the footballers drag, perhaps surrounded by his hypermasculine phallic desiderata. However, I think my disidentified reading is closer to the potential of that image. Indeed, how can an image taken by Freeman and styled by Betsi Sherman be a self-portrait? The Hamilton-Freeman-Sherman collaboration offers the collagio-compostani of the contemporary self. That is the desiring subject dispersed in the archive of the now. Emboldened by James Munoz, I think that this image can be disidentified and collaged into an archive of queer untimeliness. In doing so, it allows an easy connection with the work of another debutant of the ICA in the 1950s, Kenneth Anger. Anger was explicitly engaged with Hollywood as a system of representation to be fragmented through consumptive desire on the one hand, and undone through the exaggerated collagic interplay of those fragments into utterly un-Hollywood cinematic work on the other. Anger's occulting of glamour throws into relief the whole normative framework of assumptions that preceded William's cultural equation. What Anger's work centres is a different kind of looking to that of formal criticism or anthropological analysis looking through the framework of disidentificatory desire. In particular, Anger's early shorts, fireworks and puse moment fragment the iconography of Hollywood to resemble scenes of queer relationality. A performance of a fragmented and contradictory identitarian position, and at the same time a disidentificatory framework that remakes the normative idea of fandom that was very much part of British pop-art collage into a queer practice of untimely obsession. Fireworks is a direct queer self-portrait of Anger, featuring, as it does, anger in the lead role in a violent confrontation with Hollywood tropes of masculinity. However, puse is a queries of film as a temporal medium, a fragment of a film project, puse women, that was never to be completed. It appears also as a snippet of a home movie crossed with a screen test existing outside before and after cinema proper. Puse is less an explicit investigation of queerness than itself what Melissa Hardy calls a pliant queer object, an object that she says quote, proliferates rather than thoughts, aligns rather than disturbs, impresses rather than hibits. The pliant queer objects that Melissa Hardy analyses are the unsanctioned book collages made by Kenneth Hallowell and Jo Orton from borrowed books from the Islington Library, started in the same year, the year after collages and objects at the ICA in 1955. Whilst puse made public a private moment of infatuation with the already outmoded glamour of a Hollywood of a different era, Hallowell and Orton's queer objects took the public resource to the library and turned them into a private museum, whilst reveling in the frisson caused by reinserting private acts of collagic play back into public circulation, turning the janitor's cupboard loose. In both puse and the library book collages, queer nisk comes not primarily from the sexual dissidents of their makers, but from their uncertain ephemeral quality, the way they form a parasitic relationship with the main frames of culture. It's also not insignificant that Hallowell and Orton's primary pleasure was in peering through the book stacks to see the shock and pleasure that their collages produced, mirroring, like the furtive glances of puse, the practice of cruising. For Munars, cruising isn't just a sexual practice, but a strategy for producing queer affinities across time and space, a way of knowing outside of the evidential forms of historicisation. Indeed, there is something in the labyrinth for the exhibition displaying the overlaps of collage that invites such films of non-linear looking, the peak around the corner, the backward glance. Such is the case with another pliant queer object produced in post for Britain. The July 1964 edition of Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag, a publication that tipped from Avant Gardis magazine to punk queer scene, is cut up and recolaged into many booklets that can be read like a checkerboard to produce new collagiate texts. Here the reader is invited to peel back the front cover and peer into the glory holes of the publication. This metaphorical cruising reveals a scene of actual cruising with an extract from Small Creep's Day by Peter Currell-Brown, in which the eponymous small creep attempts to have sex with a prostitute in a public toilet only to find an orgy of gay public sex taking place. Correll, who was an ardent anti-nuclear campaigner, confronted the dystopia of nuclear end time with a small-minded small creep who has extracted himself from regulated work time only to find himself in a collage of scenes that confound his sensibilities as a respectable citizen. What Small Creep couldn't handle was the vicissitudes of what in an ICA exhibition in 1963, the organisers, some of whom became better known as ArchiGram, called The Living City. The ICA's most collagic exhibition yet, as Simon Sadler argues, Living City channeled a bodillarian taste for the contingent and ephemeral in opposition to the planned modernist city. Addition 3 of Living Arts magazine operated as a catalogue for the exhibition. However, rather than a straight space of documentation, the magazine issue provided a diverse range of images and media, predominantly collage, to invoke an anti-architectural sensibility. At the centre of this was the Living City survival kit. Simon Sadler directly relates the survival kit to the Hamilton-Freeman-Sherman collaboration, arguing that it was, quote, at some level, the self-portrait of a young man, end quote. Indeed, there is something distinctly heterosexist in Living City's homage to the flanner of the post-war consumer city. I wouldn't want to refute this reading, but I do see in the kit a queerer potential. Again, as with just what is it, there is an ambiguity about the lipstick and the gun, the washing powder and the playboy that allows for an eschewing of a straight reading of the gendered tropes that are invoked. Indeed, not being a collaged image, but more of a curatorial display of objects, it turns an anthropological gaze into a queer way, in a queer way back on the consumptive habits of its living citizens. There is one final way I would disidentify this image, the survival kit, to conclude this collage of post-war contemporary. The most striking thing to me about survival kit is that one object appears three times. John Caltrain's 1962 album, Caltrain. Actually, this should not be surprising. As Jeff Nuttall noted in his book, Bomb Culture, jazz was the ground zero of Western post-war counterculture. But the triplicate also underlines absence and disavowal, the failure in canonical Western history's institutions of modernism to acknowledge the centrality and vital importance of black music and artists to modernist thought and practice. Thinking of this absence and presence, the final queer leap I want to make is to John O'Comfra's collagic portrait of Stuart Hall in the Stuart Hall project, 2013. Paul, who did more than anyone else in post-war Britain, to take on the challenge of rethinking Williams' cultural equation, specifically challenged an idea of fixed cultural identity and assumed cultural value. O'Comfra takes this position and manifests its through the use of collage and montage to produce a pluralistic portrait that defies the traps of categorical capture. Hauntingly, throughout the film, Hall's personal cultural touchstone, the music of Miles Davis, plays, dragging out a different tempo to the frenetic ones of post-war and post-colonial upheaval. Hall, via O'Comfra, inflected through a queer post-war archive of collagic practice, seems to say that collage may not be just an act of consumption or analysis, but a practice of surviving in and despite the regimes of timeliness that were claimed to already know us. Thank you very much. And thank you very much indeed. There's so much in that paper, so I'm sure we'll pull out some of those things when we get to the questions. But what I want to do now is introduce our second speaker, who is Craig Buckley, who is an associate professor of modern and contemporary architecture in the Department of History of Art at Yale University. He's the author most recently of a book called Graphic Assembly, Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s, which was published in 2019 by the University of Minnesota Press. He's published many essays that have appeared in journals such as Grey Room, October, Log and Perspector, among others. And he's the editor of numerous collections, including screen genealogies from optical device to environmental medium, and after the manifesto, writing architecture and media in a new century. And he's currently working on a new book with the title The Street and the Screen, a media archaeology of the architectures of moving image in the 20th century, which sounds wonderful as well. So Craig, where your paper is an architecture of clipping, Raina Bannum and the Redefinition of Collage. And I'll hand over to you and you on the screen. Great. Can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yes. OK. Thank you, Lyn, for that introduction. Thank you to Rosie and Eleanor and Sarah for organising the conference and pulling it together after all of the roadblocks of the last year and of course to Shana for all of her behind the scenes work to make this all move so smoothly. Let me see if I can share my screen here for whatever reason. I don't see my PowerPoint. Hang on a second. OK, share screen. My PowerPoint. It worked earlier. Craig, are you having difficulties sharing screen? Yeah. Perhaps we could have some assistance about Lonnie. Yeah. I have a copy of Craig's PowerPoint. Just give me one moment. Could you put it on? I don't know why my PowerPoint has disappeared from the sharing options. Yeah, absolutely. You should be able to get. There we are. Great. OK, so I'll just say a slide and you can maybe advance it from your end. Great. If you could put up the first slide. Thank you. In 1965, the historian and critic Rainer Bannon published his theory of clip-on architecture in the magazine Design Quarterly. The issue arrived and blazoned with a photo collage of walking city on its cover, a speculative project by Ron Herron of the Arcagram Group for a lumbering space age mobile city capable of roaming the planet. In defining the new term, Bannon looked grasp changes in architectural culture that had arisen in conversation with British pop art since the 1950s. An architecture that he described as bright and mechanistic in spirit, but also a verse to durably fused connections and enamored with kits of interchangeable industrial parts. A theory developed to describe the work of architects like Cedric Price and the members of the Arcagram Group. It would also come to inspire a slightly younger generation, including Sue and Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. If you could put up the next slide, please. There's some examples. The clip in Bannon's clip-on architecture was an industrial fastener of the kinds used to attach industrial cladding systems or to affix the new compact portable engines of the 1960s, such as the outboard motor. In emphasizing such impermanent attachments, clip-on architecture described a different ethos of assembly, summed up by Bannon as quote, an architecture of indeterminate form assembled from expendable components. Today I want to revisit Bannon's term and suggest how it might be interpreted from a different angle. If clipping described indeterminate connections between expendable industrial parts, it had also long been a term used for the cutting out and collecting of printed information. In this double meaning, a different history of collecting paper and a different division of intellectual labour around paperwork I think can be located. This double meaning points to a distinct and not quite recognised