 I think we will make a start and people will join us in the next few minutes. My name's Sarah Turner. I'm the Deputy Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and it's a real great pleasure to welcome you all to what I think is the sixth day of this series of events under the umbrella title of Cutting Edge, collage in Britain 1945 to now. And this is day two of the workshop segment of this whole series. And we're really delighted to have you with us. It's we really enjoyed the workshop format yesterday. And I know the speakers and the chairs did as well being able to see people and just have a bit of a have a bit more of a sense of community and a conversation developing across what has been a really interesting and lively theme to think through. And we were just saying in the pre-meat with the speakers when we were doing our practice session that it feels like people are looking not only at collage as a practice, but as a kind of method to think through as well and a set of vocabulary and languages through which to sort of rethink our history and our historical writing as well. So that's just been so productive for us as organisers. And that includes myself and Elena Cripper at Tate, Rosie Ram at the Royal College of Art and my colleagues, Shauna and Dami at the Paul Mellon Centre. And we should also say hello to Mark Hallott, the director as well, who was very involved in programming this event as well. When it was originally planned for March 2020 before we transformed it into a digital event. So, yeah, you're very, very welcome. And it just reminds me of some words that Elizabeth Price said in the very first panel that we had for the conference. And she described collaged objects as objects that never rest. And perhaps if you've been to every session, you might also feel feel like that as well. But hopefully your energy levels are high. But I think that that never resting as well, that remaking, being objects that are remade from other things, transformed and anew is something again that has threaded its way across all the sessions in this session. So as always, I'll just run us quickly through the housekeeping guidelines that we have for Paul Mellon Centre events. And in this session, we will have two panels, each consisting of two 10 minute papers. And after each panel, there will be time for chair discussion. And again, with the workshop format, it's really great to have that interaction. So we really encourage you to participate to raise your hand using the raise hand function in the reactions button if you have a question or a comment. It's great if you can turn on your videos. You might, when people are speaking, you know, you might want to turn them off and, you know, sort of not have that sort of video glare on you. But in the questions and conversations, if you feel comfortable, we really appreciate it if you can join in and it feels more like a seminar workshop atmosphere as well. After each discussion, you'll be randomly assigned into a breakout room. And if you participated in the one yesterday, you'll have experience up there, just a really nice informal moment to meet other people who are interested in collage and share ideas. And, yeah, bring a coffee if you fancy. You're at home. Many of you can have a glass of wine, you know, do what you want. Just make yourself comfortable and, you know, ready to engage those ideas. We'll also fit in a short break and this session will be recorded and made available to the public. We're getting a lot of requests, actually. People really want to watch the sessions, especially these slightly longer ones in the afternoon where people might not be able to attend live, but only the papers and the questions will be recorded, not the breakout rooms. And if you want to use the closed captioning, which is a kind of sometimes uses collages method of its own kind, then you can do that as well by clicking the CC button which actually should be of, I can't see it on mine. Oh, I can now. Yeah, live transcript. Yeah, there it is. The CC live transcript button at the bottom of the screen so you can access the captioning that goes along with this session. OK, so I will hand over now to Eleanor to say a little bit more about this session. Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. It's the first time of having stayed with us and taking part in our conversations over the last couple of weeks. And especially a huge thank you to today's speakers and chairs. We very much look forward to your contributions. And I feel there is a wonderful sense of circularity in a way today papers very much seems to go back to the post war moment to that sort of sense of butter materiality that we spoke of in the first day, that sense of this proliferation of images and texts that start being fragmented and used by artists, but also to the question of the ethnographic that was raised. I think particularly Ben Crumfield did raise it during his presentation. And I think it's a great opportunity to also go back to these more difficult queries. So as Sarah said, the workshop format worked very well yesterday. So do take part, join sending raising your hand, asking questions and in the breakout conversations. And I should now just proceed and introduce the chair of our first panel, Ben Crumfield. So Ben is senior tutor in curatorial theory and history at the Curated Contemporary Arts Master programme at the Royal College of Arts. His research focuses on the relationship of the curatorial to notions of the contemporary and the archive in post war Britain. And recent articles include on not being with time clearly in post war Britain from 2018 and mind the gap unfolding the proximities of the curatorial from 2017, both published in performance search. And Ben gave us a wonderful paper last week on the clear timeliness of collage and the curatorial in post war Britain. And we are delighted that he's back with us today. So welcome Ben and over to you. Thank you so much, Eleanor. And thanks for having me back. Really excited for this day of workshops and the papers we've got coming up. So I'm going to introduce our two speakers. And then I will hand over to them. And as has already been said, we'll listen to both papers and then we will take questions at the end. And I encourage people to use the chat box as well as raise their hand if they have questions that come up. They want to kind of log as we go along and we'll review those. So first, we are going to hear from Isabel Mooney, who is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, supported by the Carnegie Trust. Her thesis considers how artists in Britain navigated the apocalyptic landscape of bombed out London as it underwent social reconstruction and urbanisation in the post war period, placing the visual impetus of the bomb site at the centre of this discussion. Isabel recently conducted research on post war collages made by John McHale and Nigel Henderson. I'm going to hear about some of that today at the Yale Centre for British Art as a recipient of a visiting scholar award. The next we'll be hearing from Rachel Stratton, who is an art historian and curator of British and American mid 20th century art who earned her PhD at the Courtauld in 2018 and completed postdoctoral research fellowship at the Yale Centre of British Art in 2019-20 and is currently writing her book Gramours of Form Art and the Crisis of Language in 1950s Britain. That sounds amazing, supported by the Paul Millan Centre for postdoctoral fellowship. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Isabel. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ben, and a big thank you to the conference organisers as well for inviting me here. I'm just going to share my screen now and get to the presentation. So today I'm going to be focusing on two collage works. The first is Maphead by John McHale, which was made in 1956. And the second is Rocket Landscape by Nigel Henderson, which was made in 1960. Both works use fragmented maps and aerial photographs to visualise the transformation of urban and rural landscape in the wake of the Second World War. They can also be mapped onto wider social issues during this time, ranging from the militarisation of the rural landscape to the deeply problematic residential and spatial practices that were happening in postwar London as Britain's empire began to be dismantled. So starting firstly with Maphead. So this work combines a collection of street maps that form the shape of a head, a body and a raised arm. The scraps are fixed together, forming a unified land mass, which is then outlined in Crayon. The left eye, which is just here, is formed from a photograph of the erosion lines of a mountainous landscape viewed from above. And the right, just here, is formed from a cropped image of an aeroplane propeller. Linking this work directly to sight and reconnaissance. The hand at the end of the figure's arm is an aerial view of an oval short circuit motor racing track, which seems to wave out at us. Sections of street maps form the rest of the collage, densely cobbled together to form an overcrowded neighbourhood. The figure of a track that Mikael uses for the hand resembles the world famous Islip Speedway race track in New York, which opened in 1947. Race tracks like these were being built across America and Britain throughout the 1950s and were predominantly being carved into large open spaces in the countryside, slicing up fields to accommodate this new infrastructure. Mikael's inclusion of this image seems to gesture to the novelty of this activity popularised in the 1950s, but also demonstrates how rural landscape was transformed through urbanisation as a result. The first point I want to draw attention to is Mikael's cobbling together of residential street maps in this work. These maps represent highly dense urban space and convey the experience of living in London in the wake of destruction. When racialised British citizens from places in the Caribbean migrated to Britain in the 1940s and 50s, they were forced into low paying jobs and into socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods like Stetney and Elephant and Castle, and both of these areas were badly damaged during the Blitz. This bomb damage map of Stetney, produced by the London County Council, depicts the level of destruction that was inflicted upon the area. And we can see where residential streets have been coloured in purple and black. These areas represent the extreme levels of disrepair and obliteration. These kinds of residential streets depicted in the LCC map resemble the overcrowded communities that Mikael constructs in map head. Reading this work then in the context of residential and spatial practices that were happening in post-war London, we can perhaps see how this work can be woven into narratives that address issues of visibility, overcrowding and substandard living conditions. During the 1950s and 60s, multi-storey houses were subdivided to maximise rental potential and temporary partition walls were put up inside, disguised behind the facades of terraced houses. The houses in Mikael's street maps are uniformly lined up, suggesting a quintessential terraced row. Yet inside they may have been chopped up by partition walls to house multiple people or even entire families within each room. In the street maps, issues like this are completely invisible, suggesting how they were quite literally being kept behind closed doors. And this also illuminates the way in which space constructed in maps is often completely detached from reality. The second point I want to draw attention to is the way in which Mikael uses map fragments in ways that seem to disrupt and challenge the purpose of a map itself. These street maps, which are part of the ephemera of the city and may have been even used in a militarised context, were once used as forms of navigation and spatial orientation and further as tools that are used for the implementation of authority and power. But now they have become undecipherable and anonymised in Mikael's work. The way that he slices up communities and fixes them randomly to the collage reflects how space had been arbitrarily and violently remapped through cartographic practices during colonialism. So we can perhaps view Mikael's work in the context of the repressive and violent processes of sociological mapping. Moving on now to Henderson's collage. Rocket Landscape is a mixed media