Reordering and Redistributing the Visual: The Expanded ‘Field’ of Pattern-Making in Parallel of Life and Art and Hammer Prints

Introduction

In 1954 Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi issued a press release to promote their newly founded design business Hammer Prints Ltd. As the unpublished drafts for this final document reveal, however, they clearly struggled to settle on what information might be of most importance to potential new customers: was it their professional credentials as artists, their public reputation through exhibition-making, their method of collaborative working, their list of high profile existing clients, or an explanation of the designs themselves that mattered most? In many ways the anxiety that these various drafts reveal over which information to select to promote the new company anticipates the conditions of its gradual demise as the struggle to reconcile a commitment to experimental design, with high levels of artisan production, mitigated against developing a more consumer-orientated and commercial model of production that other more competitive designers were pursuing by the late 1950s. More significantly, what these various drafts and the final press release reveal is the extent to which the two artists regarded Hammer Prints not as a new or separate venture from their ‘fine art’ practices (a distinction produced by such separated accounts as Robbins, 1990, and Harrod, 1999) but rather, in the Bauhaus tradition, as a natural trajectory of their practices per se.

This fundamental but overlooked point is explicitly made clear in one of the draft press releases under the title ‘Recent and Current Work’:

In Preparation: an exhibit for the Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition in Autumn 1956, in collaboration with Alison and Peter Smithson A/ARIBA. This may comprise a foun tain-swimming pool, a decorated floor or wall, an acid-etched wall, a [xxx] [sic] ceiling. (Henderson, 1955).

This reference to what subsequently became the installation Patio and Pavilion, one of the key contributions to the notorious exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956), highlights to what extent the two artists were simultaneously working through their interest in the relation between space, object, environment, display and ideas of the decorative. Indeed, it is in this realignment of the ethos and work of Hammer Prints with Patio and Pavilion that the cross-disciplinary dynamics and the extent of the radical project conceived between the Smithsons as architects and Paolozzi and Henderson as artists come to the fore. As Peter Smithson discussed in the BBC’s review of This Is Tomorrow in 1956:

… we worked on a kind of a symbolic habitat in which are found responses, in some form or other, to the basic human needs … to the basic human urges … The patio and pavilion are furnished with objects which are symbols for the things we need … the method of work has been … for the architects to provide a framework and for the artists to provide the objects. In this way the architects’ work of providing a context for the individual to realise himself in, and the artists’ work of giving signs and images to the stages of this realisation, meet in a single act … (Smithson and Smithson, 1994: 109)

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Figure 1

Installation of ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ exhibition at the ICA, London, 1953. © Tate, London 2013. © Nigel Henderson Estate. Reproduced with permission.

While distinctions between disciplinary practices were obviously acknowledged, this anthropological staging of the process and conditions of cultural self-realisation through collaborative practice was clearly more concerned with the total ‘effect’ of the installation than the sum of its parts. This relation between structure and interior realised through the import of objects to produce a ‘symbolic habitat’ not only morphed ideas of aesthetic display with anthropological ideas of object placement, but also played out ideas of architecture, art and interior decoration as connected and extended sign-systems.

From this perspective, as the article will discuss, the group’s earlier collaborative work in conceiving and mounting the 1953 ICA exhibition Parallel of Life and Art can be seen as both a test-bed of ideas for Patio and Pavilion, and an early experiment in interior decoration in the anthropological sense put forward by Smithson. This latter point was particularly played out in terms of the final display strategy of Parallel of Life and Art, which purposively rejected the conventions, classifications and aesthetic norms of museum collections and displays, implementing instead an associative form of display that summoned up fresco painting, architectural friezes, photographic collages and murals, wallpaper and the European kunstkammer, amongst other more contemporary reference points (Walsh, 2001: 89–107). This total, immersive effect of Parallel of Life and Art was arguably carried through to the design approach of Hammer Prints, as the final press release stated: ‘It is the aim of HAMMER PRINTS [sic] both to produce wallpapers, textiles and ceramics of the highest design standards and to collaborate with architects in carrying out entire decorative schema …’. As will become apparent, this concern with ‘entire decorative schema’ emerged out of a confluence of contemporary ideas, experiences and theories circulating around questions of spatio-temporal relations prompted by new technologies of vision and visualisation.

Access to the plethora of ideas and theories circulating around concepts of visuality and visualisation in the early 1950s was readily available to the group through their teaching appointments at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. From 1947 the Central School was led by William Johnstone who was committed to overhauling art school education which hadn’t significantly changed its pedagogical principles and models since the late 19th century. Having been exposed to ideas of modernism pre-war, Johnstone effectively set about introducing a ‘Basic Design’ course based on Bauhaus principles of cross-fertilisation of ideas through interdisciplinary practice and by 1951 Henderson was running a new course in ‘Creative Photography’ and Paolozzi, textile design. At the same time, Peter Smithson was also teaching at the school, along with Richard Hamilton in Silversmith and Jewellery Design, and William Turnbull in sculpture. The creative and intellectual climate that Johnstone produced at Central was particularly notable for its emphasis on innovation through experimentation, a Bauhaus creed particularly advocated by Moholy-Nagy in his pioneering book Vision in Motion (1947) which became an orthodox text for almost every art school student and teacher at the time. For a generation that had lived through the Second World War, and was still in 1951 living through a period of extreme austerity, Moholy-Nagy’s call to arms for a new future created through a revitalised function of art in society added a sense of creative (and political) urgency, underpinned by his warning that ‘without experimentation there can be no discoveries and without discoveries no regeneration’ (p. 31). This context was clearly of significance for Hammer Prints as the press release firmly asserted: ‘The origin of the designs is the outcome of the ideas worked out by Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi in their teaching at the LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts.’

