 ar y cyffredin curfio'r parwyr ar y cyfredin cerddur, ac yn fawr mwy o'r ddwylliant o'r ddwylliant, ac yn fawr ddwylliant o'r dymlo'n gwneud ar y cyffredin, ac yn fawr o'r mynd i'r fawr yn fawr o'r fawr yn fawr. Mae'r ddwylliant yn y fawr o'r ddwydau, ac mae'n fawr yn y fawr o'r cyffredin cerddur, dwi'n gweithio i'n fawr o fawr o'r ddwylliant, yw ychwanegau cyfnodol yn ymgyrchol yng Nghymru, ond ydyddwn i'n gweithio ar gyfer gynllun o'r ffordd yma. Felly wedi bod yn sefydlu'n ei wneud rydych chi gyda'r dweud o'r ddweud o ddifёт gwahaniaeth addysg. Felly fydd y gweithiau o'r alam yn yr anodd ar y ddweud. Felly, wedi fod y gweithiau, mae'n amser yna i gael i'r ddweud, yw'n amser i'r ddweud ar y dyfodol, ddefnyddio'r ddedig y gallwch cyffredin iawn. Mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd i'r panffordi cyffredin iawn after we'n meddwl â'r talon. Mae'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r wneud o'r lleiddiadaeth yn y rhan, ac mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd i'r ardal, ac mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r anodd yna, ac mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r anodd. Mae'n meddwl i'r gweithio i'r rhan o'r fewn i'r mewn i'r wold. iawn i'r byw i'n ddwyf yn y cwmhreid i'w rai'r cwestiwch, ac rydyn ni'n tynnu'r cwmhreid i'r llai a'r gweithio. Rydyn ni, rydyn ni'n ddwy'r gweithio'n cwmhreid i'r gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio i'r Wale Lucy Reynolds. Felly, rydyn ni'n gallu gweithio i'r porfmel yn y centaidd. Lucy roedden i'r gweld a'u ddwy'r cyffredinol ac yn ymgyrchu'r Cyfathiaetholio'n cyfrif am ymddangos, ffeminism, cyfrifu'r cyfrif. Cyfathiori antholaeth iawn, ymddangos, ffeminism a ffimyddiaeth, a oedd yn cyfrifu'r cyfrif iawn credu ar Siwn 1989, o'ch meddwlol ymddangos o'r cyfrif sydd i gael y quiq, ac yn ôl i'r cyfrif iawn. taeth y bydd gweithio'r wrthwyter a sutynol ar gwaith. Mae'r tîm 1995 ychydig er mwyn ffyrdd, trwy'r gweithio ar gyfer gweithio, trefnog, ar gyfer gweithio'r edrych yddu, beth yw Llywodraeth. Rwy'n cael ei cyf timing hynny, roi'r cerdd Lecage ar gweithio gweithio. Mae'r cyffredin dechrau a'r ddechrau yn gweithio gwneud hynny fod y bydd yn gweithio gwleidio, Rosie Enninga's paper. So Lucy, over to you. So, thanks very much Sarah. I'm not a treat as well for me because moving images you have from my biography is very much my area of scholarship. But it's not really, it's about something that we were talking about a little bit before when we were just discussing and preparing for today. It's about the intermedial in a sense. It's about where moving image touches other contemporary practices of their moment. For me, the other pleasure about this is what an extraordinary moment this was, this post-war moment. Even talking to students now of which war. There's a sense that this particular post-45 moment that was for the Barbican show has so much for us to reflect on in terms of the art that we're seeing and making now. So I think again Sarah's focus on making here is really important. I'm very excited to be hearing the papers and to have an excuse to come here and discuss it with them and to open it up to you as well. So without wishing to take up any more time myself, I'm going to just quickly talk about the structure of our, well I know Sarah's already talked to that a little bit, but to say that first Inge Fraser will give her paper followed by Rosie Ram, then we'll hopefully have about a little bit of time where I'll be in discussion with them. Then I'm going to open it up to you online or here in person for your questions. So that should take us to about 7.30 I think and then drinks and probably more discussions there. So I'd just like to start by giving you Inge's biography. So Inge Fraser is a curator and art historian. She's currently a doctoral researcher working on a collaborative project with Tate and the Royal College of Art that explores artist engagement with film. Her thesis focuses on artists working in London in the first half of the 20th century, intermedial practices and developing discourses of artists moving image. She also teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art and before beginning her doctoral research, Inge was assistant curator of modern British art at Tate. Previously she held curatorial positions at the National Portrait Gallery and Central St Martin's in London and has written for journals and magazines including document, Tate etc. British art studies, sculpture journal and costume as well as books and catalogs published by Koenig, Ashgate and Tate. And very delighted to welcome you to tell us more about Oswell Blakeston, The Magic Aftermath. Sorry, that's a big conch. I actually wondered who came up with the title Liquid Crystal Concrete Sarah because it was such a kind of evocative series of words and I've kind of used them in my talk. So thank you for that. So I'll just scoot on. No, I won't end of slideshow. Sorry, I'll get you there. So my aim for this paper is to fill out the picture of the post war British art world even beyond the tentacles that the fantastic Barbican exhibition post war British art begins to unfurl. I was lucky to a light upon Blakeston in the course of my thesis research and was able through his archive to trace a winding path that traverses disciplinary and historiographical boundaries, producing a different map of the connections between artists and their practices in the post war period. So this paper is as much about these contacts and encounters as about Blakeston himself. I have three reflections to keep in mind. Firstly, the difference between intentional and unintentional fragility of experimental works made during the period. Secondly, the legacy of film in terms of both production and exhibition for post war interdisciplinary practices. And thirdly, that despite the boundary line laid down by the post in post war, the tentacular paths we are following with Blakeston and indeed many other artists working in the period lead back to the pre war, whether in terms of unfinished business or to issue a new challenge to those ideologies. The writer Malk Rajanand wrote to Blakeston in 1982 after a long absence. He said, someone told me you're alive and well that you are painting now more than writing. I can only guess that you have taken up what you used to do even in the early thirties. And this is what I meant to indicate with the papers title borrowed from a book by Blakeston published in 1932. So I hope to draw attention to a number of post war pleats today. Oswell Blakeston was born Henry Joseph Haslacka to parents of Austrian heritage in May 1907 in Surrey. He left home at 16 and eventually found work as a camera boy in Gomont's Lyme Grove Studios alongside a similarly gosh David Lean. Rising to be an assistant director at Islington Studios, he gained an intimate knowledge of the operations of the film industry during this period, which he would later draw in for several technical books on the cinema, as well as for his own artistic works in film and other media. His circle during the interwar years was wide and international, including such figures as Francis Brugier, Lance Seaf King, Jack Bilbo, Frank Dobson, Oba Holloway, Len Lai, Paul Rother, Andall Crasner-Crowse, and Dr K S Bart. Blakeston met the artist Max Chapman in the late 1920s and they became lifelong partners. They were both pacifists and in the 1930s and 40s they lived between Cornwall and London. So returning to London post war, Blakeston found his 30s circle somewhat dispersed. He was buoyed personally through close correspondence and financially by the gift of regular sums of money by his friend since the 1920s, the writer and heiress Briar. Otherwise his income during this time was largely derived from his journalistic writing, consequently he wrote for a huge number of publications, as the writer Ian Young later asked, how could you categorise a man whose work has appeared everywhere from gay news to the mortician's gazette? Blakeston worked as an art critic alongside Dennis Bone and Yasha Reichhart for a number of publications post war, including art news and review and what's on. Alongside these more conventional forms of writing, Blakeston pursued more experimental modes. He published a book of one word poems and got to know Stefan and Francesca Temerson, whose own transmedial explorations in art were like his own grounded in pre-war experimental film culture. Francesca Temerson designed a cover for Blakeston's novel Hop Thief in 1959 and the Temerson's Gabobocas Press published Blakeston's novels The Night's Moves, also with a cover by Francesca and Fingers from 1964. Blakeston wrote a preface for the Gabobocas 1962 edition of Anatole Stern's long poem Europa from 1925, which also reproduced stills from the Temerson's 1930 film Europa, which was based on Stern's poem. With its dynamic juxtaposition of text, image and graphics, the book mirrored some of Blakeston's own pre-war experiments that combined still photography and text in forms that aspired to be cinematic. This type of intermedial or transmedial address was to some extent considered an unfinished project by artists and writers in the post-war period. As the poet Michael Horowitz notes in his introduction, there is still no English for collage. Here I just wanted to flag this excellent catalogue of the Temerson's archive. You can access it in a Tate library, but it's so extensive and includes Blakeston. So, Blakeston also wrote for the Trigram Press, another publisher who attempted to counter prevailing insularity in the post-war English literary scene. His book was actually the first they published. A book of his poetry printed on different coloured paper titled How to Make Your Own Confetti. It was illustrated by Max