historical terrain from which to reassess the central place of collage, the central place that collage has long enjoyed in the counts of post-war British architecture that emerged in the wake of the independent group. Introducing a notion of clipping concerns less a question of style than the procedures involved in making these works, if you can advance to the next slide, please. A logic of clipping, therefore, was distinct from the embrace of materials as found associated with the new brutalism of the Smithsons, Palots and others. But nor can clipping be assimilated to the contextualist idea of the city as a multi-layered historical field advanced by Colin Rowan Fred Ketter's influential volume, Collage City in the 1970s. Next slide, please. You see it there, published in 75 initially. So neither an embrace of raw materiality and informal composition nor a reading of context based on figure ground analysis, clipping marked a reorientation of collage discourse toward the appropriation of information, technologies and concepts that were crucially borrowed from fields adjacent to architecture. The making of scrapbooks and the collection of tear sheets and other printed matter has, as we've already seen wonderfully today, already been recognized as a hobby and practice of visual research essential to collage. Yet from the late 19th century onwards, clipping described something different from a scrapbook and something other than a pastime. It emerged as a major branch of clerical work. Next slide, please. The first clipping bureaus were established in Paris and London in the 1880s and rapidly spread around the world in the later 19th century and early 20th century. Initially a specialized service catering to artists, entertainers and businesses that were eager to track mentions of themselves. Such organizations grew quickly into firms that tracked all kinds of different references across the widest spectrum of newspapers and magazines. Scholars of communications such as Anka T. Heeson and Richard Popp have argued that clipping bureaus treated the exploding domain of newspapers and magazines as a mine whose value could be extracted through rationalized procedures for reading, collecting, categorizing and redistributing printed matter. Next slide, please. Reflector of the greater experimentation of clerical work at the end of the 19th century, clipping bureaus boasted of the extraordinary efficiency of their speed readers, almost invariably young women who entered the white collar labor force in droves at the end of the 19th century. With their eyes trained to scan the equivalent of three novels worth of text every day, the women working in clipping bureaus searched magazines and newspapers for hundreds of memorized names and keywords. Typically the scanner would underline a significant mention and set the marked paper aside for another worker who would cut out the relevant passages and paste them to a card. Yet another worker would file the notices in the extensive file catalogs maintained by the clipping bureaus. For Popp, clipping bureaus laid the foundation for contemporary data mining long before the so-called digital revolution, building a commercial infrastructure for extracting and reselling information from the daily flow of mass mediated communications. Clipping enabled the emergence of such things as mass market research and opinion gathering on a mass scale. Clipping in this sense is a distinct historical technique of cutting and collecting printed paper. As an organized process, clipping reminds one that information is not an inherent property of printed communication. Rather it describes the value being derived from being able to identify and extract elements from a flow of media. Second, the value of clipping rests on a quasi-tailorized and historically gendered division of labor in which the routinized work of scanning, storing, and classifying form the unrecognized basis for acts that's sought to interpret, analyze, and capitalize on information. The question I wanted to ask is, to what extent did collage and postwar British architecture internalize aspects of this more regimented and informational process associated with clipping? And to return to this canonical example already seen once today, it's well known that the muscle men pin-ups, appliances, gadgets, decorations, and commestibles that make up Hamilton's iconic collage were selected on the basis of keywords that were used to scan contemporary advertisements. Oh, there it's back. Hamilton is credited with the collage because he assembled the cutout elements, but it was Terry Hamilton and Magda Cordell who did the clipping, scanning through the magazines that had been brought back to the UK by John McHale. Recognizing the division of labor that echoes the practices of the Clipping Bureau as internal to one of the central works of British pop, I think could reopen questions of agency in a relationship to such a work. Now it might also inscribe that canonical image within a different history, one in which the emphasis on pop iconography might be grasped not only as derived from art historical methodology, but as a practice of seeing informed by the extractive logic characteristic of these early information industries. If Hamilton's famous photo collage made use of the division of labor characteristic of clipping, clipping also operated in complex tension with collage. For often the not, artists and architects were at once in the position of clippers and composers, scanners and reassemblers, routinised workers and consuming clients. John McHale, Hamilton's collaborator at This Is Tomorrow was also an extensive clipper maintaining a very large collection of tear sheets from the period's illustrated press. Next slide please. There they are, that's just a small selection. McHale used these clipping files and many of which are today at the Yale Center for British Art to develop a theory of popular iconography during these years and for a series of collage works. For McHale, like his colleague, Bannum, iconography became something more than the analysis of the meaning of a figure within an established artistic or theological tradition. Next slide please. Iconographic looking came to be informed by the dynamics of scanning, extraction and revaluation characteristic of clipping. In his 1959 article, The Expendable Icon, McHale theorized the icon as an image quote, extracted from the media continuum which was itself continually in flux. It was by being extracted that images of robots, rockets, computers and movie stars enabled some purchase on the continually changing movements of mass culture. Indeed, McHale went so far to argue, so far as to argue that such media icons had taken over the role played by more permanent symbolic constructs from earlier periods, whether they be poems or totems, masks or cathedrals. For McHale, the rapid changes characteristic of a mass mediated society could only be managed via clipping, the cutting and organizing of paper, providing the sense of orientation that quote, enabled humans to locate themselves in and deal with their environment. In McHale's early collages, we see, I think, an intimate relationship between scanning and reading, if we could go to the next slide. Collage, he wrote at the time, has parallels to our actual experience of the image as we turn the pages of a magazine or scan a newspaper. And if you could just click forward through some of these images, this is an early collage book from 55, just to give you a sense of it as a book. It's interesting to see the genre of the collage book in both presentations. McHale constructed these from commercial catalogs, cutting, folding and pasting the pages of a jeweler's catalog he produced a work whose form was partly determined by the user. Turning pages and manipulating flaps were physical acts that produced a continually shifting visual field, creating and destroying bazar collisions that altered the legibility of the underlying words and figures. On the one hand, such pages demanded that the eye operate in scanning mode, searching for familiarity in a field without any compositional stability. Faces sliced into strips are only recognizable based on partial, gap-laden information. If such an exercise inspired acts of optical retraining, the perceptual work they solicited troubled rather than reinforced, I think, automated reading and recognition. That is the sort of key ambivalence of these early collage books. In them I want to suggest the ambivalent importance of practices of clipping and cataloging to collage come to the fore anticipating how collage will come to be reconsidered in architectural discourse in the 1960s. This transformation was linked to another pivotal member of the IG, the South African-born architect and curator Theo Crosby who became technical editor at the magazine Architectural Design in 1953. Next slide, please. Together with Monica Pigeon, Crosby influential remated journal that was an offshoot of the architects standard catalog company, the main materials information service used by British architects to specify parts for construction. Crosby helped to turn the magazine from a specialized trade journal. You see it's covered there on the left from 1951 into a magazine with broader cultural ambition. Collage techniques were crucial to the covers which he designed each month. But even more remarkably, collage emerged as a key metaphor for conceptualizing the changing situation of the architect's intellectual work. Writing on the occasion of the 1961 International Union of Architects Congress in London whose theme was quote, an architecture of technology, Crosby highlighted how the conference's vision of technology implied an architecture assembled from industrial parts in which the architect had little, if any role in designing. In such a situation, assembly could no longer remain a secondary question, a problem of quote, mere building, but had to be understood as a question of design. Writing of the exhibition Pavilion he designed for that year's Congress, he described how the architect was becoming quote, a manipulator of prefabricated parts, his building of collage of bits and pieces. And he shows his inventiveness by taking some parts from technologies that are not his own. Next slide please. Crosby's metaphor highlights a subtle yet important transformation imposed with collage discourse in architectural culture. For Crosby, inventiveness stemmed from repurposing such materials as industrialized space frame systems, typically used for warehouses. You see it there forming the roof structure, together with lightweight polyethylene sheeting and standard rough timber boards, all of which were covered with a super graphic lettering design by Edward Wright. Next slide please. Distinct from the earlier embrace of materials and situations as found developed by the Smithsons and Polotsie, collage concerned here the manipulation of industrially prefabricated elements. Crucial was the ability to collect, manipulate and recombine information gleaned from outside the field of architecture, underscoring collage as a practice that looked to step outside the increasingly systematized and consolidated product information that had been steadily monopolized by his very own employer, AD's publisher, the standard catalog company. Inventiveness crucially lay neither within formal innovation nor with technical ingenuity, but rather in an ability to gather and appropriate knowledge from fields and domains that lay outside architecture's main material repertoire. It was in line with this sense of information technology, information and technology transfer that we might understand the centrality of clipping to an emerging generation of architects in the 1960s. For Bannum's clip on architecture, was to bring, for Bannum clip on architecture was to bring architectural design into line with the most advanced forms of post-war production, a