As will become clear, the idea of experimentation, and particularly collaborative experimentation in the Bauhaus tradition, was to assume a vital role through the form of the ‘exhibition’. Although the design and concept of exhibitions had undergone immense changes since the 1930s within the art and design fields, and had absorbed the skills and experience of commercial design, the opportunities to experiment with exhibition-making that the ICA in London presented during the early 1950s held particular value because of the anti-modernist stranglehold on contemporary art and its display held by the Tate Gallery under the directorship of John Rothenstein. For not only did the ICA offer gallery space, as a non-collection based institution, free of the epistemologies of connoisseurship and the traditions of Taste, it had a completely open remit to discard the conventions of museological display and canonical, media-specific genres which typified national museums in London at the time. As an exhibition of ‘an encyclopaedic range of material’, Parallel of Life and Art has rightly assumed a seminal role in the history of the Independent Group as an early manifestation of the interest in the aesthetic of the ‘as found’ (Schregenberger et al., 2001) and as representative of what Reyner Banham would come to term ‘New Brutalism’ (Banham, 1955: 355–361).

But as Henderson (1953a) recorded in his lecture notes for the exhibition, two specific reference points informed the development of the exhibition’s image collection and display strategy: Malraux’s writings on the ‘museum without walls’ (published in English in 1953) and Duchamp’s ideas of the ‘portable museum’, as represented by the artist’s Boite en valise series (1935–1940). Both were concerned with the ontological status of the art object and its contemporary interface with the public and cultural space of the everyday through new forms of production, display, distribution and consumption of the visual. In understanding these contexts and reference points behind Parallel of Life and Art and how Hammer Prints both evolved out of this exhibition, and led on to the installation of Patio and Pavilion, a more detailed account emerges of how Hammer Prints was configured as an integral part of the same collaborative project to develop new orders of the visual and new symbolic habitats that would retrieve the concept and practice of art from the conservative stranglehold of the establishment and return it not only to the public space of culture, but also to the private, everyday space of the domestic interior.

Vision in Motion: Staging the Spectator

Looking at the two untitled studies for Parallel of Life and Art (Figure 2) and the Tate Collection ‘Untitled’ study (Henderson, 1952/1953?) we see two male figures standing abreast of each other, fixed in time and space, gazing at a Pollock-esque image of abstract painterly marks that hangs in front and above them. Guided by the direction of their gaze we in turn focus on this central image, collaged into a loosely hand-drawn grid that holds together a disparate array of photographic images in an irregular schema. Like the elusive spatial logic of the central image, these adjacent and roughly spliced images and fragments equally test and tease us with multiple perspectives, ambiguous picture planes and conflicting spatio-temporal relations. The overall impression creates both a visually dynamic and disorientating experience. A visual conundrum of sorts. A collaged dreamscape.

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Figure 2

Untitled (‘Study for Parallel of Life and Art’), 1952. Copyright: Nigel Henderson Estate. Reproduced with permission.

Although it is not clear when during 1952–1953 Henderson compiled this photomontage study for Parallel of Life and Art, his interest in the relation between vision and motion, which this study explicitly plays with, was already well established by the late 1940s. Like many other artists at this time, Henderson’s interest was underpinned by a close reading and visual engagement with Moholy-Nagy’s image-led publication Vision in Motion (1947). Key to Moholy-Nagy’s thesis was the contemporary need to understand and develop a synthesised intellectual and emotional, rather than analytical, model of knowledge, and an awareness of the essential inter-relatedness of the arts, technology and science. Fundamental to this understanding was the further need to recognise how contemporary vision was being affected by new means and methods of experiencing and representing time–space relations. As the Hungarian artist and educator wrote:

Vision in motion is simultaneous grasp. Simultaneous grasp is creative performance – seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not in a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates and transmutes single elements into a coherent whole. This is valid for physical vision as well as for the abstract. (Moholy-Nagy, 1947: 143)

As this untitled photomontage shows, Henderson, who openly cited Moholy-Nagy’s ideas, was playing as much with representations of physical movement as he was with the perception of movement through the juxtaposition of discordant images. For example, the placing of legible but distorted images depicting boys on bikes, or a female bather caught walking along a beach, next to more inchoate, static images that conflate vertical and horizontal perspectives. Henderson’s desire to increase the pictorial effect of the representation of movement (following the examples of Analytical Cubism, Futurism and Duchamp) led him to experiment with what he termed ‘stressed’ photographic images which, in the instance of the boys on the bike, ‘would form sometimes an “expressionistic” image giving a slightly “intoxicated” version, which suggested to me a certain delirium in which a boy may fantasise and divert himself with a bike for hours on end’ (Morris, 1978: 5). For Henderson, the ethos behind this psycho-spatialisation of movement emanated from Moholy-Nagy’s text in which the latter had argued:

Intellectual grasp has to be coordinated with the emotional. The spectator must be prepared to sense the underlying meaning of the artist’s approach not as a ‘verbalizable’ … Later, after he (the spectator) liberates himself from traditional vision he will be able to apprehend this emotionally and intellectually … Through the use of this psychological insight and the psychoanlaysis of Sigmund Freud, space–time fundamentals may be understood also as the syntax and grammar of an emotional language which may re-create the path of the inner motion. (Moholy-Nagy, 1947: 115)

Inherent within both Moholy-Nagy’s and Henderson’s interest in this psychology of vision was the idea of a spectator, not as a notional by-product of the artist’s work, but as an integral, embodied and active agent in the formulation, experience – and display – of visual production. This is explicitly seen in the conventionally unusual pictorial presence and role Henderson assigns to the two male figures depicted in the study for Parallel of Life and Art – figures around which the central logic of the whole study is organised. Anticipating the ethos of the final display strategy of the ICA exhibition, Henderson’s description of his approach to his ‘stressed’ images also reinforces this commitment to creating a dynamic relation between spectator, image and space within the wider context of the exhibition format, noting as he did that ‘the effect … is in some degree to destroy the boundaries of the image, by appearing to lap them round the seeing eye, thus drawing it within the frame’ (Walsh, 2001: 29). In addition to his interest in the photographic image, Henderson’s words, however, also clearly suggest a conceptual affinity with another form of vision in motion – the cinema.