Chapman, and here's Blakeston with Trigram's Pip and Aza Benveniste. Blakeston's connection to the burgeoning 1960s experimental poetry and art scene was by no means consistent though, and often came via his local connections in Hampstead and North London. One such connection appears to have been the poet and organiser Bob Cobbeng. So, like Blakeston, Cobbeng was a contentious objector during the Second World War, and like Blakeston he cultivated an interest in experimental forms of poetry and film. Blakeston evidently knew about Cobbeng's work at Better Books, and their work was included in an exhibition together in 1967 at the Foyer Gallery in Hampstead with other artists affiliated with the Free Painters and Sculptors Group. This is a photograph of one of them from slightly earlier. One of the essays in this collection about Bob Cobbeng's life and work by Max Azola outlines the way in which post-war film societies, such as the Hendon Film Society, with which Bob Cobbeng was involved, continued the pre-war tradition of showing a diverse programme incorporating early silent cinema, avant-garde and scientific films and documentaries. Here I want to suggest that this inclusive pre-war mode of film consumption may have provided a model for post-war interdisciplinarity in literary and visual art, something both Cobbeng and Blakeston were preoccupied with. So, liquid. Although Blakeston had earlier drawn and painted as this photograph testifies, his first official one-man show is dated by Max Chapman to 1958 and took place at the coffee pot in Berwick Street. Dennis Bone describes the prejudice faced by abstract painters beyond a select few in London galleries in the 1950s and notes that the new wave of coffee shops in Soho were among the only venues open to young artists hoping to show their work. In his correspondence with the poet Briar, Blakeston appears to have stated apprehension about his career as a painter, but in June 1962 she reassures Blakeston, writing, of course you should paint, I'm interested in what you have been doing with your watercolours, I do hope you can find a place for your show. Blakeston went on to exhibit his paintings with some success at galleries including the Grabowski, New Vision Centre Gallery, the Foyer Gallery and the Drianne Gallery and here I'm just going to skip through a whole run of slides that I had to cut because my presentation was too long. So this is a potted look at Oswell Blakeston's painting career. At these galleries artists who found themselves on the edge of the established art world both as a result of style and nationality found welcome. At these galleries and others including Gallery One, Signals and Indica the welcome would increasingly extend to those who like Blakeston began experimenting with non-traditional media. So ask me questions about these artists afterwards. So Blakeston often foregrounded the use of experimental materials by artists in his work as a critic writing for instance a text for the German emigrate artist Walton Nestler's exhibition of polyester paintings at the Madden Galleries in 1964 and this interest stems from his own artistic practice. In 1962 Oswell Blakeston staged an exhibition of his work at the New Vision Centre Gallery titled Crystal Graphs. He explained, in the 50s I wanted to paint with chemicals which would crystallise on the canvas. A friend, a back room research boffin said it was impossible. I went to my local chemist who looked startled but concocted some experimental solutions. I then went to the embassy of a country boasting a new fixative for paint on combat planes and I came away with a small bottle of the secret formula. Dennis hung my first ever crystal paintings and we got the first ever art reviews in papers like The Chemist and Drugist. And there are cuttings in the New Vision Centre scrapbooks from this industry periodical chemical age. Cotty Berlin curator at the Abbey Arts Centre writing in the arts review described the crystalographs, that's his own spelling, deposit glittering purple crystals along linear patterns drawn broadly on the tinted papers. They appear to read as secret writing on a background of abstract events. I've been unable to track down with any certainty an example of Blakeston's crystal graphs. This work was included in a 2002 auction at Bonham's, reproduced at about that big in the catalogue and could potentially have been a crystal graph. It's recorded just as mixed media on canvas. And despite lots of help from the auctioneers, the trail has run cold so consider this a call out. But I also think there's a point here about the intentional ephemerality of experimental media. At the time, Blakeston referred to the crystal graphs as experiments. Thus foregrounding their nature as speculative, tentative and perhaps not intended to persist. He described how nowadays artists are always searching for new mediums to work with and in, polyester resin, venilac, ground metal, components from the factory yard, etc. Concluding that this was an attempt to bring, and I quote, the chaos of the modern world around us under some harmonious control. This conception locates such works more resolutely in their own historical moment. And elsewhere, Blakeston expressed the view that this is perhaps where such experimental work should remain. In response to an exhibition request for his 1929 abstract film Light Rhythms, he was reluctant, arguing that such works had a point when they were made years before light sculpture and the kinetic boxes of Healy. Now they're inevitably superseded. In 1966, Blakeston's work was included in Soundings 3 at Signals Gallery, an exhibition of abstract art organised by David Medalla. Signals cultivated a particular interest in kinetic works and sculpture made from a variety of materials, and in the pages of the Signals News bulletin edited by Medalla, the legacy of artists working in a similar way prior to the Second World War is made explicit. So here is the June-July 1965 issue, for example, which includes excerpts from Maholi Naj's The New Vision and Garba Mpewsner's Realistic Manifesto. I hope you can see that. It was at Signals and other spaces showing constructivist and abstract works that, as Ming Tiampo has recently pointed out, dialogues were staged between the apparent universals of pre- and some post-war modernism, with diaspora perspectives playing a key role in challenging and particularising these forms. For Blakeston, the technology that he had been so engaged with pre-war, film and television, with its own metaphors of crystal-gazing, continued to be of interest into the 1960s. In 1962, he and the German photographer Hans Kasparius, who he had known since the 1920s, became involved in new experimental collaboration involving film. Copies of letters in Blakeston's archive from Kasparius in 1963 record the intention behind the project. He writes to Jay Parry Green of Fiberglass Ltd. We have been told that a lady in America dropped a marble by chance into boiling water. It cracked immediately and opened up. In cracking, the colour inside the marble unfolded like a flower opening into a display of brilliant colour. We are hoping to produce this effect and to photograph this opening and spreading of colour with a high-speed camera. Proceeding this correspondence are a number of letters to Blakeston from people responding to an advertisement he placed in the exchange in March, requesting marbles for purchase. There is also an information sheet about the Walensac, Fastax and Eastman high-speed cameras. Unfortunately, the project was not realised evidently due to the expense of hiring the camera, which you had to hire people to operate it as well, evidently. Another of Blakeston's pre-war acquaintances, David Warnsley, made the move from pre-war work in film to post-war painting with a focus on experimental methods. Warnsley had worked in the film industry, primarily as a set designer for directors including David Lean and Pauline Pressburger. He proposed a new system of working in the post-war period known as independent frame. The system sought to rationalise a number of inefficiencies in a film industry striving for realism, rather than location shooting and the use of expensive real or highly naturalistic props. Warnsley's system deployed closely worked preparatory drawings and back projection to ensure that a setting could be curated, created with fewer resources. One of the effects of these methods was that potentially it could facilitate, and I quote, an overall system of imagistic substitution, allowing for greater artistry and abstraction in film design. This control over the film production process was precisely what many commercial and non-commercial directors and filmmakers such as George Pearson and Edward Carrick as well as Blakestone were striving for before the war, but independent frame was not taken up at scale by the industry and despite some early success was largely deemed a failure. As a result, Warnsley focused his interest on other media after the war, working alongside Joyce Morgan on a ceramics workshop in Paris and in 1952 co-founding the Chelsea pottery with his wife Mary. A new vision centre gallery staged an exhibition of Warnsley's texture paintings in May 1957, titled A Scale in Abstract, for which Warnsley wrote a text titled Painting with Time. Looking through the documentation, what becomes clear is that the experimental and multi-medial way in which Warnsley imagined direction and design for film in the independent frame system is carried through into the approach that he took in his post-war painting. A review in what's on, describes Warnsley's aim to bridge the gap between painting and sculpture by providing a medium which combines in itself all the visual elements of texture, form and