 Yn y cydnod o gyda unrhyw pryd o'r cydnod yma, mae'r newid yn unig yma yng nghylch ar gyfer yng Nghyrch. Mae'r cydnod yn unig yma ym Llywodraeth, Rydym wedi'i gyda'r Llywodraeth. Mae'n golygu'r cerddur, mae'n cael ei wneud, mae'n cael ei ddifrwg a'n eu cyfrifnigau ac yn ymlaes at y Barbachon, yn ymlaes yma, mae'n cyfrifnigau a'r cyfrifnigau ac yn ymlaes yma, a'n cyfrifnigau, ond yr adliad bwysig yng nghydforth chi. Rydyn ni'n gwelhu ddweud y byddwch yn fawr i'r adliad bwysig yng Nghymru, a ydych chi'n gwybod i'r adliad bwysig i'r adliad bwysig yn Briffton. Yn mynd yn cael ei wneud cerddurau, pryd, y pwysig, ac yn gweld â'r gwledd. memor y gwirio y rhan oedd yn ystod yn ei gweld eu gwahon yn ymchwil. Yn wrth i chi wneud yn unig i bwysig? Yn arig beth yw Ben Hymdon, ac wedi cael ei wlein, ti adeiladd ar y haes. A ydych chi'n bwysig, rwy'n gallu bod wedi mynd i mewn cais i'w rhaid. Dwi'n gallu i'n gweithio y Ffailaidd hon i ddechrau. Rwy'n gweithio y Ffailaidd hon. Mae'r defnyddio'r lleol, mae'r hunain, eu gwirionedd eich gwirionedd ac mae'r hollketigol thatoedd yn ei wahud o'r holl gwenyaf, os ydw i'ch gwirionedd ar y hwnna, a oedd wedi rhaid. Rwy'n credu bod yna wedi ddefnyddio y Ffailaidd honno. Ond now I just want to very quickly welcome our chair for tonight, Ben Heymore. As so many of you will know, is someone who, coming from a fine art anUNartysorical background, and now teaching cultural studies at Sussex, has been one of our most stimulating and interesting thinkers around post-war British culture, ranging across a huge array of materials, both visual and literary and cultural. ond, fel gyntaf, yn cymraeg i'r llyfan dda, mae yw dylunio'r eistedd ond bwysig o affectedr i'r leikon yma i ddau yn ôl, mewn gweld gwneud y ddeudol, cymryd o Llywodraeth, Ben, a myfion o bwysig. Felly, efallai ben o ddau, ond mae'r f iylau Eustafol ben i hymlwg mewn, maen nhw'n gweld i ddim. Roeddwn i'n digwydd i chi, yn ôl, fyddwch yma. Roedd afliad yn ymryth, ymddech chi, mae'r ddweud i chi – lle maen nhw, mae'r ffordd ymlaen – i fynd i'r ddweud, a'r bydd ym Llyfrgell yng Ngharragg a'r bydd dechrau Cranfield yn oed. Rydyn ni'n ddweud ar y bydd 20 mae'n ddypeth yn adeg, yn ddod i'r ffordd, ond ymlaen. I don't know. I will sit amongst them and have a conversation. We will open the floor to both the floor here, the real floor, and the virtual floor online. When I was asked if I would chair this session, and I found out it was Ben and Vicki who were going to be speaking, I said, yes, of course. I mean, we have kind of history of endless independent groups, seminars going back many, many years. But I just want to start by pointing out the title of this evening session, post-war contemporary. And just to think with that phrase, we've already got various timeframes in mind. We've got this kind of idea of something after the post-war, but also this kind of strange word, contemporary. And, you know, the very term contemporary, I think, is kind of worth investigating a bit. I mean, one of the things that I was reminded of when I was thinking about kind of post-war contemporary was when the first exhibitions to be held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, which was called 40,000 Years of Modern Art. So there, in that exhibition title and the place it was, we've got 40,000 Years, we've got Modern, and we've got Contemporary, all kind of vying for a place, congealing different times together, kind of creating temporal tensions. So I was kind of minded to think of, to look a bit further into the word contemporary. And I went to look into Raymond Williams' key words book to see if contemporary has a place there, and it doesn't. It goes from consumer to convention without missing a beat, without taking us to the contemporary. There's a recent book that Colin McCabe and some other people published called Key Words for Today, and I was thinking, okay, well, contemporary is bound to be in a Key Words for Today. But that goes straight from consumer to corporate, which also kind of tells you something about the movement of those times from the 70s to now. So I thought I'd do a little bit of kind of key wording myself. So, as Williams does, I went to the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Reference, and looked to see what was happening to the word contemporary. And this word contemporary kind of trundles along for centuries, just meaning at the same time that's, so you'd say, Charles I was a contemporary of someone. You know, it didn't mean a kind of nowness, a kind of, you know, this is the contemporary. But it starts taking on that shape in about the 30s and 40s, and then kind of really kind of takes off as people are talking about contemporary dance, contemporary architecture in the 50s and 60s. And one of the quotes they have is from Len Dayton's novel, The Ipcrestfarm, where the unnamed narrator, who will be made famous by his actor, Michael Gain, in the film, says, he's kind of moving into a room, and he says, it was a tasteful piece of contemporary. Natural wood finished doors, stainless steel windows, and Venetian blinds everywhere. So here the contemporary has become a now, you know, a piece, a bit of contemporary, a piece of contemporary. And Len Dayton approves to be quite a good segue into our speakers, because it turns out that Len Dayton was, of course, the Royal College of Art, where our two speakers are from. He studied illustration there. He wrote in the arc volumes, did a lot of the kind of illustrations for that. And this is where people like Lawrence Allaway were published, Richard Hamilton, and a whole host of others that we kind of associate with the post-war contemporary. So it's a great pleasure to introduce the first speaker, Victoria Walsh, who is Professor of Art History and Curating at the Royal College of Art and Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme. She is a curator and researcher whose projects span from the post-war period to the contemporary, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, architects and designers, reconstruction of exhibitions, practises and histories of gallery education, and issues of curating in relation to changing conditions of technology. In 2015, she led the Rainer Sophia major retrospective of the artist's work in 2014, which built on her previous experience, reconstructing the 1953 ICA exhibition Parallel of Life and Art with Claire Zimmerman. She co-curated the Tate Britain Research Display, New Brutalist Image, 1949 to 1955, and together they published the photo article, New Brutalist Image, 1945 to 55. But on a kind of personal note, I want to just mention that Victoria's kind of extraordinarily detailed curation and recreation of work has been a kind of real inspiration, I think, for this kind of period of art. I mean, it was absolutely what got me into all this when I stumbled just kind of by chance on her exhibition of Nigel Henderson's work in 2002 in Edinburgh. And I had, you know, I just got, you know, blown away, never seen this work before, never kind of heard of this guy, and so that was kind of a real moment for me. So without further ado, Victoria, over to you. Thanks, Ben, very much. You're always incredibly generous in your introduction, so I wish I had a cocknag accent. I'm not saying my name is in any way, but... Right, let me... OK, so thank you very much, Ben, for that introduction, and thank you to the Paul Mellon Centre for this opportunity. It sounds strange being in academia to say how rare it is to have such an opportunity to come and just think through ideas and to have that space and time and an opportunity, so I'm incredibly grateful, as I'm sure Ben is, that we have this opportunity to share some ideas. And it's in the spirit of wanting to put forward, and I may have overstated some of the ideas and arguments I wanted to put forward, but to put it in that context of a seminar, something that's in a first, second draft of thinking that's got a long way to go and a lot more discussions between us, but great to be able to share it with you and get your feedback. Some of the arguments I'm building on and playing with, I've made elsewhere before, but it's more about in the collective argument and the context of this current moment and in the light of the exhibition at the Barbican, and the recent exhibition that my thoughts in this paper of the next 20 minutes are particularly framed. So I will start. Walking around the recent Barbican exhibition, and I don't know if those of you that saw it and those of you that haven't seen it, the full exhibition texts are on the Barbican's website, so if you have a look. Walking around the recent Barbican exhibition, Post-war Modern, New Art in Britain, 1945-65, a prompt for this series of seminars, it would have taken a hardened visitor, particularly after two years of physical constraints of access to exhibitions, not to feel the aesthetic pleasure and proximity of so many works staged the maximum visual and dramatic effect, particularly in the opening sequence and central galleries downstairs. Iconic works just supposed with lesser-known sightlines determined by historical narratives of modernity and large-scale confrontational works in