Richard Hamilton at The Ideal Home Exhib

RICHARD HAMILTON AT THE IDEAL HOME
EXHIBITION OF 1958: GALLERY FOR A

COLLECTOR OF BRUTALIST AND TACHISTE ART
BEN HIGHMORE
1 Terry Hamilton in the Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art at the Daily Mail’s Ideal
Home Exhibition, 1958. r Richard Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2007.
In 1958, as part of the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, London,
Richard Hamilton presented Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art. It was
a minimalist space, a high street ‘white cube’ with modernist furnishings – chairs
by Harley Earl (who had been chief designer at General Motors and was the main
agent responsible for introducing styling into car design1 ) and a central ‘appli-
ance tower’2 in the Scandinavian-functionalist manner, where books, gadgets and
drinks were kept. The tower or cabinet (‘all cupboards are cabinets these days’3 )
had doors that could open out to become tables for dispensing drinks, or for
clerical and administrative work (plates 1 and 2). While the photographs from
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2007.00570.x
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 5 . NOVEMBER 2007 pp 712–737
712 & Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
R I C H A R D H A M I L T O N AT T H E I D E A L H O M E E X H I B I T I O N O F 1 9 5 8
the exhibition only show us Terry Hamilton using the appliance tower (Terry was
Richard Hamilton’s wife and ‘anonymous’ collaborator4 ), the critic Reyner
Banham, in a contemporary review, sees it as a container dedicated to masculine
devices: ‘all the technical aids considered proper to a cultured man of the mid-
fifties, from cocktails to tape-recorder, have been housed in a single mobile
fitment’.5 The prominent display of a bottle of Vat 69 Port, with its vernacular
sexual reference and connotations of male aristocracy and connoisseurship, no
doubt purposefully enhanced the expression of masculinity.
On the walls and on the floor were Brutalist and Tachiste artworks: Eduardo
Paolozzi, Sam Francis, Franz Klein,6 and one of Hamilton’s own works from the
previous year, Hommage à Chrysler Corp. (1957). In the photographs of the Gallery
Hamilton’s painting remains unseen. The selection and presentation of artworks
drew attention to the way that American abstraction was being categorized
2 Terry Hamilton in the Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art at the Daily Mail’s Ideal
within specific European formulations: Brutalism and Tachism are British and
French designations for art, architecture and design. Similarly, it is worth noting
the self-classification of Hamilton’s Hommage à Chrysler Corp. as a piece of Brutalist
art (the references to Tachism would delineate a more emphatic abstractionist
practice, and would effectively discount Hamilton and Paolozzi) within a collec-
tion pictorially privileging, at least as far as the paintings are concerned, gestural
and all-over painterly abstractions.
But dominating the room is a vast ‘picture window’ that almost fills one wall
and frames a view of the new Citro€en DS 19 set in a picturesquely rural landscape.
The picture window suggests a large external vista and works to concretize the
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 713

space of this staged and obviously artificial interior. In actuality the window
consists of a large-scale photograph recessed into the wall with a glazing that lies
flush with the gallery’s interior surface. The DS, of course, is carefully chosen: it
signals a particularly successful piece of European auto-styling that in a number
of ways is the dialogic response to what General Motors and Chrysler had been
doing in the 1950s (which was the most obvious topic of Hamilton’s ‘Hommage’
painting). With the DS, styling is no supplementary addition (say a fin tail on the
wing): it is the car itself. The DS is all-fin, its streamlining integrated at the level of
conception. But the DS had also started to become a more extensive analytic
object for those interested in postwar daily life. It is the car of choice for a number
of Europeans sensitive to changing phenomenological conditions of contem-
porary society.
It was Roland Barthes who most famously registered (in 1957) the way that
automobile design had found a new domestic form with the DS:
Until now, the ultimate in cars belonged rather to the bestiary of power; here it becomes at
once more spiritual and more object-like, and despite some concessions to neomania (such as
the empty steering wheel), it is now more homely, more attuned to this sublimation of the
utensil which one finds in the design of contemporary household equipment. The dashboard
looks more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory: the
slim panes of matt fluted metal, the small levers topped by a white ball, the very simple dials,
the very discreteness of the nickel-work, all this signifies a kind of control exercised over
motion, which is henceforth conceived as comfort rather than performance.7
To be in the DS, for Barthes, was to be in a domestic space, or at least a space that
was becoming domesticated. In this sense the staging of the DS to perform as an
external space outside the Gallery becomes ambivalent: the DS, like the Gallery
itself, becomes another ambiguous interior – neither fully domestic and homely,
nor, in any real sense, public.
But the DS was also resonating closer to Hamilton’s specific milieu. Around
the time of Hamilton’s Gallery installation, fellow Independent Group regulars,
the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, were trading in their VW Beetle for a
Citro€en DS.8 While any direct lines of confluence and determination are unne-
cessary to fix, it does suggest that the DS had cultural currency within this milieu.
More interesting, though, is the way that the DS becomes the vehicle for ‘a
sensibility primer’ that Alison Smithson would write in the 1970s. Already in the
1960s Alison Smithson was writing about the way that the spatiality of car
interiors could be related to the sort of interpersonal relationships that were
possible between drivers and passengers: ‘I remember thinking you were so close
together in the Volks and so far apart in the DS your relationship as a married
couple was bound to subtly change. Now you could stand off the situation of each
other. Then it was love in a box.’9 The different ‘affordances’ of the two designs
allows for the two cars to be experienced on different affective registers: enforced
intimacy versus a choice of proximities.
But if the DS (in its comparison with the VW) alerted Alison Smithson to the
sensibility produced by the interior of the car, it also directed attention to the
changing phenomenal perception of the environment that vehicular movement
in general and DS movement in particular could make vivid:
714 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

There has been a change in perception, possibly bringing with it the beginning of an ability to
distinguish between the inherited way of seeing and a fresh recognition of the nature of what
we see. The growth of a new sensibility precedes the inventions we require.10
The DS, then, was more than just a desirable well-designed commodity: it was
emblematic of new spaces and new ways of ‘being’ in those spaces.11 In this the
DS becomes a pedagogic device that teaches Alison Smithson the new sensorial
forms that modern living is producing. Such pedagogy doesn’t require condem-
nation or celebration it requires sensorial and phenomenological understanding:
hence the very idea of a ‘sensibility primer’.
To the three elements of Gallery for a Collector that have been mentioned so far
– furnishings, artworks, and outlook – may be added a fourth element: actors
(Richard and Terry Hamilton). The function of the room for human activity
(collecting) is inscribed in the very title of the gallery, even if that title is often
tellingly misnamed as Gallery for a Collection. Its status as a space for people and not
just things (or more specifically as a space for people who amass things) is
constantly emphasized by the inclusion of the ‘collectors’, Terry and Richard,
in the accompanying imagery (see plates 1 and 2, and 3). But a ‘gallery’ that
houses a ‘collection’ is (as has already been mentioned) an ambiguous space:
whereas ‘gallery’ suggests a space for strangers, for a public, ‘collector’ connotes a
3 Richard Hamilton in the Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art at the Daily Mail’s Ideal
4 Terry Hamilton at home with the appliance tower and Harley Earl chairs, Highgate, London,
1962. r Richard Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2007.