‘Enlarged Environments’: Scaling up the Visual

In its depiction of scale, manipulation of proportion, emphasis on directional movement, and, what could be seen as filmic moments in the individual photo images, allusions to cinematic vision are also arguably at play in this study. Moreover, it is feasible, if not probable, that the sense of the monumental and expanded horizontality which characterises this study was also informed by an awareness of Cinemascopic vision, following the first Cinemascope showing in London on 2 July 1953 which took place at the Rank Odeon in Tottenham Court Road and attracted a large amount of press attention and an audience of over 2,500. For Paolozzi, in particular, the cinema held a special interest as he had grown up accustomed to seeing films regularly with his mother who received free tickets in exchange for displaying film advert posters in her ice-cream shop window in Edinburgh (Collins, 1996: 13) This early and ongoing curiosity in the visual aesthetic and experience of film no doubt also gave Paolozzi the sure confidence to act in front of the camera, as he did when he adopted the role of a mute adult in the Free Cinema film Together (Mazzetti, 1956), alongside the artist Michael Andrews. Significantly, as Paolozzi also made it known, he found ‘the cinematic cut linked material that was often widely disparate in form and content and it also manifested space and time in a creative way’ (Collins, 1996: 13).

Although the two photomontage studies that exist for Parallel of Life and Art (Figure 2) and the Tate version (Henderson, 1952/1953?) have been attributed to Henderson (with respect to his inscriptions on them), they were clearly conceived, if not practically developed, in collaboration with Paolozzi; a fact not least reflected in the equal representation of both artists’ work in the studies themselves. While the study in Figure 2 perhaps most clearly reflects Paolozzi’s interest in the ‘cinematic cut’, supported by Henderson’s interest in Dada photomontage, the Tate study (Henderson, 1952/1953?) arguably reflects the more expanded, cinemascopic vision, and perhaps even Cineramic vision, although knowledge of this latter technical innovation could only have come through the extensive newspaper and magazine coverage that followed its premier in the film This Is Cinerama in New York in September 1952.

Paolozzi’s interest in this expanded field of vision created by widescreen technology can best be seen in his extended Collage Mural (Paolozzi, 1952; see also Tate website) commissioned by the architects Jane Drew and Edwin Maxwell Fry for the offices of their firm, Fry, Drew and Partners, in London, and installed in August 1952. While this commissioned work is important in and of itself, it also marks a significant relation with the architectural terms of space which Paolozzi became familiar with first through his commission to design an outdoor fountain for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and secondly, through the earlier commission from Jane Drew to design a children’s playground for a block of flats in London (Kirkpatrick, 1970: 20–21). From these sculptural/architectural experiments Paolozzi clearly began to develop a more complex and open-form spatial awareness and, by the autumn of 1952, working with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson (whom he had met when teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts), he designed and installed a wallpaper on the ceiling of the new offices of the architect Ronald Jenkins at the pioneering technical engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners. As recorded, a notable aspect of the installation of this wallpaper on the ceiling was Paolozzi’s directions to the decorators that it could – and should - be hung randomly, designed as it was with no fixed orientation or pattern logic (Paolozzi, 1952). Like the ‘cinematic cut’, or the experience of ‘vision in motion’, the visual impression resided in the total experience of the work, as opposed to the more conventional relations of fixed perspective, or ideas of visual coherence or narrative interpretation. The importance of all these experiments in sculpture, collage and textiles to the final realisation of the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art is apparent in their photographic documentation included in the two preparatory studies: Paolozzi’s Festival of Britain Fountain (1951), the ceiling of Ronald Jenkins’s office (1952), and the abstract screen print design that was commissioned by Jane Drew for her living room. Reproduced on the front cover of Architectural Review in March 1952, this latter design was printed and used for the curtains, sofas and lampshades of Jane Drew’s living room, producing a highly patterned, ‘all-over’ effect that, like Jenkins’s office, created a highly codified, abstract, environment.

While Henderson shared this interest in playing with scale and surface and developing a dispersed, non-specific form of imagery, his visual idiom remained predominantly graphic and his point of departure, as both exhibition studies highlight, was often rooted in the visual world he discovered under the microscope while studying Natural Biology in the early 1930s. The opportunity to re-enact the visual thrill of seeing the invisible and unknown of the microscopic world that he had enjoyed as a young student presented itself again, however, when Paolozzi gave Henderson a photographic enlarger in 1949. Converting the bathroom of his East End house into a darkroom, Henderson resurrected his interest in abstract forms and patterns through the photogram method, which, in the tradition of Man Ray and his ‘rayograms’, he termed ‘Hendograms’. Henderson later described his working method:

I was really excited by the phenomenon of photosensitivity … all sorts of things had to go down on paper, many lugged back from those gold-mines of semi-transmuted things like bombsites … and I could see how a change of scale and context … further abstracted the point of origin … I had here a method of drawing and a technique for close scrutiny of all kinds of marks and energies of line and shape and texture. (Henderson, 1983)

