’1950: Aspects of British Art’, ICA Dover Street, 1950, installation view

Jane Scarth from the Student Forum spoke to Anne Massey, art historian and co-curator of the current Fox Reading Room display The Independent Group: Parallel of Art  and Life, about the fraught and dramatic history of the ICA archive, what makes the Independent Group radical, and the challenges of re-contextualisation.

When asked if she could describe her relationship with the ICA archive, Anne Massey laughs and tells me “It’s the longest one I’ve had in all my life!” Her extensive research career as an art historian began in the late 1970s, doing a PhD at Newcastle Polytechnic on the Independent Group. Anne stepped through the doors of ICA for the first time in 1980, coming to consult the archive with a strong desire to get her hands on primary sources.

Anne was put in touch with Dorothy Moorland, ICA Director from 1951 to 68 and one of the biggest advocates for the Independent Group within the ICA staff in the early years: “She really helped me. She had looked after the archives and was really concerned that the history wasn’t being properly recorded or preserved or shared. The ICA’s archive was more or less accidental and it would have been thrown out if it wasn’t for Dorothy and Judy Lawson. We had a good relationship and we worked on this together throughout the 80s and 90s. We tried to get the ICA to put on an exhibition about its history but there was no interest. I carried on using the archives when they were based here at the Mall – all in grey metal office cupboards”.

In the mid 1990s, the ICA sold its archive material to the Tate who had the space and facilities to house it.

Jane Scarth: In the display there is a lot of your own archive material. How has that been generated and evolved?

Anne Massey: Just by accident! Partly it is because people know of my interest and give me things. I own a lot of original photos of the opening of Parallel of Life & Art in 1950 that no one else has got. For instance I don’t think anyone else has a copy of the installation shot that is blown up in the display.

A lot of the founding of it was from my own father. He was training to be an architect at Kings College when Richard Hamilton was teaching there, so he designed things like the arts ball invite for 1956. That is what partly sparked my interest as well. My dad came from that mind set, he was very similar to them in the way that he looked at the world.

JS: The Independent Group has been brought together with Bernadette Corporation for this season on radical collectives. In what way can the Independent Group be considered radical? Is it just an aesthetic radicalism or is it political too?

AM: They were young, working class and lower middle class people who would not normally be part of the art world. It was only because the ICA was so open and welcoming that they managed to infiltrate the place and were given some kind of space in which to operate. But it wasn’t a central space, they were on the fringe.

A lot of people have told me that they actually weren’t that friendly because they were so ambitious. They argued a lot between themselves too and it did get quite nasty. It was that burning ambition to make it that I think was beyond anything else.

It’s like you’re watching that film Top Hat, and on the one hand you’ve got a stuffy gentleman’s club in London and Fred Astaire comes in and starts tap dancing to jazz music, I think it’s like that. There is just that shock value of talking about the popular in an archaic atmosphere that I think can be quite political.

JS: Just to finish could you talk about the upcoming event Parallel of Art & Life: A Conference on the Independent Group that you are organizing and the kind of things that will be addressed?

AM: The plan is for it to be a two way process: looking at the IG’s own exhibitions and then how exhibitions now reflect the IG. I am really looking forward to the first morning, as it is PhD students or people who have just completed their PhDs. It will be great as we will get some new material and ideas. There is a younger generation coming along with their own ideas and that is fantastic, I really welcome that.

There are some excellent speakers over the two days and I am hoping there will be a bit of disagreement! It’s part of what we need to do at the ICA. I think often we’re far too polite!

Anne Massey is founding editor of the Berg journal, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and Research Associate, ICA Archives. She is the leading expert on the interdisciplinary history and contemporary significance of the Independent Group. She has written several books including The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59 (Manchester University Press); Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Berg); and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Independent Group and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press).

Student Forum members Amber Turner and Jane Scarth spent some time with the ICA archive to think about how this material might be relevant to the current exhibitions of radical collectives, Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years and The Independent Group: Parallel of Art and Life. Their research has developed an upcoming seminar event Radical [vs?] Institution: Revisiting Archives to form the future that will take place on Wednesday 5 June (more information to follow).