more intimate, private space, a space fashioning the home-as-a-museum. That

Gallery for a Collector, after the Ideal Home Exhibition, was installed in Terry and
Richard Hamilton’s Highgate home (plate 4) should not suggest that the space
was more emphatically domestic than public. More pertinently it suggests that
the Hamiltons wanted (or were prepared) to live with the contradictions that the
gallery presented, which gathered difficult and unresolved tensions around this
blurring of private and public space.
Gallery for a Collector ambiguously stages its space as both domestic and
professional and in this it connects to a central concern within architectural
modernism: namely the dislocation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ space that is set in
motion by the modernist poetics of glass and geometry. Those dense semantic
bundles – ‘private’ and ‘public’ – so central to conceptions of social selfhood, are
the source of endless disturbance in modernist architecture.12 Opacity and
transparency, solidity and light, are mobilized in combinations that destabilize a
formula that would fix the private within the domestic interior and the public
within a putative exteriority. Thus in the modernist canon, landmark buildings
such as Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche (1923) or Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth
House (1946–51) and Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) reconfigure and disrupt
private and public space.13 Corbusier’s Villa La Roche purposefully orchestrated
domestic interiors to serve as gallery walls for Roche’s collection of paintings,
fashioning domestic, intimate space for the purpose of a presumed art viewer. In
Johnson’s Glass House and Mies’ Farnsworth House, domestic privacy becomes
pure transparency, a volume of air encased in glass. The light and visibility
afforded to the inhabitant is matched by the absolute exhibitionism of the
architectural staging. Hamilton’s Gallery echoes this modernist legacy by reso-
lutely establishing the domesticity of the gallery and by making the picture
window such a central element of the design. When visitors wandered into the
Gallery a view ‘out’ towards the Citro€en DS is emphatically solicited. But if an
untrammelled view to the car is explicitly staged, this also indicates (implicitly) a
direct view ‘in’ to the gallery from anyone on the outside. And, of course, this
visibility is crucial to the high street private art gallery where the ‘white cube’
must also act as display case, and where a glass frontage is incontestably the
gallery’s shop window.
Looking at the Gallery for a Collector now it looks like any relatively small
metropolitan independent commercial art gallery. In 1958 such galleries were
still relatively new (at least ones that were trading in the latest offerings of young
‘emergent’ avant-garde artists). Hamilton’s Gallery is an ur-form in the making: it
is a semi-domestication of white cube space – on the one hand the home as
modern show space, on the other the art gallery as boutique. In the postwar
period private galleries were establishing minimalist spaces for showing moder-
nist artworks, and it will be the galleries that flowered in London at the start of
the 1960s – most decisively Kasmin Ltd and the Robert Fraser Gallery – that will
produce and extend the commercial and domestic public space for an avant-
garde.14 The Robert Fraser Gallery (see plate 5) will be Hamilton’s dealer for a
while in the early 1960s and it is the Fraser Gallery that offers a useful comple-
ment to Hamilton’s ‘installation’. Cedric Price, the architect that Fraser chose to
design the interior of his Duke Street gallery, describes the apparent uniqueness
of the interior:

5 Inside the Robert Fraser Gallery during the inaugural exhibition, Jean Dubuffet, in April 1962.
The designer of the gallery was Cedric Price.
At the time it was a rather startling design I think, startling as it didn’t have any colour – very
stark. Black and white sounds pretty natural for galleries nowadays, but at the time [. . .] There
were some reasonably plain galleries, but there were far more plush ones. But then the work
was far more plush, eighteenth-century horse prints and so on. Actually, they weren’t so much
plush, they were generally rather dingy. There weren’t any comparable galleries in London
certainly, in architecture or colour.15
No doubt Price is slightly over-playing the uniqueness of the Fraser Gallery. More
soberly it can be seen as part of a shift (as was Hamilton’s Gallery for a Collector)
where the minimalist gallery was taking over from the plush and dingy spaces of
a pre-war culture. Price’s fabrication of a gallery is notable partly because it ends
up as an appliance-space: a space that seems to be as dedicated to clerical tasks,
storage provision, and such like, as it is to the display of pictures.
Yet the interior design is not what is specifically new here: or rather the
newness of the interior signals as a synecdoche for a set of changing and
contradictory conditions relating to class (though Fraser was an old-Etonian, the
patrons and artists involved in the gallery will come from a wide social back-
ground) and commerce. The Fraser gallery will configure, in a way that
is embryonic in Hamilton’s Gallery for a Collector, the glamorous and seedy

interconnections between anti-establishment avant-gardism and the vast finan-

cial resources of a new cultural aristocracy (of which Richard Hamilton is, or will
be, a part).
Thus Gallery for a Collector establishes an ambiguous role for the author of the
exhibit and the author of one of the paintings in the exhibit: it poses the author
as producer and procurer in one; both artist and advertiser (but not necessarily
artist-as-advertiser); both maker and distributor. This room isn’t simply a collec-
tion, it is a gallery (and here the signs of domesticity further enforce the recog-
nition that this seems, emphatically, to be a [financially] private gallery) where
commerce and taste are intricately balanced, each one stepping round the other
in a contradictory dance. In this space we find Richard and Terry purposefully
facing their role as cultural technicians, dealers in a taste economy (where a new
DS is both financial reward and a further enhancer of cultural distinction), where
avant-gardism and consumer capitalism are rubbing shoulders in a way that it is
hard to even maintain the illusion of art for art’s sake autonomy (relative or not).
To take such contradictions ‘home’, to live them day-in day-out, alters the
conditions of interior space as both a site of production and representation.
PAT R I M O N Y A N D P O P A R T
While it is usual to claim that Hamilton’s installation was merely contingent on
his employment in the interior design department at the Royal College of Art, it is
likely that that the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition would have become a parti-
cularly significant site for display for Hamilton due to Alison and Peter Smith-
son’s House of the Future which was displayed there two years earlier.16 Hamilton’s
famous letter of 1957, where he supplies various descriptors for pop art ending up
with ‘Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business’,17 was also addressed to
the Smithsons (though Peter Smithson claims never to have received it, and the
letter went unanswered18 ), and the letter mentions House of the Future as one of a
number of ‘important’ ‘manifestations’. Inhabiting the space of the Smithsons’
success with House of the Future and suggesting (in the letter) that they should plan
an exhibition together, is evidence that, for Hamilton, the Smithsons constituted
an important reference for his practice. It also seems clear that, at least for Peter
Smithson, there was nothing particularly intimate about this relationship (Peter
Smithson mentions a ‘biological antagonism’ towards Hamilton19 ); perhaps it
was a stronger force for all that.
If commentary seems keen to suggest particularly instrumental conditions
for the making of Gallery for a Collector, it is both repetitive and simplistic when it
comes to making sense of the installation. And this is because at some point the
story of pop art in the context of Hamilton and the UK art scene gets fixed. While
the discursive sedimentation of pop art (and Hamilton’s position within pop)
emerges in the mid-1960s, it is around 1970 when the teleological story gets set –
the story of how Richard Hamilton and other members of the Independent
Group20 produced a prescient variety of pop art that would go on to become a
fully-fledged movement, paralleling its US variant. 1970 is the year of Richard
Hamilton’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery and it is this that establishes
Hamilton as the progenitor of pop art and secures the lineage of Independent
Group, to This is Tomorrow, and on to pop art. While there is commentary from the
1960s declaring Hamilton to be the ‘Big Daddy of Pop’, it is in 1970 that the

machinery of critical approbation declares the patrilineage of pop art to start

with Hamilton.21 As progenitor, all of Hamilton’s work is mined for signs of ‘pop’
that can then be marshalled to tell the teleological story of pop art emerging
(tautologically) from the work of pre-pop, which is then necessarily figured as
proto-pop. In Hamilton’s case the crucial ingredient to this story is a levelling of
taste culture, whereby an equivalence is established between, for instance, easel
painting (preferably oil painting) and, for instance, comics – or between opera and
pop music. The constant search for what can be read as ‘democratizing’ or
levelling actions allows Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art to take its
place in the story of pop art’s gradual (but seemingly inevitable) emergence, even
though the title of the gallery would seem to suggest that another narrative is
being relayed. Gallery for a Collector has been described as:
An extremely simple, elegant room with all its storage and appliance requirements placed in a
single, slender, centrally placed unit was maximally functional as a gallery for the type of large-
scale art just emerging in Europe. Works decorating the space included a battered humanoid
sculpture by Paolozzi, an Yves [sic] Klein, a Sam Francis and Hamilton’s own Hommage à Chrysler
Corp. A floor-to-ceiling picture-window enabled an avant-garde car, the Citro€en DS parked
outside, to be appreciated on equal terms with the works of art. Integration with popular
culture was further represented by modernist chairs designed by Harley Earl, chief stylist of
General Motors.22
The argument that pop art, and as exemplar Richard Hamilton, effects a
straightforward flattening of the cultural terrain so that mass-culture and easel
painting exist on a single continuous plain is still central to critical under-
standings of pop and Hamilton. Hal Foster, for instance, recently claimed that the
‘Pop insight that Hamilton shares with Lichtenstein in particular’, is ‘that today,
in both compositional order and subjective effect, there is often no great differ-
ence between a good comic or ad and a grand painting’.23
Foster’s privileging of Richard Hamilton as protagonist of pop art’s ‘first age’
works hard to avoid other cultural constellations that might be productively
linked to the work of Hamilton and the Independent Group. For instance, when
Foster mentions the work of Robert Rauschenberg he does so to make sure that
Hamilton’s ‘tabular image’ is not confused with what Leo Steinberg described as
the ‘flat-bed picture plane’ of Rauschenberg’s combine pictures.24 Yet while there
may be significant differences between the fabrication and effect of the two
artists’ work there is a significant connection between the artists of so-called ‘neo-
dada’ (primarily Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but also including the
composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham) and the artists,
writers and architects of the Independent Group.25 Both groups mobilize a
surprisingly similar cluster of cultural resources: both, for instance, bring toge-
ther the figure of Marcel Duchamp, the quasi-cybernetics and system theories of
Buckminster Fuller and the densely threaded writing of James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett. Hamilton and Rauschenberg both produce work that privileges the
tropes of metonymy and synecdoche in their production of densely scattered
pictorial fields. If both ‘neo-dada’ and Hamilton concoct work where indetermi-
nacy matters more than fixity, and opaque density is more important
than readability, then it is less a question of figuring out where their artistic