work that combines printed paper, including photographs and paint to resemble a landscape viewed from above. Henderson used both aerial photographs of land as well as photographs of microscopic material. And these photographs have been cut into small scraps and scattered on the work amongst remnants of corrugated cardboard and paper painted in earthy tones of brown, red, yellow and green. The fragments are pasted roughly overlapping each other and giving this work a kind of rawness. The scrap material is then bisected by lines that slice through the work creating these geometric shapes, recalling a landscape of fields viewed from above. Henderson's evocation of the aerial perspective is not surprising considering his wartime experiences as an RAF pilot where his duties involved working with aerial photography. And this was quite a polarising experience for him, which he describes as both exhilarating, but also as something that filled him with immense fear. Experiencing aerial visuality in a militarised context, I would first like to suggest that Henderson used the method of collage to describe how aerial perspective functioned as an abstracted vision of landscape as both an index of place, but also appearing deeply detached from reality. Taking this point further, I think that Henderson's use of collage goes as far as to challenge the optical authority of the aerial view, where collage almost behaves like camouflage. The aerial view is physically torn apart and shattered in his process, setting up an alternative view of a landscape brutalised at the hands of aerial reconnaissance. The second point I would like to make about rocket landscape is that this work evokes the militarisation of urban space, not only through the evocation of the aerial view as a tool of military surveillance, but by specifically depicting a landscape infiltrated by urban and militarised structures. The painted pieces of corrugated cardboard which are shattered in patches across the work, as seen in this detail of the collage on the left, resemble the corrugated metal roofs of nissen huts viewed from above. Henderson's landscape could be a military base located in the countryside. A photograph of child-growth airfield in Oxfordshire, taken in 1953, depicts a field with nissen huts that were still in use after the Second World War had ended as temporary accommodation. Henderson's collage, dated 1960, gestures to the lingering presence of military structures combined with the looming growth and presence of the Cold War demonstrates a continued fear around urban and military infiltration of the countryside in the post-war period. Henderson's landscape draws on this anxiety by forging a disordered and crudely organised space that continues to feel traumatised by the lingering presence of war. Bringing both of these works together... Sorry, I accidentally stopped your sharing. Please put it back up. Don't worry. Hold on, here we go. Bringing both of these works together, it seems that through collage and its representation of a physical breakdown of material, both works engage with the destruction of landscape and cityscape. What also happens paradoxically through the collage method is that there exists both the destructive and visceral breaking reform, but then a remaking and mending through the reconfiguration of the broken fragments to make a new home. This process is directly reflective of the transformation of the landscape itself during this period in Britain, destroyed during the Blitz creating bomb sites in the landscape, but also as a space on the brink of reconstruction and renewal, a time when both ruin and reconstruction coexisted, and this tension between the poles of ruin and remaking is poignantly captured in these works. Thank you. Thank you so much, Isabel. Already a whole bunch of things to unpack and look at further. Thank you so much for those detail analysis, those two images. Next, we're going to pass to Rachel, and then we will take questions for both speakers. So thank you, Rachel. Okay. Thank you very much, Ben, and thank you to all the organisers. This has been really an incredible conference. So much appreciated. Okay. I'm going to share my screen. I have a disclaimer about my images because unfortunately quite a lot this material I wasn't, I'm not able to get access to at the moment, so some of that I had to cobble together from quite rubbish photographs that I had. So apologies in advance for the images. When Theo Crosby became co-editor of architectural design in August 1953, and subsequently technical editor in November 1954, the character of the journal dramatically changed. Bright eye-catching covers became the norm, often consisting of floating coloured blocks that overlap and buy for attention, or else comprising overlay disparate images such as the cover second from left. Each used the collage inspired technique to say something about the urban environment, whether to invoke the ordered modularity of the pre-designed urban plan, the layers of different buildings that form the urban space, or to drive home the relationship between human behaviour and urban or industrial design. The rise of collage and assemblage in the mid-1950s, especially among the so-called independent group of artists, architects and designers, is closely tied to a renewed fervor in the graphic arts to which Theo Crosby was a key contributor. The process inherent to graphic design of bringing into relation different types of information became a key mode of inquiry into how information is transmitted and received, a fact perhaps best indicated by John McHale's transistor series in which the collage fragments actually represent information passing through a transistor. Crosby experimented with the possibilities of collage as an epistemological tool across the pages of architectural design and in the Little Magazine uppercase, which ran for five issues between 1959 and 61 and from there in living arts. While the extensive use of collage in little magazines from the 1960s has been thoroughly examined by Beatrice Columbina and Craig Buckley, my particular focus on the 1950s seeks to understand how and why the journal emerged as a site for experimentation with the language of collage and its epistemological potential. The proliferation of collage and assemblage practices in the mid-1950s coincided with a cross-disciplinary cultural concern about how the structures of language and knowledge captured reality and how best to convey the flux and multivalence of the post-war urban experience. Within this context, the print journal with its intrinsic relationship between text and image became a uniquely suitable forum for experimenting with different methods of information transfer enabling Crosby's collaborative graphic art practice to flourish. Crosby's name is often associated with This Is Tomorrow, the remarkable exhibition he organised at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, in which 12 groups designed a series of statement pavilions that reflected a projected future dominated by new technologies, materials and forms of communication. The exhibition became something of a manifesto, pailing the new era of plurality and collaborative endeavour in which multiple ideas existed simultaneously vying for attention in a crowded communication environment. In the height that has and continues to surround this exhibition, it can be easy to overlook the fact that one of its most iconic collages produce this image, just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing, produced by Richard Hamilton, Terry Hamilton and Magda Cordell was displayed not in the exhibition itself, but in the catalogue designed by Edward Wright. It was in this more intimate and portable setting which served as its own distinct artistic space that viewers were introduced to Hamilton's notion of a tabular image. That is an image generated from a constellation of descriptive terms, man, woman, space and so forth. A contrast to the tabular collage was made on the opposite page of the catalogue by a black and white perceptual illusion in which figure and ground alternated in the viewer's perceptual field, causing what Llyfrid Wittgenstein coined in the Philosophical Investigations posthumously published in 1953 an aspect shift. The collage and the illusion represented two different structures of language and by extension thought, the one attracting multiple meanings and associations while the other illustrated either all modes of representation. Crosby's own contribution to this is tomorrow in a group including himself, the graphic designer's Germano Facetti and Edward Wright and the artist William Turnbull was closely aligned with this approach to the print journal, a point made by Craig Buckley who compares the three-dimensional architectural framework to the flattened grid so often visible in architectural design. Crosby described this assemblage technique as an antagonistic collaboration, one in which objects and images were placed in a context and left to fight it out. Is this idea of an antagonistic collaboration that I would suggest guided much of Crosby's inclusion of collage in the print journal in this period? The intimacy of the journal and the relationship it established between text and image created the environment for experimenting with different modes of symbolic representation and provided a forum within which the tabulated plural nature of collage came into direct contact with more traditional written language. Here is perhaps necessary to give a little context about the anxiety surrounding language and its structures in the 1950s. In a series of seminars on aesthetic problems and contemporary art given at the ICA between 1953 and 1954, Tony Dalrenso delivered a seminar on action painting in which he reconstituted the crisis of culture taking hold as a crisis of language. Language he claimed is at the same time a tool and a track, a collection of cliches applied to an inherited system of abstractions such that the kind of language used i.e. the structure of that language determined the statement about reality being made. In his summing up seminar on art in the 1950s in the same series, Reynabannan reinforced this view stating that language was quote a filter through which we took a partial view of the world and that the laws of language were seen to owe their consistency to their own structure and not to the connection to their connection with the world of fact. This idea was echoed by theorists with whom the circles at the ICA were interested including Marshall McLuhan and Kenneth Boulding but none more so than that of Alfred Kozipski whose ideas were influential to many artists and critics at the time including those associated with the independent group and constructed abstract art. In the 1979 documentary film Fathers of Pop Reynabannan cited Kozipski's pseudoscientific term science and sanity as a key source aligning its exploration of the disconnect between language and reality and call for linguistic structures that looked beyond Aristotelian either or binaries with the group's own endeavours to find ways of representing the plurality of the modern environment and these are just screenshots from the film where you can see he shows both science and sanity and the science fiction level the world of Lulea which used Kozipski's ideas. Kozipski's structural differential diagram shown here matched the levels of human abstraction from the event level that is the atomic and subatomic levels of reality through the human experience of the objective world and into the infinite levels of abstraction available thanks to language, inference and interpretation. Kozipski called for greater consciousness about the abstract nature of language and for the development of non-Aristotelian modes of representation that encouraged both and modes of thought. In the pages of architectural design and uppercase Kospy had an opportunity to experiment and play with these levels of abstraction using collage and assemblage inspired techniques to provide different layers of meaning. Here for instance he overlays large blocks of text with suggested imagery a nude that looks like a screwdriver or a lattice spaceship-like structure that riffs off those represented in the article. Unlike the text and the photographs these illustrations float on the page uncaptioned and unspecified adding a further abstracted layer of representation to the otherwise