conversation with more subtle and nuanced ones. As Laurence Allaway might have noted, there was plenty of aesthetic distance to lift the works out and away from the distractions of the everyday. As the exhibition text described the period under review, as it wrote, certainty was gone and the aftershocks continued, but there was also hope for a better tomorrow. These conditions gave rise to an incredible richness of imagery, forms and materials in the years that followed. Focusing on the new, the exhibition explores the subjects that most preoccupied artists, among them the body, the post-atomic condition, the blitz streetscape, private relationships and future imagined future horizons, so read the exhibition text. What I asked myself would Allaway have made of this deep aestheticisation of the works on show and the claim that the exhibition was of subjects that most preoccupied artists, and why the emphasis on artists per se when what was particularly notable and in flux at the midpoint of the timeframe of this exhibition, 45 to 65, was the very separation of practices defined by the pre-war model of art school education. Indeed, as Allaway had noted in his now, canonical article along front of culture in 1959, the abundance of 20th century communications is an embarrassment to the traditionally educated custodian of culture. The aesthetics of plenty oppose a very strong tradition which dramatises the arts as the possession of an elite, to approach this exploding field with renaissance-based ideas of the uniqueness of art is crippling. Acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our notion of what culture is. Herein lies a fundamental tension, a problem, I think, of the Barbican exhibition, that while trying to retrieve historically marginal representations and silent narratives of gender, race, immigration, it tried to do so through the existing aesthetic and hierarchic forms of a pre-mediatised world that empties out exhibits of all signification through their decontextualisation and aestheticisation within the logic of the exhibition display. As Allaway argued also in his off-site text and his argument around fine art pop art continuum, the proliferation of popular culture, the impact of technology and the mass media meant another well-known quote, the spectator can go to the National Gallery by Day and the London Pavilion by Night without getting smeared up and down the pyramid. I think that pyramid and maybe others here can help it through. I think this is also a reference to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy, pyramid hierarchy of needs from a paper he published in 1948 around human motivations in culture and life. In the absence of any potential smearing up and down the pyramid, the Barbican exhibition highlighted the exhibition narratives of an obliterated past, prevailing conditions of uncertainty and an emphasis on future thinking, which its selected artists were claimed to represent. Temporalities of past, present and future seem stable in these narratives, but the contention of this short paper is that one fundamental and important aspect of this period is missing, and that was the key concern and questions many artists had of how to make sense of the present to be both in time and with time as Ben Cranfield has argued elsewhere. For many artists, being out of time, trying to locate oneself in time was the prevailing struggle and project of how to make sense and locate oneself in the cultural continuum that characterised the everyday of city life under reconstruction. For the practitioners that I want to consider here briefly, the exhibition particularly, conceived as a mediating form and technology, presented itself as an effective vehicle, further enabled by the mediating function of photography to make sense of the present. As I have argued elsewhere, the 1953 ICA Iconic Exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art, organised by, as we know, the Smithsons, Paolots in Henderson, recognised photography's capacity not only to unify a very disparate body of contemporary visual data to offer a snapshot of contemporary visual culture, but also to visually identify, and brackets perhaps propose, question mark, patterns of association, practising correlations, as Maholi Najwadwyr termed it, and providing what the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead would argue as patterns of cultural association, patterns that, through recognition, would offer an insight into contemporary cultural meaning and social values. In short, reflexively working with the media of the day, within the mediating framework of the exhibition, the group sought to make sense of the here and now. Comparable to Allaway's practice of writing through the present, what he called provisional art history, a form of art criticism, a kind of ethnographic, deep descriptive writing, parallel of life and art sought to write a new visual language, if not an alphabet, to decipher the conundrum and the paradox of the contemporary. And here you have, and I'm afraid it's reversed, I don't believe this image. It's the wrong way, but this is an image, I'm sure some of you are familiar with Nigel Henderson's study for parallel life and art, and it's often reproduced in black and white, which takes away the impact of the fact that it is on paper and that textual differentiation and heightened impact that this is a study the collage of photographs put together. It is not for nothing, let me move forward. It is not for nothing that amongst the 122 photographic panels in parallel life of art, many are to do with forms of writing and communication, in particular images taken from the British linguist and paleographer David Dyrringer's The Alphabet, a key to the history of mankind, published in 1948. Indeed, as Maholi Nage had argued in vision in motion, identifying new ways of seeing the world was key to our age. As the Smithsons wrote in a draft press release for parallel life and art, this exhibition will provide the first atlas to a new world. The method used will present dramatic yet rational picture of the times, a kind of Rosetta Stone. You can see here taking directly from Dyrringer's publication, you can see it, the typewriter, and the Rosetta Stone is one of the key parts of the publication. This exhibition, as I said to the Smithsons, this exhibition will provide the first atlas to a new world. The method used will present a dramatic yet rational picture of the time, a kind of Rosetta Stone. Also, of course, included in Dyrringer's text as the Pinnacle of Translation Achievement. Tatiam Pavilion, the second configuration collaboration of Henderson, Paolotsyn and Smithsons, clearly developed this esbos of how to make sense, of how to locate oneself as with parallel life and art, and like parallel life and art, not only consistently beguiles, but eludes or resists narratives that close or confine it to any temporal claims of futurity or indeed present. Multiple temporalities play out for the spectator, both in space as contemporary reviews detail, but also today through photographic representations. Again, I would argue that the photographic images of the installation provide a meta-image, a totalising yet inchoate one in waiting for translation for cultural analysis. From the collective staging of the visual to the architectural staging of a set by the Smithsons to be occupied by Henderson and Paolotsyn, is how Smithsons described it. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, of his motivation for human needs, comes to the formal, clearly. As Peter Smithsons discussed in the BBC review of This Is Tomorrow, we worked on a kind of symbolic habitat in which are found responses in some form or other to the basic human needs, to basic human urges. The patty and pavilion are furnished with objects which are symbols for the things we need. The method of work has been for the architects to provide a framework and for the artists to provide the objects. In this way, and we all know that quote, if we're familiar with this period, but I repeat it for the second part. In this way, the architects' work are providing a context for the individual to realise himself in and the artist's work of giving signs and images to the stages of this realisation meet in a single act. It's almost a kind of translation of Maslow's ideas of the hierarchy of needs for man to live a good life, with self-actualisation being at the top of the pyramid. As is often noted, patty and pavilion, with its overtones of archaeological and apocalyptic times, unfolded, as we know, in the same timeframe that the Smithsons designed by invitation, The House of the Future, for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 1956. How to make sense of these two projects, these two sets of images, in thinking through what the modern, the contemporary and even the present made possible could be. The contrast of poor materials to the slick, smooth surfaces of the modern have been topics of research for some time, as indeed the appearance of smooth surfaces but, as we know, the materials of the House of the Future were not those that we perceive in the image, but mock-ups of plywood and other. But