antecedents lie than in asking why indeterminacy and density would be the
solution to the problem of conjuring a pictorial practice in the late 1950s.
While one aspect of the work of the Independent Group was to extend the
purview of analysis outwards from a concentration on fine art so as to include
design and mass-culture, this was not resolved into a levelling of the cultural
terrain. Indeed the question of mass-culture’s ‘sincerity’ was always at issue.
David Sylvester, in an article in 1964 in the relatively new colour supplement to
the Sunday Times (Sunday Times Colour Magazine – itself an example of the extension
of the term culture to include a wide variety of attitudes, beliefs and practices)
understood the world that Hamilton’s work responded to as including both ‘wine
culture’ and ‘coke culture’. But such an attitude, rather than potentially homo-
genizing the world, worked to draw out distinctions. Wine culture and coke
culture both elongated into a seemingly endless inventory of specific practices
and qualities. Thus for Sylvester ‘wine culture’ would include, for instance,
‘containers of food and drink that are awkward to open’, ‘techniques which have
been learned over centuries of trial and error’ and ‘living with flies and bedbugs’;
while ‘coke culture’ could consist of, for instance, ‘using machines and self-service
counters’ and ‘endless, exhilarating freeways along which drivers fall asleep’. For
Sylvester:
The point is not whether Coca-Cola culture is wiser and nicer than wine culture: the point is
that it is a culture – a set of tribal tastes and customs which implies certain values and attitudes
and a conception of what life could ideally be.26
Rather than using this anthropological version of culture to flatten the cultural
landscape, it puts the burden of responsibility onto being able to describe
culture’s varied sensorial textures, its iniquitous social economy, and its material
effects and affects. But it is worth noting here that the terms of ‘culture’ amount
to a mass of synecdoches (‘freeways’, ‘self-service counters’) which are just part-
objects that together (presumably) make up this thing called ‘culture’. But
when we get to culture (Coca-Cola culture, wine culture) all we find is another
synecdoche.
Similarly, the labour of Hamilton’s work (and many others associated with the
Independent Group and early ‘pop’) is descriptive rather than evaluative. Or more
precisely: the labour of description is required precisely because evaluation
(which would include the evaluation of general equivalence) seems impossible.
And this descriptive labour was often closer to a loose phenomenological and
existential form of attention than it was to a celebration or denunciation of the
‘democratic’ potential of advanced capitalism:
The magazines Playboy and Esquire, the cinema, posters, advertisements, Brecht, the art of the
past in the museums – they all exist together. To express Being Today you must take into account
the inheritance from the past.27
To see this labour, to gather together its descriptive successes and failures, is to
take Gallery for a Collector out of the evolutionary narrative of ‘the emergence of
pop art’. When we do that we find a much more ambiguous installation. Gallery for
a Collector and Hommage à Chrysler Corp. point, albeit obliquely at times, to a much

more dangerous culture than that signalled by ‘pop’, and signal a much more
serious and anxious response to that culture. To get to this response requires a
brief discussion of this essay’s methodological values.
M E T H O D O L O G Y M AT T E R S
So far this essay can be seen as going about the usual work of art historical
research: research that can be used for the reassessing of a hitherto marginal
work within the artist’s oeuvre; for reinflecting the way it signifies so it can be
repositioned as central or important; which may result in the general revising of
art historical categories (like ‘pop art’); and so on. However this essay is only
peripherally interested in the meanings of Richard Hamilton’s Gallery for a
Collector (and his other interiors) as part of a larger understanding of his oeuvre,
and does not want to direct its labour towards establishing new or reconfigured
categories for the chronicling of artworks (this artist’s or artists’ work in general).
It is also generally unconcerned (at least here) with whether these artworks are
‘critical’, ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ and so on.
What I am interested in doing is attending to artworks for the purpose of
researching cultural history. To put it bluntly, my intention is not to produce a
better understanding of Hamilton’s work (though I would argue that this should
be a necessary by-product of the approach). More insistently my intention is to
produce – via the artworks – a convincing, even compelling, sense of what the
cultural field might have felt like for Richard Hamilton, and by implication what it
felt like for others too. I want to do art history where the work of doing history is
constantly being made possible, and made anew, by the material peculiarity and
particularity of the art object (which importantly would include the limitations of
the object as much as art’s potential). As far as this goes I see art history (or design
history or literary history, for that matter) as a form of materialist cultural history
that can write about the past through its peculiar and pressing attention to a set of
objects labelled art. This may not at first seem like a radical direction for art
history and may already be written into some of the founding texts of what used to
be called the social history of art. So, for instance, when T. J. Clark states that, ‘I do
not want to talk about history as ‘‘background’’ to the work of art – as something
which is essentially absent from the work of art and its production, but which
occasionally puts in an appearance’,28 he is not just claiming that socio-cultural
history is crucial for attending to art works, he is also claiming that such history
can’t simply be found outside of the artwork: it is the material substance of the art
object. Yet, while Clark is mostly dedicated to better understandings of the artwork
as object, I’m keen to redirect this proposition, to point scrutiny outwards, towards
a better understanding of the experiential realm of the lifeworld.
Here I want to suggest two things that may seem contradictory: first that the
object of art history, or cultural history more generally is not the ‘text’ (painting,
performance, installation, etc.) but the context; second, that the best way to reach
such context is by inordinate attention to specific texts. Concentrated attention is
what allows objects to spill out into the more diffuse scene we call culture, and
this diffusion is there loaded (surreptitiously or not) into the art object. There is I
think a more substantial claim to be made here for the business of art history:
namely the specific type of object that is called art (rather than an object called
‘legislation’, for instance). Again I might be tending towards the perverse: art