informative piece which encouraged imaginative analysis. In uppercase one Kospy adopted collage inspired techniques to make audiences aware of the distinction between information and interpretation. The journal he wrote will deal with the whole field of visual communication and if some of the connections are tenuous then the reader must bridge the gap with his own experience and imagination. The way Kospy assembled text and imagery from current pop culture of contemporary art and historical art put this method into action creating an environment of antagonistic collaboration in which the very ability of language to convey meaning is called into question. In Kospy's layouts as in the collages included by John McHale the gaps between the fragments of information served an important function in that they revealed the chasm between representation or language and reality or truth. In the same year that he began publishing uppercase 1958 Kospy worked with Richard Hamilton and the print technicians at architectural design to produce a print version of the graphic design inspired collage on Margeau Chrysler Corr. It was likely the first public showing of the work presented not in a gallery setting but in the print journal. The journal environment allowed Kospy and Hamilton to play around with the different levels of abstraction and interpretation offered by text and image setting up the type of antagonistic collaboration Kospy had alluded to in the catalogue for this is tomorrow. To the left of the central fold was an authorial statement by Hamilton about the print which formed a kind of margin alongside the artwork guiding audiences through the levels of abstraction from object to interpretation. A description of the printing process was followed by an iconographical reading that cited his sources from Glossy's and his obsession with the trope of the car and the female sex symbol. Audiences were invited to seek out these signifiers in the image adding layers of association and meaning. However, the fragmentation of the collage structure paired with the flattened monochrome of the printing process made this nigh on impossible because the text and image seemed to operate at cross purposes. The collage image constantly eludes and evades Hamilton's narrative rendering his descriptions of the iconography somewhat confusing as the forms of the sex icon and car slip between recognisable iconography and the interplay of surface texture that engulfs the collage elements. Here the collage presented in the print journal surrounded by linear informative texts made space for entropy the moment at which communication breaks down. And representation whether in text or image fails to convey useful information. In this and the other examples given the importance of assemblage was in its multivalent both analogic. Crosby's graphic layouts were enhanced by the collages he included by McHale, Hamilton and others as they like his designs resisted synthesis and instead presented language as a series of layers of meaning that existed simultaneously. The palimstestic collage image thus made apparent the partial view of reality offered by all language and the danger of unconsciously utilising symbol as truth. Thank you so much Rachel again a very densely packed and fascinating paper. We'll move into questions but I do just I know it's kind of almost customary to point out the nice correspondences between these papers and obviously the conference has been well put together like this but I thought there was some really interesting crossovers and one of the things I thought was really powerful between the two papers was demonstrating this kind of ambivalence or an interest about structuralism and a kind of ambivalent structuralism that emerges but also this foregrounding of around communication and the kind of persistent interest in forms of materialities as well of communication. Before we open it up to the audience I'm just going to take chairs prerogative to ask a kind of initial question to both speakers and I wanted to start with Isabel because one of the things that I guess really hit me was that I think there's a tendency often to see members of the independent group and a lot of their workers quite playful and often quite celebratory of different forms of kind of mediation and media but what you showed also presented something which perhaps bit more troubling a bit more disturbing and a bit more anxious and kind of uncertain so I wanted to kind of ask you about that anxiety and the sort of monstrosity of that anxiety that particularly emerges in the Cale's image of course which is also similar to other images that Henderson produced with kind of heads to think about just to think to say a little bit more about this strange relationship between the fragmented figure to some kind of figuration that fragmented figure and this this I guess slightly disturbing image of a kind of fragmented landscape. Thank you Ben yeah I think where I sort of started with this paper I was thinking about particularly with John McHale's work The Figures so Maphead was one of a number of collages he made of these sort of cobbled together figures and as I sort of looked at them I started to sort of think about them as landscapes as well as images of the sort of fragmented body and I think particularly with the Maphead work because of this use of street maps and you know the photograph of the of the mountainous landscape there is definitely that kind of register towards the landscape and sort of sort of representing that there is another collage he did called Figurehead which actually tears a map of the USSR in two across the body of a figure and the landscape that he represents at the time in the 50s was going through it was actually Kazakhstan now was going through extreme sort of agricultural reform was being heavily industrialised and brutalised so I began to start thinking about what exactly are these sort of maps and streets representing in the real world because I think through engaging with these you know materials and fragments that you find in everyday life there is that very direct engagement with the world around you and definitely the kind of register of landscape and the way that the fig operates within the landscape is definitely prominent throughout so I hope that answers your question Yeah thank you very much Isabel you're gesturing towards a kind of greater depth of I guess sort of political social concern and perhaps sometimes giving credit for it was really interesting and I just wanted to ask Rachel something that you very powerfully draw out here is the function of kind of mass mediation so that the magazine, the reproduction and I wondered how you feel sort of approaching particularly something like Hamilton's work but thinking about Theochrosby's practice etc thinking about the what shifts in the way that we look perhaps at these different kind of disciplinary formations and fields of practice particularly say fine art and architectural design when we start to look through these collage this kind of these collagic instruments like the small magazine and we start to see things kind of leveled out through the form of reproduction I'm just kind of interested to know what you think then shifts within our understanding here within our understanding or within the culture of the time I'm happy with either I mean I guess I was thinking in terms of how it encourages us to think about it differently but yes also yes absolutely maybe they're challenging the culture of the time as well yeah I mean I would say that I think that's initially how I interpreted your question and I think there are some really significant shifts that are well known for instance the fact that they all worked I mean most of them worked across various different media and did work in you know some form of industrial design whether it was producing catalogs for the ICA or working you know for Harper's Bazaar as Tony del Renzi I did and so there was this kind of natural dissolution of these disciplines of industrial design and art and I think I mean I do see also the kind of rise of screen printing as a huge influence in not just the proliferation of screen printing practices but also the way in which collage was being thought about collage proper as in kind of cutting up and pasting bits and pieces onto a piece of paper because I think that the process of screen printing allowed them to really think about things in terms of these layers these flattened layers instead of the kind of more surrealist way of thinking about collage as this kind of juxtaposition of two things that sparks a kind of unconscious association so these different layers could exist simultaneously and kind of overlap and not necessarily meet in some cases I think yeah I also could I just say something about Isabel's paper which I'm really fascinated by Isabel's work which I know a bit already and one of the things that really strikes me about your work is about is that is the way in which it kind of points to this new ecology of that it was coming about in the 1950s and this kind of lack of separation between mankind or humankind and environment and you know the fragmentation of the body equals the fragmentation of the landscape and I think that's something really really interesting in your work Thank you Rachel yeah and I think that I did first sort of came about through my study of bomb sites and kind of how the body is broken in that space but also the landscape and how there was this coming together of those two very sort of violent and traumatic things that happened to both sort of space so yeah thanks Thank you I want to see if we have questions from the audience feel free just to unmute yourself put your virtually raise your hand or physically raise your hand anything you want to ask Eleanor I just have a quite simple question for Isabel really curiosity is about the relationship between McCall and Anderson at that moment and any you know whether they were discussing their work with maps and what the actual relationship between them would have been over those works if you know of it Yeah I don't know immediately if there was that sort of conversation I think at the time McCall was travelling quite a bit between US and Britain and kind of bringing stuff back with him that I know he's sort of shared at the ICA images fragments of of just ephemera that he collected I think that for Henderson his sort of interest was coming from the the aerial visuality and the aerial photographs so I think that's where they slightly differ because you know I'm talking about fragmented maps but there is also a distinction between the map and the aerial photograph as well that's happening there so yeah I think they they both had the interest but I don't know if they communicated directly about it that it would be good to know Thank you Thanks Layla Thank you Isabel this is a question for you you mentioned John McCall's travels to the US and I'm just interested based on the relationships and the correspondence between McCall's and metagraphs and those of Paris based movements such as the letterists international and the situation of the international afterward was there any travel to Paris or was there was he informed by that Paris in Malaya with the time? I know that Henderson visited Paris and was particularly in touch with artists sort of the brute movement I think he he took a lot of he drew a lot on that I don't personally know about McCall I think he was more sort of operating in the US context at the time but maybe Rachel could come in and say something as well because I know that she does a lot of work on McCall may know about a kind of connection with Paris I mean I think that you've said it I think McCall was much more oriented towards America and you know it's difficult to know exactly who McCall was in touch with because his archive is under lock and key so there's there's I'm sure much to discover about who he was corresponding with but there's in everything that I've looked at I've never seen any indication that he was involved in any way with groups in Paris the only person who I can think that he I mean there was obviously people like Anthony Tapier who came to Britain in 1953 so there is crossover there um he did he was involved with the opposing forces exhibition and um I think Ralph Romney is also someone who had a very you know strong connection with Paris but also operated