colour. And a review in the time summarises, Mr Warnsley has abandoned the painter's brush and called chemical knowledge to his aid in making his abstract designs. The fine webs that are spun across the pictures create objects of great fascination which invite meandering fancy to weave dreams of science fiction around them. The non-standard methods and materials pursued and deployed by Warnsley, Blakeston and others can be seen as an attempt to reckon with the changed material and conceptual post-war world, a science fiction made real. The link between their work and previous experience in film is not coincidental but demonstrates the persistence of a desire to exploit novel materials in contemporary image making, world making even. The film industry did not ultimately provide the creative or economic conditions for the likes of Blakeston and Warnsley to flourish and in the final section of this paper I want to look at the material conditions of the post-war art world in London and reflect upon the way in which they facilitated or held experimental modes of making. So the times review of Warnsley's show that I just quoted from refers to the new vision centre gallery situated in the basement of Four Seymour Place as the tom-fum among London's galleries with its small headquarters situated rather off the beaten track behind Marble Arch. That's a later photograph. In his artist's lives interview Dennis Byrne describes the very basic resources with which new vision was set up and many other galleries such as Gallery One at One Lichfield Street were similarly housed in modest spaces. It was not just galleries but independent bookshops and publishers who occupied such spaces for example Better Books mentioned at length in a text by Blakeston called Big Little Magazines. He describes, under Cobbings regime Better Books has become a meeting place for real book lovers. Poets meet to discuss and the new wave novelists come from France to lecture. Avant-garde films are shown and painters exhibit in the cellar. But in an essay on the demise of small publishing in England, Blakeston complained, the world is to be rebuilt and then the landlords will propose rents which the booksellers will not be able to afford. Many of them at the moment only remain in business because while the old buildings stand they have a right to remain in their premises at pre-war rents. The truth is that London is losing its fine buildings which are being recklessly pulled down. Its theatres which are also demolished to make room for rent collectors slabs of office blocks. Its art galleries which have a platform for book shops and its publishers. For Blakeston then there was a direct but also a metaphoric relationship between the undeveloped physical fabric of the city and its idiosyncratic spaces and the experimental artistic practices existing on the margins of the commercial art world that flourished within. But this is not to say that galleries did not also embrace the new developments that were rising in areas in and around London. Nicholas Treadwell in addition to running his mobile art gallery from 1963 to 70 and that was a converted furniture removal van going from door to door selling art. He opened his eponymous gallery on St George's Walk in Croydon in 1965. He had met Blakeston through Max Chapman having been introduced to Max by Aubrey Williams and staged an exhibition of Blakeston's work that opened in April 1966. Treadwell recalls that on a rainy evening there were only three visitors to Blakeston's private view in Croydon. John Holmes, the self-taught artist and former meat market porter. John Foster, the managing director of the Stretton branch of John Lewis and his wife Mary Foster. On the location Treadwell summarised that out of the ten venues his gallery has had St George's Walk Croydon was my worst decision. He explained the poor planning of the development by the architects which became and still is a wind tunnel remaining empty for many years after completion. Treadwell left the premises in 1968. The present, and we've just learned that it's not present, it actually closed, Barbican exhibition ends in 1965. For Blakeston it was the year 1967 that marked a downturn in his own fortunes and those of the experimental ventures that he interacted with. It was the year of the devaluation of Stirling causing investors and would be patrons to retract potentially unreliable investments. In a letter from December that year Blakeston predicts that the general collapse will have a bad effect on galleries and publishers and refers to a show of his that was planned in Bristol but cancelled as a consequence of a top-down directive No More Modern Art. He refers to his recently published Trigram Press pamphlet titled appropriately The Furious Futures Dying noting Trigram started it before the collapse, before Collins closed down Bob Cobbing, the one big outlet for this sort of thing. They certainly wouldn't plan anything like this today in the anti-art atmosphere which has closed so many galleries in the last months. The Hamilton, McRobertson, Tunard, Tama, Indica, etc. Personally, Blakeston was also facing difficulties at this time. He wrote in 1968 I'm living out a difficult stage in which I have to look after an invalid, his mother and I find it harassing to fit in that chore with the art reviewing, painting and general journalism that has to be done. He nevertheless continued to take opportunities to exhibit his work now more often straightforward oil paintings and drawings and watercolours, holding shows at a range of non-specialist venues including the Cuestas Theatre, Ealing, the Mount Street Post Office, Hornsea Library, Battersea Park Library, Greenberry College and Barclays Bank. Intermedial experiment in these circumstances for Blakeston at least became more difficult. So, the work that I began this presentation with was likely made in the early 1970s. I'm including it with reference to the amazing large scale laser work Full Stop that opens the Barbican Exhibition as Blakeston's Full Stop on two decades of interdisciplinary experiment. So in the post-war years the production of works variously described as multimedia, dematerialised or intermedial became more widespread, encouraged through dialogue with pre-war experiment, diaspora perspectives and the availability of spaces in post-war London. This breakdown of medium specificity and categorisation in art was linked by fluxus artist Dick Higgins to a parallel dismantling of hierarchies of class, nationality, gender and sexuality and indeed the spaces in which these new works were seen were not exclusively the gallery or the museum but more often the coffee shop and the music venue thereby linking them to notions of counter culture. Blakeston wrote in an essay on obscure art writing, painting and composing are not escapes from life but ways of life. This alignment of rebellion against the conformity represented by traditional materials and processes in art with a tendency toward politically and socially anti-establishment consciousness broadening ideals is something that must be continually critically interrogated however post-war artists, gallerists and works remain selective as to precisely which consciousness broadening ideals they promoted. Similarly today in curatorial, museological and academic contexts we must be also aware of the way in which inter-disciplinarity in both historic and contemporary work is uncritically invoked or interpreted as serving progressive social, economic and political purposes. This is both to diminish the complex intentions behind such works but also as Annette Michelson has suggested such focus on the dissolution between media can in effect occur in lieu of contrastingly impervious social and economic hierarchies and distinctions. Reviewing historical intermedial work in detail helps us remain alert to these subtleties. Thank you. Thanks so much Inge. Lots of bewildering. The energy of the man. He was everywhere doing everything. I can't wait for us to talk more about it. So thank you very much. So I'm now going to introduce Rosie Ram. Rosie is a visiting lecturer in MA curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art and she's the course leader of the curating contemporary art and design short course programs. In 2021 she completed her AHRC funded PhD at the RCA images method Nigel Henderson and the art of research. Rosie is a specialist in modern and contemporary visual culture and curating whose research has been published across print, film and online formats. She's curated displays, taught and programmed events of Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Arts very fittingly given your subject Central St Martin's and Chelsea College of Art most recently she co-curated vital fragments Nigel Henderson and the art of collage at Tate Britain and co-convened the International Conference and Workshop Programme Cutting Edge Collage in Britain 1945 to now. Prior to her doctorate Rosie worked at Chisholnhill Gallery in East London so lots there and I know that you work a lot with Nigel Henderson's archive too so looking forward to hearing more about that. So Rosie's paper is called The Negative Logic of Parallel of Life and Art. Hello everyone Thanks so much for being here this evening and hello and thank you to our audience joining us online as well and a huge thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for Organising Liquid Crystal Concrete. It's really fantastic to be here and be able to share my research as part of this seminar series and great to be in dialogue with Inge and with Lucy this evening too. In the period of nearly 70 years since Parallel of Life and Art opened the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on 11 September 1953 the exhibition has accumulated an almost mythic status in the literature becoming lauded as a landmark event of the post-war years. Organised collaboratively by artists Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, architects Alison and Peter Smithson and engineer Ronald Jenkins Parallel of Life and Art comprised more than 122 photographic images which had been extracted from highly heterogeneous sources photographically resized, cropped and reprinted in black and white. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with Henderson's shots of the hang which show this complex configuration of monochrome photography crowding the gallery space at the ICA with prints pinned directly onto the walls, some cropped unceremoniously on the floor and others pasted onto panels that hung from the ceiling in a fractured canopy of overlapping photographic planes suspended just above visitors' heads. Despite its prevalence as a reference point across the scholarship on art in post-war Britain and its increasing prominence in major exhibitions and catalogs on the period such as Post-war Modern that's recently been on show at the Barbican I'd like to argue that Parallel of Life and Art remains a challenging object to study that there is something about the photographically mediated form of the exhibition that seems to evade comprehensive or conclusive analysis. I'd like to suggest that the locus of this complexity this ongoing sense of the exhibition's irresolution resides in the ways in which Parallel of Life and Art invokes the most destabilising properties of photographic technology. And to make this argument I want to consider the more unsettling effects of this now infamous exhibition presented at a time when photography was largely excluded from the canon of modern visual art in Britain and while photographs remained almost entirely absent from museological collections in this country, the photographic constitution of Parallel of Life and Art proved controversial. Indeed, when it opened at the ICA it elicited a critical response characterised by feelings of disturbance and uncertainty with commentators accusing the exhibition makers of obfuscation arbitrariness and even perversion. Reflecting upon the prevalence of this disconcerted critical sentiment Tom Hopkinson remarked in The Manchester Guardian that to judge from published comments the show had proved disturbing and even repulsive to many critics and journalists alike. Even Rainer Bannum, otherwise an advocate for the project, noted the unnerving effects of this photographic display remarking that truth may be stranger than fiction but many of the camera's statements are stranger than truth itself. Reading across these published reflections the critical discomfort elicited by Parallel of Life and Art appears to have derived from a kind of double departure or negation. Not only did the images within the exhibition fail to adhere to the documentary or illustrative function of photography but they also subverted the codes and conventions governing the artistic context of their presentation. Parallel of Life and Art emptied the gallery of traditional art forms and instead repopulated this valorised space with highly ephemeral photographic materials. Materials that through their explicitly replicated status dramatically disrupted the traditional tenets of artistic authorship and originality. In doing so, Parallel of Life and Art deviated from the classificatory criteria, taxonomies and hierarchies that determined the category of art in post war Britain a category from which photography remained overwhelmingly excluded. And these disruptions and deviations are emphasised by the concertina folded catalogue that was provided as a kind of guide to accompany the otherwise unlabeled exhibition images and which details the disparate sources of these photographic materials while categorising and seemingly miscategorising them under a series of somewhat oblique headings. These negational maneuvers enacted by Parallel of Life and Art this double departure from both the conventional role of photography as well as from artistic tradition appears to be at the root of the critical accusations of evasion and even perversion levelled at the exhibition at the time. Staying with these more disturbed critical sentiments I want to consider how Parallel of Life and Art was able to repurpose photography in this way as a kind of negational medium as an inversion of the exclusion of photography from the canon of modern visual art and at the same time as an expansion of the emergent category of contemporary art into the realm of the photographic image. To explore this aspect of Parallel of Life and Art I want to turn next to the research practice from which the exhibition emerged which saw Henderson, Paolocti, Jenkins and the Smithsons meeting on a weekly basis to share and study found images. These meetings were held in the house belonging to Nigel and Judith Henderson of 46 Chisenhell Road in the east end of London. Gathered in the couple's upstairs study the group would discuss the pictures they had amassed in their scrapbooks and as loose tear sheets and prints pinning up materials throughout the house to juxtapose images and test out spatialised modes of display. During this extended period of collective visual investigation the exhibition makers developed a distinctive research methodology as they sifted through and selected material that seemed to be of shared significance for them they would convert their chosen images into copy negatives a stage that they outsourced to a technical printing facility thereby inserting a further hidden layer of photographic replication, labour and alteration into the development of the exhibition. These copy negatives which sit almost invisibly between the found images and the exhibition prints offer an alternative lens onto Parallel of Life and Art and onto its underlying photographic logic. The negatives suspend the project in an intermediate state a state in which the images remain ever malleable and open to ongoing multiplicity. Here we see the source material of Parallel of Life and Art photographically transformed each ghostly image is extracted from its original context and function reduced to a uniform size tonally inverted and translucent. These highly ephemeral materials which are now held in the archive at Tate bear further traces of the group's collaborative research process of examination, reclassification and experimental display. Their glassy envelopes have been labelled and relabelled and the negatives themselves have puncture marks in their corners where they've been pinned up and studied in their negative state and it's worth highlighting how dramatically different it is to look through and handle these photographic images in negative form. A form in which the image itself feels at once flexible, full of potential highly sensitive and photographically unstable. Although not constituted by a traditional artistic material these negatives functioned as the primary medium of Parallel of Life and Art permitting the amplifications of photographic tone and texture the distortions of scale and the dislocations of context and the jarring incongruities of content that so disturbed its critics. Reflecting upon the development of the display, Henderson argued that the conception of the exhibition was inseparable from the medium and building upon this assertion I would argue that the underlying logic of Parallel of Life and Art was in fact inseparable from the medium of photographic negativity and photography's most primal and most volatile state. Indeed, looking through these negatives and with Henderson's statement in mind, Parallel of Life and Art can be read as rooted in the most disruptive capacities of photography capacities which are attained by the negative allowing the ongoing migration, mediation and manipulation of images and revealing their irresolution as they undergo technological change. Crucially, the role of photographic negativity within Parallel of Life and Art is reactivated and even elaborated upon within the public hang of the exhibition itself, where we find a small grouping of Henderson's own photographic experiments inserted, if somewhat obliquely, among the photographically replicated contents of the display. Often referred to by his peers using the hybridised term artist photographer with the two words hyphenated, Henderson's role is critical here because of the uncertain and interstitial position he himself occupied between art and photography at this time. Appearing in a loose configuration at one end of the gallery, Henderson's four photographic experiments included a triptych of distorted images of male bathers made from a Victorian glass lantern slide, a contact print produced using a piece of decaying mirror, a photochemical palm print that had been dramatically enlarged and a photograph created from discarded coffee grounds. Importantly, these four photographic experiments are distinct from the rest of the pictures that comprise Parallel of Life and Art, in that they do not straightforwardly represent enlarged photographic reproductions of found images per se. Instead, created through artistic intervention in the dark room, intervention at the technological level of the negative, these images seem almost surreptitiously inserted among the hang, given their departure from the group's overarching protocol of sourcing ready-made pictures and subjecting these to photographic reproduction. Indeed, Henderson's four photographic experiments trouble photography's straightforwardly reproductive role. As if intent on studying these alternative forms of photography within Parallel of Life and Art, many of Henderson's installation shots focus upon this particular portion of the