objects, I would argue, are particularly good for writing historically about sense,
perception, affect, the sensorial environment and so on (and more generally
about social experience) not because such work is aesthetic, but because such
work is, crucially, meta-aesthetic.
There is a tradition of aesthetic thinking (for want of a better term it could be
called social aesthetics) that stretches from Georg Simmel to Jacques Rancière,
and that analyses the aesthetic realm as the entire ‘distribution of the sensible’
(le partage du sensible), to use Rancière’s term.29 For both Simmel and Rancière the
aesthetic realm is fundamentally originary: it is the material base without which
‘superstructural’ phenomena like the economic, the political, and so on would
not be possible. Thus Rancière links aesthetics to politics because his under-
standing of aesthetics is as a determinant that produces the political: aesthetics is
‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.
It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech
and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a
form of experience.’30 Thus aesthetic life is both perception and what is perceived
and perceivable. It is the realm of the senses and the realm of the sensed. The
‘distribution of the sensible’ is the order ‘that parcels out places and forms
of participation in a common world by first establishing modes of perception
within which these are inscribed’.31 When art takes on the task of examining
these modes of perception, when it opts to undertake meta-aesthetic work, it is
unquenchably social.
Such a position suggests that description (the labour of mapping ‘the distri-
bution of the sensible’) is not only essentially social, but also linked to potential
political possibilities (and impossibilities). What it doesn’t suggest is that such
labour will have necessary progressive or regressive outcomes – in a very literal
sense it is work that is pre-political (which is not to say it isn’t informed by
political commitments, biases, and so on). In Simmel’s work, for instance, it
meant tracing the new forms of social experiences that took their representative
form in the abstractions of money. In this, money is the representation of the forms
of sensual organization that adapts to the saturation of the sensual field in urban
commodified living, and so on.32 But this work didn’t translate directly into a
political programme (in the way that might be seen in certain other sociological
or philosophical attempts to make sense of the world).
It is not possible in the space of this essay to do justice to this tradition of
thought, and no doubt there is a polemical argument here that will strike some
readers as problematic. Here I want to make a more limited point: if the realm of
aesthetics (the history and future of aesthetic regimes, or ‘structures of feeling’) is
constituted by the sensual and sensorial arrangements that organize perception
(and are organized in their turn), then the description of this realm is necessarily
meta-aesthetic. In this way many artworks would fall into the category that the
Smithsons called ‘sensibility primers’ in that they are engaged in describing the
sensorial world, learning from it, and teaching their audience ways of perceiving
that world. Alison Smithson’s book ‘on’ (or in) the DS is meta-aesthetic, but so too
(in some ways) is the Citro€ en DS: the DS is after all the instrument (the pedagogic
instrument) that allows her to recognize the changing perceptions that are alive in
a car-driven world. Of course there is no pure dividing line here between the
aesthetic realm and the meta-aesthetic form of attention: works of art, for instance,

6 Richard Hamilton, Hommage à Chrysler Corp.,

1957. Private Collection. r Richard Hamilton.
All Rights Reserved, DACS 2007.
can simultaneously provide symptomatic examples of sensorial arrangements as

well as providing instructive and diagnostic explorations of these arrangements.
While this might seem to be a slightly abstract argument about methodological
values, it does go some way to describing Hamilton’s material practice in the 1950s
and early 1960s. Time and again Hamilton describes his practice in terms of its
attention to the ordinary in its historical specificity: ‘I would like to think of my
purpose as a search for what is epic in everyday objects and everyday attitudes.’33
And this search for ‘what is epic’ was part and parcel of wanting to treat the material
elements of culture as sensorial agents within larger social and sensual arrange-
ment. The link here to perception and sensorial organization is apparent when he
talks about the way he understood the work of the Independent Group and what he
saw as the project that might carry on the initial analysis carried out by the Group:
Everyone was looking for new activity and I suggested that we might now turn our attention to
using the experiences and the investigations of the previous years for the purpose of creating a
new aesthetic: to produce work which showed the consequences of this thought.34
In other words, new (meta) aesthetic practice is produced out of the analytic
investigations of the Independent Group, investigations that were insistently
aimed at understanding the phenomenological conditions of the new material
visual environments of mass-cultural living. While discussion went some way in
this meta-aesthetic direction it could not provide the experiential and pedagogic
dimension that an artwork might afford. Hommage à Chrysler Corp. (plate 6)
was the result – the first experiment in a ‘new [meta] aesthetic’.

And here Hamilton’s notes, while providing an inventory of the iconographic

elements that it was made from, offers little information on its specific form, its
particular meta-aesthetic work:
The painting ‘Hommage à Chrysler Corp.’, is a compilation of themes derived from the glossies.
The main motif, the vehicle, breaks down into an anthology of presentation techniques. One
passage, for example, runs from a prim emulation of in-focus gloss to an artist’s representation
of chrome to ad-man’s sign meaning ‘chrome’. Pieces are taken from Chrysler’s Plymouth and
Imperial ads; there is some General Motors material and a bit of Pontiac. [. . .] My sex symbol is,
as so often happens in the ads, engaged in a display of affection for the vehicle. She is
constructed from two main elements – the Exquisite Form Bra diagram and Voluptua’s lips. [. . .]
The setting of the group is vaguely architectural; a kind of showroom in the International Style
represented by a token suggestion of Mondrian and Saarinen. From a number of rather more
direct references which were tried, a quotation from Marcel Duchamp remains.35
For all the technical details the specific look of the picture – its insistent spar-
seness – is evaded. What is left fairly opaque is how and where the meta-aesthetic
work is being done. As far as this goes, Hamilton might not be the best guide for
understanding the painting’s registration of what might be called aesthetic
historicity – a specific ‘feel’ of the world at a particular point in history. In many
ways, to get Hamilton’s work to evidence an exploration of the arrangement of
the sensorial world we need to wrestle these objects away from his discursive grip.
Attention to Hamilton’s work is often directed to, and seduced by, the
historicity of his source material. In various ways Hamilton produces work (and
commentary on work) that actively invites and entices a certain form of icono-
graphic art historical scholarship; the references to other artists and to the vast
archive of industrial culture that Hamilton uses are nearly always meticulously
laid out in publications that accompany the artwork. Whether this was designed
to seduce the accountants of the history of art, or wrong foot them (what is there
left to do now that all the tracking and tracing of materials has been done?) is, for
this essay, beside the point; what is evident is that Hamilton makes no secret of
the materials out of which his artworks are fabricated and fashioned. But the
seductive quantity and quality of the referenced material might actually limit
enquiry into the historicity of the artwork. Hamilton seems to recognize
historicity only at the level of the inventorying of sources – whether these are
‘real-world’ sources, or those taken from the cultural ‘image-bank’. For Hamilton
an overt formal concern, when it seems to take precedence over subject matter,
removes a practice from contact with its social moment:
Impressionism looks like 1890s, Cubism does not look like 1910, Surrealism looks like 1920,
Tachism does not look like the 1950 environment. The reason for these differences is simple
enough: those great styles of the past which strongly evoke the period of their birth portray
objects and visual atmospheres specific to their time; those styles which do not build in a date
tag tend to avoid specific figuration or adopt appearances of other times or material which is
‘classical’ and therefore dateless.36
Yet for an art history that is keen to demonstrate the specific quality of its
object in relation to history, the challenge is to show how cubism does look like

7 Richard Hamilton $he, 1958–61. London:

Tate Britain. r Richard Hamilton. All Rights
Reserved, DACS 2007.
1910 or how Tachism (or Brutalism) does look like 1950. The difficulty is in
knowing where to find this historicity: do 1950s abstractions look like they
were from the 1950s as a symptom of that period’s aesthetic proclivities (and in
this it may count less rather than more than wallpaper colouring and design,
or the designs for linoleum for telling us about that aesthetic historicity)?
Or is there in the arrangement of space, shape, facture, frame, and so on, a
more analytic or meta-aesthetic inquiry into the conditions of perception and
sensorial life?
A more useful guide to this aesthetic historicity can be found in the words
of the painter Patrick Procktor commenting on Hamilton’s work. Writing
about Hamilton’s one-person show at the Hanover Gallery in 1964, Paintings etc.
’56–64, which included nearly all the paintings that had been produced since the
Whitechapel exhibition of 1956, This is Tomorrow, Procktor writes that Hamilton’s
practice is defined by its use of the figural trope of synecdoche:
It is not symbolism, but a form of synecdoche, and supremely poetic. [. . .] If Sartre’s world is one
made real by words, Hamilton’s is that of marks. It is not just the literal application of
industrial methods of decoration (as in the spraying of parts of a car body), nor just the
introduction of real polished steel into the painting of a swivel chair (in Interior II). It is also an
inventive procedure whereby a girl’s shoulder is air-brushed on to make a simile with the
surface of the machine-goods in her kitchen.37
This last comment is a reference to Hamilton’s $he (see plate 7) with its abbre-
viations of fridges and female bodies and use of graphic shorthand to show the

