London Calling (12 page)

Teddy boy style and attitude was not entirely confined to the working class. It had a certain resonance in the art schools,
where a new generation of young people were up against an even more thickheaded and obdurate establishment. Sadly, unlike
in the USA or Germany, the art schools were still in the hands of ex-colonials and public schoolboys, which, as Richard
Hamilton wrote, led to the ‘dismal design standards’ of the Festival of Britain.
⁷
At the Royal Academy schools, the new president, Sir Alfred Munnings, stamped into the studios wearing jodhpurs, hacking
jacket and riding boots that he thwacked with his riding crop. He would accost students and demand to know if they were ‘one
of those buggers that talks about Picasso?’ If they were he would yell: ‘Then get the hell out of here!’ No wonder the RA
schools remained a joke, certainly until the end of the sixties. Richard Hamilton’s appreciation of the new teacher Thomas
Monnington got him expelled:

Monnington could be hilarious. His deadpan delivery of the line ‘Augustus John could knock spots off Cezanne’ was masterly.
Another time I fell off my
drawing donkey laughing at what I mistakenly took for broad humour – ‘They are not even good honest Frenchmen, they’re a load
of fucking dagos.’ My open amusement at these antics got me into difficulties and I was expelled for ‘not profiting from the
instruction being given in the painting school.’
⁸

The pathetic state of art education gave extra importance to the creation in 1947 of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (I
C A).

The ICA was founded in 1946 by the artist and critic Roland Penrose, the poet and art critic Herbert Read, the Cornish poet
and editor Geoffrey Grigson, and two sponsors: the art collector and benefactor Peter Watson, who had financed Cyril Connolly’s
Horizon
magazine (and subsidized the early efforts of Francis Bacon, among others), and Peter Gregory, the owner of Lund Humphries,
then the best art printers in the country. Penrose, Grigson and Read were the ideas men and the other two paid for them: at
the end of the year the overdraft was calculated and they split it between them. It was originally conceived of as an alternative
arts centre to the Royal Academy. Penrose and Read both had backgrounds in Surrealism, having been organizers of the London
International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, a direction that showed in the early ICA exhibitions. Watson, who put up most
of the money, was an unconventional old Etonian whose boyfriend, Denham Fouts, was once described by Christopher Isherwood
as ‘The most expensive male prostitute in the world’. In 1956, Watson drowned in his bath, possibly murdered by his lover,
Norman Fowler.

The ICA launched itself with two remarkable exhibitions, held in rented galleries: 40
Years of Modern Art
, which reflected Penrose’s interest in Cubism, and 40
,
000
Years of Modern Art
, which showed his interest in African sculpture. The Institute’s first premises were on the first and second floors of 17–18
Dover Street: a main exhibition space with polished wooden floors, windows to the right of the stage, audience seated in rows
of six on stacking tubular metal chairs with canvas seats and backs, very functional and modern, and a separate club room
for members. It had the atmosphere of an intimate club and because it was so small conversation and the exchange of ideas
were easy. Most people seemed to be regulars and knew each other. In the early fifties the artist Jack Smith wrote: ‘I feel
that the wilderness starts ten miles from the centre of London in any direction.’
⁹
Walking around the ICA’s early exhibitions of Picasso or Jackson Pollock it was easy to agree with him.

One of the more active members at the ICA meetings was Ralph Rumney, a painter and theoretician who is best known as a co-founder
of the Situationist
International (SI), though Tate Britain has an important abstract by him –
The Change
(1957) – in its collection. In 1952 he was one of the few voices to oppose Professor Buchanan’s plans for rebuilding London;
a scheme which gave precedence to the car and involved cutting roads through residential neighbourhoods and building monolithic
high rise blocks. Rumney wanted to apply Situationist ideas to London planning. Instead of destroying communities, he wanted
a London made up of pedestrian zones: ‘I would have liked it to become a grouping together of different districts, as it was
in the beginning. I thought that the main roads should be built on the periphery of the villages that made up London.’
¹⁰
In
The Consul
he describes how the Independent Group invited him to present his ideas:

At the ICA there was a group of individuals who had formed themselves into a sort of gang, a private club, something that
was obviously quite sectarian… I was invited once to give a seminar on the way in which the architects – the Design architects
who were the nucleus of the Independent Group – had to some extent collaborated in the destruction of London.
¹¹

Many of the architects involved with the ICA were the very people who believed in the Los Angelization of London and his
views were regarded with derision: ‘No one listened to me. I was seen as a little jerk.’
¹²
And so the Westway was cut through Notting Hill ripping away large sections of Little Venice and Paddington Green and new
highways forced through Tower Hamlets. Many of the tower blocks have since been pulled down. In the fifties and sixties ‘developers’
tore down the majority of the beautiful eighteenth-century houses that had survived the Blitz. It was to be expected; this
is the nation that bulldozed Nash’s Regent Street in pursuit of money. Despite the animosity of the architects, Rumney was
permitted to organize some exhibitions at the ICA by Wols, Baj, Michaux, Yves Klein and Fontana, with the last two giving
talks to the members.

In 1955, in order to promote his various ideas, he decided to start his own weekly arts review,
Other Voices
, ‘to get myself heard and to squire a certain legitimacy’. It was a precursor of the London underground press. Rumney was
both editor and publisher. He published several pieces by Stefan Themerson as well as Bernard Kops, Hugo Manning and C. H.
Sisson. He was living at the time in a squalid block of flats in Neal Street, Covent Garden, in a building not yet wired for
electricity, just gas lighting, and with a toilet in the hall. (There were many streets like this in central London even in
the mid-sixties. I had a flat on Gilbert Place, just off Museum Street, in 1965, where not only the buildings but the street
itself still lacked electricity. Each
evening a lamplighter turned on the street lighting. With no hi-fi, television or radios the loudest disturbance was a local
sculptor hacking at a giant tree trunk.) Rumney was painting at the same time as editing
Other Voices
and was under contract to Rex Nankivell, at the Redfern Gallery, who once a week would send his chauffeur round in a Bentley
convertible to take Rumney to the gallery to collect his cheque and take him to the bank. But much of his time was taken up
with the newspaper: he did everything – assembled the copy, typeset the articles, and did the layout; he had a Polish printer
who was already working for Stefan Themerson but set all the headlines himself by hand. Every week he produced six large-format
pages and distributed them himself to bookshops. After six weeks he was so exhausted he contracted pneumonia and had to cease
publication. Rumney: ‘It was fantasy, really, but at least it existed.’
¹³
By a curious coincidence, he chose as his headline typeface the same font that the New York underground paper
East Village Other
used a decade later, making an even closer connection between
Other Voices
and the sixties phenomena of the underground press.

In July 1957, the founding members of the Situationist International held their first meeting, in the Italian village of Cosio
d’Arroscia. There is a set of photographs of them all posing together: Walter Olmo, Michèle Bernstein, Elena Verrone, Gallizio,
Asger Jorn, Piero Simondo, and founder Guy Debord. Ralph Rumney is missing because it was he who took the photographs. Rumney
joined on behalf of the London Psychogeographical Committee, which he had just made up, though psychogeography itself was
an invention of the Letterists. Considering how many scholarly essays and books have been written about the SI, Rumney’s own
assessment was surprisingly modest: ‘At the level of ideas, I don’t think we came up with anything which did not already exist.
Collectively, we created a synthesis, using Rimbaud, Lautréamont and others, like Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, the Futurists, Dada,
the Surrealists. We knew how to put all that together.’
¹⁴

Back in London, Rumney organized lectures on the SI and put on a screening at the ICA of Guy Debord’s film:
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(
Howls for de Sade
). The film has no images whatsoever but consists of about twenty minutes of spoken dialogue, during which the screen remains
white, intercut with long passages of silence, totalling one hour, during which time the screen, and therefore the cinema,
remains dark. Rumney: ‘After the lights went up after the first show, the audience protested so loudly that their shouts could
be heard by those waiting outside.’ The first audience tried to convince the audience for the second show to go home, but
their arguments had the opposite effect and the second screening was full to capacity.
¹⁵
Less
than a year after the formation of the SI, Rumney was expelled by Debord, ‘politely, even amiably’. The reason given was that
he had failed to complete a projected psychogeographical report on Venice. (He was a few days late.)