This fascination with the interplay of scale, space and image legibility that the photographic process could produce echoed much of the writing and images presented in Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, but equally also resonated with another seminal publication for artists at this time, Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision (1964[1944]) in which the latter had observed: ‘The photographic image, however, is cut out from the familiar spatial frame of reference and there is frequently no cue for deciphering the spatial scale. A micro-photo and an aerial photo can easily be confused’ (p. 149)

At the same time that Henderson was experimenting with the manipulation of scale in his photograms, he was approached by the artist Richard Hamilton to develop a proposal for an exhibition which became Growth and Form (Tate, 1950–1951) and opened at the ICA in 1951 as the ICA’s contribution to the Festival of Britain. Although the dramatic manipulation of scale became a defining feature of the images presented in Parallel of Life and Art, and indicated by the study in Figure 2, this aesthetic strategy, was, however, first piloted to some extent in this earlier experimental show on which the two artists collaborated. The idea of the exhibition had started out as a proposal by Paolozzi who had alerted Henderson to a scientific book that was attracting significant attention in Paris in 1949 where he was living at the time. The book, On Growth and Form, written by the Scottish embryologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson in 1917, argued that mathematics could be used to explain the relation between the forms and patterns of growth of the natural world such as skeletons, eggs and crystals. Hamilton was instantly enthralled by the thesis of this book, and subsequently took the lead on putting the exhibition together, with some photographic input from Henderson, and the inclusion of one of his photograms.

While the catalogue paid respect to the scientific significance of Thompson’s book and identified a vast range of photographic material under such headings as Crystal structures, Chromosomes and Cell Division, and meticulously identified the original image sources from scientific journals and laboratories, the exhibition itself made no reference to this scientific terrain, opting instead to present a purely visual and spatial experience. As the original exhibition proposal noted:

The painter and sculptor have much to gain from the enlargement of their world of experience by an appreciation of the forms in nature beyond their immediate visual environment. It is the enlarged environment opened by scientific studies that we would reveal for its visual qualities. (Hamilton, 1949)

As can be seen from the original installation photographs, the aim to create a total and enveloping visual environment through the magnification of imagery and the scaling up of photographic prints to the size of the wall, rendering it the equivalent of wallpaper, could only be achieved through the latest photographic and printing technology.

This staging of the visual through scale and dramatisation of space by lighting effects, summoning up associations with cinema auditoriums and photographic darkrooms, equally displaced and disassociated the imagery from the conventional gallery setting or the educational space of a science museum, leaving the full viewing emphasis on the physical and optical encounter with the works as images and forms. And the formal diversity of imagery on display was quite considerable, bringing together as it did different media including sculptural renditions of molecular structures, animal skeletons, photomicrographs, electron-micrographs, radiographs, photograms and, notably, two films, depicting crystal formation and cell growth of a sea urchin – one projected up on the ceiling and another down on to a table surface.

Perception as a Pattern-Seeking and Pattern-Making Function

As the back cover of the Growth and Form catalogue advertised, a volume of essays was brought together under the title Aspects of Form (1951) to accompany the exhibition in which ‘nine scientists and two exponents of art give their views on the significance of visual form in their various fields’. In the introduction to this collection, Herbert Read (1951) enthusiastically endorsed the exhibition and its scientific roots noting that:

The revelation that perception itself is essentially a pattern-seeking and pattern-making function (a Gestalt formation); that pattern is inherent in the physical structure of the functioning of the nervous system; that matter itself analyses into coherent patterns or arrangements or molecules; and the gradual realisation that all these patterns are effective and ontologically significant by virtue of an organisation of their parts which can only be characterized as aesthetic – all this development has brought works of art and natural phenomena on to an identical place of inquiry.

Read’s embrace of gestalt principles of perception, and in the specific instance of Growth and Form, the principle of similarity, clearly built on his close reading and working relationship with Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus aesthetic, which he had addressed in his earlier book Art and Industry (1934), and which had been designed by the influential Bauhaus figure Herbert Bayer, with specially commissioned photographs by Moholy-Nagy. Like Moholy-Nagy, Read had been consistently interested in the teaching of art as a foundational knowledge for society at large (Education Through Art, 1946), advocating the value of essential form to all cultural and industrial production through an understanding of structure which ultimately underpinned the principles and values of good design. But while Read’s position remained essentially rooted in German idealism and universalist aesthetics (which translated into his preference for English neo-romanticist painters such as Moore, Nash, Sutherland and Piper), Moholy-Nagy’s analysis of the conditions of aesthetic and cultural experience was inextricably rooted in the contemporary experience of the everyday and the technological changes impacting on it which demanded that the artist, like the scientist, proceed empirically, rather than purely conceptually or formalistically.

This distinction between the two proselytisers is clearly laid out, both visually and discursively, in Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947) and in the particular emphasis he placed on teaching exercises that would foster the idea of the ‘quality of relationships’, and ‘complex relationships’ at that, which good design was based on; exercises that would enable ‘practising correlations’ (pp. 42, 68). In concluding his description of such exercises, Moholy-Nagy proclaimed: ‘If the same methodology were used generally in all fields we would have the key to our age – seeing everything in relationship’ (p. 68, emphasis in original). This relational model distinctively differed from Read’s exclusive emphasis on the visually formal relation, positing as it did a different paradigmatic account of pattern-formation and identification, one that was defined by socio-biological factors which in and of themselves constituted a ‘common denominator’ (p. 70) and which could be intuited through a trained socio-biological awareness. Indeed, for Moholy-Nagy writing in 1947, two years after the end of World War Two, it was the failure to develop a sensitivity to the correlations between the separated spheres of art and science that had led to the debasement of culture and society, which only art could retrieve: ‘Today, lacking the patterning and refinement of emotional impulses through the arts, uncontrolled, inarticulate and brutally destructive ways of release have become commonplace’ (p. 28).