reorientation that meant abandoning architecture's aspiration to permanence in the hopes of working with the accelerated and changeable cycles of design, manufacturer, consumption and obsolescence that characterized advanced post-war industry. He championed a younger generation of architects producing what he called protest magazines, such as Archegramming Clip Kit, if you can go to the next slide please. Created using accessible photo offset lithographic technology, this younger generation made magazines by combining materials from their own clipping files on cardboard sheets to make paste-ups that high street offset printers could then reproduce cheaply alongside supermarket flyers and other printed ephemera. Next slide please. Peter Murray and Jeffrey Smites clip kit was not a bound magazine at all, but an open-ended clipping file, a monthly collection of offset printed sheets that compiled information on new technologies, materials and projects gathered from a wide range of sources. Subscribers received the packets of unbound sheets in the mail and were to organize them together using their own clipping files by means of an extruded plastic binding. Next slide please. You see it there on the right. A new device designed to manage the paper flow in post-war offices and factories. Bannum glossed the title of Murray and Smites magazine for an older generation. Kit are usually ideas, images, forms, documents and concepts rated from other disciplines and clip is how you put them together to make intellectual or physical structures. His concern hinges notably less on the qualities of physical joints and connectors than on the processes of displacement and transposition, how the intellectual assets of other fields might be appropriated and recombined for architectural purposes. In his description, an important slippage occurs. A term for the routinized industrial cutting of mass printed paper is here recast as a mode of experimental reattachment and recombination. Architectural agencies envision not as the masterful imposition of shape on raw materials nor as the perfecting of elements that could become new industrial standards. Rather it was the capacity to act on the flow of information extracted by extracting and reassembling relationships among its short-lived elements. If the composite material sensibility associated with collage became a metaphor for this new type of intellectual work, less well-recognized was its debt to the domain of the clipping bureau. If Bannum's theory of clip on architecture offered a different idea of architectural agency in the 1960s, it elided the hierarchical division of labor that had been crucial to information gathering and management since the 19th century. Such a disappearance was a key to the changing meaning of clipping, aligning the term with creative technological recombination but aligning the routinized work of information scanning that this entailed. For this very reason, recovering clippings ignored history might enable this enduring period concept to be read from a different angle. Thank you. Craig, that was great. Thank you so much. And I wonder if Ben, you would like to join Craig and I for some questions. Craig, can we? Thank you both very much. I've been told by the organisers that we started a bit late and we're running a bit late, but we can have a good time, 15 minutes for questions. So that we can begin to tease out some of the ideas. I think the papers go together and also kind of contrast really interestingly because what they seem to suggest together is the way that Collage can kind of, Ben, I really like the idea of Collage disturbing state-sponsored forms of cultural consumption and economic consumption. That idea of post-war Britain is very linear. And yet, Craig, with your paper, we're getting the idea of a different kind of history that comes out of the imposition of a kind of structure and of Taylorism and of office work. So I think that those two, you begin to see what a kind of rich medium and technique this is. But I just wanted to just take the sort of chairs prerogative and ask you both to perhaps say a little bit more about two phrases that one each that you used, which were a little bit throwaway and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about. So it's about looking, really. Ben, you used the phrase non-linear looking, which became part of a sort of spatiality of the backwards glance and the peak around the corner. So I was sort of wondering if you could say more about that. And Craig, you then talked about a practice of seeing. And that, again, was drawn from this rather interesting different history of clipping. And both of them seem to me to imply a kind of mobility of the eye. And if you can, I wonder, Ben, perhaps first, and then Craig, if you could just say a little bit more about those rather sort of tantalising phrases that you used. As Evelyn, attendant to the things that have not been fully unpacked, thank you. I mean, I just have to say that listening to Craig's so interesting and it is really useful for me. I was skewing things, I guess, towards the idea of collagio, something that could produce kind of non-normative ways of thinking and looking. But I really wanted to counteract that, in a way, by saying that there's nothing, I think, inherent within the collagio or within that fragmentation, which is subversive. It is part of a dominant order. And I think Craig thinking there about the way in which we understand this as information, I think, is really, really important. And it made me think across that. And this is in relation to what you're picking up on, Lynn, that a lot of this is about a very sort of the developing of an attention, a tension economy, and thinking about what is it, how are we being asked to direct our attention? And I guess that's sort of what I mean. Obviously, I'm using the word linear because I'm trying to kind of evoke the idea of straightening and its kind of various meanings. And absolutely collage and the curatorial together as dominant kind of media devices are not inherently not necessarily producing a queer forms of looking at at all. And I think if we think about exhibition paths as a kind of way of literally suggesting to people the way they should go and how their attention should be directed, this is all part of that. So what's particularly interesting to me, I guess, are those engagements with the very same devices and their possibilities. But to produce a, I guess, a kind of what we might say, a sort of dissident form of looking. So looking otherwise and the possibility, I always think of that you can walk an exhibition backwards. You can flick a magazine the wrong way. You can fold something and do something else. This is where one in a very humble way can start to kind of trouble those things that are purposefully trying to direct our attention to reorder it another way. And that's where I would say the kind of non that's what I sort of mean by by the non linear there. Thank you, Craig. Terrific. Yeah, I really appreciate the juxtaposition of the two papers. I think it's absolutely unexpected in the best possible way. And just to say a little bit more about the practice of seeing, I think one of the one of the things I was trying to draw out is just this shift in the meaning of iconography within this milieu of the independent group at the end of the 1950s. On the one hand, you have figures like Bannum, who is picking up that term through his own art historical training, circulating it through the IG. You have Mikael's encounter with, you know, art history, but also the legacy of the Bauhaus at Yale in the 1950s. And to think about that in relationship to a different practice of seeing, which is that of the sort of the scanner, the professional scanner, whose eye really cannot linger, but is trained to recognise, sort of memorize terms or certain terms that have already been pre-established, you know, as part of the wage labor system under pretty important pressures. And to think about how those two almost antithetical practices somehow are brought together in the 1950s around this notion of the icon, which Mikael develops in these articles published in architectural design at the end of the 1950s. And I think in some ways the legacy of clipping is not always directly linked, although I think the clipping files that so many of these artists are themselves incredibly rich, if hard to interpret archives, that can be revisited through a different lens if we think about them in relationship to more systematised practices of, let's say, information management and the effort to extract value from information. I think that there's something about the collision of those two very different ways, very different practices of seeing in the late 1950s that's intriguing. I think when finds it, particularly in Mikael's work. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think I mean, I'm not quite sure how they would work together, but I think it would be really interesting to explore this more. And it seems to me that they've both shift looking towards a kind of spatiality and to, you know, kind of collage as well in clipping as spatial and as sort of multidimensional. So, yeah, as I said, I can't quite sort of work it through, but it's. I mean, I would also just add that they are both focused on an imminent idea of archive and the idea that the archive becomes not just a kind of historic space, but becomes a kind of constantly updated and interacted with mechanism. And it's interesting to note that the clippings agencies were obviously being used a lot by places like the ICA, places that were non-musiological, who had to track their value in a very, very different way from that of the collection. So they're having to track it through the archive of the clippings. I guess a lot like architecture of practices would, too, to be able to kind of record and locate their value. But then, of course, that becomes another material that could be utilised. Anyway, yeah, that's. We've got a couple of questions. One from Jasmine, which, yeah, this is really for Craig. Do you think that clipping still affects us today via the internet? Yeah, I would say so. I would venture to say that the materiality of clipping today is obviously very, very different. But the idea that there is a type of value to be generated through a systematic surveillance of continually changing ephemeral mass media is at the basis of the internet today. While we don't have clipping bureaus operating the same way, they still do today. They're called media monitoring services. That idea of just continually monitoring the output of newspapers, magazines and, of course, webpages, blogs, what have you is the very basis of the economy of the internet in some respects, though I would say it's probably would have to be thought through the lens of advertising today more than through, let's say, the clipping bureaus of the 19th and 20th century. I think that is that is absolutely crucial to think about. I think you refer to data mining. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's also a question about archives, really. Are there specific archives? This is from Abby of the works mentioned. So you've been using different images and where are those archives? Are there specific archives that you've been using? Is that for me or for Ben? No, I think it's for both of you, actually. Ben, do you want to go for it? OK, that's perhaps. Well, mine is quite simple. Terms of a lot of the ICA references. I have worked closely with the ICA archive that's held at Tate, held at the Tate, Tate Britain. But and there was a list at the end of my presentation, I did a kind of full image credit list, which I was mindful of you weren't getting as I was going. But I thought if there was one place I could play a little bit with not the kind of formal requirements of attribution, it would be in a discussion of collage. And I think that is important. You know, I mean, it's very easy to put those kind of things together now because of the internet, but I'm doing exactly. I guess, you know, taking what's available, what you can easily search for as those, you know, as the principle as the principle of collage and you do it with a irresponsibility as well. You do it with an irresponsibility to the original source material in the context. And it's sort of why I had hovering there the question around colonial extraction because I think that with that removal of context and the removal, perhaps of the scene of the archive as a place of legislation, you offer up a series of kind of perhaps quite playful opportunities, but there may be also a danger in that in removing attributation and removing a sense of where things are from and do we really know? And that and some of the works and artists that we've alluded to have fallen, you know, foul of that criticism of being too free and loose with their source material without thinking about actually where's this from and what's the politics of that? Sorry, it's a slightly complicated answer. But yes, the short one is the ICA archive at Tate. Right. OK. More things we could say. Craig, you mentioned the McHale archive at Yale, didn't you? Yeah, there's a group of clippings files that were donated to the Centre for British Art by Magda Cordell McHale, I think in the 80s or 90s. And that's a rich archive of hundreds of care sheets that McHale and Cordell McHale collected. And it would be very interesting to know more about what that relationship was, in fact, around the collecting of that material. And the other archives that I've used are the Archegram groups archives, which were private until very recently and are now going to Hong Kong, but are largely available online, at least a lot of the. A lot of the drawings and photographs are available online. But I think what's really interesting and a challenge, particularly when you're dealing with clippings, is that they're often not really that visible within the archive. They tend to be sort of tucked away in one file. And so and certainly with a lot of the online availability of archives, that's the last material that's going to get going to get digitized. So I think it's a complex question about how one thinks through the status of this material within, let's say, the larger composition of an artist or architect's archive, which pretend to privilege their their authorial documents rather than the things that they collected. OK, well, I've got two more questions. We haven't got much time left, and I think what I'll do is just that they're mostly for for Ben and Ben, if you could just sort of perhaps, you know, do fairly brief responses because we've only got, you know, a few minutes. So the first question is about the work on anger. This is from Anna Sharples. Did you find interesting any intersections between your thoughts on collage and on the occult? A lot of the material culture of post war occultism seems oriented towards both collage and the archive. So I suppose that's just a question around how the occult comes into some of the material you've been looking at. And the second question is, could you, Ben, talk a little bit more about how Craig's recovery of the clipping bureau's modes of visual scanning might be applied to some of the practices that you've been looking at? I suppose we could do it the other way around too, but we haven't got time. So, so, Ben, as I say, just a brief kind of thoughts and then we'll have to draw this to a close. We might we might be able to come back to it in the final panel. My very OK, so occult. I was interested to bring in anger for that very reason and that very idea of kind of the occulting. I'd be honest, I haven't thought about it enough and and was it Gemma who posed that question? I think you probably wouldn't know more about it than than than me. I am what I would say is that if. If we think about that, there's a kind of occulting as well, a kind of weird quality of sort of magic around collaging that burrows is also kind of engaged with this idea that you can put things together and read across them something which isn't quite there. So there is something kind of and and actually I was thinking about David's introductory presentation yesterday. We were talking about more the more and there is something about ghosts here and it should be noted that a lot of the collages have been made out of things that are not just immediate contemporary but Victorian or and all sorts of stuff. And there's definitely this kind of idea of playing with playing with ghosts on the clippings thing. I'd have to think about it and I think I think what Craig's point to do is something that I completely really neglected because of what I was looking at, but I think is so important, which is about labour and about work and about what labour and work is valued. And that point that Craig just made about the difficulty of finding clippings in a way of difficulty of finding source material and archives because it's not necessarily prioritised in terms of what we understand to be original work, I think is another way of also saying that we find it hard to value perhaps what we might call kind of information work, which is this kind of this this work of trawling and looking and that is looking as a practice becomes a kind of very interesting but much greatly under explore question. You know, and what do we do with that today? You know, when attention economy, Instagram as work, you know, the practice of what sort of labour is that? And I think that throws up a really interesting question. That would be my yeah. That's great. Thank you. I think all I can say is thank you both again so much for these really interesting papers. We might be I think we can come back to some of these. I don't think we've sort of I think we've just touched the surface of these questions and we can come back to at the end of the second panel. We're going to take a five minute break now till one fifteen and so just a comfort break and then we'll start with the second panel. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, speakers, and thank you for your questions. Hello, everyone. Thank you for taking the speediest of comfort breaks and we are going to carry on with the second panel to make sure we can hear the papers and fit in as much discussion as we can as we saw in that first panel. So many ideas have been generated and we want to make sure that we give them space and that we can have some dialogue between all the panellists, too. So I am going to hand over to our next chair for this session. And that is Dawn Addis, who is Professor Emeritus of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex and also Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy. You can find Dawn's full biography on the events page for this website. But many of you will be very familiar with her work. We're having a bit of feedback issues there. Hopefully that sorted out now on Dada and Surrealism and also publications on photo montage. And those ideas are particularly opposite for this session today. So Dawn, I'll hand over to you to chair this next session. Thank you very much, Sarah. And it's been a very exciting process so far. I've learned a great deal about collage. I mean, both wonderful, detailed presentations with a lot of new research and also an extension of the very idea of collage. I mean, yesterday Elizabeth Price was talking about her film and she was asked about whether she was interested in the Gothic style. And she said she was, but she would never sort of use a Gothic style. What she would like to see was an art history lecture as Gothic. So I quite like that idea of a new sort of juxtaposition. But I will stop there. I just want to say that I think Surrealism has been a kind of ghost haunting this this conference so far. And I expect we shall be looking more closely at that question. So I'm now with great pleasure going to introduce my two panellists, the two speakers, Nicole Simpson first. Nicole is a curator and researcher at Norwich University of the Arts. And her research interests are focused on the performative and experiential influence of Zen and Tantric Buddhism's on transnational and transhistorical countercultural art and writing. She is editor of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter, The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Wydar. That was in the Occasional Papers 2012 and co-editor of Dom Sylvester Wydar published by Ridinghouse in 2017. She also organized the exhibition at the Listen Gallery in 2020, which originally should have coincided with this conference and we would have had the opportunity of actually seeing the Tantric Poetry by Wydar at the same time. But never mind. We will now be shown images of them in her talk. And our second speaker is Andrew Hodgson. I'll go straight on and they will then speak back to back. Andrew is author of the monograph post war experimental novel British and French fiction 1945 to 75, published by Bloomsbury in 2019. Novelesque nomic symbols, Manchester Dostoevsky, one of the 2019. And editor of the experimental writing collections, Paris. And he's currently researching and writing a book length study of surrealism and the novel. He teaches in French and culture studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. So, Nicole, could we, Nicola, could we start with your presentation? Yes, of course. Thank you very much, Dawn. Thank you for inviting me here today to give this paper and, as Dawn mentioned, when I was originally invited to give the paper back in March 2020, it did feel very serendipitous to me that the show I'd curated for the Listen Gallery, Dom Sylvester, Wydar Tantric Poetry's, would have just opened a couple of weeks before and that I could encourage the attendees of this take conference perhaps to go along and participate in the environment poem installed there. Tantra, whether Hindu or Buddhist, is an experiential transmission and it did seem fortuitous at the time that there might be this possibility of actively engaging with the work in the exhibition, which was really, most of the work there was unseen for almost 50 years and especially unknown are the collage poems I'm going to talk about today. So, as a replacement to seeing the work in situ as originally planned, all the images I will show now come from that exhibition, Tantric Poetry's, under with the kind permission of the Listen Gallery. And I hope that these images do communicate to you some of the colour, tactility and kinetic energy of these poem objects. So, Dom Sylvester, Wydar, I'm assuming perhaps not many people know him, so I'll just do a little introduction. Dom Sylvester, or DSH, as he was known, was a Benedictine monk, artist and poet from Prynysh Abbey, best known for the concrete poems or type strax that he made on his Olivetti Lecture 22 typewriter in the 1960s and 70s. Wydar, with his early contacts with the Tibetan Lamas, Chogyam Tronpa Rinpoche and Akon Talka Rinpoche, his autodidaptic study of the first Western comatries to the practice of Tantra or Vajrayana Buddhism, as it is known, and his initiation into the path by the Dalalama was instrumental in acting as a conduit for the transplantation and transmission of this doctrine to the transnational avant-garde artists and poets of the 1960s. Wydar had been interested in the eastern contemplative traditions and Tibetan music since a small child, and his studies of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism was run parallel with his Catholic theological journey. He saw his Christianity in any practice of Tantric Buddhism as dovetailing into the mystic's journey to knowing his own heart. In one of his first published essays, Heathen Holiness, he outlined what he understood by the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist practices. Tibetan mysticism aims at liberation from all