as Claire Zimmerman has argued, imagining and occupying these paradoxical presence of the post-war was inextricably tied up with the mediating aspect of photography. As Zimmerman writes, when being modern within the existing technologies of the building industry was not yet possible, looking modern might do instead. I think this point about photography is simulating capacity. Coming to the end. The work of a photograph mediating and simulating how to be with time, past, present and future, also opened up the possibility of how to choose to position oneself in time or equally to be or stay out of time. The prevailing and teleological assumptions that the call and response mode of modernity was a given for post-war artists which the Barbican show suggested, denies not only the condition of a fine art pop art continuum described by Allaway, but also of the cultural context in which we encounter the exhibition today. The lack of reflexive engagement not only with the exhibition as media, but also with the mediatized practices and culture of the post-war art empties out or were still, renders all works purely representational and indexical rather than discursive, cultural or social. In many respects, this understanding or the understanding of photography within the exhibitionary context was much more sophisticated than this post-war period than perhaps today, despite the parallels of the proliferation of media and visual saturation. To work with this sophisticated deployment of photography in the post-war period demands, in many instances, the research and tools afforded by art history, not just the provisional art history of Allaway or art criticism. As this final slide, I would like to finish on, gives hint to. On the left, you have the sepia image of a photograph that was taken and used in the This Is Tomorrow catalogue, including the Eames chairs acting for the most part as supporting props. While on the right, you have the chairs performing and positioned as much as the subjects choose to position themselves in performative acts of potential self-actualisation, question mark. Mediating and positioning and remediating oneself through the opportunity of photography was clearly in play in 1956. How we value and understand this legacy today remains elusive. Thanks very much. Of course, today they'd be likely to get run over by a Niccardo delivery van. I mean, it's always so amazing, isn't it, that you see these streets and the idea of doing something like that now and how few cars there are. Oh, thank you. Great, thank you, Vicky. Let me introduce the next speaker, Ben Cranfield. A senior tutor in curatorial theory and history on the curating contemporary art programme of 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. Stemming from his ongoing work into the histories of art institutions, the theory of archives and shifting ideas of art and culture in post-war Britain. Recent articles include on not being with time clearly in post-war Britain, which I read on the train up here and is a great reading of Mozzetti's Together film. Really great. Other essays include Mind the Gap, Unfolding, The Proximities of the Curatorial and All Play and No Work, A Ludistry. A Ludistry. Is that how you say it? Of the curatorial as a transitional object at the early ICA. He also wrote a fantastic PhD on the ICA and the curatorial and kind of archives, and it was a really amazing piece of work. So, Ben, over to you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you very much for the introduction. I appreciate that final comment. It's one of probably the only people who've read that PhD. So, thanks, Ben. I have to say a huge thank you to Paul Mellon Centre for accepting a proposal to talk today. As Victoria said, there aren't always the opportunities that we might imagine to have these kind of conversations, even with people you work with every day. It's going to sound a bit Oscars, but it is genuinely a huge honour to be speaking with Ben and Victoria, who have been incredibly important in my thinking and my work since I started engaging with this post war period, well, quite a while ago now. So, 10 years ago, let's go back, I gave a paper at a conference called Bunk Celebrating 60 Years of the Independent Group at the ICA. Oh, I should... If I just move myself, we should be there. OK, yes, we should be there, yes. And I talked about the idea of the parallel from Parallel of Life and Art as an emergent space and thinking about what that idea of the parallel in between the parallel lines might be and do. And at some point during that conference, I made a very basic observation that what I was talking through was not the exhibition, I wasn't talking about the exhibition, but images taken by a photographer, also a collaborator later of the exhibition, Nigel Henderson, who was at that time experimenting with photography, as we've heard about already in this series. And I could and should probably have gone further and said, talking about images digitised and projected onto a screen, a basic observation that would have made sense, I think, to a room full of people interested in the independent group, whose mythic origins are often traced to back to Paolozzi's ffateful Epidioscope lecture. But it was Victoria who seized on the importance of this and initiated a conversation with me after the conference about collections, art museums, and disciplinary and institutional formations. And what Victoria helped me to understand was that a full engagement with mediation, not as an incidental issue of needing and failing to record or transmit that which was somehow more real, vital or important, irrevocably undoes given structures of cultural and artistic value. What the issue of mediation and its consequences are, sorry, whilst the issue of mediation and its consequences are trans-historical and trans-geographical, of course. I think, as Victoria has just argued, the long post-war moment in Britain, and especially those artists and creative practitioners who circulated around the mythological space of the IG, can be understood to be a particularly concerned with the implications of living in a mediatised world, and a wiggling of the frame to not only up-end or flatten the popular culture fine art hierarchy, but to rethink the entire way that being an agency in the world is constituted through practices of negotiation with the materialities of semiosis that operate through networks of more than human relations. I thought about this when I visited, as we've already talked about, the post-war modern exhibition at the Barbecombe. When my attention immediately was arrested by the first image of the exhibition, this image of the photographer Lee Miller in Hitler's Barth, and it's a very complex and troubling image taken by Miller's collaborator David Hitcherman, but credited in the exhibition as by Miller, and it's been the subject of a lot of really interesting analysis since its publication in Vogue in 1945. I'm not going to dwell here on the many layers of complex signification that weave through the image. It is an image caught between wartime document and the mise-en-scène critique of aesthetic regimes and entwinements of racialised and gendered notions of beauty with horror, violence, death and consumptive capitalism. What interests me here is the uncertain status of this image as a node in a network of cultural production and consumption. The accompanying caption in the exhibition describes the image as a radical document of performance art by a female artist resident in Britain. Whilst I find this retrospective claiming of Miller as a performance artist usefully provocative, I also wonder if this is not better understood as a performative document or a performance by Miller of the mediating mechanisms at her disposal. Miller knows that it's not Sherman that looks at her but the readership of Vogue. She knows that this image will sit in a magazine in proximity to articles on beauty, food and fashion on the table in someone's home within the mise-en-scène of their bourgeois domestic environment. This image then is not only a potential historical document but a mediating agent that brought the disturbingly incongruous discontinuity of the shared and unevenly experienced space-time of that particular present, a present space-time designated by the prefix world in World War II into focus. Here I'm intentionally invoking Peter Osborne's now well-known description of the contemporary as a quote disjunctive unity of present times. It is attempt to define the specific understanding of the contemporary as a philosophical premise drawn from an historical condition to which contemporary art responds. Osborne's focus is on the meeting point between global technological mediation, the collapse of a political horizon of socialism and the dwindling of the projective realm of the future through the dominance of global capitalism. Contemporary art then for Osborne is both the art that fills the void left by the retreat of modernist futurity and the space in which the operative fiction of the foreclosed contemporary can be revealed. Whilst Osborne marks the beginning of the slide towards the contemporary from the postal