Amber chronicles the research process.

Following up our initial interest in the ICA archive we selected some boxes to be delivered to the studio in order for our research to progress. A full day working with the archive seemed daunting because of its current state (loosely organised with an un-detailed database and generally lacking in TLC). However, as we continued to trawl through what seemed like an endless array of material, much of which without name of date, we began to appreciate the ICA’s history as an environment for radical exchange and ideas. This inspired some questions, such as what constitutes a radical institution? Are the terms Radical and Institution mutually exclusive or paradoxical?

How does the process or the act of keeping an archive actually affect the term radical? Does an institution or collective stop being radical? We actually found that one of the ICAs early fundamental values was that it was not initially going to keep an archive at all. The institution was going to be based on the new and contemporary art world, which would not be interrupted by keeping a record of events. Thinking about the ICA’s upcoming exhibition – Independent Group: Parallel of Art & Life and the fact that it is based upon the IG’s activity within the ICA, got us reflecting upon the group’s importance to the institution’s history.

Our interest in what an archive might mean to an establishment or organisation developed, because so far our research had proved interesting. We listened to a talk that took place at the ICA last year, Making Archives Public: Digitisation and Display, which had centred on the uses of archives and their accessibility. In particular, it was interesting to listen to what Naiya Yiakoumaki (Archive Curator, Whitechapel Gallery) discussed, because many of her experiences working with the Whitechapel archive appeared to be similar to our own at the ICA.

She noted that the Whitechapel’s archive (although it is now archived properly and continually utilised by the Whitechapel) was kept in a similar condition to the ICA’s. She found that much of their archive was accidental, emerging simply as a way for staff to make room for other files, as a means of utilising space. So, is the archive often subjective the needs of an individual, based on ideas of what they feel are necessary? Naiya’s discussion brought to light the way in which archives can be used to help stage future exhibitions and to instigate new research surrounding current programmes and artworks. It also addressed how archives trace the popularity of artists or artworks throughout an institution’s history. The key questions of interest were; what happens after an artist or curator has studied an archive or intervened? Making an incision within the archive but also the creation of a new archive by intervening within the main one. Is the archive enhanced by curatorial intervention and the re-archiving of materials?

As we delved deeper into our research we came across some interesting articles regarding the Independent Group exhibition in 1990. It was interesting to note the general unease from the press about the exhibition, some articles reflecting negatively upon it, one even considering what the IG actually contributed to the art world at that time at all. This in itself brought up some significant questions in relation to revisiting and re-contextualising exhibitions or groups such as the IG. Can the return to a past exhibition actually taint or damage it in some way?

The terms of re-contextualisation raised the question of appropriation and the way in which the ICA and other institutions choose to appropriate their own history. Interestingly enough, one article (while referring to the IG exhibition in 1990) considered whether the ICA was “cannibalising its own history”. The idea that we settled on as an overarching theme from our discussions became the relationship between Radicalism and Institutions, questioning how many institutions are or have actually revisited past radical exhibitions. Once more, some key questions have been raised: Why are these institutions re-contextualizing these radical moments in history? What happens to radicalism when it is re-contextualized? And what does this say about radicalism within art today?

Text: Amber Turner

Artists and curators Kate Mahony and Rachel Dowle (Kate Mahony TM) for one night only are excited to present LIPA! (Lock IN performance art) at the ICA bar.
From the garage to the gallery the LUPA artists: a mad mix of early career, emergent to established performance practitioners are leaving the lock-up to stage a Lock in: closing the bar doors behind them to orchestrate a one hour intervention. With props in hand the artists will enter the bar at 8:00pm, highjacking the bar to create DIY Performance art.