that is unreal. It seeks attainment of a blissful knowledge of ultimate reality. The aids used in Tibet are based on the Tantra, net, web, wovenness between the inner and outer worlds, forces and their events, consciousness and its objects, all form a single weave. The Tantrism is the discovery or establishment of inner relationships between the matter and the spirit worlds, between ritual and reality, between mind and the universe, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Tantra is not unique in asserting this position of ultimate truth that it is understood in Buddhist traditions. What characterises Tantra is the methods used to experience this truth that in the experience of non-duality, there is no distinction between the mind in here and the world out there. Waydad in his essays continues. Mudra, Mantra and Yantra are translations of the inner experience into movement, speech and pattern. They link inner and outer reality. They perfect the correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm. In this essay, written before he made any type strokes or any of the prime objects, Waydad established his understanding of the performative reality of Tantra. I am interested in his understanding of these Buddhist contemplative method practices and how they were incorporated into an increasingly performative artistic practice that engaged directly with Tibetan Vajrayana ritual. Clare Cates Waydad is one of the very first Western Tantric artists, if not the very first British artist, to acknowledge that his work may be understood as Yantra, Mantra, Mandala and Mudra and as such function as an intentional Tantric language that asks questions about reality. Waydad termed the collage points I'm showing you, Cosmic Dosparins or Laminatparins and which in their very different compositional nature of the type-stracts allowed him to engage in the relationship between matter and spirit with the intentionality of pasting together forces, events, consciousness and objects that weath together his outer and inner realities of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. This method of working developed in around 1966 and continued alongside his almost daily ritual of composing type-stracts. Small found objects, cut-up prose and cut-up pictures were pasted onto clear or bright technical sheets or transparent plaster. They are very visually different from the precision and the permutational variations of the type-stracts and the Yantric patterns made on his typewriter. Of these laminat poems I suggest also engage with Tantric practises of transforming the mind and the objects which appear to mind. Through stochastic and kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of forms often found in his immediate environment his methodology consisted of covering one piece of coloured plastic in glue, jam, spit or other bodily fluids and act as an adhesive before layering the visible objects of cut-up letters, words, images and the found. But also invisible objects such as the vibrations left behind from mantra recitation, the gestures and mudras of hands of prayer, the sounds of footsteps retreating down the corridor outside his monastic cell at Prynysh Abbey. Then another piece of plastic was placed on top. In a wonderfully vivid description of these laminat poems in the exhibition The Waydard visual poachers at the Victorian Albert Museum exhibition from 1971, the critic Guy Breve described these cosmic patches as follows. They are concerned with matter in a way the diagram poems cannot be, but matter is signed. Again on equal terms with words they keep the form of pages, transparent, flexible pages, sandwiching the stuff of the poem like microscope slides. The words and sounds are found, cut from the great surplus store of newspapers. The overlaid colours of the plastic may suggest warmth, a cold, storm, calm night or day. Words mingled with modest substances like powder, spit, jam, wire, pills or dust, which could be found in any room, influence one another to become carriers of meaning. By creatively reimagining the monk, one of his many tricks to London, dressed in his signature blackberry and black polaroid glasses and mingling with the far-out and intoxicated crowds in a typical evening at the counterculture club UFO, we can get a sense of the cultural influences of these microscopic slides. But here he encountered the light projections of the colourful liquids and bodily fluids of the artist's marked boil and Joan Hill. Their microscope projections of sperm and blood and vomit filling the whole space alongside the music of soft machine or the pink Floyd and the improvised belly of the exploding galaxy. In fact, many of the laminate poems are portraits of the countercultural figures he met there at the UFO club and at similar psychedelic events at the roundhouse. This one here is actually made for John Hopkins, one of the best-known figures of swinging London and his girlfriend, Susie Crenches. But he also made these kind of portrait collages for other members of the exploding galaxy in countercultural figures such as Edward Pope and here he is, actually Richard Sulton's show in 2017 with the collage portrait that Wadad made for him called Ant. Wadad was a well-known figure at all these countercultural habitnings and although he never exchanged his monastic cell at Prinish Abbey for a room at 99 Balls Pond Road, the anarchic hippie commune of the galaxy, he did certainly spend time there and counted himself as a member, as David Madala recalled, Dom Sylvester often slept at the exploding galaxy when he couldn't get back to Gloucestershire usually after midnight around two or three a.m. The people who were performing as musicians would usually pass by my place to relax. It was an amazing group of people. You would sometimes have Ravi Shankar, Jimmy Hendrix, soft machine, incredible string band. The galaxy, especially in their reuse of waste and found objects, scrunch, where a defining influence in Wadad's move away from the typewriter. One member, an early member of the galaxy remembers the dematerialist philosophy of the commune and their repurposing of found objects into the necessary requirements for a simple living space and art practice. The Dalston House epitomised their actively dematerialist philosophy. Partly out of necessity, but mostly out of principle, they recycled and re-adapted just about everything. They took consumer commercial waste, which they call scrudge, and made personal clothing and decoration with it, as well as serious playful temporary and less temporary artworks. What brought them together? That that within their own world they could eliminate materialism almost entirely. This behaviour from a Catholic ordained Benedictine monk is inhibition and participation in the excesses of a counter-cultural art scene is transgressive, dematerialist, deconstructive and tantric in a manner that recalls the behaviour of historical Vadriana practitioners, such as Frupa Kulley, and later Choghrym Parimpashe himself, with his unconventional behaviour and delivery of the crazy wisdom teachings to the American avant-garde. Wadad had a powerful but an orthodox way of engaging with Buddhist doctrines. These works here are part of an embodied tantric practice where all text, all objects, Christmas cracker toys, talcum powder petals, all actions, however seemingly transgressive for an ordained Catholic monk, sex, eating, dancing and taking drugs, and all bodily fluids, spits, blood, mucus and semen, are methods for spiritual transformation and transmission. They function as observations of the microcosmic, not just in that they are tantricly weaving together tiny particles of substances such as talcum powder, semen and dust, but also an invisible world that remains very deliberately invisible. Inner forces and energies of the tantric practitioner are manifest and collage, as is the invisible subatomic world of matter and quantum physics to become carriers of a spiritual meaning within Wadad's eastern counter space, informed by the Pressing Zika School of Magymaqa Buddhism and its distinct philosophical and hermeneutic approach to the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths. In the first exhibition of these works at the listen in 1967, Wadad curated them playfully alongside some particles of antimatter from Gloucestershire. There are particles of antimatter glued down alongside images of ritual objects and the vibrations made by mantra recitation, the sun nocturnal martens of Benedictine ritual and the call of birdsong from the Pranish Abbey Gardens. There is a constant play between the mind and the universe, between the interdependent relationship between all phenomena and how these phenomena are momentarily created and destroyed by mind. The tantry uses methods to create and essentially destroy an ordinary appearance that sees objects as inherently existing outside the mind. This series of work engaging with the world beyond that of ordinary appearance could be said to exemplify what Sean Miller has described us, the imaginative encounter between Buddhism and quantum theory. Miller describes the rhetorical strategy of parallelism and the imaginative parataxis required in this juxtaposition of ideas from two distinct epistemological domains. These strategies are certainly helpful and useful in reconsidering Wadad's engagement with the subatomic world. As Miller suggests, quantum theory has an inaccessibility as an abstraction that invites imaginative appropriation. He continues, quantum theory promises a corollary to Buddhism pregnant with possibilities in large part due to the suggestiveness of juxtaposing to imaginary interior spaces, the internal world of the mind within Buddhism and the microcosm imagined as a world internal to the universe itself. It is this possible corollary between Buddhism and science and the imaginative parataxis that can juxtapose the creation and annihilation of objects within the epistemological frameworks of Tibetan Buddhism, the ritual practice of the Mandala in particular and in the discourse of quantum theory that can be useful in understanding the performative strategies and the imaginary interior spaces created by these cosmic patches and Wadad's intention to exhibit them alongside particles of antimatter. Wadad's interest in using invisible matter and or the inclusion of a cut-up visible vocabulary explores collage as trans-historical and transnational tantric Buddhist methodology that imputes and then dissolves the existence and meaning of form. Each cosmic dust poem is about the auto-destruction of the cataphatic cosmos an apaphotic claim of not this and not this but what Wadad called the non-non, the non-conceptual experience of God or the emptiness at the heart of the contemplative experience. It is termed non-non because although there is negation or a no-thingness there is still non-conceptual experience. The laminate poems demonstrate the infinite interrelationships between all phenomena across all time and space and how these relationships are created and destroyed by mind. The cut-up text in these works often act themselves as semantic keys to these processes and purpose. Here on this work, for example, are the words on the enclosed leaf are petitioned to time before the no act of undoing. Another example here, me, not, not, not, not. To conclude today, I want to return briefly to the Don Sylvester where Dad Tantric Poetry's exhibition was created at the Sun in 2020. In the gallery space where I exhibited the laminate poems, the focus was on this very trans-historical interpenetration of all forms, the interdependence of and dance between all objects inside the gallery space and all objects outside the gallery. Initially those changing forms seen through the gallery window, the cause of the primary aged children tumbling through the local school gates, the spring trees emerging into leaf on the pavements outside, the intermittent traffic on Bell Street, and the grey march London skies beyond, and then beyond and beyond to all phenomena. In hanging together the laminate poems like an assemblage of hallucinogenic prayer flags in the impermanent environment of the exhibition, this gallery space became a transient mandala where the viewer temporarily encounters an installation that activates the microcosmic and the microcosmic beyond the world of ordinary appearance. To activate this mandala, I felt it was important that these laminate poems were exhibited alongside some extracts from the mantra Drim Ho Ho Pe, just as Wadad had intended in his 1967 exhibition. In this contemporary exhibition, the mantra was printed in the exhibition guide, enabling the viewer to recite it out loud or silently in their head as they participated in this environment poem. This was an instruction to bring the visual, the oral and the kinetic together in one environment poem that again replaced the viewer consciously into the central experience of spiritual transmission. Here all phenomena are born and return, the microcosm of the scene gallery space, the attendees, the invigilators, art works, floorboards, walls, windows, and the microcosm of the unseen vibrations of spoken word and breath, the impermanent thoughts and emotions of the person's present, and the further hidden collisions, appearances and disappearances of the subatomic quantum world. Okay, thank you. Yes, thank you very much indeed for that, Nicola. It was a fascinating presentation and there will be questions, but I wonder if we can go straight on to Andrew now, because we are rather short of time. So Andrew, are you there? Hello, I should be here. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. All right, I'm going to try and share screen this one. Okay, so, right. Hello, good afternoon. I'd like to begin by thanking the organisers for having me here to speak about transform action in Syrileism in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s. Apologies in advance for the very rough archive photos I've used for examples here. Well, a central figure of what I'll talk about today is the bookseller John Lyle, who despite the various denunciations and conflicts with other British figures, especially Conor and Maddox in particular, or perhaps indeed also due to those conflicts, appears a linchpin in the continuation of Syrileism in the geographical space of Britain from specifically 1967 to 1979 to the organisation curation, writing and printing of the sort of scrapbook or Zinesc journal, Transform Action, and his DIY publishing house, which continue to bring the text of Syrileism and Dada into Britain and into English in somewhat a regular fashion over those years. I've been asked before why I keep... I've been asked before why I keep banging on the bookseller in Exeter and a fairly obscure zine published in Sidmouth half a century ago. However, I find the sociocultural effects of Lyle, the bookseller publisher, translator, writer, and indeed collagist, has been somewhat understated. Lyle represents a weird sort of intersection in the avant-garde of the post-war era. Transform Action began life as transformation and was printed during the Expansive Syrileist Art Fair festival he organised next to Festival of Modern Art between 24th April and 20th May 1967. The festival itself was a sort of re-esthetisisation, re-esthetisising collage, rather. There was an exhibition titled The Enchanted Domain with Painting and Sculpture by Ernst Miro, Picasso, Maglith, Dali, Clith, Tangy, et al. Films built by Bunwell and Bostick Keaton and others were shown. Lectures were given by Ron Penrose, George Melly and others. The first edition of the publication, Transformation, was put together over the course of five days. Stefan Femerson was a participant. He, along with other experimental novelists, include B. S. Johnson and Alan Burns, referred to in documentation for the festival as the Young British Surrealists. A draft section of Burns' novel America is included in the issue, and he continued to participate in the subsequent numbers. Also included are Anthony N showing in Breakwell and his diary project. In the movement whose play, The Labyrinth, was performed and whose Viva la Muerte is also exerted in Transformation. Also present at the festival was the Psychiatric Doctor R. D. Lang of LSD Experiment of Fame who, similar to Jean de Buffet in France, curated an exhibition of degenerate artworks by psychiatric patients titled Psychopathology in Art. Later inclusions in Transformation include new writers from across Europe and America including elsewhere and published work by the US writer Ted Jones on what he calls Black Surrealism in 1970s America. This draws the projects of the festival, Transformation, the tenets of Surrealism itself into a space we might not normally critically equate it to out of those into war years of its sort of regarded heyday and into new aesthetic and historical context, firmly into the post-Sochema war era and the attendant new aesthetic experimentations in art and literature of that era. Provides space for. So the first issue, that first issue of Transformation, then Transformation also includes work by ELT Messens who co-edited the first four issues in Jacques Brunius who had come to Britain in the 1930s and the attention of guiding the formation of a Surrealist movement there. Both Messens and Brunius took a role in putting together the extra festival that according to Lyle Brunius received Andre Breton's ascent before his death in 1966 for continuing a sort of sovereign strain of Surrealism in Britain. And that continuity Surrealism we might say began with the festival in 1967. Unfortunately it was actually at the festival that Brunius himself died as recounted in Transformation 2 in 1968. For Jacques Brunius it was a new beginning of exhausted and isolated by anxiety and illness though he was he devoted his attention to stimulating the Surrealist activity in the belief that Britain at last would now be able to assemble the group who would understand the Surrealist objectives and who would own nothing to rank capital god or ancestors. He arrived in Exeter happier than he had been for many months ready for the opening of the festival the following day at dinner surrounded by the friends for whom he had been isolated from whom he was full of wit and optimism. The following morning as he was preparing to leave to put the finishing touches to the exhibition he felt tired, lay on his bed and died. Black with irony the festival which proved to be his last work began, succeeded and led as he had hoped it would to the beginnings of a Surrealist group. So after failing to form a cogent movement in Britain in the 1930s and announcing a discontinuation of that effort in 1947 due to the claimed inherent Surrealism within British society character that prevented the formation of coherent groupings 20 years later the iron here is perceived to be ready to be struck. As documentation for the festival in the first issue of transformation transformation reads these figures of different groups and generations brought together here perceived there was it was once again the time to seek open conflict with closed rationalism which was bringing about the death of the word without wasting any more time Surrealism now. Which brings which draws this intersectional figure of Lyle into a before alongside Messins and Brunius and Conor and Maddox, Itel Coelcun and Leonora Carrington and these figures are stated as contributors to transformation or perhaps coopted rather and Roland Penrose continues to contribute through other life of the journal. Transformation takes on a sort of pastiche quality in the sense of mixing new writing and artwork by an array of figures alongside old work, letters and unpublished tracts all in barely legible mimeographed print including handwriting. They do not present as anything aesthetically similar to the polished and somewhat sober artefacts of pre-war Surrealist revolutionists such but rather a curated space of myriad strains of Surrealism across spatial temporal bounds or limits. Drawing plethora of Surrealist writings into the historical context of their publication May 68 attacks on the British Film Institute and the Arts Council referred with disgust as the Neo Subsidar, Enoch Powell and Rivers of Blood as artefacts they take on the sense of perpetually reinventing re-estheticising Surrealism for their native moment of production communication and reception of meaning. The handwriting, typewriter print, scrolls and scribbles, reproductions of newspaper copy, drawings and photographs give off this sort of frisson or movement on the page as they barely coalesce together leaving a halo of static or noise around where they have been cut and pasted to be made camera ready for the cheap lithograph printing or ran through the ditto machine and stapled together. Transformation is the product essentially of cheap access to office supplies. It is for this frenetic sort of quality I have for entirely ahistorical reasons called this paper Xeroxing Surrealism although the process is perhaps also similar to building Christmas lists from the Argos catalogue back in the 90s if you were a child of them. Lars essay on what he saw as pressing essays on what he saw as pressing issues at the time of publication of each of the ten issues of transformation are jumbled together with quotes, aphorisms, poems, scribbles and artwork that he presents as pertinent to networking these social concerns into the culture of Surrealist thought and aesthetic. This was a process of cutting pasting, copying, stenciling, typing and mending that is more in common with late 20th century zin culture that flourished with the advent of the Xerox photocopia and had a similar degraded noisy chaotic sort of character but itself becomes a sort of framework for reading and viewing of what that zin or this publication here presents. This idea of later realignment or re-estheticisations of earlier Surrealist work was not singular to transformation. The Chicago Surrealist group similarly performed this practice for example in a 1998 edition of the journal Race Traitor Franklin Rosemont redeployed the long dead French Surrealist writer René Claver's work from the early 1930s to declare a Surrealist revolution against whiteness in America. Emerging in 1957, a further late Surrealist group the Tendons Populat Surrealiste in France led by Mérédel Dorf, Maurice Vaughan and despite his death in 1967, René Magrits editorial direction and material input for their publications continued into the 1970s. When speaking of collaging Surrealism transformation therefore was not alone and these groups were not isolated the Tendons Populat Surrealist sent their roughly mimeographed parcels sort of publications to Lyle in sincere homage throughout the 1970s. The more anarchist aligned Rosemonts alongside Maddox and others signed their names to Nose Realism in 1971 what the Met Museum in New York describes as a diatribe against the English book seller John Lyle. In that diatribe they denounced transformation in the following words I quote Lyle's menu offers only a leftover stew of insufferable nostalgia, self-satisfied slogans vain glories, posturing, pompous rhetoric and a theoretical incoherence of staggering proportions. Now it's exactly the stew like quality to transformation and indeed these other late Surrealist publications that draws my interest while featuring new writing in art transformation was also frequently jigsaws in much older writing by older figures like Philippe Supo and Louis Coutenaire. It also does so with dead figures like Breton, Jacques Brunieus, Ealtime Essence and indeed René Magrits alongside Andrew Marvell and Alfred Jerry all of whom whether aware or not or able to be aware or not are referred to as actively offering their contributions to the publication. This is a very