Although recognition of Moholy-Nagy’s influence on Parallel of Life and Art is often granted courtesy of the selection of one of the most striking images of Vision in Motion for the front cover of the catalogue, an x-ray of a man shaving (p. 253), a more complex interplay with the full argument of his book and the idea of ‘practising correlations’ is evident, not in the oft-cited final exhibition press release of August 1953 (Henderson, 1953b) which places full emphasis on the medium of photography, but rather in the internal memorandum that was circulated in the ICA in March that year which reads as a précis of the book’s entire thesis:

Technical inventions such as the photographic enlarger, aerial photography, and the high speed flash have given us new tools with which to expand our field of vision beyond the limits imposed on previous generations. Their products feed our newspapers, our periodicals and our films … Today the painter may find beneath the microscope a visual world that excites his senses far more than does the ordinary world … But his work will necessarily seem obscure to the observer who does not take into account the impact on him of these new visual discoveries. The exhibition will try to show how the findings of the sciences and the arts can be regarded as aspects of a single whole … In this way the individual members of the group will present the most significant material from their various fields so that the characteristic features of our changing attitude will become apparent. (Henderson, 1953c)

Despite this original emphasis on the individual selection of images from each ‘editor’s’ field, as valuable in the collective sense of signalling a ‘changing attitude’ of socio-cultural import across all their ‘fields’, the final title of the exhibition, along with the final press release which talked of ‘common visual denominators’, led contemporary audiences to predominantly view the exhibition as an eclectic collection of images assembled on the basis of their formal visual relations, consistent with Read’s earlier account and visual analysis of Growth and Form. What led to this conceptual shift in the final press release, and what arguments informed the choice of exhibition title is not clear, but in his notes for a lecture given at the Architectural Association on 2 December 1953, Henderson (1953a) lamented:

I now consider the title of the exhibition to be unfortunate because it refers to only one of the ideas latent in the exhibition and gives the quite false impression that we set out to make an exhibition on the theme that the title suggests. This couldn’t in effect be more misleading in view of the fact that we had always, as a principle almost, proceeded empirically at each stage of our decisions.

While in the selection of material across the arts and sciences the exhibition clearly maintained an interest in the type of socio-biological synthesis that Moholy-Nagy had called for, what was lost in the final reception of the exhibition was the group’s equal interest in the idea of ‘complex relationships’ that underpinned Moholy-Nagy’s relational model of the role and function of art in society. For, as Henderson went on to discuss in his lecture notes, in proceeding ‘empirically’, in pooling material that ‘got us’ and was ‘moving us’, the group had sought to excavate through their choice of material what the ‘common denominator’, in Moholy-Nagy’s terms, was between their practices and their situatedness in contemporary culture; which is to say, in pursuing a processual method of individual assemblage and collective ‘editing’ of material, the group had sought to discover whether a pattern of connections at a cognitive, rather than purely visual level, would effectively and creatively emerge.

As Henderson (1953a) noted, since many, but not all, of the images they individually found ‘significant’ were brought to their attention through the new technologies of photography, the way in which they tried to bring the ‘common denominator’ of their ‘encyclopaedic’ range of material’ within their own emotional and intellectual grasp, to a point of ‘sensible’ recognition, was to subject all their material to the medium and technologies of photography, in what Henderson would describe as a ‘special use of André Malraux’s ‘Imaginary Museum’:

We have exploited the analogies (graphic correspondences) which appear to exist between disparate things as a result of this universal dispersal of image of the printer’s block derived from photographic scrutiny in the 1st [sic] place. We are using a special case of André Malraux’s ‘Imaginary Museum’ extended to cover a range of phenomena reduced to the common factor of the photograph.

Building on Malraux’s analysis of the impact of photography on creating new relational categories of artists’ works based on visual affinity through the printed image, i.e. ‘style’, the group adopted photography as their medium to precisely bring about this ‘uniform’ homogenising effect which would facilitate and enhance perception of the commonality of their selected images. Whereas for Malraux the loss of specificity that the printed photograph brought rendering the object as image, through distortions in scale and dislocated context, was disconcerting, for the group this was a liberating factor. Indeed, it was exactly this suspension of the indexical function of the photograph that appealed and opened up the creative potential to play with scale and space–time relations, and the visual ambiguity this produced. As Henderson went on to explain, paraphrasing Malraux, ‘the common factor to be [sic] of the Imaginary museum where objects divested of their original significance and function might almost be called not “works” but “moments” of art.’ It is within this logic of the photographic aesthetic that the group adopted, that a documentary photograph capturing Pollock in the act of painting can fall within the same sightline as a static cross-section drawing of a frog, an archaeological photograph of a medieval city, an over-sized Muybridge photograph of a man cycling, and a series of ‘stressed’ images of bathers by Henderson.