moment, specifically he locates it in Britain or mentions Britain, he notes that the contemporary had not yet, at this time, taken on its full specific meaning in terms of its parodic difference from the modern. As such, in the postal moment, it merely marks a kind of up-to-date-ness, a way of marking the most recent work of cultural production. And he says, quote, the contemporary was the most recent modern, but a modern with a moderated, less ruptural futurity, the quote. Osborne marks this moderate modernism of the postal contemporary in Britain with the establishment of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. However, the ICA and that moment are not Osborne's focus. For his theorisation of the contemporary. But I ask, what if we do dwell in this uncertain emergent space of the contemporary before it becomes the preferred prefix of art and fully institutionalised within the networks of galleries and markets? What if we stay with the idea of trying to institute a space for the understanding of the contemporary? What would that mean? Who and what would it be for? What is it, after all, to be with time? The adoption of the term contemporary was for the ICA less of a programmatic gesture than it was a point of differentiation from its larger and richer American cousin, MoMA, in New York. Similarly, the ICA Boston, a year after the formation of London's ICA, substituted the term contemporary for modern as a way to differentiate itself from the New York powerhouse. But whilst Boston specifically dropped the term modern to avoid its political connotations at the time in America, the ICA in London did so in order to avoid MoMA's museological overtones and return to what they say is its lost original mission of supporting living art or living artists. If modernism increasingly meant collecting art objects to furnish museums of art to hold the spirit of modernism in perpetuity, an institute for the contemporary was destined to be most particularly a space for the transient and the ephemeral. And it's unsurprising then that what is most remembered or talked about in terms of the ICA are not necessarily key works that it showed, but those exhibitionary experiments it gave space to, talks perhaps were given but maybe not even recorded and mythic moments of performative eventfulness. To inhabit the space of the post-war contemporary in Britain, therefore, is to dwell not in the collection of art but in the archive of ephemera. In a recent conference organised by Tate and Paul Mellon Centre on Collage in Britain, I discussed... I should have brought that up. It's nice. I discussed this image, which although it is a high-rise image, it's not coming out that well anyway. Apologies for that. And this image is called Survival Kit and it was an image produced by the nascent group Archigram, although there were more people involved than those kind of core Archigram members. In 1963 for an exhibition at the ICA called Living City and it appeared in Living Arts magazine, which was a very short run publication by the ICA and operated here in part as a catalogue for that show. Now, to my mind, Survival Kit is a primary example of the ephemeral archive of the post-war contemporary. So what do I mean by this? Firstly, to be able to apprehend one's present anthropologically as something that is qualitatively different from the past, one must first fragment the present into objects and images that can be analysed metonymically in relation to something like a distinctive subjective experience of contemporaneity. Secondly, this process of archiving one's present to curate it back to oneself in order to grasp it from the distance, perhaps an ironic distance, means rendering it again as image, not to perform what Boris Groes calls the economy of modern contemporary art, that is the transubstantiation of the profane into the sacred, but to recirculate the image using the ephemeral media of mass reproduction from whence you've taken those images in the first place. That the subjective and thirdly, that the subjective positionalities that the image produces are not that of an idealised subject of the contemporary moment, but an uncertain, distributed and unfixed subject of multiplicitous and perhaps contradictory identifications through which the individual is mediated in relation to a collective, a collective of the present. In talking about this, I'm tempted to use, well I am going to use, but maybe I don't know if I should, a word from the discourse of British psychoanalysis at the time, another independent group, and call this objects like this survival kit, transitional objects of the contemporary, because they are both of the world and can be used to disenchant the individual of their authority over the world, whilst enchanting the world again with the magical possibility of the individual's speculative potential. What makes this an ideal transitional object, I think, its ambiguities, its playfulness, its particular use of the curatorial laying out the objects alongside the collagec, is what I argued previously makes it a queer object. Furthermore, using the work of queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz, I suggested that this image offers itself up for queer disidentification, a way of taking the image and using it beyond or perhaps against even its specific authored intentionality. Now I now want to pursue that line of thinking a bit further and suggest it is specifically by understanding this image to be part of an unfinished archive of the problem of the post-war contemporary, that is the problem of being in or out of time as subjects and agents of mediation, that this image must be disidentified towards the positions that were disavowed by the then dominant discourses of timeliness. Survival kit presents objects as images that are mass-produced, disposable, desirable and related to a mythos of the present as brought to audiences in post-war Britain through cinema magazines, pulp fiction and increasingly television. The supposition of survival kit, however, is not that these are the items that make the subject of the city contemporary, but rather that these are the objects required to survive in the contemporary city to construct a liveable relationship with it. The survival kit in its wartime form was a vital collection of items that were used, especially by pilots, should they find themselves crashing in unfamiliar territory. Survival became not just synonymous with war, but with a future where the world had become unhospitable to human life. An idea brought to the popular imagination in post-war Britain by the figure of Dan Dare, there we are, who had not only had to survive on the unusual environment of Venus, but whose mission it was to find new food sources to help the survival of people on Earth. Surviving and living are intimately linked in the living city, the message being that one lived despite not because of the built environment, that the aim of this attack was modernist planning was explicit in the pages of the accompanying edition of Living Arts. To suggest that a survival kit, an exhibition, a poem or a collage could be part of architectural practice, was to question the modernist hierarchy that had been at place at the formation of the ICA, that art was a test in ground that architecture would then make into social relations. But the contemporary seemed to reverse the equation. It was not, it was the ephemeral practices of everyday culture that would make the living city after, not before it was built. Survival kits suggest that to be contemporary is a matter not how modern or up-to-date one is, but how one navigates and survives urban alien landscapes. What survival kits in Living City for that matter did not interrogate, however, was who it was in particular who had to survive in the city, for whom culture was a matter not of continuity but of collage and juxtaposition, for whom was being in time a matter of critical necessity and creative imagining. In disidentifying survival kit towards an archive, an archive of the post-war contemporary, it is what is there through absence or through an underlying present absence that needs to be drawn upon. Last time I discussed this image, I suggested that the triplicate present of John Coltrane invokes the vital importance of jazz and more generally black artists to the development of contemporary cultural thought, especially sub- and counter-cultural thought in post-war Britain. Furthermore, I want to suggest that despite the masculinist, militaristic and misogynistic overtones of much of Archigram's imagery, the presence in survival kit of gender-ambiguous metonyms alongside the underlying presence of Coltrane and jazz as the only identifiable subject in Living City allows it to be used to invoke other synchronous and non-synchronous analyses of cultural belonging that may have been outside of the intentional purview of the image's collagic authors. In particular, the importance of jazz to cultural thought and practice for those struggling to be contemporary speaks to the preeminent cultural thinker of the post-war period Stuart Hall. What I want to suggest is that ephemera such as survival kit, because of their