Long Front of Culture

About this book

"The Long Front of Culture is the first book-length treatment of the exhibition designs of the Independent Group and its key members: artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi; architects Alison and Peter Smithson; critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham; and many others. A pivotal research collaborative united by a shared interest in technology, popular culture, and lost histories of art, the IG came together in the 1950s at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. There, as the story goes, they first put into practice a non-judgmental approach to the objects and pleasures of consumer culture that we now recognize as Pop Art. But if the IG gave rise to Pop, it also, Kevin Lotery argues, invented a form of research and experimentation that far exceeded the Pop label, one that could embrace all the sciences, technologies, aesthetic forms, and military-industrial discourses conditioning what they saw as a new chapter in the history of culture after the Second World War. They named this new phase the "long front" in order to get at the ways all visual production of the postwar period-from X-ray crystallography and painting down to science fiction and automotive design-seemed leveled within the non-hierarchical sameness of a horizontal field or "front." In his study, Lotery argues that the IG turned to exhibition design-that most cross-disciplinary technique of research, display, and spectator involvement-as the only medium capable of incorporating, reconfiguring, and ultimately, reimagining this expansive front of technologically-aided appliances, advertisements, films, and consumerist fantasies into new spatial set-ups and experiences"--