different form of making new to the claims and practices of earlier avant-garde groups and figures it presents both a sense of continuation and departure while the pre-war movement at times displayed a fairly fashionable strain of Marxist political engagement for example with the countercolonial exhibition in 1931 its tendency in this sense was to performance and display to an aesthetic violence that is mirrored in its shallow rhetoric is the famous equation of Surrealism in the second manifesto in 1930 to going down into the street with a revolver and shooting passes by random suggests and yet the Jean-Paul Satt states in 1947 the sheer total violence of the Second World War itself killed the poetic political experiments of Surrealism in his words Surrealism was a pretty candy too quickly sucked and it was in this is in response to the 1947 exhibition where the British group itself disbanded Breton himself in preface to reprint to the reprint of the second manifesto in 1947 begs the reader to appreciate his hasty remarks for what they were in the context and by 1953 he himself writes of Surrealism in the past tense so as referenced in the shifting pastiche aesthetic of transformation the reader is presented with a potentiality by which Surrealism might continue beyond this historical aesthetic death and that is in the pursuit of a Surrealist social aesthetic the passes by in the street are no longer there to be performatively shocked but engaged with, convinced I quote the starving will not be fed by our postures of violent revolution but by our refusal to exploit them the blacks in the USA are not helped by the comfortable dwellers in Hampstead piously shouting slogans and provoking policemen this belittles their suffering which is of a kind we can't fully comprehend whatever we claim there will be helped only when we men and women liberate ourselves from superstition and from greed muttering time one revolutionary mantas quoting heroes boasting of our enlightened sympathies repeatedly and publicly registering ourselves on the side of the angels striking postures however violent or aggressively nonviolent all these things are at best not enough and at worst near alibis this unsigned essay from transform action concludes that we should try to live with less I quote perhaps then the desperate of the earth will believe in our good faith and welcome our participation the interest of the artwork itself shifts from political abstractions dogmatic maxims about revolvers to the practical process of quotidian oppression in British and wider global society Surrealist aesthetics become very much more Fabian in concern a heuristic process as the following passage reads that might remind of the context we find ourselves in Britain today I quote there are signs of a possible right wing tyranny in this country given a failure in the economy to which we are all tied and admired as to the wheel and a despised Labour government replaced by a massively conservative one controlled by its extreme right wing the only cause in which British workers have come out on the streets in the last 20 years has been that of Enoch Powell Labour will lose its traditional seats to candidates for preaching race hatred the small freedoms of which we boast when comparing ourselves to foreigners so fearably will be eggs in the hands of blind juggler it is in this sense the artefacts of transform action both in content and form themselves create a new aesthetic subservism a sort of sieve of its contemporary societal moment which slithers of Surrealist text new and old make a sort of patchwork, a collage for approaching the social context of its contemporary moment and done, thank you Thank you so much Andrew and thank you too to Nicola Not an easy job really to bring these two papers together because one is so much about an extremely specific isolated rather isolated individual and then you Andrew were addressing the possibilities and failures of collective action and the problems of post-war surrealism I thought that last quote you had I'm not sure what date that was about Enoch Powell was that sort of sick what date was that 60 off the top of my head I think it's from the 1960s that's right and extraordinarily pertinent to where we are today it could have been written about right now and conservative party conference one could obviously spend a great deal of time talking about surrealism and about the extent to which it is still very much alive in many places but has been declared dead so many times I think the 1947 English group declaration that you quote from the catalogue of the French exhibition it was a kind of declaration of disinbanding the group but the group was hardly a group as it was it was almost bore a statement of faith in the continuation of surrealism which as they say was the only international movement not to be subordinated to politics nor sterilised by purely intellectual attitudes so I think that there's still something important there but obviously collage as our main even point was at the very core in a way of surrealism the question of the real of reality and of surreality and I thought we might perhaps start by just a very general question to both of you to you and to Nicola to say a little bit more about this philosophical conundrum of what in each case was meant by the real Nicola, would you like to start? You need to unmute. Sorry, apologies. Yeah so I think what is always difficult on packing down Sylvester's work is because his work is actually so intricately engaged really with a very specific Buddhist school of thought the Prasensika Madramika school of what's real and what's unreal within the philosophy of Buddhism and Buddhist thought and emptiness and the work is always very playful with that it's always playful with what is seen in one sense as a conventional reality, the object that people experience through their senses and how that is created through mind as well and the book and also Sylvester and obviously the Buddhist school is called the ultimate reality that experience of reality beyond the experience of any of the sense objects that we encounter through the mind so obviously that is that I suppose when I was talking a little bit maybe about that quantum theory it was that sense of to accept the fact there may be particles of cosmic matter or antimatter from Gloucestershire in one of these kind of visual microscopic slides that you pose slides you can see from both sides or the traces of mantra recitation and all of these things that we cannot see involves this kind of huge imaginative leap and it's that sense of that imaginative leap that the imagination creates reality which is really at the heart of tantric Buddhism so reality really is the imagination in those works and within those Buddhist philosophies I don't want to go on, I might like to hear more about screen as I'm actually sad getting that Andrew talk Okay Well I think that in a lot of the kind of things I've been looking at this included there is this question after the Second World War like Sartre himself says something very interesting you know you can make art about incendiary bombs however incendiary bombs themselves will destroy you know you and the artwork about incendiary bombs altogether and this idea of mediating the new realities of a post war world in this much more as I kind of referred to it as a sort of more fabian concept here is this idea of I think of trying to meet the idea that meet the kind of brokenness of reality in a sort of in what might be termed a sort of constructive or productive way if reality has become incoherent due to the violence of the mid 20th century then the work that would respond to that or try to mediate that would similarly become formally incoherent however I think the what John Lyle I mean John Lyle himself was a very isolated figure for most of the work that he did you know he was sort of a bookseller on his own with the Rosemonts in Chicago sort of telling him all you know he was sort of his process after ELT missiles and Jack Brunius were gone was very much he had this huge collection of surrealist work and he would translate it himself he would cut bits out he would create these collages transform action itself and in doing so sort of re-esthetise earlier surrealist writing and artwork that perhaps no longer could have been perceived as no longer functioning in a social capacity it might have claimed before and I think this sort of engagement with reality with the real of the post war is itself perhaps a sort of mediation that that time demanded Thank you very much there is a question we have here which is specifically for you Andrew we have two questions actually one for Andrew Andrew can you talk more about how transform action operated in dialogue with or contributed to the strains of surrealism found in the British underground press of the period magazines like Oz and IT well I mean this is the beginning of a sort of of the research really into this part of the book that will come later as I say John Lyle himself became very isolated later on looking through what I can access of his he had a very very large archive and after he died 10, 15 years ago now that archive sort of went into the wind sort of it was sold on online auction sites and it crops up on a books and stuff like that so trying to rebuild his connections with these other presences it's sort of this like internet Google detective work and you find these kind of like notes written on things on a books or on these auction websites he did have he had a productive interaction with the it's not as popular as it is in France and as I say he had this sort of like these ongoing arguments with the Chicago group specifically bymatics who felt that Lyle had sort of frozen him out and the Chicago group wrote sort of attacks on him and he wrote a text back so he refers to here this is a sort of pull out from I think the third copy of transform action called a new pope at Avignon or Laurel and Hardy slay the dragon which is an attack on the Rosemons and Maddox you know sort of saying Maddox is sort of a desperate fanboy of Lyle that's why he's so obsessed with him but yes he did have productive interactions constructive interactions with others but then others not so much it's particularly interesting I'm sorry I mustn't go on because we could talk about this forever but it's very very interesting that Ted Jones contributed to transform action because I think he was a very important figure in moving between the US and France to an extent the UK he's his work is also in the copy of race traits that I refer to and he's definitely so identified as a surrealist as well as jazz musician I have a couple of questions for Nicola Nicola you're very invested in the kinds of spiritual belief propagated by doesn't this make it difficult to maintain a critical or art historical distance on your part how do you avoid simply describing and celebrating the work yes hands up I am a tantric practitioner of 25-26 years with the Prasens Econmadro Marcus School of Tibetan Buddhism however I think this notion of propagation that these are ideas propagated in the work is slightly different I'd like to try and say perhaps like I've titled my talk a talk on transmission of the poem objects in one sense it could be seen to be describing them but I think I'm trying to align it a little bit more with this notion of transmission the notion of transpiritual transmission through the way that I felt himself was a conduit for too many counter cultural artists and allowing that really to open up the space in how critically you can engage with the work and curatorily in a notion of transmission there isn't a sense of just describing this engagement of Don Sylvester with particular tantric disciplines and theories and ideas but that notion of transmission that these ideas have an experiential presence themselves in critical and curatorial dialogue I think and so