hang, revealing interactions between the photographic experiments and their neighbouring pictures. For instance, if we turn first to Henderson's tryptic of photographically distorted male bathers captured undressing on an unknown shore, we can read these figures in dialogue with an adjacent image, a photographic reproduction of a painting by Picasso titled The Bathers and dated 1923. Here we see Henderson's photographic distortion entering into a direct, and I would argue photographically negational, confrontation with modern painting, and by extension with the entrenched artistic traditions of painterly skill, authorial status and form. While in Picasso's piece the figures become contorted through the conventional artistic media and technique of paint and brush on canvas executed in the artist's studio, Henderson achieves a comparable level of contortion by folding, increasing the photosensitive paper in the dark room during the printing process, while projecting the found Victorian image through the glass lantern slide. Within Parallel of Life Nart, not only does this pairing show modern paintings subsumed into the photographic display, but it also deftly inserts the photographically manipulated image into the valorised realm of painting, a manoeuvre that is made possible by the flexibility of the image in its negative state. As if to dramatise a dialogue on the back cover of the catalogue, Henderson selects an intriguing professional title, identifying himself here as painter and photographer, despite rarely painting during the period and claiming little proficiency or even interest in the medium. And it's interesting to note that in the rest of the marketing material produced around the exhibition, the word painter remains absent until we enter Parallel of Life Nart and find these manipulated photographic images invading the traditional territory of painting. Read in proximity with the bathers, Henderson's chosen title can be seen as playing off the pairing like a pun, Picasso and Henderson, painter and photographer. This confrontation between painting and photography that we find submerged within Parallel of Life Nart is extended if we look just to the right of Henderson's Bather images. Here we can see a shot of the American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock in his Long Island studio captured by the German photographer Hans Namuth in 1950 and deriving from a series of pictures of Pollock taken by Namuth at this time, which has since become some of the most iconic images of the painter at work used not only to inflate his individual celebrity but also to propagate the mythology of the studio itself as a source of artistic genius and heroism. Building upon the interaction between the painted and photographic bathers, this depiction of the modern painter at work in his studio can also be read in dialogue with another of Henderson's dark room experiments. Hanging just in front, face down in parallel with the ceiling, was an image entitled disintegrating mirror contact print and identified as coming from the collection of Nigel Henderson. This image had been produced in the dark room by placing a decaying mirror directly onto photosensitive paper before exposing the arrangement to light. Creating an abstract pattern of tangled lines which, when placed into the hang of Parallel of Life and Art, echoed the paint spattered on surfaces of Pollock Studio. As if to extend the fractured pattering from the painter's floor and walls onto the ceiling of the exhibition. Again, here we see a trope of modern painting disrupted photographically. In Parallel of Life and Art, the modernist sanctuary of the artist's studio is ruptured and relocated. The interior world of the studio becomes photographically extracted and transferred partially into the hidden zone of the dark room and partially into the contemporary art gallery. While at the same time as with the bathers, replacing paint, brush and canvas with photo chemicals and found materials. And together, these photographically negational manoeuvres trouble one of the most fundamental traditions of painting. The authorial touch, status and skill of the artist's hand. Indeed, within Parallel of Life and Art, the question and role of the artist's hand loomed large. Suspended centrally within the disorientating display was Henderson's photo chemical palm print. Executed in black and white and blown up to dramatic, even grotesque proportions. The fingerless photographic palm hung vertically from the ceiling. Positioned just in front of the horizontal disintegrating mirror panel and perpendicular to the wall displaying the image grid that included both Henderson's and Picasso's bathers and the Muth's photograph of Jackson Pollock painting. Henderson's photographic hand print is likely to have been made using a form of camera-less photography that later became known as a chemogram method. In chemogram photography an object, in this case the artist's hand is placed into photographic developer fluid and then onto photosensitive paper to make a print which is exposed to light performing stock of fixer. This print can then be photographically reproduced, translated into negative and enlarged using a photographic enlarger. Given its central location within parallel of life and art Henderson's palm print raises the question of how to reconceptualise artistic skill in relation to the photographically mediated exhibition. Coated in developer fluid the photochemical palm print creates the direct evidentiary trace of individual creative handling during photographic image production. In doing so, the hand could be seen to reinsert itself back into the creative process repositioning itself as the source of artistic skill, subjectivity and authorship after the advent of photographic reproducibility and in spite of the prevalence of the photographic image as a ready-made commodity. Here then artistic skill can be seen as relocated from the modernist work of painting to a collaborative, transdisciplinary and highly technologised kind of research practice. One task with interrogating the function of the photographic image in the post-war world and testing the capacity of contemporary art to serve as an emergent space capable of sustaining this kind of investigation. Most critically perhaps, parallel of life and art represents this form of research as unfinished, as suspended in the ongoing process of image reproduction, translation and analysis. This is evident if we turn to the shots Henderson took of the display after it had been hung where we find the exhibition returned once again into photographic form and, importantly, into the primal state of negativity. Here parallel of life and art itself becomes a negative image darkly translucent and miniaturised reduced to the status and scale of the negatives that we used to construct it. This final manoeuvre returns the shots of the exhibition to the research process from which it emerged, a research process that is recorded in the negative state of these complex archival materials. Studying these images allows an alternative analysis of parallel of life and art, one that moves from thinking about the photographic image as a fixed pictorial form to reconceptualising the photograph as itself processual. Seen through this lens, the exhibition can be reconceived as constituting a kind of ongoing investigation into the post photographic visual world and into the function of contemporary art in this rapidly advancing technological context. At the time it was presented, as I've argued, the photographic constitution of parallel of life and art posed a profound challenge to artistic tradition, to canonical structures and to the definition and value of art upheld by museological conventions. Just before I finish, I want to reflect on the afterlife of the exhibition and the complexity of accessing these materials in their most destabilising photographic state. Stored within the archive at Tate, the negative traces of parallel of life and art become a kind of invisible presence. In the reading rooms and on the museum's website, positive proxies are provided in the place of these negatives, as the assumption is that audiences and researchers are looking for the pictorial content of the images in their correct and natural form as printed or digital positives. The negatives are thereby concealed, becoming instead a kind of dark shadow archive of the exhibition submerged beneath the visible surfaces of the museum. And I think it says a lot about the uneasy relationship photography continues to have with visual art in Britain, particularly within museological space. So just as parallel of life and art presented a kind of negative provocation to the institutional structures governing the category of art in the post war period, I think its shadow archive of photographic negatives continues to pose a complex provocation to the ways in which photography is allowed to function within the art museum today. Thanks very much. Lots to talk about. I'm sure lots of questions. So, shall I look to see what bridges we can make of similarities across your papers and the subjects that you're looking at? Shall I ask direct questions to you? The one thing I do feel that is interesting to me about what both what the show is doing in 53 and what Oswald was doing throughout his extraordinary life is something about excess which seems very different from our notion of the kind of post war modernism as being something clean, pure and all of them embrace this idea of what do I write, precarity, instability, it's in flow, the use of detritus, you talk about magic lantern slides, but the use of a kind of indexical type of photography and process but also books, writing, that idea of text but text which is concrete poetry but