in in Britain and was known by all of these so there's kind of figures that would link them but I don't know that McCall necessarily was contacting them directly okay I am aware that he did trans or McCall did translate a situationist text so I was just wondering to what extent does he position himself alongside feedable um and the rest but thank you that was really enlightening It's always amusing to think that Ralph Romney always gave the ICA is the address for the Psychogeographical Society of which he was the only member so you know there's a kind of if nothing else there's a milieu right where these things are circulating but it's quite interesting to think about the difference I guess between a kind of a more um to read approach and a kind of aerial thinking and and how those do don't cross over question from Mark Thanks Ben I've got a question for Rachel but it kind of is quite a close question about some of the imagery that she showed and I don't know whether Shawna we can get back to Rachel's she's screen share and your PowerPoints I mean we don't have to but it would be helpful to be able to do so is that possible I think I should be able to just do that Yeah Yeah could you go ahead because I don't have a copy Oh Well maybe I have one and I don't download it properly What was the Yeah so it's if you can just quickly pause on your on the this is tomorrow exhibition catalogue spread that you show and I thought it Whoops this one this one yeah that next one Sorry about that and I thought it was really interesting the way in which you're asking to us to think about the dialogue between either side of this spread and then I can you go forward to your your architectural design spread with the Hamilton homage and and yeah this one I was just really interested in the correlation if it's hard for me to point from where I'm sitting but if everyone looks at the image on the right and you see that design on the bumper at the sort of bottom left hand side of the image you see that there yeah it offers a really interesting parallel to that image of the kind of perceptual shift you know that as the figure ground thing and it just made me interested about the ways in which it seems as if Hamilton integrates that kind of pattern into this image but also once again plays it off against this much more tabulated text on the left which is a kind of a gathering together as you said of all the kinds of contents that you might get that you saw earlier in the thesis tomorrow but here so it's kind of got it on the one hand I'm interested in the relationship between that shape and the text on the left but also interested in the way in which he seems to have integrated that idea of that play between negative and positive space or light and dark space into the actual imagery of modern consumption that's there and I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that yeah I mean that's really interesting and not something that I'd noticed before so thank you very much for pointing that out and I mean I think it is really interesting that he integrates that kind of play with positive and negative and I think Hamilton particularly is really interested in that in how abstraction can kind of offer almost a kind of subversion of interpretation you know or kind of it can kind of subvert the iconography so the abstraction can kind of become your perception can kind of shift between the abstract moments and the iconography and then in this particular one the abstract moments seem to be kind of winning in a way and the iconography seems to be kind of almost dissolving into it and so I think that there's something definitely interesting to tease out there in terms of how that other image of the black and white kind of plays with figure and ground and here he's kind of also playing with figure and ground okay thank you we have a question from Andrea you're on mute Andrea I was interested in that positive negative aspect that you introduced you referred to oh that's it this is the structure that we were just on oh sorry showed the hand that no no the one we were just on the big one of the yes yes yes yes that positive negative hand it reminded me of the yng ng yang symbol where they you see the interweaving of of that the white shape that becomes part of the black shape around it too it just struck me because I just saw it as that yng ng yang symbol and you know that too no go ahead Rachel please I know I was just saying that's a really interesting thing to raise because another things that I kind of think about quite a lot with this image which I seem to return to all the time is you know whether this female figure is kind of defined by this might maybe easy to see in the original defined by the consumer items or whether she is kind of hanging the whole thing together and imagining her presence into the image is actually what allows us to see the image at all and that's that kind of masculine feminine energies that the yng ng yang also kind of thinks about Thank you Rachel and we have a question from Robert Robert you're muted can you hear me now yes we can this question is for Isabel but also relates to one of the slides shown in Rachel's presentation regarding Mikael's map head and the transfer of the rural landscape onto a bodily form which to my eye those cutouts of the urban streets can also kind of be read as technologically to some way like transistors or something and there was one of Rachel's slides of Mikael's work that I was not familiar with that referred to like a technological aspect and I'm wondering if either of you or both of you could speak to how you know in addition to the rural landscape that's being transferred onto this bodily form the you know changes in technology that were occurring at the time was all may have also been transferred onto this bodily form Yeah Robert thank you very much I think you know in terms of Mikael's particular engagement with you know technological transformations he is very explicit about that in many of his collage works the transistor images and sort of the way in which that the figure the mind is being kind of impacted by these developments in terms of that coming through in map head I think you know in terms of um sort of registers of information and transformation of physical space and how potentially urban spaces is being transformed may be sort of being impacted by sort of technological information in you know innovations and things like that I think absolutely there's so much that can be read just from the residential streets and how he sort of layers those things so yeah no that's a good point yeah I think that that there are examples of Mikael's collages that that make that more explicit the kind of mapping of technology onto the body the one that comes to mine immediately is is at the Yale Centre for Chart it's called EV1 so if you want to have a look at it it's and it kind of looks as though a kind of x-ray is happening but also if you look more closely there's all sorts of bits of machinery and that kind of thing so there I mean he does do that very directly as well and again that kind of machinic self and that both embrace and fear which is also through the slightly slightly tongue in cheek tongue in cheek lens of the BEM the bug-eyed monster I think really comes out in those we have a question from Marianne and we are going to be very close to going into our breakout so it's maybe our last one thank you I promise to be very very quick Rachel I wanted to go back into the aspect shift and just wanted to see whether you've thought about or sort of gone into the idea of whether the artists consciously use these triggers to provoke you know certain idea shifts or whether they'd be just a happy accidents and well I think that there people there are people arguing both sides but I think that they are very consciously using them because I've looked into the kind of interest in Wittgenstein in the 50s obviously Edwardo Pellots who becomes very interested in Wittgenstein towards the end of the 1950s but actually from the research I've done you know the publication the posthumous publication of the philosophical investigations was quite a big deal it was it was talked about widely in the press and people like David Sylvester the critic were interested in Wittgenstein and I think that you once you start looking at a lot of what they were doing in the early to mid 50s actually it chimes a lot more with the philosophical investigations rather than the tracked artist which is what Pellots he became more interested in in the 60s and so yeah I think that there's a lot to say about Wittgenstein in the 50s Thank you Rachel I mean I also think there that you know that this breadth of interest in communication is also you know very strongly related to that the contextual and kind of real language through you know really thinking about what are the meat what are the context for meaning making and communication and I just was also struck is a but I just want to just fine you wondered if you might say something about the this this figure this monstrous figure that's doing this looking and I kind of wondered what you thought about this ambivalence around the the kind of technological on maybe professionalised eye of kind of urban looking Yeah I think I absolutely think that it's explicit in this work especially by making these eyes so linked to aerial reconnaissance and sight I mean the aeroplane propeller and the the mountainous landscape I mean it's sort of you know landscape and then this sort of military related thing and I think that there's definitely this kind of reflexivity going on where the the figure is also looking out at us through these modes of of vision and through those things that are you know part of systems of communication and things like that also very much linked to war and you know war from the air so yeah just Ben can you just tell me what do you mean by ambivalence in this context Well I guess I'm thinking across yours and Rachel's papers that there's such a enthusiasm an interest in kind of a hyper forms of mediated looking through technological modes but in that image there's also as you pointed out there's there's also sometimes something of a kind of concern or a concern about the alienation that might be produced by that which is perhaps a little bit more kind of closely related to something we might associate with sort of post war existential kind of concerns that often gets neglected so I'm just kind of interested to bring that a kind of ambivalence around that back in I'm looking at the time and I'm looking to the organisers should we be going into a break out now Yes please so I'll invite Eleanor on to give us some details about that and then we'll spit you into break at the end of my friend Thank you firstly just to say thank you so much to Isabelle and Rachel for not only incredibly interesting papers but also such thorough engagements all these questions thank you so much No thank you very much thank you Indeed thank you all thank you Ben and yes we are going now into break up rooms we will be four to five people in each room around 10 minutes just relax introduce yourself and pick up any of those conversations we will also have some prompts sort of coming up on the screen suggesting topics but just feel free to address anything that has been discussed just today or beyond and this session is not recorded so it's a very relaxed improvement part of the day so see you in around 10 minutes I think Shona yet is sending us a joining message now so just click that Shuda must say we'll be a few weeks until we get everything up but you will reference a lot in the fourth session the collage politics and punk practices so next week I might send you a sneaky link to the raw video of that Oh wonderful well after all these discussions these sessions these two days I've up to my auntie in terms of found footage on the side I fancy mark making on a freshly printed copy of Dreaming Rivers that'd be nice that would be quite nice yeah if you decide to invite people in 2020 or something we'll come along or please do I will send out those invitations thank you for that offer so I think that's pretty much everybody back breakout rooms are closed so I'll pass back over to Eleanor yes I think we just welcome back everyone I think we just have a few minutes if you wish to do so to bring back to the table to everyone any fragments of conversations you