yeah I feel my part not the part that I am a tantric practitioner very much actually is important to my approach to the work in that sense Yes very very interesting I think there are a lot of fascinating questions about exhibiting showing curatorial practices that we could go into here but perhaps this is the moment to open up to the whole panel to all those who've contributed Is that right Sarah? That's great thank you Dawn, it's a good moment to bring all the team back on screen and I think as Sean has just put in the chat as well we realise people have probably got things to run off to we will just take a few more minutes to bring some of these ideas together and if you have to leave the recording of the whole session will be available so you can kind of catch up if you do have to log off now and yeah I think it's always when we've had such wide-ranging papers and such a richness of debates it's obviously this is not a moment to conclude but perhaps tease out some of the threads and I think they will get picked up in future sessions as well I think one of the things that really stuck up out for me and it sort of relates to a comment Dawn that you made about surrealism haunting the panel was about historical framings of collage and obviously as a conference we as conveners and I would just want to point out fellow co-conveners here and I will share with you my colleagues from the Royal College of Arts and Rosie Ramp and Royal College of Art obviously this conference has been shaped as a 1945 to now or placed within that framework so with a post war through the 20th century lens but I think it is interesting to think about those pre histories or the longer connections that are part of collage work of the 1940s onwards as well so I wondered whether any of the panellists had other thoughts about the sort of historicisation of collage and perhaps some problems with framing it within a sort of post war culture that was just one thing that really lept out at me from all of the talks as well so I don't know if anyone wants to jump in there but it is going through my mind as well listening to the first panel and also to this panel because clearly the now or the contemporary and temporality are really crucial and they are kind of played with in and through collage but I was also thinking I think Dawn mentioned the Gothic about Victorianism and the Gothic and the occult that seems to be weaving in and out of this as a kind of disturbance as well and actually the characters who have come to my mind and I apologise this is just my own work and where I am at then Jane Mansfield and Anton Leves who was the high priest of the church of Satan and with whom Jane Mansfield had a relationship at the very end of her life but I was just thinking that the newspaper reports about their relationship which were very sensational often had that kind of collage scrap clippings look to them so I think there is a kind of current it's not even on the current of something residual something old and something irrational that is very important to a lot of the aesthetics that people have been discussing this morning or this afternoon. Yes, I just very quickly say that one of the names that has kept coming into my mind as people have been speaking with strange little observations and that is Alfred Jerry and it seemed to me that there is a Jerry presence in the post war period not necessarily, well obviously through pataphysics but I would like to know how broadly is it where anyone else has come across that those sort of references to Jerry and I wonder whether there is a renaf bannam essay that one of you mentioned I think it was a craig wasn't it which involves a cyclist I was thinking of the Jerry essay on the passions conceived as a bicycle race and wonder whether any of the irrationality and nonsense if you like but also extremely pertinent point of that could have been part of the idea and the ideas that Bannam was playing with Craig do you want to come in there? I think that might have been Ben who mentioned that essay on the atomism of the mini cyclist but no I think it's an intriguing line I know that in the architecture circles that I have been looking at the French group in particular the utopie group they were very much interested in the legacy of Jerry and Jean Bauduyard was himself a member of the Collège du pataphysique and he was a degree to which thinking about technology was inflected with a kind of pataphysical sensibility hinging on the absurd absolutely sorry in terms of transformation it's full of representations of the pataphysical spiral and it's very much weaved in this pataphysics weaved in very deeply I mean some of the people that contributed to it were indeed members of the Collège I mean just to say quickly on the on the atomism essay I mean I think it's kind of it's like anything with Bannam there's a lot of humour in it and play in itself as kind of purposefully sort of non earnest but I guess the atomism of the short distance mini cyclist you know is a kind of bit of as well of a sort of fingers up in multiple directions one of which being kind of angry young men you know and loneliness long distance in the long distance runner and kind of a I guess a sort of sense that maybe some of the interest in kind of playfulness and style was a little bit to the side of some of the more kind of earnest and serious I guess sort of socio commentary of the time but also I think atavism itself you know there was such a sense that what was being displaced at the early ICA was a kind of Jungian interest in archetype and the universe in a way that I think there's also a kind of critique of an idea of an idea of an of idea of the atavistic. I don't think one could say that there was necessarily a kind of conscious critique of the problems of atavism in its relation to primitivism and colonialism, but I think there was a kind of implied critique of some of those elements that some of the pre-war surrealist affiliations maybe had with a kind of more deep-rooted union understanding of atavism and archetype, but that's just my kind of take on it. Thank you, and I think it will be interesting to reflect when we've heard all the panels about these moments of disturbance or haunting of different periods and modes and, you know, the reappearance or the the revenance as well being evoked through certain practices and images. Just another point that made that sort of for me came across through listening and watching actually all the the panels thinking about these Zoom webinars as a viewing experience as well and was the points that I think quite a few of you touched on about the experience of viewing collage or interacting with it as not just as physical objects and I think in a way sometimes taking us away from thinking about these things as physical objects to thinking of the artwork or the work as experience or an environment and I think Nicolae, your paper sort of made us think about that in particular and how then these things are displayed in their afterlives or then your comment that you made about, you know, you can walk through an exhibition backwards or you can, you know, go through a magazine the wrong way as well and taking us sort of into the realm of viewing and encounter and using these works as well and I thought that was just again it's a different framing of the material which I felt connected across the panel and I don't know whether anyone has further thoughts or Rosie, Eleanor as well whether you wanted to come in here and make any comments. No, I thought what you're just saying was really interesting in terms of I think and seeing Nicolae, your show at the Listen Gallery as well as thinking about the curatorial presentation of these kind of practices today and and how we whether we encounter them through the digital or whether we encounter them within exhibition spaces and even, you know, thinking about how we might encounter transformation today. Andrew was talking about, you know, finding some of these archives online and yeah I suppose it speaks to your question Sarah about the and and even earlier when we were talking about the kind of the sort of spatial when our engagement with collage is kind of spatialised, how that is very different to a collage practice that kind of consolidates something into a single material form and I think these papers that we had over the course of today have really spoken to that, you know, when we're thinking about text or turning pages or thinking about kind of collections of clippings, it's like the kind of aggregation of these materials and what that does to our understanding of the relationships between them. Sorry, most, is there time for me to say something? Yeah, it does go back to you. Okay, this is a really interesting point for approaching something like transform action where like where all of the documentation was there for the festival and for everything, but then it was dispersed beyond our ability to kind of like to access that now. So all we have are, you know, especially for the festival, the vast majority of documentation that we have that we might have for that unless we can find wherever that documentation has been sold to. Our photographs from the auction website, which are these little clippings like, you know, these little clip kind of photographs of different documents and trying to rebuild an image from that. And it's this, yes, it's sort of like the materialized sort of snippet view from Google Books, really. And that has an effect on how we interpret the historical record, the art and literary historical record. There was a question earlier about publications and John Law's interactions with them and, you know, at present, I have not seen the documentation to say how he did interact with those. However, I have seen it for this, this and this, therefore, that definitely guides focus in that respect. I mean, just very, very quickly, I mean, it was a great tragedy that John's archive went and there were many attempts to save it, but as with Breton's collection that was dispersed, there's an institutional dislike of people like John Law and Breton, of surrealism. I mean, it doesn't actually quite fit with the official cultural policies and, you know, it was not possible to organise anything to save it, but it was a great tragedy. I mean, he had an enormous collection of, obviously, all the material behind transformation as well as a great book collection, yes. And there were many other little publications that he made at the same time, like Blue Food, which I think, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes. In no surrealism, they, I think they call it, I can't remember what they call it now, so I think some petty side project. Great. Well, I think in view of time, we will draw things to a close for today, but we hope that our panellists and the audience who have logged on will join us again tomorrow or when you can or come back and look at the recordings for this conference. I want to thank all our panellists, Ben, Craig, Andrew, Nicola and our two chairs, Lyn and Dawn, for bringing together such a rich conversation. And I think we can see from the chat how people have really engaged with your idea. There's probably, you've been concentrated on your talk and you've not been able to perhaps always see that people have been really responding and thanking you for really great papers and for prompting so many, many more questions. And that we hope will continue over the next few sessions. So, do you join us to get tomorrow at 12 o'clock when we have another session, which is called Collage as Method, Manuscript and Moving Image. And that will consist of a keynote by Claire Zimmerman, which is chaired by Victoria Walsh. And we'll also have an artist presentation led by Judah Atil. So, I hope you'll be able to join us then and join me with a very loud virtual round of applause for all our panellists today. Thank you so much, everyone.