trajectory of newly toasted bread. The creation of visual similes in Hamilton’s

work is partly what makes his paintings seem flippant and superficially witty, and
take away from what might be a distinctly less optimistic account of body parts,
machine elements, and so on.
This insistence on synecdoches (parts taken for wholes – for instance,
the rendering of a car by just headlamp and fender) is what allows Hamilton to
make amalgams of a vast range of source material at the same time as
producing work that looks not simply sparse, but as if the attempted calm of the
painterly surface is being agitated by the intrusion of bits of worldly matter.
From a certain angle Hamilton’s works are empty because, and not in spite
of, their inclusion of a variety of referents. Against the blank flatness of the
painterly field, with its slight and half-hearted scrumblings, the motley assort-
ment of cultural shards simply increases the desolation of painterly space. In this
the paintings can be viewed as more Brutalist than pop in the way that surface
and reference interfere with one another. But more importantly it may allow us
to suggest that synecdoche in the late 1950s in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere)
was not just a way of figuring culture, it was in some profound way culture
itself. David Sylvester’s account of wine culture and coke culture, detailed above,
offers a useful analytic frame. On the one hand we have an ahistorical truism:
all social practices and productions express beliefs, values, and lifeworlds. On the
other hand we have a claim related to aesthetic historicity: at this moment
signifying elements are accumulating out of hand, and tradition is everywhere
seeming to disintegrate; all we seem to have are synecdoches which seem to
relate to some vague and un-represented sense of the world. In this all
individual commodities are synecdoches for that more general sense of commo-
dification: but commodification is precisely the endless accumulation of all these
synecdoches.
But it is the empty spaces between the synecdoches that often seem to be
stressed in Hamilton’s work, and it is here that excessive accumulation breaks
down (or merely fails to come together). What is harder to perceive is whether this
empty space points to anything other than the limited success of the commodity.
But it is here in the peculiarity of the iconographic elements and, more obliquely,
in the non-iconographic space (space that Gallery for a Collector and Hommage à
Chrysler Corp. is ‘full’ of – if ‘full’ is the right word) that we should look if we want
this work to reveal its more general historicity. To do this we need to be attentive
to the synecdoches, attentive to their status as synecdoches, and to the voids that
separate one element from the next. We need to work not simply on what the
work refers to, but also on how the work is doing this referring. It will mean
pluralizing the possible contexts for understanding the painting and the gallery,
not so as to secure an interpretation, but so as to set the work loose in a more
dynamic social and cultural field.
IN BITS
Whatever else Gallery for a Collector does, it stages a viewing situation, and perhaps
most crucially (given the authorship of the room) it stages a viewing situation for
Hamilton’s Hommage à Chrysler Corp. All galleries invite the visitor to view its
objects, yet because of the nature of the Ideal Home Exhibition the viewer is also

8 Growth and Form, 1951. London: Institute

of Contemporary Art. r Richard Hamilton.
invited to view the gallery room itself as an exhibit. Anyone familiar with
Hamilton’s work in the 1950s might be surprised, though, by the conventional
form of Gallery for a Collector, or at least its conventional practice as regards the
hanging and viewing of artworks. Between 1951 and the staging of Gallery
Hamilton had designed and curated a number of exhibitions: Growth and Form
1951, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (plate 8);38 Man, Machine & Motion
9 Man, Machine & Motion, 1955. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Hatton Gallery. r Richard Hamilton.

1955, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Institute of Contemporary Art,

London (plate 9); and with Victor Pasmore and Lawrence Alloway, an Exhibit
1957, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Institute of Contemporary Art,
London (plate 10). And of course he was also partly responsible for the design of
the Group Two space in This is Tomorrow (1956).
Common to all these exhibitions is the insistent eschewing of an uncluttered
cubic space in which to view an ordered row of images that would hang flush
with the gallery wall. While all the exhibitions experiment with different
display forms (Growth and Form uses curvilinear and cellular display forms;
Man, Machine & Motion uses transparent screens to provide visual layering
and a saturated visual space, and so on), in today’s museological vernacular
Hamilton’s exhibition spaces would be considered ‘immersive’39 – demanding
an enquiring disposition and perambulatory action of the spectator and
challenging the usual contemplative habits associated with gallery viewing.
Why then would Gallery for a Collector establish quite simple and undemanding
contemplative space; why would the engagement of spectator-activity be suddenly
dropped?
One answer to this question is to argue that Gallery for a Collector was not a
prescriptive space, not a space showing how the viewing of modern ‘progressive’
art should be undertaken. Instead of prescription, description is offered. I have
already mentioned that Gallery for a Collector stages some of the contradictions
facing postwar avant-gardism, in as much as it recognizes that any art (however
negative) can be used as a positive sign of the progressive tastes of a new cultural
aristocracy. As Peter Burger
. suggests (and on this point it is hard to disagree),
structurally the social role of avant-gardism changes in the postwar period in that
it is not only more easily absorbed by the institutional spaces of art (art schools,
galleries, museums), it is actually underwritten and often produced by these
institutions.40 To some degree avant-gardism is, in the 1950s, becoming the
official art for a class, for a milieu. Gallery for a Collector, then, describes the space
of this becoming and it does it by describing both the private gallery and the
public-private space of the display home.
10 Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, and

Lawrence Alloway, an Exhibit, 1957. London:
Institute of Contemporary Art. r Richard
Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2007.

The Ideal Home Exhibition is a scene dedicated to the display home. The display
home, though, that is most congruent with Gallery for a Collector can be found, not
within the walls of Olympia, but in the pages of Playboy (September and October,
1956) in a design spread and article titled, ‘Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment: a high,
handsome haven – pre-planned and furnished for the bachelor in town’. Not only
is Playboy the first in Hamilton’s list of resources for art-making (see above), and a
standard reference in all his work at this time, there are also a number of reasons
why he might have been drawn to this particular article. Hamilton’s investigation
of interior spaces (car showrooms, domestic interiors, galleries) is always an
investigation of sexualized and gendered space.41 At times this is insisted on by
the inclusion of (usually) female body parts, but it is also achieved by drawing
explicit attention to the gendering of design elements (which again is shown by
revealing the visual congruence between object and female body part).
His interest in sexualized objects and objectifications of sexuality is partly
tuned by a longstanding involvement with Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box and Large
Glass.42 Indeed the fascination with Duchampian themes would no doubt have
made Hamilton particularly alert to the mention of bachelors, and it would not
be hard to read Gallery for a Collector as, partly, a reworking of these themes: the
appliance tower as bachelor machine; the Citro€en DS (DS 5 Déesse 5 Goddess) as
bride; and so on.43 My interest, however, is drawn towards the non-artistic
materials that might be incorporated into the Gallery.
‘Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment’ is filled with ‘appliance’ cabinets filled with
gadgets (in particular, that sign of cultural switched-on-ness, the now more or less
outmoded magnetic tape player): more crucially every room in the bachelor’s
apartment is a potential site of seduction and it is therefore necessary that any
appliance cabinet has the facilities for making an alcoholic drink:
One of the hanging Knoll cabinets beneath the windows holds a built-in bar. This permits the
canny bachelor to remain in the room while mixing a cool one for his intended quarry. No
chance of missing the proper psychological moment – no chance of leaving her cozily curled up
on the couch with her shoes off and returning to find her mind changed, purse in hand, and the
young lady ready to go home, damn it.44
In this last phrase sophisticated macho nonchalance reveals (albeit mockingly) its
desperate undertow. Playboy’s bachelor pad became a recurrent theme for articles
and designs in the magazine45 and much was made of its qualities as a haven that
was also a ‘heaven’: it was (meant to be) ‘a bachelor haven of virile good looks, a
place styled for a man of taste and sophistication’.46
Playboy’s bachelor pad combined domesticated modernist design (furniture by
Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, for instance), with an instru-
mentalist obsession with technology (nearly every ‘mod-con’ is designed to aid
seduction), and the odd bit of ‘virile’ ornament. For instance, in the massive
bathroom ‘one entire wall is decorated with bold and vigorous primitive
paintings reminiscent of the prehistoric drawings in the caves of Lascaux’.47 To
see Gallery for a Collector as sexualized and gendered as a ‘bachelor pad’ draws
attention to other gendered elements in the Gallery; the Goddess in the window
and the female lips and breast in Hamilton’s painting. But now instead of this
being an art historical reference (in relation to Duchamp), it takes us to a primal