It is only in understanding this ‘special use of Malraux’s “imaginary museum”’ in relation to how and why photography was adopted by the group as the visual medium of display for Parallel of Life and Art that we can begin to understand what aesthetic and strategic value Henderson, and arguably Paolozzi too, placed on the actual photographs of the exhibition itself which Henderson took. For, whereas Henderson’s extensive number of photographs of different angles of the exhibition at the ICA have been, without exception, used by scholars as ‘archival documentation’, as installation shots holding an indexical relation to the original exhibition, they clearly held a different primary function consistent with the logic of the exhibition itself (Henderson, 1953d). This function was to create a second level of ‘uniformed image’, a kind of reflexive or ‘meta-image’ that would in and of itself reveal the intrinsic patterns of selection and correspondences that they as a group were attempting to bring to the surface, i.e. to (re)materialise through the visualisation of the photographic printing process. It is at this juncture, between Moholy-Nagy’s insistence on scientific experimentation, the embrace of photographic technology, an understanding of the need for ‘practising correlations’, and Malraux’s analysis of photography as a pattern-generator, that it is possible to see in both the photomontage studies for Parallel of Life and Art and the exhibition photographs how the developmental design process of Hammer Prints emerged. Indeed, I would argue that the photographs of Parallel of Life and Art, if not purposively, ultimately acted as design studies for Hammer Prints if one considers the account given in the Hammer Prints press release:

The two designers … frequently work very closely together, and it is not always possible to attribute designs to either of them individually. A motive may be suggested by Paolozzi, then taken over by Henderson for manipulation with the help of camera, enlarger, and a whole range of technical processes, to produce a large number of variations on the original theme, for further development by one or both. Or the underlying theme may be supplied by an illustration in a book, a child’s drawing, a photograph; but its final integration into the design will be the result of considerable experimentation, using photographic methods in a non-mechanical way to reveal new aesthetic possibilities. (Henderson, 1955)

As the quote highlights, what is often forgotten in art historical accounts of Henderson’s role is the fact that he was not just a photographer, nor even a documentary ‘street’ photography as some accounts position him, but rather as the art critic and friend David Sylvester was later at pains to emphasise, an ‘artist–photographer’ (Walsh, 2001: 9), a fact no more clearly indicated than by his teaching on ‘Creative Photography’ at the Central School of Arts and Crafts at the same time that Parallel of Life and Art developed.

Reordering the Visual: Iconology, Configurationism and the Multi-Evocative

A second key point of Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum’ which Henderson focused on was the radical change that photographic reproduction had brought about in the expansion of the category and canon of art beyond the classifications of art and the ordering of the visual historically defined by the museum on the basis of what they could and could not collect. Reflecting on the limitations of the museological canon, Malraux (1956[1953]: 15) had observed:

Of what is it necessarily deprived? Of all that forms an integral part of a whole – stained glass, frescoes, all that cannot be moved, or that is difficult to display – sets of tapestries – of all that collection is unable to acquire.

In drawing into the same visual domain a wealth of new objects beyond the scale of the museum, photography had not just prompted a new collectivising type of visual analysis based on formal comparison (i.e. style), but also presented an opportunity to effectively dismantle the museological and epistemological distinctions between the fine and decorative arts. This point is particularly evidenced in the photomontage studies for Parallel of Life and Art through the juxtaposition of images of Paolozzi’s decoration of Ronald Jenkins’s office, his water fountain for the Festival of Britain, his low-relief sculptures alongside Henderson’s own experimental photographic images with the enlarger.

Such ontological questions which Parallel of Life and Art posed through the manipulation of scale and the processes of reproduction also significantly fed off the radical ideas and practice of Marcel Duchamp, as Henderson (1953a) openly acknowledged in his closing remarks at the Architectural Association in 1953: ‘What I think we have been doing is putting forward as individuals working professionally in different fields images which were “A small portable museum”’. This direct reference to Duchamp’s Boite en Valise (1943) implicitly framed Parallel of Life and Art as an equal challenge to the ownership of the category of art and the art object by the museum as Duchamp’s original tactical conception of the Boite en Valise had, but it also carried within it a further conceptual lineage, if not homage, to Duchamp’s earlier challenge to the epistemological and museological certainties of classical aesthetics that the museum embodied in the form of the Green Box (1934). As documented (Walsh, 2001: 15–16), Duchamp had had a profound impact on Henderson when the two had met in Paris through Peggy Guggenheim, and again in London in 1938 when Henderson helped Duchamp hang a show of Cocteau drawings at the Guggenheim Jeune gallery:

In that long day I spent with Duchamp – a day that both hung in the air forever and passed in a puff of smoke like a hashish dream – he drew me out. ‘Throw nothing away’ – it was almost like hearing the voice from within. (Henderson, 1983)

Crucially, out of this experience Henderson was given a copy of the Green Box which, like Parallel of Life and Art, brings together a disparate range of material that, while pertaining to hold an informational relation to The Large Glass, resists the role of clarification by disrupting all linear narratives of interpretation through the random assemblage of its individual documents.

This random interplay of images, text and meanings that characterises both Duchamp’s Boite en Valise and the Green Box arguably fed into the logic of selection and display that Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons adopted; a fact most resonant in the internal ICA exhibition memo of 27 March 1953 which carries the strapline, ‘An exhibition of documents, principally photographs and diagrams’. Furthermore, within Duchamp’s emphatic instruction to Henderson, ‘Throw nothing away’, lay a pointer to the former’s prevailing strategy of image- and meaning-making/breaking based on the recycling of imagery; a recycling which would allow the image/object to be repeatedly reconfigured again without becoming indexical or descriptive; that is to say, to accumulate meaning through appropriation as each rendition of the image acquired the surrealist status of an ‘objet trouvé’, or progressively, through the processes of reproduction, that of the ‘ready-made’. It is within this cycle and trajectory of image-making and image-mutation that Henderson later described the move he and Paolozzi made from collecting images that appealed and intrigued, to systematically creating a ‘compendious image-bank’, that

was to service the work we proposed to do … through the firm we started Hammer Prints. The idea was to do some design work within our range for architects, exhibition designers (the world of the 1950s when this was spoken about) and to draw on a bank of visual imagery that I had put on negative. (Henderson, 1983)