uncertain stages as transitional objects of the post-war contemporary, not only invite diachronic and synchronic connections but require them to stop them from becoming fixed within given and dominant narratives of modernist and musiological progression. Under the auspices of Stuart Hall at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the question of contemporary culture became not a what, but a how. How subjects come to understand themselves is not just the products, but also the agents of endless processes of material semiosis. It is not surprising that Hall was interested not in the singular products of culture but in their movement, their usage, how culture comes to be lived, as this is where the agency of mediation is to be found. It is also not surprising that it was the diasporic subject that came to be the exemplary figure for Hall for the study of contemporary becoming, starting as he did with his own transitions, geographical, temporal and political. I want to argue that the diasporic subject who I would add by necessity becomes a queer subject is also an archival figure. Diaspora and queerness do not only trouble the fixity of identity but also the temporal possibilities of the present as an assimilation within the value systems of the present. Whether that's because one's historicity is now not available within the official archives of culture or because one has to live beyond the constraints of the present in order to survive. If the problem of the post war contemporary as it manifests itself as an uncertainty of progressive cultural production within the titular formation of the ICA becomes most meaningful in the moment of survival, then the archive of the post war contemporary must exceed that temporal moment because it could not be addressed by those who are denied access to or in excess of the official platforms where those questions were being answered. Therefore we must open the archive of the post war contemporary to other moments and places where such questions were being asked. Here I find the ICA useful as an institutional archive and an unfinished proposition. In 1980, over three decades after it was founded and still 15 years before the exhibition Mirage was to bring the ideas of post war thinker France Fanon explicitly to the ICA for the first time, a series of exhibitions took place that are now known as the women's exhibitions. Only four years this is after the first major solo exhibition by a woman artist at the ICA had taken place in 1976, Mary Kelly's postpartum document. The women shows coincidentally an unprogrammatically sought to ask how the positionality of women artists might rethink the space of the contemporary. One of the exhibitions issue social strategies by women artists curated by Lucy Lippard produced an accompanying catalogue that didn't so much document the exhibition as create another platform as Living City had done through which reproductive print media was used as a particular site of social praxis. One of the most pertinent uses of the format was by Adrienne Piper. Piper, consistent with her exploration of mediated identity and political becoming, used a double fold spread in the catalogue to explore her own arrival as a political subject. Accompanying a short text that recounts phases of understanding and self-awareness in relation to attempt to assimilation to collective identification are three photographs. These photos form part of an everyday apparatus of subjectivity, the family photo, the school photo, the passport photo. As I look at these photos alongside Piper's work, I'm reminded of the theorist Tina Camps astonishing work on the Ernest Dich collection in Birmingham. The Dich photography studio operated from the 1940s to the 1980s and they were, as Camp says, quote, the photographers of choice, many members of the city's largely working class Afro-Caribbean community, end quote. They commissioned portraits for official reasons but also to send to loved ones as, quote, Camped again, material and effective objects of diasporic connection that instantiated practices of attachment belonging in relation between cities and their recipients. The images that Camped had originally passed over when she first wrote about that archive is too flat in affect to be worthy of attention. She now returns to, in her book, listening to images. These are passport photos. Whilst Camp goes on to recount the ways that passport photos can be understood as part of a regulatory state apparatus and how they performed as part of the reshaping of, quote, post or culture of the Black Atlantic, they are also part of what Camped terms quiet but not silent images. Specifically what intrigues me in Camps listening to these images that sit between their function as, quote, regulatory document and, quote, effective repository is how Camped understands these images to hold a resonance in their archival state. They are, after all, the leftover images of a photographic studio practice, what Camp called orphaned images. They are ephemera to that never fully become encoded with the apparatus of state border control. Camped understands their fugitivity as images, their persistence in time as part of a, quote, refusal to stay in one's proper place and here Camped is quoting Judith Butler. Or rather, they are part of the survival kit, I might say, of those who had no choice but to exist in a status of transience. To return Pipers and Camps work to the ongoing archive of becoming contemporary in post war Britain, I want to invoke one final image. This image is printed in the catalogue to post war modern but notably is not in the exhibition itself. The image was on the front cover of Francis Newton Souza's exhibition at gallery one in 1962. Gregory Salter reads this image as part of Souza's self-fashioning of his brand as an artist but also as a conscious play on stereotypes of migrants in Britain at the time, juxtaposing the good immigrant image of a simulated dress with a feared immigrant image of an animalistic and dangerous figure using the barred teeth in one of his own paintings. Souza does not resolve his identity but tawns a potential public with their own projected fears and fantasies. I am also interested that Salter notes how the image can be seen as a taking back of artistic control by Souza over his image in difference to the shots of the artist taken by Ida Carr in 1958 in which Souza looks out at the view with shyness, perhaps uncertainty from amongst his artworks. Indeed, what Souza's cut up self-portrait performs is an act of mediation that inverts a more usual relationship between the reproduced image and the painting. It's hard for me anyway not to see a reversal of Francis Bacon's gaping pope mouth taken as he did from Battleship Potemkin and then de-ephemeralised in paint. Instead, Souza remediates his painting back into the circulation of mechanically reproduced images to intervene in the media scape of image production. To finish, I just want to observe that in a recent talk, the senior curator of Postal Modern Jane Allison spoke of the opening work in the exhibition being John Latham's 1961 full stop. I was surprised to hear this. What about Miller's performative image that opens the show? Perhaps Allison is right, Miller's image is not a work in Postal Modern but an uncertain and mobile image in the unfinished archive of the Postal Contemporary. Thank you. Right. Okay, so now we have discussion. Conversation. This is how it goes. So, I think to start with that, I'll pick up on that last point of differentiating between the modern and the unfinished contemporary as these being distinct things. One of the things I was interested in was the images of John Coltrane or net Coleman in the Stuart Hall Johnna Cumpfer film. You've got Miles Davis going all the way through it. But jazz, that is modern jazz. People talk about modern jazz. It doesn't seem to be as problematic as your discussion of the modern and the contemporary. So, I wonder if there's a long form of culture, if we're moving with Allaway to a more inclusive range, where does the modern and the contemporary sit? Is the modern within the contemporary but now popified? I was thinking of Thomas Crowe's new book where it's very much about the mod. And he mentioned Lawrence Allaway as a mod, a self-actualised mod, if you like. So, how would you both place the modern and the contemporary in a kind of relationship? I'll have one for both, but I think that's what we connect with more. One of the things that I think I'm always struck by is how belated modern is. I mean, modern doesn't emerge as a functional category in popular terms, put it that way. In terms of when Allaway, the embrace of modernity, let me start again, I've been through the kind of resistance to ideas of modernity, calling and being the answer to the moment. And one of the things that I think is kind of curious about figures like Hamilton, Mike Henderson, and Miss Nessons is the recognition of the call of modernity and the opportunity of modernity for the irreconcilability of acquiring the modern in the current. So you have the aspirations, you have the simulation, but you equally have in a lot of the works the kind of cues, the anomalies, the cues to suggest that this is an aspiration and an ambition that is compromised or complicated by the unknowingness of the present or the complexity of the present. So that kind of tension, and I think brutalism and I think one of the arguments Caz, in the mind, tried to make in your group this image display at Lake Britain was that tension between the kind of imaging of modernity and the grid, but then the messiness of the everyday millering was very successful in the period. And the messiness being used there as a disruptive strategy to call modernity account as a not yet as a project becoming. I think Henderson's photographs of Huntshampton is one of the classic examples where you have the grid, the transparency of the modernity of steel and glass being erected. Confounders and confused by the materiality of the image or the tap, the mudly tap, dripping water in the pores of land. And that kind of tension between image, aspiration and the moment in time, I think it sets up a contemporary inking tension with a lot of such sort of. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking of the wheelbarrow, the image of the wheelbarrow. That's Ben. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So I guess there's a few things. There's a few things I guess I would pick up on that. What interests me about the usage of the word modern, the contemporary in that moment is exactly as the reason why Osborne is less interested in it, which is that it's not really in it, it's interchangeable. It's not quite clear what it is. It's not really a position as such. So I think we are still very much within that. Yeah, we're still very much talking through the language of the modernity. I don't think that we're talking about the contemporary being a really conscious kind of periodic break. And certainly we're not talking about it as an active prefix of art. But it is interesting when you talk about the mod, because I think the kind of thing there is, I would say that that is the idea of the modern repurposed in relation to the function of being contemporary. So that's, I think Victoria has pointed into as well, it's about how do you relate to those different kind of temporalities within your self-fashioning, I guess, to some extent, which is a different thing from necessarily being concerned with some kind of projective futurity about how cities, whatever, should be planned and constructed. It's more about I am modern now because I am creating a generational break or whatever it might be. But I guess for me, the other thing is that there's something more methodological that's opened up, I think, by what I'm suggesting about not trying to cleave them apart, particularly, but whether one understands this in relation to trying to think through traditions of the new, traditions of the modernity, or whether one is concerned with the issue regardless of the problem of temporal belonging, which is obviously absolutely part of modernism all the way through, but is a specific problem. And I'm sort of saying, well, what if we pay attention to that specific problem? And it's interesting for me to, for example, that Corbusier, when he shows at the ICA, shows tapestries. So again, the tapestry to my mind is this kind of, you know, literally putting back in the kind of weave and texture of the present, of the now, back into the space of the modern in the same way that I, and it's interesting that Collins and Jim Wilson writes about that and does a catalogue for that, because I think that there is this idea of kind of looking at the underside of modernism, where you're concerned with the texture. And this is liquid concrete, and there was another version of this presentation, which is all going to be about the textures, you know, and what gets caught in Bretton, Bruton, et cetera. And what we constantly find is that process and contingency and the kind of, and the now of temporality in the process of making constantly gets kind of captured on the surfaces of modernism, glass, screens, concrete. And I think that's kind of what we're playing with here, rather than saying that there is, we can kind of say, well, that's modern and that's contemporary. I don't think that's possible to certain others here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, kind of following on from that. I mean, I suppose one of the things I'm getting from that is that, in some senses, the modern, you know, for a mod or something, is a kind of non-rhaerified idea of a kind of progressive form stretching into the future that, you know, only certain people have kind of access to. And I was kind of very taken with your sense here of this work being about trying to understand the present moment here, that there was some sort of difficulty that needed to be understood. And how much this work, I mean, you use Ruth Benedict's Margaret Mead, the hierarchies of need, you know, work coming from before the war, I mean, Ruth Benedict's book is from the 30s. And how does this kind of inform how you're kind of thinking about these artists? I mean, it strikes me that kind of self-actualisation isn't necessarily one of their goals, but actually it's a more kind of research project that in itself is kind of anthropological, an anthropological way of thinking about the kind of anthropology of the now. So that kind of idea of the kind of art as being research and maybe art and being kind of form of cultural studies for this kind of period. And it's, I mean, one of the reasons I think this kind of feels very kind of relevant is because a lot of art today feels like cultural studies too. You know, it feels like kind of, you know, the social project, relational art. So what makes this time so fruitful for doing kind of art as research? I mean, I think one of the things that's inherent, and I suppose where the frustration or my kind of frustration of the problematic of the Barb Cane exhibition is that the very questions that many of the practitioners, not just artists, were constantly playing with was that the hierarchies of knowledge, the organisation of practices, you know, the specialisations, the pre-war organisation of systems of knowledge and taste and value, you know, were already fragmented pre-war, but post-war become completely redundant in discussions of how to re-imagine and restructure the present and the future. And because the Allaway is the first to really sort of put the case for the dissolution of the categories. And I think what many of the artisans, and obviously Magdell and Michael and the others are also, and Hamilton in particular, sees the opportunity that research has to pull into the frame all the different discourses, disciplines and practices that had already come into crossover discussions in other spaces that were needed to imagine this new moment, because that separation of science and technology and the arts, you know, was not going to produce the world that was relevant or happening in the everyday. And I think, you know, every time one hears, and of course we've been at conferences and said exhibitions for 25 years now, but every conference and exhibitions manages to claim that there are resonances between the here and now, the post-disciplinary, the interdisciplinary collaboration, that all those things are relevant now. But we're still resisting, we're still in 19th century structures of knowledge and practice and taste and value in many respects, as I think the exhibition highlighted, that those, that organisation of culture and value actually, fundamentally hasn't changed, and so that research project is ongoing. I think that's why we keep returning to a lot of these practices and groups because the kind of questions they were tangling with still resonate today, but we still have the same infrastructures, the same codes and systems of signification in a way. We're not looking at exhibitions as technologies that are media-tized, we still seem to be thinking in highly aestheticised, modernist terms of consumption of art, not as culture. I mean, your own book made that case around brutalism. And why, you know, despite Birmingham, despite Stuart Hall, despite the many other moments we've had, why, what is that continued investment in the category of art? Well, we know what those are, it's the art market, it's patronage, there are other investments, but I think the politics of that moment still have a currency that we're still working through and still, actually working through, most probably still beginning to work through. And I think just thinking about Stuart Hall and some discussions, you know, it's that politics of attention that there is still the need to keep pulling attention on the same arguments and the same propositions and the same research by practising a way it's the same, it's that argument, to keep it in frame because change is slow. I was just thinking, you know, a text that I go back to quite a lot is Hall's Constituting and Archive and she was originally given at a talk, given as a talk, at Tate around the kind of formation of the archive really of Black British artists constructed by Andy Chambers and I think what's really interesting about that text is it's an absolute