also, you know, review writing I mean it seems to absolutely go against our perceived notions of what the kind of rather more homogenised idea that we have of modernism so I don't know am I completely off key there or do you both think there's something in that? I think so, yeah the word that we said before was that this work is almost unexhibitable and it never will be part of a main narrative of post war British art or in a variety of context because as you say the negatives are in a box your advice not to handle them but you know, Bacon's works have disintegrated, evaporated whatever so, yeah, I think that's a kind of good observation here I think it's also that question and I think the parallel of life now it's like what the kind of increasing amount of stuff and as you say the kind of detritus pre-war and the interwar period, you know what do we do with all the stuff that we're left over with and the kind of ruins the material around that and then also what do we do with the exponential increase in the production for instance of images you know, it's like that what to do with the kind of ruins of the past but also the yeah, exponential production of the present and would you say that you know often again the narrative we're given looks to British pop art as being something which is a response to a kind of consumer and consumer excess but I think this is something a little different and again I was looking at the catalogue for the show and there was Metsa and others I'm thinking about you know Trockie, about Jeff Knuckle that whole extraordinary slightly grimy if I can say that world of that time which was generating such extraordinary work so again I wonder what you think about how we might not make connections neat kind of teleologies towards pop art, of British pop art or so and I'm good to get your thoughts on that I think parallel art is absolutely about this I mean as I said at the beginning in my talk it's unresolved you know it's unresolved character makes it so generous they're generous to kind of think about today and also that I think that these collaborative projects they don't, you know you can't neatly resolve them and I think they're about that the uncertainty of that moment as well and they kind of their aesthetics hold that uncertainty and they're fractured as well kind of formally fractured and I think that speaks to what you're talking about absolutely and I sort of on an individual level Blakeson couldn't quite decide what he was going to be and you can argue looking at some of the documentation in his archives that actually he wanted to be a writer and he kind of turned to film to a painting sorry as a because I think there's some letters between him and Briar that talk about people aren't interested in text anymore they're only interested in the visual so he was kind of trying to kind of express himself according to the mode of the day and then there's this additional kind of overhang on film and how that itself kind of frames an intermediality which you know is similar with photography I was just going to say we were talking about that idea of what to name these kinds of work or practice or these forms of labour that don't yet have a name and these I mentioned that Henderson was known as artist photographer because it's almost like there was something unresolved in that pairing as well and I was talking about those kind of forms of work that didn't yet weren't yet kind of identified what they are, are they creative practices what are their kind of disciplinary traditions I think it's really interesting and I think also what's interesting as well I mean that interdisciplinarity I mean that's we're so used to that today but think about research based practice in for PhDs and so on but it's taken a long time just to get to that point where you're not sort of placed with one medium only and told you have to stay with that but I was also interested again not only in the very exciting unresolved aspect of their work the kind of endlessness of it somehow particularly that fantastic show but also that both of them and we talked a little bit about this before didn't we their sort of bridge and perhaps that uncertainty comes from that they bridge a pre and post war period and I mean I know certainly if you think about the involvement of Lakeston with close up and that very particular and exciting moment in film when he was making work himself and also I know you were saying I know less about Henson that he as well was very involved in it. Yeah absolutely yeah he was slightly older than he was 17 and he was a piece of Virginia Woolf and the his mother was Win Henderson who was working with a Guggenheim on the Guggenheim Journal Gallery and it's also those kind of energies from Dada and Surrealism and Bloomsbury and that kind of moment after the war of what do we do with these you know that assumption that they've kind of gone underground and then we're in this new kind of technological context and the very new way in which people are working but where do those kind of energies go and I think Henderson was absolutely a sort of conduit between the pre war and inter war period and post war. It's not just you know like other painters who have kind of peers of flakes and also express this insurity about technology and what it meant to be a painter in a kind of technological environment is a great quote in the Imre Caesar film of Williamson right at the very end he's been interviewed by Guy Brex and he says you know this anxiety about technology keeping a pace with technology and that's what's his work. But that's interesting isn't it because at the same time that they're picking up I want to come to this as a question for you in a minute Rosie at the same time that they're picking up images of ancient statues in negative or magic lantern slides or exhibiting in coffee shots because they can't find anywhere else. They're also being told to look ahead to technology so in a sense it's both looking back to that kind of ruination which has come after the war but also the kind of white teacher technology that they're also expected so there's a real confliction there I think. The other thing of course we haven't mentioned is that it's a post atomic time. I mean this is post Hiroshima and what was it? Jeff Nuttall said that didn't he? He said we are the Hiroshima generation so I imagine that that's imbuing very much. Or unless you again this is you know am I wildly out of that? No all of the kind of bits and signs of circle that he exhibited where there's a painter, Helen Manalich Dennis Bowen all of that you know there's the kind of nuclear series there was one that featured very briefly on this slide by Helen Helen Manalich which is called nuclear image. They were all kind of working within that as a kind of dominant feature of their culture. Yeah I kind of wondered about that even the crystal pictures there's a sense of that. But can I ask you Rosie I mean this is maybe a bit of a dumb question but the choice of images in the show where did they come from? I love the way you talked about the kind of complexity and I was thinking about this idea of of layering and again of the kind of precarity of looking through the image and looking around it but why did they write much about their rationale for the show? Yeah so they the kind of methodology that they developed so initially they weren't it wasn't intended there wasn't the explicit intention for it to be an exhibition they were just meeting at Henderson's house and kind of sharing tear sheets, books it was a real disparate source of images and thinking about the notion of the image kind of conceptually really trying to kind of get to grips of what images are and how they function and how they can be made to kind of re-functional re-perform by extracting them from different contexts so a lot of it is kind of collage source material it's things from there, scrap they were often all keeping scrapbooks and I showed those images of Henderson's house but pinning things up around that it's really the kind of found detritus and I think that what you are speaking to also that huge kind of breadth of history that those images come from that they aren't and I think that's what parallel life of life and art kind of sits in a funny position in relation to the kind of conventional idea of pop art as being kind of of the modern moment they're not modern those images you know that's amazing that kind of deep history and the kind of trans-historical form of the exhibition because of that methodology that they developed it's really interesting and that's also reckoning with psychology and obviously you know Henderson's partner had this kind of wish you like one of the first psychoanalysis like people to be sorry yeah parents were and that when you mention them kind of all sitting around in Henderson's house looking at the images you get the kind of this is the kind of spectre of the Bloomsbury Salon you know cribbing each other's literary work but instead now looking at images and the kind of the history of the image kind of being supplanted onto the kind of history of one's own mind and the domestic context and that kind of the decorative modes of display using the house as a context to kind of test out the exhibition in a very kind of partial and fragmented form but you see it on the shelves in the house pinned up on the walls there's kind of fragments of parallel life and art that have this very interesting I think relationship to the fine line exhibition itself so in a sense it's what we would today call research based practice but in a really extraordinary I was thinking of the Eames as well I don't know if they were anywhere in the picture they came to mind but I shouldn't keep you all to myself I really should open