Both in considering putting this ‘image bank’ together, and from the acutely precise and highly crafted press release for Parallel of Life and Art, it is evident that the organiser–‘editors’ of the exhibition were also very much alive to contemporary theories of iconology, particularly emanating from the Warburg Institute and the ideas of Erwin Panofsky who, in his 1939 publication Studies in Iconology, had defined the practice as ‘the branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to form’ (p. 3). This emphasis on the communication of meaning through subject matter at the level of the symbolic complemented Moholy-Nagy’s idea of ‘complex relations’ and pattern-making and identification for the group; as the press release for Parallel of Life and Art indicated in its descriptive analysis of the camera as a visual data-capturing device: ‘As recorder of nature objects, works of art, architecture and technics; as reporter of human events the images of which sometimes come to have a power of expression and plastic organization analogous to the symbol in art ….’ In invoking the idea of the ‘symbol’ it is clear again to what extent the idea of pattern in Parallel of Life and Art was not being actively pursued in relation to formal value but rather in relation to making visible types of human association and communication, inherently suggested by the number of photographic panels that depicted forms of ‘writing’; a fact particularly highlighted by the inclusion of images taken from the highly influential book The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind by the British linguist and paleographer David Diringer which was published in 1948. Indeed, that these aspirations to provide the ‘key to our age’ as Moholy-Nagy had called for, underpinned the collective ethos of the exhibition was also laid bare in an early working statement of the Smithsons: ‘This exhibition will provide the first atlas to a new world … the method used will … present a dramatic yet rational picture of the times, a kind of Rosetta stone’ (Robbins, 1990: 129).

While Henderson’s photographs were predominantly aligned to a tradition of creative photography, he was certainly alive to photography’s ability to capture the explicit and implicit patterns of the everyday as his photographs of graffiti, dilapidated billboards, shop windows and bomb-damaged walls in the post-war East End of London in the late 1940s visually testify. But while this sensibility towards documenting an explicit, visual form of patterning called up Surrealism and the aesthetic of collage, Henderson was also immersed in contemporary ideas of patterning emanating from the social sciences which he was exposed to through the work of his wife Judith Henderson whom he had married in 1943 following her return to England from America where she had spent a year at Bryn Mawr College studying under the pioneering social anthropologist Margaret Mead. Indeed, the Hendersons’ move to the East End of London in 1945 was a prerequisite of Judith’s successful application to work on a social anthropology project called ‘Discover Your Neighbour’ which was predicated on gathering information about the specific habits and behaviour of the local working-class community to help inform new ideas of social welfare and organisation. Trained in pattern-identification as cultural analysis through the practice of highly detailed ethnographic note-taking, Judith’s copious daily notes documenting the everyday life and habits of the neighbouring Samuels family (Morris, 1978) undoubtedly nurtured an interest in Henderson in the social and domestic rituals of everyday street life and allowed him to adopt a comparable mindset. The foundations for this shared interest were, however, in some respects already laid during the war when Judith was studying under Margaret Mead. For, as their courting correspondence reveals, Judith was clearly encouraging Henderson’s reading, as he wrote: ‘I look forward to cutting my anthropological teeth on the Ruth Benedict. I was tantalized by something you said about Dionysius and Apollonian. We shall see’, further reflecting, ‘I’m glad you see me as a Naturalist Explorer, a role I’ve often considered myself’ (Henderson, 1942).

The reference to ‘the Ruth Benedict’ undoubtedly referred to Benedict’s seminal book Patterns of Culture (2006[1934]) which had built on her great friend and collaborator Mead’s equally seminal publication Coming of Age in Samoa (2001[1928]). The key argument of Benedict’s book was that, through an ethnographic study of individual patterns of living in the social context, wider cultural patterns of behaviour could be subsequently detected and analysed. This linking of the social to the cultural, establishing a model of cultural relativism, was predicated on the idea of pattern-identification and recognition, as Benedict wrote (2006[1934]: 46–47):

Cultures are more than the sum of their parts … A culture like an individual is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. The integration of cultures is not in the least mystical. It is the same process by which a style in art comes into being and exists.

Significantly, both Benedict’s and Mead’s understanding of the formation and recognition of ‘pattern’ was rooted in Gestalt Psychology and specifically the concept of ‘configuration’ which denoted a coming together of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic elements into a unified whole. In linking a theorisation of the cultural with this gestalt concept, Benedict’s model of ‘Cultural Configuration’, further developed by Mead, clearly became a potent and latent idea within the discourse of pattern and symbol for Henderson and, as Peter Smithson later reflected on the East End years with Henderson, it marked a moment when sociology had ‘begun to emerge from the rain-forests into the streets’ (Walsh, 2001: 150).

It is within this complex interplay of ideas of pattern at the cultural and symbolic level that a more insightful grasp can be gained of how and why the designs of Hammer Prints – such as ‘Newsprint – which was originally called “Paris Wall” (and) has its origin in a large number of photographs of hoardings, wall drawings – and – “Sgraffito” – is built up around several photo prints of an inked impression of engraved block of plaster’ – emerged (Henderson, 1955; see Figure 3). For, in transferring images and objects, or what in sociological terms could be understood as ‘visual data’, from one medium to another – from sculpture to photograph, drawing to photograph, photograph to textile – it is clear that, as with the aesthetic strategy adopted in Parallel of Life and Art (see Figure 1), Henderson and Paolozzi equally pursued the project in Hammer Prints to not only identify and create a new visual language rooted in the cultural specifics of the contemporary, but to overthrow the existing visual order (and the distinction between fine and decorative arts) based on classical aesthetics and its concomitant hierarchy of cultural value.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3

Hammer Prints Ltd Sgraffito wallpaper c. 1955–68 / Photo: Douglas Atfield / Courtesy the Estate of Nigel Henderson and the Estate of Eduardo Paolozzi / All rights reserved DACS 2013. Reproduced with permission.