scene of modern Western (American) sexuality. The Gallery becomes another lair,
another trap, another quintessentially modern home where heterosexual
coupling is animated by masculine aggression and by the sex-appeal of the
commodity.
David A. Mellor, in an essay based on various conversations with Hamilton,
links Hommage à Chrysler Corp. to another male domain – the car showroom – and
informs us that Hamilton’s ‘father had worked as a driver for Henley’s, the
prestige car showroom in the West End’. As a young boy, Hamilton would
accompany his father, sitting with him while he drove the latest Jaguar or
Bentley: ‘it was rather glamorous to sit in the front of the car with my father’.48
For Mellor, this connects Hommage à Chrysler Corp. to Hamilton’s childhood:
Hommage à Chrysler Corp., conserving the glamour, is in the alternative childhood space of
motorcar associations, the showroom: a place that joins those other crisp and tense
stages of display in Hamilton’s iconography. An example was his stand at the March 1958
Ideal Home Exhibition. A Gallery for a Collector where a blown-up photo of the new Citroen DS
entered the domestic space (Hamilton hung Hommage à Chrysler Corp. on the wall in this
installation, repeating and wittily insetting a painted showroom within a showroom-
cum-gallery).49
But alongside this scene from Hamilton’s childhood we could also suggest a
childhood scene much closer (in time) to the making of Hommage à Chrysler Corp.
and Gallery for a Collector.
The material circumstances of Hamilton’s practice are worth dwelling on, and
insisting upon. At this point (1957–8), Hamilton was teaching in Newcastle (he
commuted weekly during the academic term) while he also had a studio at home
in Highgate, in London. The Highgate home was a space of work, family and
friends – and, no doubt, their difficult and productive intermingling. When he
painted Hommage à Chrysler Corp., Richard and Terry Hamilton’s children were
eight years old and two years old. The day-to-day-ness of ‘family life’ is often erased
from accounts of the productive labour of people who are also carers of depen-
dent children (replaced by an exclusive focus on professional matters) or else
milked for interpretative clues that might fuel psycho-biographical writing. Here,
though, I want to direct a concentration on children elsewhere.
For anyone as interested in perception as Hamilton, having children must
have offered an invaluable lesson in cognitive and sense development.50 For
those parenting small children in Britain in the 1950s, certainly for parents open
to the latest ideas about child development, D. W. Winnicott’s work must
have been hard to avoid. During the 1950s Winnicott was a regular broadcaster on
BBC radio, and his theories of ‘transitional objects’, of the ‘good-enough-mother’,
and his account of the relationships between children and their environment
became part of the landscape of popular ideas. Addressed primarily to mothers,
the radio programmes popularized the psychoanalytic traditions of object
relations associated with Melanie Klein (Winnicott was supervised by Klein
between 1935 and 1941) and emphasized the very first years of a child’s life. In
radio talks, such as ‘The World in Small Doses’, Winnicott descriptively discusses
how a baby gets to know the world in gradually enlarging segments – from the
enclosed microcosm of the newborn, through the expanding environment of the

toddler, and on to the adult world.51 In Winnicott’s view, ‘for the little child, and
how much more for the infant, life is just a series of terrifically intense experi-
ences’ where the line between imagination and actuality is fundamentally
blurred.52
Like Klein, Winnicott sees the world of the infant as an experience of part-
objects (in particular the mother’s breasts) that become a site for a range of
affective experiences (aggression, love, anxiety, and so on). Experiencing the world
and the people in it as a series of fragments is continued, and to some degree
managed, when the child (from as early as four months) starts having an intense
relationship with the object world and with what Winnicott calls their first ‘not-
me’ possession (a toy, a bit of blanket, and so on): an object ‘that becomes vitally
important to the infant for use at a time of going to sleep, and is a defence against
anxiety’.53 Such objects Winnicott terms ‘transitional objects’ and they fulfil a
number of tasks:
The first possession is related backwards in time to autoerotic phenomena and fist- and thumb-
sucking, and also forwards to the first soft animal or doll and to hard toys. It is related to the
external object (mother’s breast) and to internal objects (magically introjected breast), but is
distinct from each. Transitional objects and transitional phenomena belong to the realm of
illusion which is at the basis of initiation of experience.54
While it might be tempting, for instance, to use such material to argue for an
interpretation of the painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp. based on Winnicott’s
ideas, my intention here is more modest.
On the one hand, Winnicott’s theories can be treated as an available context
and material resource for Hamilton’s practice (in the same way that the Playboy
bachelor pad can be), one made more likely because of the everyday context of
Hamilton’s family life. On the other hand, though, Winnicott’s work provides one
of the best accounts of the power of the synecdoche. As both a representational
device and as an aspect of the phenomenal world, synecdoches are particularly
powerful forms because of their phenomenal and existential link to something
else.55 Historical upheavals sometimes reveal the tragic power of synecdoches,
and this was, of course, evident in London through the 1940s and 1950s. During
and after bombing campaigns streets are littered with synecdoches: bits of
clothing, odd bits of interiors, a photograph, a letter – little bits, part of a life that
is now torn apart. The evocation of a traumatic scene via the use of synecdoche is
the stock-in-trade of photo-journalism (the abandoned child’s doll, for instance).
In London in the 1950s synecdoches, in the shape of undeveloped bomb-sites,
were still very much in evidence. But alongside this wounded culture there are
also synecdoches at the heart of an aggressively commercial culture: commodities
work as synecdoches – a coke bottle is merely the part of a lifestyle that consti-
tutes the whole but is just an accumulation of bits. For children the reality of
their imaginative world consists of synecdoches: a world of bits that are invested
with enormous density.
What is peculiar to the synecdoche is that it doesn’t ‘re-present’ something
else through its qualitative similarity to another object or phenomenon (as a
metaphor might), nor does it stand in as a relay to another object that is
fundamentally separate (as a metonym would). Synecdoches are the ‘thing-itself ’,

fragmented and intensified, amputated and amplified. The child’s over-loved

blanket is not like the microcosmic world of the newborn’s environment:
importantly it was there at the scene, a fragment left over from a now lost time.
Synecdoches have power because their existential link (one formed either physi-
cally or historically, or both) to something else that may or may not have been
obliterated, to something else that may or may not be a mirage.
AND IN THE CONTEXT OF OBLIVION . . .?

Looking back on the 1950s, Magda Cordell McHale (in the 1950s she was Magda
Cordell), an artist who worked closely with both Terry and Richard Hamilton,
described the affective milieu of the Independent Group:
The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in
our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images
might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some
excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.56
Cordell, a Hungarian-born artist (whose immediate family had been killed in the
1939–45 war) and a central member of the Independent Group, points to an
important context for understanding art produced in Britain at this time, and
more specifically for understanding Brutalist art. Yet her version of this moment
also requires further clarification. If the bleak past was a constant presence –
something that might require reparation, for instance – how was the future (‘the
new’) shaping up? Were the artists of the 1950s in a position to ‘erase the old’ as
they ‘approached the new’? And was ‘excitement’ the only term that might
characterize the affective force of this process? Was ‘excitement’ twinned with
anxiety, fear, and trepidation?
At stake, of course, is the future. For Richard Morphet, writing for the cata-
logue for the Tate retrospective of Hamilton’s work in 1992, Hamilton’s use of
‘pop’ iconography (industrial culture generally) should be seen as resulting in an
art ‘that could be fun and could also have a strange kind of optimism’.57 Opti-
mistic, or perhaps ironic, accounts of commercial culture are what, it seems,
Hamilton produces, or at least produced in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet such an
assessment of Hamilton’s work at this time has more to do with the historio-
graphic success of ‘The Story of Pop Art’ than it does to a close attention to the
work itself.
Biographical experience and social events don’t speak for themselves but they
do speak for something. By the end of 1955 an aggressive atomic-energy strategy
was in full swing in Britain: Calder Hall in Cumberland was being built and would
start producing electricity (ahead of schedule) as the world’s first nuclear power
station in October 1956; an experimental fast-breeder reactor had been commis-
sioned for operation at Dounreay, Northern Scotland (this would begin producing
electricity in 1959, and start supplying the national grid in 1962); and further
sites for the production of nuclear power had been agreed in Essex and Glou-
cestershire.58 Prior to this, but developing alongside it (though more secretly),
was a nuclear weapons programme; with weapons being produced in Alder-
maston (Berkshire) – from 1950 – using plutonium produced at Windscale
(Cumbria) – from 1952. In 1957 a major fire at Windscale resulted in the shutdown