had for everyone's reflection we've spoken in our group about the wonderful tension between the materiality of the collages we have been looking at and the discursive Judah please do jump in yeah I just had a lovely conversation with Michelle Teak who's in Hanoe and we're talking about the work she's doing for her students because because of they were unable to do stuff over lockdown they were working with found footage and so we and Michelle's made her bring in archives and collections from institutions nearby at her university into allowing her students to access footage and that sense of collaboration the enthusiasm around that collaboration is quite exciting and that led on to discussion about citation that was touched on today in the presentations and in the discussion you know in that in the way we privilege bibliographies and references when we're writing essays I was really impressed at the Sheffield Dockfest this year to see some of the short films reference every moment of found footage in the work which presented a very different set of credits at the end of a film and so this idea of citation or referencing as a way to access an artist's work and to locate the work in history it doesn't necessarily fix the meaning of the work but allows a reader or a viewer more access into the thinking that went into the work so yeah what Michelle's doing is really fantastic really impressed Thanks for sharing Judah any other thoughts or comments on your conversations or on the day? I just I just wanted to say how interesting it is to be joined by so many practising artists in my group we had two artists and a curator with us but just to hear from practitioners how these different papers have been chiming with their practises and the different definitions of collage that they're working with in their work or have been thinking about over the course of this conference and also Ellis was very rudely interrupted when we were dragged to mid-flow dragged back into the break out room so sorry about that Ellis I was kind of on the edge of my seat waiting to hear the end of your sentence Well it's just very briefly I was just saying that I'm really enjoying this for so many reasons this whole thing and thank you all but briefly I was starting to say that 15 years ago a friend of mine who's a fairly well known artist was introducing me to another fairly well known artist and she said what do you do and I said well I collage and my friend said oh don't say that that's awful and she gave me a lecture later for putting myself in my work down because I use the word collage so I'm loving this this is brilliant you can use the term you know we're just overusing it which is wonderful I love the idea is collage is a dirty word or dirty phrase maybe oh would you just switch over so I think we'll go with breaks now Eleanor can you do it? Yeah just 10 minutes break and then we reconvene for a second panel so see you all off by 25 past great thank you hi everyone welcome back I'm just waiting for people to settle back into the room I can see lots of you are sitting down making yourself comfortable so welcome back for what promises to be another exciting set of papers and new research this afternoon and again we will have time for questions and focus discussion at the end of the presentation so stay with us until the end and it is now my pleasure to reconvene our workshop and introduce the chair of our second panel Samuel Bebe Samuel is managing editor of the journal Art History his current research focuses on the interactions between collage magazines and historiography within the context of 1960s and 70s British art history is currently working on a visual special issue of art history entitled Ever tied to the fragment art history and as collage as well as a book length study art history as things seen the new arts historiography which looks at art magazines and art historical periodicals from the 1970s in Britain some of his research in this area has already appeared in British art studies and in art history so we are absolutely delighted you accepted our invitation to chair this session Samuel and I now hand over to you thank you so much Elena our final panel in this workshop brings together two papers both of which promise to remind us of the ways in which collage and in particular the means by which it's presented and represented on the walls of galleries and museums on the pages of magazines the various ways in which it can traverse time and space in the introduction to his 1948 work Mechanisation Takes Command Siegfried Hiddigan proposed that history writing is ever tied to the fragment known facts are scattered broadcast like stars across the government we assumed that they form a coherent body in the historical night obviously then we represent them as fragments and do not hesitate when necessary to spring from one period to another pictures and words are buttoxiliaries but a decisive step must be taken by the reader in their mind the fragments of meaning here displayed should become alive in new and manifold relations a pair of presentations that we'll hear now promise to do for this afternoon this afternoon's audience maybe maybe that the people of our first speaker Leila Nasser-Eldin is titled Humphrey Denning's Handominium and the Colour just as as a historiographic practice Leila is a chase and AHRC funded by a doctoral scholar in political aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London where she also teaches across the English art departments a thesis versus montage as a historiographic practice in correspondences in the interwar work of Otto Benjamin and Humphrey Denning's the examining a shared milieu of surrealism between the two wars then here from Lisa Madigan-Newby which paper today is called Exhibiting Ethnographic Collage in London on the I.C.A. Museum Lisa completed an AHRC funded PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2017 entitled Assembly in Practice Artists, Ethnography and Disability in London 1945 and our research associate in the AHRC department of UEA is currently developing this material for publication supported by a community fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Art We'll hear Leila and then Lisa's presentations one immediately after the other before everything's up and it's from the audience Boys, please feel free to me to chat box and you have any questions during the discussion and do please use its hand function without further ado then Leila I shall hand over to you thank you Thank you Samuel and I'm just going to share my screen but also a quick disclaimer that this presentation isn't very academic I've not got any citations there for the images but if you're interested just to get in touch and it's also just a way of giving you a sense of the value of Jennings as a multidisciplinary artist and it doesn't really specifically relate to some of the points that I'm going to go into but here we go So born in 1907 in the small fishing village of Walberswick Suffolk Humphrey Jennings died suddenly in 1950 at the age of 43 falling to his death on set whilst filming for the European Economic Commission in Greece Most known for his work at the General Post Office Film Unit later the Crown Point Film Unit making government films such as Listen to Britain A Diary for Timothy and Family Portrait Jennings also wrote poetry and criticism painted and produced visual collages inspired by the movement of surrealism From the age of 17 onwards Jennings subscribed to the Surrealist Revolution the first of two Surrealist publications published by André Breton Having first read the journal in French before its translation into English Jennings spread the word of surrealism amongst his friends in Britain including William Empson Jennings was particularly struck by the surrealist interpretation of Freud Oh I can see that my slides aren't moving on anymore Here we go Jennings was particularly struck by the surrealist interpretation of Freud their honouring in both in terms of the formal and thematic character of their artworks of the unconscious workings of math human experience emotion the imagination and quote mental events events of the heart unquote These themes shape Jennings' film at montage with works such as Spare Time 1939 attesting to a radical open endedness in meaning and a repositioning of documentary audiences away from didacticism and towards spontaneous and creative undeterminable poetic knowledge For this Jennings attracted the epithet the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced Jennings ought to be understood as a poet of ethnography too for his role played in mass observations May the 12th publication for which he realised the technique of collage in his organisation of hundreds of variegated fragments on the subjective experience of individuals across the nation on one day in 1937 Similarly, Jennings' historiographical project Pandemonium the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers composed entirely from archival scraps on the quote place of the imagination in the making of the modern world should attract for Jennings the title of being the only real poet that British historiography has ever produced In 1936 Jennings was enlisted to work alongside Breton and Salvador Dali creating London's first international surrealist exhibition at the new Burlington galleries in Mayfair where he was also featured as an exhibiting artist Unlike his interwar contemporaries in the movement of British surrealism he was like the Daithless Herbert Reed, Roland Penrose Paul Nash and David Gascoigne Jennings remains an unsung surrealist omitted from the Dullidge picture galleries 2020 inaugural exhibition on British surrealism Overshadowed by his contributions to the British documentary film movement Jennings' historiographic work has failed to receive sufficient scholarly attention This paper therefore focuses on Jennings' development of a historiographic collated aesthetic for pandemonium published posthumously in 1985 by André Dutch So in the 13 years before his death Jennings collected archival fragments He visited archives and public libraries across the south of England consulting a range of scientific and literary texts published between 1660 and 1886 Lifting very specific parts of these texts from their broader context Jennings copied passages by hand sometimes he used a typewriter reproducing only the most visually discreet and evocative passages from the works he consulted He referred to this project as a quote imaginative history of the industrial revolution unquote and called his literary fragments quote images Pandemonium is dedicated to portraying the quote means of vision unquote in the making of modernity It includes fragments taken from the diaries of Samuel Peeps the poetry of William Blake and the scientific reports of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday as well as lesser known figures in British industrial history such as anti-slavery writer Mary Ann Schimell Pinnock and the grandson of the late emperor of Persia Najaf Cooley Mirza Upon his death Jennings' huge and variegated collection remained untouched for several decades stored in a box in the home he shared with his wife Sicily In the years between 1950 and 1985 Jennings' friend and colleague Charles Madge worked alongside Jennings' daughter Mary Louise Jennings to bring the thousand page collection down to a publishable number The edited down version of Pandemonium gave a readership therefore 45 years after Jennings' death later becoming used by Danny Boyle and his opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games Jennings first started trawling archives for fragments on the industrial revolution for a series of talks he gave to miners in South Wales as preliminary research means making of the film The Silent Village With an unbounded compulsion to collect energetic fragments from pre-published texts Jennings' collection soon became surplus to requirement informing independently of the Silent Village a magnificent historiographic project in and of itself Jennings' approach to the study of history as illustrated in Pandemonium's Origins emerges from a great concern for his present moment particularly the then contemporary moment of work and capitalist instrumentality in general between the two world wars This brings to bear his inclusion of snippets taken from left-wing social commentators such as Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Ruskin and William Morris The notion of progress is jeopardised in Jennings' collection with citations illuminating a non-harmonious experience in the making of modernity clashes and conflicts such as the 1819 Peterlun massacre the Luddite riots of 1811 the cruel violence of scientific experimentations on children and animals and the exploitative working conditions of a class-based economy dissolved any sense of universal linear advancement in Britain's historical development The citation, as Walter Benjamin illuminates through his reading of Breptian theatre are quote robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions With its origins in John Milton's Paradise Lost the word pandemonium names the capital city of hell Jennings' unpublished notes reveal his understanding that quote the building of pandemonium is the real history of Britain for the last 300 years unquote and thus leak his mobilisation of historical quotes in a number which outweigh his commentary shocks readers out of a complacency with the status quo Whilst Jennings may have certainly aligned his politics with the left describing himself as having the principles of Morris and Ruskin his collection also includes fragments which show the excitement of social change and technological development Jennings' collection is entirely horizontal with no one perspective finding supremacy over the others Non-pejorative accounts for industrial development are placed incongruently beside those of a critical nature which in addition to liquidating the notion of progress have the critically productive effect of endowing readers with an uncertain representation of historical change Negating the semblance of conclusive totality Jennings' juxtapose fragments serve to reposition audiences towards new and undeterminable meaning making a matter which has its roots not just in the writings of the surrealists but in Jennings' own reaction to the propaganda of his age As a collection of fragments authored by historical actors the role of Jennings as an author of history is negated entirely in this publication with Jennings' voice appearing only very rarely as infrequent annotations bend fragments Beyond four markers which split the publication into sub-collections bearing the titles observations and reports exploitation revolution and confusion Jennings stands back in providing an overarching narrative on the past Jennings' approach history by way of collection by way of collage disrupts the common sense notion of history as that which offers a cohesive and conclusive story on the past and it is for this reason that pandemonium could be understood as a historiographic project for the term historiography refers to any writing about history be it fragmented or not Much like his visual collages Jennings' historiographic project has the potential to fill audiences with confusion Jennings' subversion of historicism of authorship of singular and totalised narratives on the past informed by positivistic laws of causality brings to bear a different way of doing history one which dislodges the power of the historian to produce a conclusive vision of the past A polybocl cacophony comprised of a multitude of non-unified historical voices Jennings silences his own voice in pandemonium allowing for a flood of conflictual and poetically ambiguous historical reports to inform new associations in recipient audiences a productive form of confusion therefore pandemonium offers an example of radical audience repositioning for history To conclude Jennings' guided and controlled form of archival exploration sets it apart from other surrealistic collages Firstly, Jennings' collection cannot without question be said to be composed entirely of junk for many of the authors included in the work have enduring fame Pandemonium reveals a reimagined engagement with detritus with Jennings showing a specific interest in the imaginative aspects of scientific texts therein promoting the preservation of certain passages within the history of science which alone do not stand up to the scrutiny of scientific empiricism Furthermore, pandemonium differs from examples of interwar avant-garde collage whose production is often predicated on chance encounters with Jennings using a specific approach to archival exploration imposing in an act of mediation a certain degree of intent The place of chance is not negated entirely in Jennings' historiographic project however it is pushed back from the moment of collection to the moment of reception with the potential for unforeseen correspondences between fragments pivotal in the experience of Jennings' readership In Jennings the collagic is brought into critical dialogue with classic historical approaches with the text subversion of historicism rather than classical art situating it as a work demonstrative of critical historiographic approaches which focus on both the representation and repositioning of the imagination showing a form of collage which is distinct from that of the wider movement of surrealism during the interwar period pandemonium is in my doctoral research referred to not always collage but as a collated aesthetic with its roots in collage Thank you Thank you ever so much Leila for that incredibly rich paper We'll now move before we take questions we'll move on to our second presentation in this panel from Lisa Thank you Hello and thanks so much for the invitation to be part of what's been such an exciting week or say in the event Okay I'm going to launch straight in In the catalogue for this collaborative exhibition with the Ethnography Department at the British Museum in the mid 1980s Edwardo Polozzi highlighted the pivotal influence of surrealist attitudes to ethnography that he'd encountered in Paris in the late 1940s He describes a special sort of cognitive experience where a person can look at and associate disparate things at the same time Polozzi connects this ability to see different sorts of things at once each with each with what he describes as that French sensibility which could embrace dogon masks pre-Colombian stone sculpture and for example Baroque churches or modern machinery adding that that sort of sensibility doesn't exist in England even now The first part of Polozzi's statement captures one of the most distinctive elements of his broader and longstanding approach to collage which involved taking a dynamic and horizontal approach to his visual environment where everything was potentially a source of aesthetic interest and subject to ongoing processes of transformation As has been much discussed in the scholarship relating to Polozzi and other artists associated with the independent group in the 1950s this attitude was radical in the context of London's post-war art world calling into question the fixed notions of high and low art embedded in the arts establishment By exposing himself to everything as a potential source of visual stimulation Polozzi's work from this time was seen as channeling a new way of seeing the world moving beyond surrealist juxtapositions to create multi-evocative images a gene to the complexity of his contemporary cultural environment Analogies with an anthropological way of thinking were made in the 1950s based on his attention to lived experience and to culture as what people do rather than a set of specific objects These analogies were extended in his British Museum project in the 1980s The assemblages that he presented which as you can see in this picture combined the museum collections with his own work and various found objects and images recognised some material culture was in a constant state of entangled transformation a position which resonated with the concerns of contemporary anthropologists at the British Museum and beyond Links were made with the historian James Clifford's recent account of ethnographic surrealism in Paris in particular the idea of treating ethnography as collage of bringing together disparate things and ideas to disorientate and dislodge fixed cultural values Given this background one of the things that interested me most was that he had a project at the British Museum and the connections encouraged with radical surrealism was that his assemblages were seen at the time as both challenging and reaffirming the aesthetic hierarchies associated with primitivism For some his collage based approach opened up new ways of seeing the collections and their relevance to artists foregrounding an expanded range of material processes and the metamorphosis of overlooked objects and images This was seen as an exciting departure from the juxtapositions of individual masterpieces in the controversial primitivism exhibition that had opened at Mamre in New York the year before For others, Palloxi's confidence in interpreting the collections on his own terms and his blunt distinctions between western and non-western art and primitive and modern did not engage with the questions that had been raised by artists for at least a decade already about the racism and silencing inherent in the way Britain's arts establishment used such categories These conflicting responses were characteristic of the climate of critical debate in the mid-1980s However, they also raised a broader question about accounting for Palloxi's horizontal approach to culture that's disrupting and reaffirming hierarchies at the same time I was interested in what looking at these positions together could say about the transgressive outlook associated with ethnographic collage and more broadly, the different ways that collage was experienced in the gallery spaces of London's cultural institutions in the post-war period So with this in mind what I wanted to focus on briefly in this workshop paper is some of the different ways that Palloxi's references to ethnography were registered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the 1950s My point is not to question the continuities that Palloxi and others have emphasised between his work from this period and his collage-based approach to the British Museum collections but to reinstate some of the different conditions in which his utopian promise of seeing different things at once at the same time was experienced The association of disparate images was central to the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art that Palloxi staged with others at the ICA in 1953 There are a lot of things going on in this much discussed exhibition but I wanted to focus on it today as engaging key aspects of Palloxi's horizontal approach to visual culture and in particular his distinctive attitude towards ethnographic objects and images The organisers had selected and arranged a diverse set of images according to a deliberately vague visual denominator which the viewer actively participates in identifying as they move through the exhibition making new connections between the images Crucially, as the organisers made clear in their statement of purpose they were not attempting to demonstrate any single-fix scientific or philosophical system They were interested in exploring a new visual order attuned to the new conditions of their contemporary environment In the reproductions that overlap with the interests of anthropology which are scattered throughout the display the focus was on engaging with the reproduced image itself as part of the flood of images presented rather than the original context or field from which it was taken This manoeuvre in the ways it would have been experienced by the ICA's membership in the early 1950s signals an important shift in how ethnographic objects and images were being interpreted in the gallery There was a characteristic Palloxi's border approach Although he certainly visited museums and considered them an important source of inspiration Palloxi's references to ethnographic objects and images sent on encounters in books, catalogs magazines and popular culture as part of the massive images that constituted his own visual environment This is clear in the photos of images sometimes pasted sometimes not that he kept throughout his career which suggests a concern less with individual forms or specific juxtapositions and more with what happens when you see all the different images that have caught his attention together More specifically by retaining the captioning as we can see here in this early worked up collage he shifts attention from the mask itself to its isolation on the catalogue