Its gonna get messy.
PARTICIPATING LUPA ARTISTS SO FAR:
Daniella Vaz-gen (LUPA6)
Sean Francis Burns (LUPA12)
Holly Slingsby (LUPA7)
John William Fletcher (LUPA11)
JB&The Bubbles (LUPA11)
Hans Jacob Schmidt (LUPA14)
Selina O (LUPA15)
kit Poulson (LUPA8)
kate Mahony TM (LUPA2/10)
8PM (SHARP)-9PM

Inspired by Bruce Nauman piece ‘Days’, Kate Mahony, Cameron Foote and Rachel Dowle turned the touring talk into a performative exploration into the notion of time and memory within the ICA gallery space. Asking the audience of the tour to become participants, they created the 101 sound piece to be added to the Soundworks archive, released on the ICA blog. After a brief explanation behind the nature of both Days and Soundworks audio pieces, copies of blank diary pages were handed out for that current week, the previous week and the following week challenging participants to recall what they did, are currently doing and what they plan to achieve in the future. This was then recorded on site to make an audio diary entry merging the lives of 6 strangers.

still from “Journey to Orion” part of Terrestrial Futures program, 16 June 2012- ICA London

The first student forum film night, Terrestrial Futures was screened on 16 June 2012 in the ICA’s Cinema 2.  The program was organized by Seth Pimlott, Jane Scarth, and Rodney Uhler.

Exploring the wider implications of television in art and culture, Terrestrial Futures looks back at how artists, filmmakers, and writers used and questioned television. They have been interested in what has been the dominant and collective cultural form – as an artistic device and a political force. A response to the ICA exhibition Remote Control, the program is a snapshot of how politics, science-fiction and art worked with TV. Journey to Orion explores a fictional outer space where media-technologies are used for more sinister ends. The film by Ian Breakwell, One, shows us the ways in which artists began to engage with the issues of television, the broadcasting of mass events, and their removal from everyday life. Death Valley Days is a re-working of news spliced and mis-matched, subverting the images of political leaders.

DEATH VALLEY DAYS
Gorilla Tapes (1984)

UK, 1984, 20 minutes
Colour, Sound, Video

The writer J.G.Ballard said of Ronald Reagan,‘How could a man so intellectiually third rate, an empty stage set of a personality across which moved cartoon figures, dragon ladies and demons of the evil empire ever have become President of the worlds most powerful nation? Was the image everything now?’ This film was an attempt to explore what politics as a branch of advertising, entertainment and even romance, might mean.

Death Valley days (1984) was the first pro-duction of the British artists Jon Dovey, Gavin Hodge, and Tim Morrison working together under the name Gorilla Tapes. The film uses television news and interview footage of Ronald Reagan(and sequences lifted from his B Movie west-ern of the same title, Death Valley Days) and Margaret Thatcher. Taking advantage of a time when television news in Britain reached between twelve and twenty million people, and images of these two leaders were ubiquitous, Gorilla Tapes re-contextualized familiar images. The film edits this material to highlight and play with the personal and political relationship between the twoleaders. The piece was produced during a particularly divisive time in politics; the Cold War was still running, and Reagan had just launched Star Wars, a missile defense system that seemed like a confusion between reality and a half remembered B movie from his youth.

The film seems conventionally hostile to the two leaders in what is now a slightly cliched way, with a kind of bolshy pop politics that feels typical of the moment it was made. But at the time it was radical, and its wit was original – the techniques it helped to invent in analogue video, with a real political purpose, foreshadowed and has now become the model for anybody playing with content online.

However the film represents a response to J.G. Ballards’ understanding that television produce politicians who confused their position withentertainment and spectactle. His idea – which finds a kind of expression in this film – was that politicians seduced the public, involving the audience/voters in their private fantasies. As a consequence, he said, politicians , ‘could hardly complain if we involve them in ours’.