11 Richard Hamilton at the Holy Loch protest,

1961.
of one of the reactor piles as well as large-scale television, radio and newspaper
coverage of the event. In 1960, as part of an escalating Cold War fever, the British
government finally entered into a long-awaited ‘tender’ agreement with the US
which resulted in the stationing of US Navy nuclear submarines equipped with
Polaris missiles.59 In 1956 Hamilton was active in the Whitehall protest against
Britain’s aggression towards Egypt during the Suez crisis. In 1961, as a supporter
of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – which started in 1958),
Hamilton, along with about 1,000 others, travelled to Holy Loch to protest the
arrival of the Polaris submarine (plates 11 and 12). He, along with Terry Hamilton,
was arrested and sent to prison along with hundreds of others. What are we to
make of such events: or rather what did Hamilton make with such events? Political
and social commitments don’t necessarily make it into artworks, but their
absence, as well as their presence counts for something.
It is a risky business mapping absences onto artwork – after all, most of the
world is entirely absent from each and every artwork. Yet there is something
about the context of nuclear build-up that won’t go away. We need to tread
carefully here and hang back from using social and political commitments as an
excuse for reading-in content. Like the contexts set out above, the history of
Britain’s nuclear production – its ferocious acceleration and decisive link with
the USA – will have to take its place as a possible context for the historicity of the
artworks. My interest is not in finding reference to nuclear material but to fathom
the peculiar emptiness (the massive gaps between the synecdoches, for instance)
12 A US Navy’s submarines carrying Polaris

nuclear missiles, Holy Loch, Scotland 1961.

in Hommage à Chrysler Corp. I want to argue that this work is historically sand-
wiched between a recent traumatic past (the 1939–45 war) and a future that
held out the possibility of oblivion. Rather than seeing such a context as an
‘absent presence’ which is a significant feature of the work, I want to suggest that
the gaps (both in the paintings and in the impossibility of visualizing a response
to the threat of oblivion) are a significant feature of the experience of the
late 1950s.
And here it is the context of domesticity that is crucial. In another essay I have
tried to demonstrate that the domestic spaces of Hamilton’s work become
gradually more porous in the 1950s and early 1960s; they start to fall apart and
leak. My argument was that domesticity itself was changing during this period as
a response to the increases of, most notably, television. TV in the home imme-
diately creates dissonances, visual and aural collages produced by a constant flow
of the outside into the inside. In some ways this porosity is both visible and
invisible: radio waves magically appear in the shape and sound of television
programmes. The possibility of radiation (for those, like Hamilton, who were
attuned to its dangers) constitutes another level of domestic porosity, but this
time without an ‘object’ or product that could be rendered (a screen for instance)
in pictures.
What might be important here is that one context doesn’t win out against
another. A nuclear context is not more explanatory than one based around a
psychological investigation of a child’s perception, which is no more explanatory
than the rise of a predominantly American commodity culture. Explanation is
not, in the end, what this essay pursues. In terms of meta-aesthetic work, the very
fact that Hamilton’s political allegiances and critiques can’t (at this point) find a
referential form might be highly significant. Perhaps more than anything, the
experience of coming out of a traumatic past, heading for a future filled both
with material abundance and the possibility of catastrophe can only be met with
uncertainty, with the impossibility of picturing an adequate response. My argu-
ment then is that the meta-aesthetic work being done is in the description of this
uncertainty, an uncertainty given a deathly context in the light of the expanding
nuclear threat in Britain.
In this sense Hommage à Chrysler Corp. needs Gallery for a Collector to perform
as meta-aesthetic work, to capture the extent to which uncertainty and
anxiety undercut the surface desire for the commodity. For Hommage à Chrysler
Corp. does look like a cool analysis of modern commodity design and its
trappings: all sleek surfaces, happy smiles and packaged sexuality. Yet at the
same time, and without drawing breath, it looks like scattered remnants
spread over a field of blank emptiness. Here the painting rocks between
announcing itself as clever abbreviations with witty visual confluences set
amongst casual, sparse painterly infill, and insisting on a more catastrophic scene
where the very blandness of its overall field casts these dislocated fragments into
oblivion.
At the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition, Hommage à Chrysler Corp. could not
help swaying towards desolation, could not help but privilege the ruin of
commodity culture over its surface celebration. In the face of such a replete
version of modern styling as the gigantic photographic window presenting the
Citro€en DS, Hommage à Chrysler Corp. was a sparse collection of car shards and

body parts. In the company of Paolozzi, Francis, and Klein, Hommage à Chrysler
Corp. has little sense of a gestalt form or enlivened painterly surface. In this
light, the expanses of sketchy nothingness look resolutely uninspired and
uninspiring – not even a glimpse of eternity, nothing but a dead end. In dialogue
with the appliance-tower-as-bachelor-machine, Hommage à Chrysler Corp.
presents an almost annihilated femininity fashioned in chrome and advertising
rhetoric.
Hommage à Chrysler Corp. performs its meta-aesthetic work partly through its
ambivalence towards the world it pictures – an ambivalence, no doubt, felt by
many in Britain viewing the glamorous products in US magazines and in Holly-
wood movies. But Gallery for a Collector also performs meta-aesthetic work and it
does so by intensifying one side of this ambivalence. Here, commodity design
culture as, partly, an American Dream, is presented as already ruined, already
spoilt – a dream cast in a void. If to look from Britain to the US was, at times, to
see the pleasure of a culture dripping with the promise of material happiness, in
1958 it was, for those on the cultural left, also to see the intensification of Cold
War activity, to see the deathly struggle for supremacy, to see US nuclear
weapons arriving on the shores of Scotland. Gallery for a Collector was an empty
room where the outside was a mirage of an improbable dream, a dream which
batted you back to the scattered field of Hommage à Chrysler Corp., or on to the
scarified surface of the Paolozzi sculpture. In this room, where the future was
already ruined and where you dare not look towards the past, the present was
hardly present at all.
Notes
1 On Harley Earl and the importance of General the conceptualizing and fabrication of Gallery for
Motors’ style innovations for developing a Collector as well as other work at this time.
consumption-led production in the automobile 5 Reyner Banham, ‘Ideal Interiors’, Architectural
industry, see David Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social
Review, 734 1958, 207.
History of American Automobile Design, London and
6 The literature claims that one of the paintings is
New York, 1994.
by Yves Klein – I’m assuming that somewhere
2 The determining possibilities of ‘the appliance’
in domestic architectural design (appliance-led along the line there was some confusion
design) were a central topic in the work of between ‘Franz Klein’ and ‘Yves Klein’ in this
Hamilton’s Independent Group associates Alison regard. The painting slightly obscured by the
and Peter Smithson (‘The Appliance House: An central appliance tower would appear to be
Hypothesis’, Architectural Design, April 1958, 43– classic mid-1950s Franz Klein (either that or the
7). The Smithsons’ House of the Future (1956), also
work of Pierre Soulages). An Yves Klein painting,
at the Ideal Home Exhibition, is an example of
however, does make an ‘appearance’ in Richard
appliance-led design, and a line can be traced
from this work through to the experiments of Hamilton’s Interior II of 1964 – also partly
Archigram, by way of such work as Reyner obscured.
Banham’s essay , ‘A Home is not a House’, Art in 7 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette
America, 53 April 1965, 70–9. Lavers, London, 1973, 89.
3 Cyril Ray, ‘Home, Sweet Ideal Home’, in The 8 Spring 1957 is the earliest mention I can find of
Spectator, 7 March 1958, 32. the Smithsons owning a DS. The DS came out in
4 On Terry Hamilton’s role in the Whitechapel 1955 but was still looking like ‘advanced design’
Exhibition, This is Tomorrow, Richard Hamilton
in 1958.
would write: ‘my wife Terry was a dab hand with
9 Alison Smithson (under the pseudonym I. Chip-
a saw as well as an anonymous contributor at
every level of the project’ – Richard Hamilton, pendale), ‘Love in a Beetle’, Architectural Design,
Collected Words, London, 1982, 22. There is no October 1965, quoted in Alison Smithson, An Eye
reason not to assume that this was also true of on the Road: AS in DS, Delft, 1983, 13.