page encouraging the viewer to reflect on what kind of image it is and how it's encountered In London in the 1950s this approach marked a double layered relationship with anthropology as was recognised at the time it constituted an anthropological way of thinking about the conditions of Palloxi's own visual environment However the move away from engaging with actual ethnographic collections and their original context set Palloxi's approach apart from the dominant dialogue between our practice and anthropology that was taking place at the ICA This dialogue had been encouraged from the outset by the ICA as part of their founding vision building on the surrealist longstanding interest in ethnography but also on the ICA's commitment as a new kind of institution to engage with creative practice as an integral part of society a model they associated with unindustrialised or in their terms primitive societies founding member Herbert Reid made this connection explicitly in 1948 during one of the ICA's first exhibitions titled 40,000 years of modern art a comparison of primitive and modern which brought together more than 200 works from different times and places Confident that the works displayed shared a vital aesthetic force Reid describes the purpose of the exhibition and of the ICA more broadly as helping to reinstate the arts in our life and to give them back a position and arrogance to what he describes as the spontaneous and all-pervading way in which they exist in primitive society Building on this the ICA developed a relationship with the British Museum's Ethnography Department and with the Royal Anthropological Institute in the 1950s that informed a series of exhibitions and debates about the relevance of ethnographic collections for artists Different views were expressed but in general the ICA used these projects as a premier of a primal aesthetic essence that could be recognised in certain works William Fag from the British Museum who was involved in most of these projects argued that for works from ethnographic collections this timeless aesthetic essence was the result of strict adherence to cultural traditions in other societies uninterrupted by the conditions of modernity a view that was embraced at the ICA In contrast to this the influential social anthropologist Edmund Leitch criticised the loose and questionable connections that were being made between objects from different times and places in the ICA's displays He argued that aesthetic judgments about objects in ethnographic collections needed to be rooted in the specific conditions in which the works were made and used Although they took place at the same time connections between Leitch's criticism of the absolute and timeless qualities that the ICA associated with ethnographic collections and the questions that Polotsia and others were raising about their own cultural environment were not developed This meant that although an exhibition like Parallels signalled a radical departure from seeking predetermined connections or affinities this didn't impact directly on the way that the relevance of ethnography collections was being negotiated at the ICA nor its continuing promotion of primitivism On one level these strands of activity at the ICA serve different agendas but it's revealing at least in terms of grasping Polotsia's references to ethnography to look at them together operating comfortably side by side Indeed in terms of Polotsia's college-based work by the early 1960s it was being presented explicitly as embodying the vital aesthetic force that the ICA still associated with primitivism shown for example alongside displays of traditional and contemporary African arts considered by the ICA to also embody their shared vital force The broader narrative of these references depended on the distinctions between modern art and generic categories of what were described as tribal, primitive or ethnographic arts encouraged in Britain in the past As Polotsia's ethnographic colleges demonstrate the relationship between these categories was interpreted in different and multiple ways but debates about the distinctions themselves and their consequences for a horizontal approach to culture were yet to be fully addressed by artists or anthropologists at the ICA This highlights the significant shifts that took place in the 1970s new more reflexive approaches to museum anthropology in Britain allowed a direct conversation to develop between Polotsia's college based approach and the ethnography department at the British Museum At the same time, artists were asking new kinds of questions about the relevance of ethnography collections and the politics of the distinctions being made between western and non-western culture that went beyond Polotsia's interests In these changing contexts it becomes possible to trace the different ways that Polotsia's ethnographic colleges were experienced how this intersected with the cultural issues of London's post-war art world and to notice which aspects of this do and do not receive critical attention The challenge then is to keep these shifts in play at the same time as maintaining the ambiguity and disruptive energy associated with the enduring appeal of college Thank you Lisa for another incredibly stimulating paper I thought I might start with a question by posing a question to both of you Something that I couldn't get out of my head whilst listening to both of these papers was Walter Benjamin who in the origin of German tragic drama says the writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging I wonder whether I might ask you both to ask you about the way in which each of you see your own practice as art historians as scholars as writers how much you see that as itself a form of collage I was really struck by what we saw on the screen in front of us not just the individual images but the arrangement and images for us so yes how much do you feel your own work is a form of collage I can go first I mean certainly for me it's a really important structuring idea I think that kind of the kind of simple act of bringing different things together and kind of noticing where the boundaries might be in what you you know the things that you might normally overlook and what happens if you bring in something that you wouldn't usually be brought together in that context and also you know the potential for that to stimulate new ways of thinking about a historical period I suppose that for me and my research has been really important and also just because of the kind of material that I've been making out which crosses disciplines where those you know you'll have exactly the same story being told in two completely different ways and I suppose it was driven by dissatisfaction with that and just thinking what happens if you join those things together that don't sit comfortably together at all so yes I mean it's very important to me as a writer Thank you Leila you are on mute Sorry thank you Yeah I echo some of those things that you said Lisa actually so a few things I think in terms of bringing together figures you previously haven't always been considered together that's in a sense an act of collaging montaging together and I think also in relation to some of the methodological pursuits of considering the past and the present considering notions of afterlife and the way through things like citation the past can penetrate the present you have a new relationship there those types of things definitely inform my selection of who to work with and what kind of figures to work on consider these figures and these works but in terms of my writing until I break out of formal academia I think my writing will be a lot less fragmented than I would like it to be there is an imposition on my work to join the gaps and not present my work as fragmented or as poetically open and to bring forth the conclusion so there's a sense in which it informs my thinking and my methodology but not always my writing especially as a PhD shooter I mean collage can be just as much about about rupture but yes thank you very much I have hundreds more questions I'll keep them for the time being and open up to the audience do please either wave your at all in the air or use the raise hand function if you have any question Eleanor sorry me again I was struck by the fact that I love both presentations but I was struck by the fact that you both use the term horizontal approach and yet they seem to me to bring quite different results so I was wondering if you wanted to comment exactly what you mean by horizontal approaching relation to the artist and the world you're looking at and possibly even reflect on how different it is from one another I think for me personally it's about the arrangement of historical citations in so far as those being flat and not one historical account having a greater importance than the others and it kind of allows a democratic field of voice and that's for me where it lies I was so interested later in how you were talking about Denning's work which I didn't know at all and when you talked about him not putting his own voice into it or not kind of introducing a kind of hierarchical version of history into it and I think in terms of horizontal for me I used that in the way that it's often used to talk about that kind of work as not being hierarchical so that idea of kind of setting things out on a level playing field or things that I was interested in is how often that occurs and how rarely it is a level field that there are so many things layered into that in the way that it's experienced especially say for example in the gallery space that are often very rooted to a specific time or a specific experience of it and I suppose it's one of the things that I feel very conscious of for example at exhibitions of thinking but what did it mean to go to look at those things together at that time and that's I suppose it's that tension between thinking horizontal isn't on hierarchical but then thinking what are the hierarchies that get laid into that quite utopian idea In I2 was absolutely fascinated by the suggestion of Jennings negating his kind of authorial presence and I wonder if I might ask you a little bit more Leila about the visual form of pandemonium in the Andre Deutsch in its eventual final manifestation which is obviously remediated completely and I'm thinking so many of the things that we've seen over the past week thinking well I mean to the palotsy scrapbook thinking back to the scrapbooks the smiths and scrapbooks that we saw as Imerman presents last week the things in which visual form is maintained and you know facsimiles of all of these things are very often an important part of how they're subsequently mediated and what was the thinking behind this complete negation and visual negation and remediation Okay so in a sense a lot of my thoughts are in comparison to classic demographic methods and historicism so in relation to that his giving presidents to voices of the past rather than his own in a way where as I said the sensations outweigh his own commentary kind of silences himself unless the past speak but of course with his mediated selection and deselection there's definitely a presence there in terms of his intent of what to bring together and what to leave out and I think if I'm correct you were asking as well about the visual aspect of the publication the 1985 and 2012 publication that is a essentially in that last slide you might have seen the page so it's just several fragments brought together with space in between it's very formal kind of like bringing together of these passages the visual aspect comes in the fact that a lot of the writing in fact all the writing is visually discreet it's very evocative it brings to mind things to your imagination and that's where the ambiguity ambiguity lies too so it potentially enable people to make their own meaning Is the published version simply text or is it also does it also carry images illustrations There is a very few number of illustrations and I would like to do more research actually on the role of those illustrations they weren't actually selected by Jennings though which is why they don't feature in my work but I would like to think more about the editorial work of Charles Match and Jennings's daughter Mary Louise Jennings I have seen through looking at the the unpublishment manuscript that there have been several emissions that I think are problematic