ONE
Ian Breakwell (1971)

15 mins black and white video
Performance. Original 16mm film made in 1971 with Mike Leggett and digitally reconstructed in 2003

On a day when every television shop displayed the broadcast of the Apollo 17 Moon mission, the downstairs window of the Angela Flowers Gallery screened CCTV footage of a performance by Mike Leggett that was taking place upstairs. It was the galleries first anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than to subvert the legitimacy of a space mission. As an endurance piece the performance itself uses the act of digging to trivialize the geological experiments of the astronauts whilst commenting on the current socio-economic climate of unemployment. Ian Breakwell’s film, which both documents and narrates the event, draws out a meditation on the significance of historic events and the effects of our viewing of them.

The banality of the every day activity – digging – when undertaken on the moon has special significance because we are viewing it. We see it and thus believe it because it is recorded and acknowledged. The repetition further enforces the notion that the two digging events happening simultaneously have a pertinent link. In the wider context of Terrestrial Futures, One shows us the ways in which Leggett and Breakwell have tuned in to the significance of widespread cultural images and and potential subversions of CCTV which was only beginning to be introduced in a big way during the early 1970’s.

still from “Journey to Orion” part of Terrestrial Futures

JOURNEY TO ORION
Solveig Nordlund, (1987)

Solveig Nordlund’s Journey to Orion is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s short story Thirteen to Centarus, but also a unique piece of short cinema itself. In terms of an adaptation it tells the basic skeleton of Centarus, a curious young boybegins to question and thus disrupt the life he knows on board a spacecraft. Nordlund has only changed names and other small details, but the biggest difference is in the omissions. Nordlund is wise to keep the story simple as Ballard’s Centarus is a particularly loaded short story. Where Ballard forgoes heavy atmospheric description typical of science-fiction he adds psychological weight reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick or Stanley Kubrick. Throughout the story we follow the on board controller as he becomes increasingly aware of one of his pupil’s, Adam, (Abel in Centarus) unique curiosity. As the story progresses we understand the dangers and implications of Adam’s curiosity, but the controller comes to discover new aspects of the mission as well, which alters his perception of the journey. Despite an unusual and complex situation the questions it raises are grand and universal: How do we react when presented with the reality of our existence? What dangers and freedoms does knowledge present? Neither Nordlund nor Ballard attempts answers to these questions but simply raising
them makes for an engaging experience.

Now living and working in Portugal, Swedish born Nordlund has always found particular inspiration in Ballard. She interviewed him for Swedish television and directed a feature-length adaptation of Low Flying Aircraft in 2002. Journey to Orion, filmed in 1987 on a ferryboat between Stockholm and Helsinki, is a moody, atmospheric adaptation that despite omitting certain story elements from Centarus, adds a level of creepiness and mystery. There is no on camera dialogue, instead the story is driven by the Controller’s narration and a few added lines for Abel. The visual element is also strong; the industrial set is frequently awash in large fields of color as if Mark Rothko was the consulting production designer. We’re given hints of other life on board the ship (an aimless old man, some nude sunbathing girls, Adam’s female friend Eve) but the driving personal story is of the Controller and Adam. The Controller’s obsessive observation of Adam gives an eery Death in Venice tone; a game of hide-and-seek between an older man and a cherubic boy. Yet the chase here is not guided by sexual underpinnings; it is driven by the commitment to the upholding of innocence and construction of reality. Still the relationship seems uneasy and we question the Controller’s motives. A powerful tool (and visual device) for the Controller is the CCTV on board the ship. It allows the Controller to observe all areas and also provides mini canvases for Nordlund to present
addition frames. There is a particularly captivating sequence in which we see a lone monitor recording Adam as he swims leisurely. In the film we are often looking at another monitor, an effective visual device that provides a compliment to some of the ideas behind Terrestrial Futures. The power of television both as an artistic device but as a mode of surveillance and control. It’s progression has seen dramatic changes both in its technological and mechanical self, but also in regards to both the content and delivery of content. Nordlund and Ballard present theoretical visions of the future but as we reflect on what has been written in the past and what awaits us in the future it seems inevitable that some of the best science-fiction will become, simply, reality.

The student forum would like to thank Solveig Nordlund, LUX, and Debbie Herring for their assistance with Terrestrial Futures.