While this discourse formation around pattern would not necessarily have been as evident as it is now with historical hindsight, given its more exclusive currency within the privileged interdisciplinary networks that Henderson moved in both before and after the war, the discourse around ideas of ‘a-focalism’, ‘aformalism’ and the ‘all-over’ effect clearly held much greater currency at the time for Henderson's contemporaries. It is at one particular interconnection of this discourse that issues of iconology and configurationism are brought into focus for a final conceptual insight into the design practice of Hammer Prints, and this lies within the adjacent and connected discourse of the ‘multi-evocative’. For, as addressed in detail before (Walsh, 2001: 103–104), Henderson’s references in his lecture at the Architectural Association in 1953 to the ‘multi-evocative’ nature of Parallel of Life and Art openly acknowledged the influence of the art critic David Sylvester’s writings on Paul Klee (Sylvester, 1948, 1951) which had brought this gestalt concept into contemporary currency. Significantly, however, Henderson did not only summon up ideas of the multi-evocative in relation to the individual images of Parallel of Life and Art, but also described the radical installation design of the exhibition itself in relation to the idea of the ‘multi-evocative image’, which, for Henderson, ‘ stood for a punchy visual matrix that triggered off a number of associational ideas’ (Walsh, 2001: 103). Taking up the ‘all-over’, ‘a-focal’ aesthetic of Pollock and Klee, images of whose works were included in the exhibition, the installation design of Parallel of Life and Art clearly adopted the same ‘all-over’ aesthetic through the strategy of ‘scaling up’ its exhibits to ultimately create an immersive environment which inherently produced in the spectator a ‘vision in motion’. This visual dynamism was not only dependent on physical interaction but, as Sylvester (1948, 1951) emphasised in his texts on Klee, also depended on a dynamic form of cognitive interaction:

Thus Paul Klee does not represent a scene but an adventure … and for the artist wanting to create not merely a map but an IMAGE [sic] of the world … Must produce images which are not scenes, set up apart from the observer … but must be images in which the observer participates, images whose spaces make sense only in relation to the position in it occupied by an observer.

As the publicity description of one of the Hammer Prints designs, Hessian, testified, these accumulative gestalt ideas of pattern-making and pattern-identification were conceptually and aesthetically carried through for the new audience–customers of the company: ‘HESSIAN [sic] is a demonstration of a monotype principle, pieces of inked canvas arranged and rearranged to form a multi-evocative’ pattern.’ Moreover, in the same way that the installation photographs of Parallel of Life and Art operated both indexically and visually as studies in ‘entire decorative schema’, so the installation principles and instructions of Hammer Prints designs were also conceived to create immersive, interactive visual environments:

The same designs are used for both wallpapers and textiles and, in some cases, ceramic tiles as well. The tiles can be used both as wall-coverings or as table or bartops etc. … so that it is possible to carry through a unified decorative treatment using similar elements in different areas, and for different purposes.

Which is to say, Hammer Prints was in itself the logical extension, the inevitable ‘scaling up’ and ‘staging of the spectator’ that Parallel of Life and Art had been in relation to its original photomontage studies.

But the radicalism of Hammer Prints, however, developed to be ‘displayed’ as much in the private and domestic domain of potential clients as in the public and corporate realm, rested not only in its embrace of the debates around the socio-biological and socio-cultural function of art and design established by the Bauhaus (and promoted within the pedagogical culture and principles of the Central School which Henderson and Paolozzi enjoyed through their teaching positions), but more significantly in the synthesis of these ideas with those emerging from the social sciences. For, in describing Parallel of Life and Art as a ‘visual matrix’ with the potential to trigger off ‘associational ideas’, Henderson was undoubtedly registering the ground-breaking work of Gregory Bateson in his book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry which received immense critical coverage when it was published in 1951. It should also be noted that Bateson had also been married to Margaret Mead, Judith Henderson’s mentor, from 1936–1950. In this work, Bateson had proposed his communication model of ‘feedback systems’ and it can be no coincidence that in describing the selection process of material for Parallel of Life and Art that Henderson (1953a) had observed in his AA lecture: ‘At this point certain groupings began to declare themselves … these terms … then began to play back on our selection and condition the choice of further images.’

In resituating the design development and principles of Hammer Prints within the conceptual development of Parallel of Life and Art, which it clearly emerged from, it becomes clear to what extent the designs themselves combined with their installation guidelines were being conceived and constructed not within a tradition of applied or decorative arts, but in a new expanded category of art as installation and as a form of visual communication to be read as complex networks of culturally codified signs and symbols. Designed for the domestic as much as the public realm, the newly configured spatio-temporal relations presented to the spectator/consumer of Hammer Prints no longer depended on a passive consumption of taste and static imagery, but rather on the premises of the spectator/consumer as an active player and co-constituent in the meaning-making and cultural ownership of the space and imagery around them. At the core of this new visual communication based on pattern-making and pattern-identification lay the promise of both personal and cultural regeneration beyond the confines of taste and convention. As this article has tried to argue, Hammer Prints both helps us to look back at Parallel of Life and Art as a complex field of communication, and towards Patio & Pavilion as a symbolic habitat.