Jennings collated a lot of things with regards to imperialism and a global capitalism that do not feature in the published version and as I say these illustrations were selected by his daughter apparently Jennings did always want to have illustrations there but it's interesting in the 13 years of collecting that he didn't actually collect any illustrations so that's why I really talk about this as being a literary collage of textual collage I mean I've long thought about pandemonium that is something that Super Gideon's Mechanisation Text Command which is about the I've long thought that they really deserve to be thought about together and one of the things that's brilliant about the Gideon is the fact that as I've tried to bring out in my book he sees not only his historical method also his visual collage and that book, Mechanisation Text Command is visually astonishing in a way that pandemonium doesn't seem to be which is in itself interesting. Of course and this research comes out of my finding of a correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Company Jennings and of course Benjamin was greatly inspired by Gideon so that's for sure where those kinds of connections come out. We have a question from Rachel. Thank you I have a kind of general question for both of you I thought both papers were really fantastic and then a kind of more specific one for Leila I wondered whether you both of you had thought about what the generalising principles were that if they were not chronological collage does require some kind of organisation and I'd be interested to know what you thought those were those principles were and then Leila I wonder I was wondering if you could maybe expand a bit more on the relationship if there is one between pandemonium and this historiographic project and Jennings' work on mass observation and how you see that it's fitting together or not Shall I go ahead? The historiographic project is pandemonium and he did actually start that project at the same time that he started the mass observation project so there were both works that he brought to bear under the influence of surrealism around 1937 is when he started these two projects and they are very similar in terms of form and it's interesting to note that Jennings pandemonium is something that he worked alongside Charles Match and Tom Harrison but it was Humphrey Jennings that actually arranged that decided the organisational principles of the May 12 publication and great correspondence can be found between that and pandemonium one of the greater differences is that we can see mass observations May 12 now as a historical text but of course it was a work of contemporary import, it was fragments of people's experience in 1937 and published that exact year whereas pandemonium was always a project of looking far into the past and very far as well into the past so I hope that kind of prioritised that and again in terms of the organisational principles Collage is really brought to bear in kind of highlighting juxtapositions between accounts and narratives so you'll get aspects of celebration of social change following forms that critic social change so juxtaposition is crucial there as well does that go in any way in answering your question? Lisa I was just trying to think about organising principles and I suppose the connecting thing through the material I was talking about today is the thinking about collage specifically as it's conceptualised at the idea of ethnographic collage which is associated with questioning cultural values and kind of not simply bringing things together but bringing things together in a way disrupt dominant existence so I suppose that's the what was running through what I've been looking at but there's always something layered on top of the idea of collage Now I think we have time for just one more question Sarah Turner It's more of a comment and this will probably chime with you Sam but it's sort of coming out something that Lady just said but also connecting to several of the papers across today about how what I've heard has made me think more about cultural practitioners more broadly beyond the figure of the artist like the word editors the designers the people involved in the practicalities of layouts and how those decisions are made in magazines exhibition catalogs that's sometimes what still remains behind the scenes work and I think the work is not just like a social history of excavating who does what and where and when although that's important but historical work as well about how that impacts on aesthetic decisions and the visuality of objects and artworks and the look of a period as well how it's presented through an exhibition or a magazine as well so it's just those agents who are making this stuff happen and making it public as well it's more of a comment that the papers just really made me think about that today as well Can I just add to that that's a really interesting point Sarah the parallel of life and art they actually describe themselves as editors the exhibition makers name themselves as editors I think that's a really interesting idea in relation to collage and this concept of editing that we've kind of been finishing with here today I mean the nation of putting a magazine together I've always thought is really one of collage of arranging things and I mean I was very struck Sarah with when you're making your comment it reminded me of a very very brilliant by David Lubin when he talks about art history as a form of collage and he talks about about whether or not we need to see joins and the edges and overlap in collage earlier that some collages and he said that for art historians the tools are almost the colons you know the punctuation and when I was completely taken with your use of airquapes as a way of signalling your own the logistic nature of your own comments on the day I think now that we have got the end of questions so the first thing I'd like to do is thank very much indeed our two speakers Layla and Lisa for incredibly rich papers and you all for the discussion I'll now hand back to and I think to talk about now in our final breakout session yes thank you some indeed we have around just over 10 minutes for our breakout sessions again it's not recorded so please feel free to continue this conversation or connect back to other discussions we had over the last week and we should reconvene at alpas four sorry for our final goodbye see you soon just click on the link that I think Shona should be sending very soon and that will take you into your room hi everyone I think people are still coming back from breakout rooms and it's nearly alpas four so we are coming to the very end of our long journey of a week of in-house speaking about collage from the post word to now so I feel it's incredibly difficult to try and bring all the ideas and conversations we had into anything meaningful but if you want to share anything from your breakout conversation please do it doesn't matter how relevant it is to today's discussion or to the teams that we have been looking at in the last couple of days come on I guess we must be tired this is very hard isn't it who wants the last word I just I don't want to have the last word but I was just in a conversation and Judith was making a really interesting point about the amnesia of cultural institutions particularly where certain conversations happen and we were talking about how late it was in the ICAs history for racial politics and for colonialism to come in and be discussed at all and then we were chatting and Judith was talking about how one can kind of chart back the ongoing kind of engagement and conversation all the way back to some of these early kind of post word collagic moments and I think it's so interesting to think about how one doesn't put together a seamless narrative but creates a collagic conversation about these kind of strategies of decontextualisation recontextualisation etc etc that can go that can carry across time and it was and if I'd had a for some when I was thinking about my paper someone I just kept on coming into my head was Liz Johnson Arsas and her work at the South London Gallery and the Black Balloon archive project because it seems to me that it's so interesting if you look at the way that someone like Arsas using structures of collage and mechanisms of curating and decontextualisation removing say certain kind of forms like the label etc but with a very very different effect to that of as we were just talking about something like perhaps Palotsy's intervention within the ethnographic collections so I just think it's quite interesting if one traces the kind of ongoing and shifting collagic methods right up to the present anyway thank you, thank you very much everyone Yeah Thank you Ben and I think more broadly the conference has been so exciting I think for so many of us because of collage helping us to revisit these long periods since the post war in terms of looking at a different grouping of artists sort of reshuffling some of the narratives but also reflecting very much on our own methods and your methods as you presented these histories and how important the different approach that you take as researchers in looking at these narratives bring very different results so I think methodologically it's been very interesting born in terms of the way we've been looking at the work of the artists and how different artists have come into these narratives but also in terms of how you have approached these very subjects and the subject of your research it is now Alpas 4 so I think unless anyone else would like to add anything I think we are coming to a quite natural conclusion Rosie, Sarah my co-conveners please come back in if for us goodbye if you want to add anything I just wanted to add that in my group we finished with the idea that we touched on yesterday of collage permitting a certain degree of non-conclusion and irresolution and I thought that was a really quite a nice spirit to end on well that seems perfect I don't want to make any concluding remarks and I was typing in the chat box to thank everyone for the collaborative spirit in which everyone's joined these events as speakers, as chairs and as audience members someone's just saying it's brilliant to be able to join this event from Hanoi and I think that kind of idea that we're sort of gathered together as an international community of interest is something that's particularly inspiring and really enriching to get that feedback from people who are also artists and practitioners historians, writers, students again that's just an event like that really kind of facilitates that kind of conversation across different places and across different medium approaches so thank you to everyone for participating and I think maybe we should just end by thanking the PMC events team as well who we were talking about behind the scenes work earlier and you've seen a bit more of Shawna and Danny perhaps in the workshops than the webinars but they're ever present and the speakers know this from actually getting contributions ready to all the work that goes on behind the scenes to make a multi-day, multi-panel event like this happen so massive thanks from all of us to Shawna and Danny for keeping us going throughout the conference and I also want to say thank you a big thank you on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre to Rosie and to Elena because they've put in so much work as well as collaborators and friends going well beyond probably what they originally signed up to as well it's gone on, it's a multi-year collaboration huge thanks to you and to the Paul Mellon Centre team for realising the event because when it was paused in March 2020 there was so much energy there and it's just amazing that that energy has persisted and seeing these papers that we had proposed in late 2019 to now be able to engage with them and seeing the level of discussion that they are listing from the audiences and it's just really exciting to finally hear everyone's research and it's so rich and varied it's been fantastic to engage with it and thank you for making it happen Sarah Great, well safe travels to everyone in the virtual and the real world as well as you log off this evening and thanks so much to everyone for joining us today and the other event so we shall say goodbye now Thank you so much of what everybody of what everyone Thank you Bye, thank you Bye