up to the floor on the online floor too does anybody have any questions hello both papers focus very rewardingly on individual figures named individuals and offered little snippets of biography and little bits of information about who these people were I wonder if you could both elaborate a bit more on that kind of biographical question who they were, where they came from and I ask that pointedly, with a bit of pointedness because I'm restriking that both practices as we've been hearing about in this discussion were very focused on precarity on being unsustainable in effect and you sort of wonder well what is it which makes unsustainable practices sustainable and is there anything in their biographies is there any common ground as well between these two lives that might be kind of worth exploring a bit more I think on account of his sexuality he kind of felt quite alienated from and kind of ended up working a film in the street so I think biography was a really important way for me understanding his work because it's so much and it covers so much territory like the reason why my paper was three times as long was because I kind of wrote it and was like he knew that person and they knew that person and you know they're not kind of kind of wrote about them in depth spanning his own kind of work as a critic as well and he was very I guess biography in terms if I had another like hour I could kind of fill that out a bit more but I don't think there was any actual crossover with Henderson like I have not read any reference so the kind of little man that was earlier the key split comes because under the auspices of the ICA the free painters and sculptors group formed which was Dennis Bowen and had an allege some of the co-founders and they sort of started exhibiting at Dover Street and then kind of went off on their own and kind of detached from the ICA and then I guess Henderson and Palots he were you know like Blake's never mentioned Blake in a contemporary film he doesn't really get to it until um the late 70s he must have had some through coping but like it doesn't feature in his criticism until the late 70s and that's when his own work starts to be of interest so there's the kind of big hammer which shows the film's film show in 78 and I think there was a 30 show and there was a David Miller curated a sort of British photography show around that time so you get always there's people writing today saying that it still exists and then he starts he goes to the film's film and he hates he hates Malcolm the Grife it's not going to be more about this he doesn't rate it at all so his own kind of comments on his own experimental work are quite dismissive like from that point so yeah that can be it sounds in a way like he's and again being a gay man at that time when he was still illegal of course he had to have multiple selves and that really is reflected just talking about psychonautism but that really does seem to be reflected in the way that he works across media so on it's very heartwarming in his archive because he becomes embraced by the community at a later stage so he kind of writes articles for gay news and they kind of write things about him as an elder so I think he almost gets a kind of a place at the end of his life and he kind of is able to be open in some way yeah I think in relation to Henderson it's a really good question I mean perhaps similarly he came from an upper middle class background and I think that idea of what enabled him to be precarious and to kind of sustain a precarious practice in that way and his wife as we talked about Judith Henderson so she's an anthropologist who was working on a project called Discover Your Neighbour which was a descendant of mass observation and as part of that they were kind of given that house in East London so that she could do her research from there 46 Chesnell Road and so he's the kind of infrastructure of support that enabled that very precarious practice is a really interesting one as well but I think that question of biography in relation to parallel of life and art specifically is really interesting because I think part of that collaborative research process that they adopted kind of obscured I mean I know I kind of unpick it in relation to Henderson and kind of read that function of the artist's photographer role in relation to the way that photography operates in that exhibition I kind of use his role in that as a kind of device to think about photography but equally we could think about you could read the exhibition very differently if you thought about the Smithsons or if you thought about Ronald Jenkins the engineer or Paolozzi so I think it's at the interesting that the methodology that they devise and the way that photography kind of extracted the images from their individual maybe kind of biography or their individual practices and kind of disguise them through that process of replication and then put them into the display as the individual in a way and I think that's part of the exhibition and it's part of what makes it so rich in terms of the ways in which you can read it I think another thing just to speak back to you is I think they really both reject the all-terrorist notion of the single artist don't know it's networked all the time isn't it even if he's got many versions of himself but it's networked too so many different artists engineer it seems that they have a kind of restless curiosity on one level but also they want to resist being turned into the artist par excellence who does one thing he shows in a certain way would I be right in thinking that they really quite consciously or maybe even unconsciously rejecting that kind of model I think there's this kind of tension there between because it's not an entire relinquishing of authorship I think you know I showed the back cover of the Parallel by Mark Hatelog where Henderson that statement of painter and photographer you could read that the other way but he's asserting his artistic status in relation to the exhibition so I think there is a tension and I think perhaps often in collective subjects of wanting to relinquish or call of status and yet still naming oneself and claiming a certain position around that and I think also that changes kind of historically particularly in relation to Parallel but now as it becomes mythologised and kind of monumentalised and becomes a kind of work of art then authorship around it there's a kind of higher stakes to claim an authorial position so I think and you see that would be a dependent group but with Parallels you know the association with what become kind of landmark events I think the claims to authorship also shift over time Flixton is a kind of compounding a diwethaf mlynedd and as well is a composite of authorship diwethaf his kind of whole artistic identity is a kind of knowing does this answer your question or maybe just bring on one sorry just keep it going just keep it going really great any other questions thanks thanks very much for those tours fascinating my question is about roses talking especially the way in which photography is positioned and I really like the idea of Henderson's work being about a kind of conflict between painting and photography but I want to bring in the actual space here and the experience of being in that space which surely was a major contributing factor in the critics reacting to its disturbing and even confusing nature because if we can focus say on that handprint picture by Henderson that is skyed it's right beside the ceiling in that space as indeed on many of the pictures or they're propped against the floor they're on the angle between floor floor up and wall and so when you talk about relocation which you were talking about in a metaphorical sense we could actually talk about relocation in a kind of fun phenomenological sense in that space it would have made it very difficult to actually see as pictures some of the images which are skyed how do you respond to that I think it's a really good point and it's interesting I was talking about the research that their kind of methodology of finding those images and kind of testing out spatialized modes of display in the house 46 years in her own in Henderson's and other photographs of that house you see them pinning up materials on the ceiling and it's really interesting that that kind of testing out of the ceiling as a surface of display and I think it's in comparison of Pollock Studio where you have the floor as the kind of space in which marks are made and coming back to the Bloonsby group as well thinking of the decorative and how that kind of taking on the decorative space transplanting that into the exhibition space is really interesting and I think it's also why Henderson's shots of the exhibition are so interesting because they really test out different they show different ways of looking at the exhibition and they frame very particular groupings of material and they're often kind of angled upwards so they're directing the gaze they're kind of unusual they're not conventional installation photographs they're particularly kind of focused on testing out ways of looking ways of framing using the camera he uses two different kinds he uses a roller-cord camera and a plate camera to photograph the space so you also have different kind of ways of cropping images and looking at the overlaps of images as well so I think that's very much part of what's being kind of tested in that space I think it's also something interesting about what you both feel around the kind of utopian attitude to this technology and I wondered if that was coming into it as well I mean I love to see that both teaching at LCC as it then was and really getting my hands on the stuff in quite a kind of physical way but exploring what was available