celebration of the work that Chambers and others have done which is around the kind of defiance of a certain erasure, but there's something else in it, he's giving a warning, he's warning that, he's warning that we have to keep the archive not just in its context but as a structure alive to the problems of the present and in some ways what he's saying is that if we just go well that's great, thank you very much and include it within, you know, a canonical understanding of the culture then we may have solved a kind of small problem for now but we haven't necessarily created a new structure which is going to be applicable and useful for ongoing generations of artists to think about and I think he's also hinting at the fact that those conceptions around identity and belonging and who's included and who's not included, they will continue to be challenged so if you set something up and you put boundaries around it and you're not alive to your doing in fact then you're going to be challenged further down the line that you don't, you know, about what those boundaries are and so the reason why I think that, you know, the word archive is interesting around the collection is not here because I'm thinking about, you know, the institutional archives as necessarily a kind of source of revisionist history which, you know, of course that's a very valuable work that we're doing but I'm thinking about could they, can they be perceived and actually it's easier to conceive of that within the digital world, right? But can they be conceived rather as this kind of, much more as the archive is understood within a digital context as a kind of constantly accessed memory and therefore a kind of place of interchange is not the final stage of a deep, a deep, you know, repository where it goes from office to repository to archive, the traditional sense rather the archive is always that holding place where something is waiting in abeyance to be picked up again or rethought and for me that's kind of what Hall is also doing with contemporary culture is saying the way we understand culture itself has also got to be this kind of constant creation of our own kind of archive, our own series of reference points, our own kind of series of points of reflection to be able to grasp these moments within this kind of constant network of mediation and it's not surprising to me in a way that, you know, Birmingham country culture is to describe and it's not surprising to me in a way that Hall's thought needs to be kind of constantly resuscitated but it is being really right now kind of brilliant because it's very difficult to maintain that place because you are constantly undoing the infrastructures of value that would allow you to claim a kind of permanent position within a kind of cultural field but in terms of the post-war moment I think what kind of makes it interesting going back to is in some ways, you know, a moment of opportunity, right, lots of people going to our college even if they weren't thinking of being artists, there's an opportunity and a possibility to go and experiment and play without necessarily that idea that I'm going to become this and that of course is mixed for a very kind of fertile space on the ground but also we could say there's a poverty as well that makes it kind of fruitful in as much, you know, if you fast forward 20 years you've got a much more dominant art market, a much more available art market that people can work towards being a part of that wasn't necessarily there at that point so, you know, we see that with the independent group who start to then refashion their kind of work very much in relation to kind of a market so I think what we can say is it's a kind of unmoaring moment and that's what makes it interesting to kind of go to go back to not much I'd say, a whole ton of unresolved issues with what we're doing. Right, thank you. It's more than you want isn't it? No, no, that's great, that's great. So we've got a quarter of an hour, open the floor to you lovely people and your lovely people online, you've got some questions coming from... We've got several great questions from the online audience ready but I'm going to pitch in with one from Harriet Atkinson who's director to Victoria. Thank you for a wonderfully rich and thoughtful open paper. Is it possible to draw a distinction in terms of the temporal encounter between independent group exhibitions such as Parallel of Life and Art and earlier exhibitions constructed from photographs that were also focused on making sense of the present, albeit in a very different context, eg, pubachanda exhibitions produced during World War II by the British Ministry of Information. I'm thinking that one through. I mean I think, what do I think? I mean one of the things that, what was the core of this first part of it? So it's asking about, well I think it's asking you to explore really about the way the exhibitions of the 1950s that you were showing using photography compared to earlier exhibitions that had a different kind of propaganda purpose in the war. I mean I think potentially yes in the sense. I suppose what I was particularly interested in and was trying to draw out was the way with Parallel of Life and Art, they were thinking through not necessarily recent but more in recent circulation theories and discourses around iconology and iconography and trying to think through how the visual could be interpreted and understood at the level of symbol rather than at the level of just interpretation and discourse and I think in that sense what it was heralding was the awareness of how images communicate and trying to bring that into focus through a very concentrated form and obviously supported by recent, not so recent but more recent sociological and anthropological thinking. In that respect, yes I think you could apply the same, but I think the politics of what was being proposed and why that was being applied would be very different and the cultural conditions in which the questions of how images are signifying and circulating and producing the cultural specificity of that moment has to be retained in the account. There's also the plague on us, I was in there as well, with that because that culture of long-time exhibitions running steeply through the ICA at that time, you know, through the use of black and what we were involved in designing and used up was the exhibition design but in some ways that's what started with 40,000 years and it was designed specifically like a lot of those long-time exhibitions where to be kind of informative spaces but also experiential spaces for public and obviously Hamilton's interested in that but when Hamilton others are taking it up it seems to me there was much interested in exploring that mechanism as they are just kind of using it and I think that's that kind of that's the difference isn't it when we move into a space of cultural analysis. And I think it's you know the difference and where Hamilton you know separates out from the ideas in in kind of strategies of thinking about design as opposed to cultural propositions to say. We've got a question over here, not this. Yeah sure, thank you. I very much agree with the critique that you've made of the bubble show and I think it's obviously partly a problem of a kind of periodisation that they want to pop as the 60s when they were concerned with that. But I think that there's equally perhaps a problem with seeing the period through 2022 eyes as well and a kind of academic culture of you know art by research and equally a problem I think perhaps of seeing the 50s through the lens of the Birmingham cultural studies of the 60s. And I wanted to go I actually wanted to go to to something quite specific in a sense to think about this which was Victoria quoted the Smithsons on the parallel of life and art show which of course you know it's going to create endless interpretations. We had we heard a wonderful one last week actually by yes I can't remember your name but we had a wonderful paper about it. And this you quoted the Smithsons as saying what was it. The exhibition would create quite a dramatic yet rational picture of the times which kind of seems very peculiar and obviously as we know the Smithsons were only really involved in the very early stages of parallel of life and art. But at the same time it's kind of it kind of gives us a kind of clue maybe an answer to that question Ben asked about the modern and the contemporary you know whether the Smithsons are thinking in a too modern and not enough contemporary way and whether actually Henderson and Palotsu seeing through the exhibition were thinking more in terms not of the rational but of rationalities and in other words a kind of relativism perhaps is more of a key to one key to what's going on in that show and in a sense allowing us to make of it all the thing the wonderful things that we have made of it and relativism of course is a key to so many other things of that mid 50s post war butchalism and all those other kind of like toning down of political edges and extremes what do you think of that? I wouldn't disagree I mean I think as I said but I slightly overstated it but I think I mean I think there