Rumney spent little time in Britain after this, preferring to live in the South of France and Italy. His influence extended
in many directions and it may be that he was responsible for some of Manzoni’s most notorious artworks. Rumney:

[Manzoni] was doing horrible paintings when I knew him. He was even younger than me, a student… one evening when I was round
at his place I said to him: ‘If you want to be an artist you won’t do it by making paintings. You must live the life of an
artist. It is a practice, so that even your shit should be a work of art.’ A little while later he was putting shit in tins!
¹⁶

Rumney was not invited to join the Independent Group, which had a closed membership and whose discussions were not published.
The committee members were Lawrence Alloway, the assistant director of the ICA from the mid- to the late fifties; the architects
Peter and Alison Smithson – inventors of the ghastly ‘streets in the sky’ concept for urban housing, whose style was described
as ‘the new brutalism’ – and Reyner Banham, best known for his sympathetic study of Los Angeles; Toni del Renzio, a freelance
graphic designer who taught at Camberwell School of Art and worked part-time at the ICA; and the artists Richard Hamilton,
John McHale and Eduardo Paolozzi (who was then teaching fabric design at Central School of Art). Other participants included
Victor Pasmore, William Turnbull and Nigel Henderson, who was best known as a photographer. Peter Blake, though not central
to the group, also attended many of their meetings. The group first met in April 1952, when the meeting featured projections
by Eduardo Paolozzi of pages from his large collection of American illustrated magazines using ‘a rather hot epidiascope’.
Though the ICA was founded as an alternative to the art establishment, the new generation saw its founders as out of touch.
‘How pompous, formal and antiquated the art establishment was. The Independent Group was for practicing artists and critics
and no one else. They even talked tough, in a certain way – the linguistic equivalent of Brutalism’, wrote Richard Lannoy.
¹⁷

Richard Hamilton: ‘If there was one binding spirit amongst the people of the Independent Group, it was a distaste for Herbert
Read’s attitudes.’

Toni del Renzio wrote: ‘At the time, we were more united by what we opposed than by what we supported. “Antagonistic co-operation”…
constitutes the most accurate description of the Group.’
¹⁸

Some, such as Eduardo Paolozzi, saw the group as actively researching a new iconography: Paolozzi: ‘Group members such as
del Renzio, Alloway, Reyner Banham and myself were bound together by our enthusiasm for the iconography of the New World.
The American magazine represented a catalogue of an exotic society, bountiful and generous, where the event of selling tinned
pears was transformed into multi-coloured dreams…’
¹⁹
In 1953, Paolozzi exhibited collages made from American magazines at the ICA in a show,
Parallel between Art and Life
, described by him as containing ‘imagery from the budding worlds of admass and new technology. This material, seen in an
unfamiliar context and on an inflated scale, suggested an area of visual delight unsuspected at the time by most of the audience.’
²⁰
To a British audience still experiencing food shortages, the luscious coloured advertisements for food worked on more than
just the visual level: they posed questions concerning Britain’s relationship with the USA, which now had the world’s highest
standard of living whereas Britain was virtually bankrupt. All the young artists wanted to go to America, the land of huge
fruit salads, whipped cream, chewing gum, cars with enormous fins, white teeth and hamburgers. British pop art, in some ways,
can be seen as a strategy to deal with the imagery of this unattainable dream.
Parallel between Art and Life
revitalized the Independent Group, which by then had almost ceased to exist. In 1955, Richard Hamilton organized
Man, Machine and Motion
at the gallery, featuring twentieth-century images in photographs: speed, stress and man–machine relationships are predominant.
The result of all this activity was the
This is Tomorrow
exhibition out of which came the British Pop Art movement.