to them and also that quite clearly that Blakeston was really enjoying trying at these different media but do you think that there was an engineer involved in the show and sort of looking ahead to the artist placement group and there was in some sense a utopian attitude that we wouldn't have now around the use of different technologies I think yeah possibly but also kind of I could have done a whole other kind of reading of his role in the exhibition but also a kind of necessity and I think that's what collaboration speaks to as well of needing different kinds of expertise and coming back to that idea of the complexity of that hang and that kind of spatialise working with architects, working with an engineer and the way that they had this kind of lattice of wires across the ceiling and those images in that way and so it's also kind of bringing together those different loads of kind of technical and technological expertise in order to make a project like that kind of realisable together I think Anything you'd ask? I mean yeah also all kind of like pick and mix with technology and the other gallery that he exhibited was The Painter, it was The Grobowski Gallery which was owned by Matthias Grobowski who was a chemist in Chelsea you know he delighted in kind of a kind of amateurish like approach to technology I guess Fascinating also the idea of the amateur as well as opposed to having the engineer it's again part of that unresolved witness that they both say with in a way Lucy, we've got to push it online but just to say let's come and say we really enjoyed both talks and that they weren't aware of both artists so I think as well it's quite interesting isn't it if you're familiar with this period like a figure like Henson it's entered into research and the conversation but actually wider histories or more chemical histories as well that these figures are not fully accounted for or the networks and the gallery spaces in which they were operating are sort of in and out of the history so that was a really interesting comment from one of our online audiences who's like meeting these artists for the first time through your talks Did you say that you also had an online question to answer? No it was a comment it was that comment by George Phoenix So James Yeah I suppose it's sort of about mediation but it's to do with whether you think of these artists as being at the time they were working in a coterie of artists who were making work for members of their own circle because even though we also knew that you might know working in publications or in penitent and mediation did you get a sense just actually for a minute or two that we both used archival images and it's got some roots in the sense to it but I kind of wondered how broadly we think this work might have circulated beyond London I'm going to ask you this because there are some artists that have been working in New York a lot like that work who didn't know what we were, Williams and I wonder is that a personal thing or are these things actually circulating more than you do? So Blake's indefinitely it was he there's by the victory of Great Yarn Central Library he did a show of Gary and Colt of Gary was 16 more in the late 1670s he did a couple of shows in my gosh Harrow Don't forget Croydon he's great at London now and he kind of very much took every opportunity some of them are quite surprising and quite like Gentile as well the Aron Arts Centre in the south might be a different thing but that was with Wren Barnard who was one of the co-directors of the Gamblebox Press all the Williams, Max Chapman so these artists were certainly circulating and definitely through revision he had a lot of contacts up in the northeast and Blakeston's work was kind of followed those he also exhibited in Toronto and Germany in the 60s but I think it was circulating and it was very much part of a particular theme for the network Yeah I think it's interesting though the criticism that I talked about in the beginning of my talk the Manchester Guardian and I think that the ICA had a kind of and some of that criticism you read it and you get a sense that people are going or the critics are going to the ICA to be kind of shocked and scandalised sort of a certain thrill in that and then writing these very scaping abuse so I think that that and I think that's part of the kind of function of the exhibition is positioning it within within the ICA and also the ICA in its title making a certain claim to be contemporary rather than modern and I think that's a really interesting part of that kind of what its function is in that space Just going through the press cuttings books from the new vision gallery as well I think to read how absolutely critical the mainstream press wear was abstract half just generally doesn't even need to be photography hung on the ceiling they hated it Mark, I think you had a question Sort of No I just wondered what the kind of work the two of you are doing feels like in relation to a kind of broader description of British art I mean whether you see I was just interested if you could step back a bit from your specific projects and what kind of directions you see, can I work with you whether you're taking the histories of British art and I wondered whether it was part is a way in which the kind of work you're doing is a reaction against that very dominant canon especially who are seen to be traditionally and the market certainly seem to be these towering figures in the post-war period and whether the kind of work you're doing practises and figures who are not part of that very familiar story of baking and drawing and that kind of thing I was just interested to see what's going on now with the show and with the work you do this series is illuminating even conference-illuminated pan histories of British art and directions go I think it's interesting because it's not like these galleries and figures are not discussed there are displays that take Britain there are conferences organised by the poor medicine that kind of deal with them periodically but I guess looking at the work and seeing how hard it is to just pull together some images I really tried it's never going to be canonised and I don't think it should be canonised but it's always going to have to exist in this kind of recurrent like oh have you thought about my behind-the-scenes novel but let's look at it now and then it'll go back in the archive for ten years and then come out again it's never going to be canonised and I guess it's just part of a recurrent in the same way that there's a baking exhibition every six years or something there's little conferences and papers about more peripheral figures I guess Yeah, absolutely I think that's the kind of the kind of interstitial and the familiarity that makes and I think what I was talking to you initially about with Parallel Life Nights it's challenging you know and I think that's the kind of it's archival location now it doesn't sit in the reflection of Tate it sits in the archive and it's very kind of distributed and fragmented state because it's totality because it's so ephemeral and interstitial as a form of work but I think also there's something really interesting with Henderson now that Tate digitised the negatives and they're available as online images and the way that they kind of circulate online and also just how many of them that there are but as I was talking about at the end of my talk they're actually negatives a lot of them so they don't exist as positives but now they become very kind of familiar images so there's something interesting I think about doing this kind of research with so much access to online these materials online but then I think there's also a danger there where we don't can't necessarily access them in the archival of kind of material form that it's a very yeah that the way that we research in online space is very very different and I think that I don't quite know how that becomes kind of resolved it's so interesting that you say that they're not on display they're in the archive just like spend a lot of time complaining for somebody who works a moving image it's in the education room it's not in the gallery so it's almost a sense going back to that rather tiresome Benjaminian idea of the the awe of the art object that somehow these practices aren't very peripheral but because of their very material traces material traces that I know I use the word they're access before but actually they're networkness in which really speaks of technology actually they're difficult to grasp difficult to buy difficult to put in a collection to put on a wall and perhaps that perhaps that's one of the reasons that as you say they get taken out for a while looking back at a certain radical moment and then they get put back again but also you know that that's what I was trying to get at in the last section in my hope about the spatial kind of configuration of these works at the time is that that ends up being replicated in a physiological setting is that as you know which album got a fill it's in the bloody basement it's in the bloody basement that's where it was at the time it was in the basement from Terry Crawford and that's where it is now well today at least we brought it out of the basement it's here in the middle of the centre British Centre for Art of Four Menom thank you so much and I know you had a question I think I will get into trouble if I let you ask it but you'll just have to ask these speakers later thank you so much to everyone who came today and to such fantastic panellists and papers and looking forward to seeing them in print as well as like that I know and to more discussions that are really interesting here so thank you very much to everyone for coming and we'll wait for the next