was a reason for the collaboration I think that you know how do you reconcile Henderson's concerns with Victorian memorabilia alongside a stressed image alongside but so I think that the you know as I say hands up for a second draft it's a slightly overstated to make a point of sorts but but that said I'm not sure and I would defend the proposition that this was a kind of research project that's not a of today they write of it in a nod that time as does Hamilton the exhibitions are research they you know there are propositions there are grids of propositions and tables of information behind exhibitions and you know formulation is one of of thinking through questions and answers so you know that might sound expanded in current day practices but but I think they were they were genuinely motivated and confronted by trying to inhabit and understand the contemporary but of the moment they were in but I mean I think one of the things that is elusive and we those looking at the area is just how did class differentiation play out in terms of understanding a sense of belonging and with time and that's you know and that seems to make that point about the exhibition but that's an ongoing issue around the kind of historiography of this at this moment um but I don't think there's a I would defend the over determination but it might be overstated to the exclusion of a much more pluralistic and cultural relativist understanding of the exhibition but I think what has been underestimated you know is the role of photography I mean Hamilton uses it to the same effect as a meta image you know with clues and prompts you know I mean the image as I left up and didn't entirely complete of the four of them for this is tomorrow has a classic what I would call sort of Henderson Hamiltonian game in there which is Smithson encouraged myself and somebody called Martin Harrison to reconstruct the photographs so have you been there have you been have you been there have you been there in the miston street it's where we live thank goodness for Martin Harrison being a very um transporting type of art historian of sorts we went back and reconstructed it and and the the position at which the photograph was taken outside 46 limiston street where Smithson's lived is at the intersection of somebody called camera place and you know that was a classic classic sort of moment of of of taking attention about photography in its role one of many games of which Hamilton has many behind the scenes so I think um can I just yeah I'd like to ask a question prompted by Vicky's uh reading of uh Parallel for Knife and Art but really directed at you Ben um when I was very struck by the the ways in which this the you you were reading um the exhibition and it was being articulated at the time in relation to the Rosetta Stone and that's that idea of a an iconography that had taken centuries to decipher but and you know and that it had taken years of scholarship and difficulty to decipher this incredibly elusive and difficult language and that somehow life and art was parallel to that it was doing something it was trying it was digging deep and finding a a new language that was going to be uh that expressed the contemporary but did so in a way that was very hard to read and of course has remained incredibly hard to read as all the different kinds of interpretations that we're seeing in the series have proven when you juxtaposed a photograph then of Parallel Life and Art with the Archigram image it felt like it really did feel like we were moving there were two totally different worlds and it was I mean and in a way it's the distinction fits the classic narrative of 50s and 60s pop and and brutalism but one of the things that was so distinctly different between them to my eyes at least was that issue of legibility that when you saw that imagery in Parallel Life and Art it looked so difficult to read and it posed so many problems whereas with the Archigram image it was hyper legible it was quite literally not only the labels were clear but the images the objects themselves are so obviously labeled and it kind of provided a very it gave you something much more tangible to work with in terms of legibility and it just felt so different and I think I wondered what you made of at least to my eye something that's so distinct when in some ways you are suggesting a kind of parallel between them yeah I guess a kind of a few things I mean so I wouldn't say they're the same at all I mean I guess I would say kind of I guess there's a couple of things one is from a period periodising point of view I I mean they don't look any further away do they house the future looks from Patty and Pavilion and I think that's the kind of thing that I think Ben really explores so well in in in his book which is that how can you have very kind of different concerns that appear visually to look so different actually as part of similar questions you know coming from similar questions so similar if we look at that this is tomorrow catalogue so that's very close to parallel of life and art you've also got that thing about labels right and an image that's all labelled up and playing with the idea of information because this is a big question you know where does you know there's a challenge as far as I understand it to significant form and the language of a significant form and instead moving towards kind of thinking about the idea of information and what we do with that um so there's that I guess sort of answering that question but also I guess answering a kind of implied question from Mark as well is that um of course the question shifts and of course the language shifts and of course the the imaging shifts but there are seeds being sown that I think absolutely are the proposition around cultural studies so you know I've said it kind of set many times but you know in the um same time of parallel of life and art they're proposing to the film department of the ICA to do a series not of film showings but of discussions about popular cinema and what they're really looking at is not it is all sorts things about how popular cinema is made wanting to look at Hollywood as a kind of system um which is part of a much later analysis that you wouldn't really get into kind of you know Laura Mulvey and a much later moment of really trying to analyse the mechanics um and ideologies of Hollywood production um but also wanting to take things like Marilyn Monroe as another whole part of this which is just Marilyn Monroe um you know wanting to marry Monroe apart as an anthropological kind of signifier what is um what is Monroe and and and I've said this so many times because I just loved the response Brenda Paul who was organising it was very much part of the ICA establishment although she was really administrator but she was organising the film program said they think there's a lot they think there's something to be learned in asking about Marilyn Monroe and why she's so popular and she says I would have thought that I could answer that very easily but they tell me I'm ever simplifying things so and I think that's a kind of real sort of there's a real line around an idea that the the ICA or something like that is should be a space for avant garde kind of production and for the kind of um for really the exploration of kind of significant form versus the idea that you might flip the whole thing and make it a space to explore contemporary culture as it as it as it were so the Archivegram Survival Kit to my mind is a very kind of IG object um but I think there's a kind of and I think the kind of key thing is in the way in which uh you know Bannum calls parallel life and art the locus classicus of new brutalism um both of two people here are better placed to speak to that than me but I think what's kind of interesting there is that we have to understand that this is a provocation to certain groups of people particularly say to architecture students or others this is going to make sense to them so it might be kind of quite eligible to us but it's kind of the eligibility is the message to some extent you can't make sense this when I said this to when you showed that image of them standing in front of the you know the collage image to me it's kind of an absurd image they're too close they wouldn't be able to see anything so it's a kind of piss take about the legibility of exhibitions as public information I think and I think so in that way I think it is complex but I also think as image it's also it's quite a straightforward kind of to you can't make sense of this your tools for making sense of culture don't work here and I think that absolutely a challenge with Archivegram who were essentially the children of the independent group in that sense my watch says is help our seven which means we have to draw this to a close if you've got further questions for our speakers there's a wine reception afterwards you can pigeon hold pigeon hold but I don't know I don't know and for people online if you have questions unanswered questions then email their emails are very easy to find the RCA likes to keep stuff like that very well hidden so yeah so once more can I ask you to round of applause for our speakers