10 Alison Smithson, An Eye on the Road, 47; this book, 21 See: M.G. McNay, ‘Big Daddy of Pop’, The Guardian,
which is shaped like a DS as seen from above, was 25 July 1966, 7; Edwin Mullins, ‘Father of Pop’,
finished in 1973. Daily Telegraph Magazine, 13 March 1970, 45–8; ,
11 During the 1950s and early 1960s Hamilton’s ‘Pop Daddy’, Vogue (London), 127:4, 14 March
writing and writing about Hamilton is littered 1970, 137; Terence Mullaly, ‘Father of British Pop
with existential language: being, authenticity, Art’, Daily Telegraph, 21 March 1970; and James
sincerity, etc. (rather than the ad-speak asso- Burr, ‘The First ‘‘Pop’’ Painter’, Apollo, 91:97,
ciated with later pop art) is the language of March 1970, 238. Daddy or Father is a trope that
criticism. is insistently used; the above is a sample of the
way patrimony is figured in the title of journal-
12 For a compelling account of this aspect of
istic texts. It must be said that other (male)
modernist architecture, see the work of Beatriz artists are also often designated as Fathers of Pop
Colomina: Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: (Paolozzi and Warhol most often). My argument
Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MA is merely that the discursive sedimentation of
and London, 1994; and Beatriz Colomina, Hamilton as ‘Father’ (even if discursively this
Domesticity at War, Cambridge, MA and London, happens to a number of artists) establishes the
2007. repetitive figuring of early work as ontologically
13 For Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche (or Maison La proto-pop.
Roche) see Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier 22 Richard Morphet, ed., Richard Hamilton, London,
1920–1930, New Haven, CT and London, 1987, 45– 1992, 152.
75. For Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House see 23 Hal Foster, ‘On the First Pop Age’, New Left Review,
John Zukowsky, ed., Mies Reconsidered: His Career, 19 2003, 112 Hamilton for Foster is a pivotal artist
Legacy, and Disciples, New York and Chicago, 1986. in his recent overview of pop art.
On Philip Johnson’s Glass House see Christine 24 Leo Steinberg, ‘Reflections on the State of Criti-
S. E. Magar, ‘Project Manual for the Glass House’, cism’, 1972, reprinted in Brander W. Joseph, ed.,
in Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Robert Rauschenberg (October Files 4), Cambridge,
Henderson, eds, Architecture and Feminism, New MA and London, 2002, 6–37. The discussion of
York, 1996, 72–108. Hamilton in relation to Rauschenberg is in
14 And of course, to describe the space in this way Foster, ‘On the First Pop Age’, 108.
(domestic, commercial, avant-garde) is to empha- 25 For a quick curatorial sketch of Neo-Dada, see
tically signal the presence of contradiction. Susan Hapgood and Jennifer Rittner, ‘Neo-Dada:
15 Cedric Price in Harriet Vyner, Groovy Bob: The Life Redefining Art, 1958–1962’, Performing Arts
and Times of Robert Fraser, London, 1999, 68. For a Journal, 17:1, 1995, 63–70.
very useful anecdotal guide to London art 26 David Sylvester, ‘Art in a Coke Climate’, Sunday
galleries at this time, see David Sylvester’s review Times Colour Magazine, 26 January 1964, 14.
of Groovy Bob: ‘Someone You Had to be a Bit 27 Hamilton quoted in Charles S. Spencer, ‘Richard
Careful With’, London Review of Books, 22: 7, 30 Hamilton: Painter of ‘‘Being Today’’’, Studio
March 2000. Jonathan Aitken, The Young Meteors, International, 168:858, 1964, 180.
London, 1967, includes a chapter on the London 28 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and
art world in the first half of the 1960s that is the 1848 Revolution, London, 1973, 10.
centred on the emergence of new galleries. 29 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated
16 See Graham Whithman, ‘Chronology’, in David by Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, 2004.
Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain 30 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.
and the Aesthetics of Plenty, Cambridge, MA and 31 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 85.
London, 1990, 42. 32 See Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans-
17 The letter is dated 16 January 1957 and the full lated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby,
letter is in Collected Words, 28. I need to point out London and New York, 1990 – this edition was
that Hamilton is not talking about fine art (his or first published in German in 1907.
anybody else’s) when he is talking about pop art 33 Hamilton quoted in Lawrence Alloway, ‘‘‘Pop Art’’
here, but about ‘art manufactured for a mass since 1949’, The Listener, 27 December 1962, 1085.
audience’ and that he is still unsure about the Alloway’s text is the script for a radio programme
‘sincerity’ of this material. that was broadcast on 8 November 1962.
18 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Friends of the Future: A 34 Richard Hamilton in David Robbins, ed., The
Conversation with Peter Smithson’, October, 94 Independent Group, 40.
2000, 5. 35 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words, 32. This was
19 Colomina, ‘Friends of the Future’, 5. originally published as Hommage à Chrysler Corp.,
20 For the Independent Group and Hamilton’s Architectural Design, March 1958, 120–1.
involvement, see Anne Massey, The Independent 36 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words, 35. This was
Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain 1945– originally published as ‘An Exposition of $he’,
59, Manchester, 1995. It should be noted that Architectural Design, October 1962, 485–6.
Massey’s book seeks to defeat this teleological 37 Patrick Procktor, ‘Techniculture’, New Statesman,
narrative. 6 November 1964, 710.

38 For a reading of this that relates it to the ethos of Between 1956 and 1970, Playboy commissioned
the Festival of Britain, see Isabelle Moffat, ‘‘‘A five different designs of bachelor pad, and
Horror of Abstract Thought’’: Postwar Britain included numerous articles on the houses of
and Hamilton’s 1951’, Growth and Form Exhibition’ famous ‘virile’ and ‘sophisticated’ men. For more
October, 94 2000, 89–111. on this see George Wagner, ‘The Lair of the
39 For a fascinating account of the idea, history and Bachelor’, in Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze,
practice of ‘immersive’ exhibitions, see Michelle and Carol Henderson, eds, Architecture and
Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory, Feminism, New York, 1996, 183–220.
Maidenhead, 2006. 46 Sanders, ed., Stud, 67.
40 Peter Burger,
. Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated 47 Sanders, ed., Stud, 67.
by Michael Shaw, Manchester, 1984. For Burger, . 48 David A. Mellor, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of
‘the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant- Modernity: Vision, Space and the Social Body in
garde as art’ (58). For Burger,
. while ‘the institu- Richard Hamilton’, in Richard Morphet, ed.,
tion art’ is not reducible to an inventory of social Richard Hamilton, 33.
spaces (gallery, university, journal), such spaces 49 Mellor, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Moder-
provide the environment where much of the nity’, 33.
work gets done to secure a social role for art in
50 For instance, his ‘Trainsition’ (1954) paintings
the postwar era. His most explicit account of ‘the
(which were based on studies undertaken during
institution art’ is in Peter Burger . and Christa
his weekly train commute to Newcastle) were
Burger,
. The Institutions of Art, translated by Loren
informed by J. J. Gibson’s The Perception of the
Kruger, Lincoln and London, 1992.
Visual World, Westport, 1950. Gibson’s book
41 At times the titles alone are enough: $he, Hers is a developed a psychophysical exploration of
lush situation, Pin-up, Towards a definitive statement perception.
on the coming trends in men’s wear and accessories (c)
51 D. W. Winnicott, ‘The World in Small Doses’, in
Adonis in Y-fronts, and so on.
The Child, The Family, and The Outside World,
42 He first comes across the Green Box in 1948, Harmondsworth, 1964, 69–74. The Child, The
publishing an English-language, typographic Family, and The Outside World is a collection of
version of it in 1960. In 1965 he begins the Winnicott’s radio talks.
process of reconstructing the Large Glass and
52 Winnicott, ‘The World in Small Doses’, 70.
some earlier studies for it.
53 D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Tran-
43 For an account of Hamilton’s work more
sitional Phenomena’ (1951), in Playing and Reality,
attentive to its Duchampian aspects, see, for
Harmondsworth, 1974, 4.
instance, Sarat Maharaj, ‘‘‘A Liquid, Elemental
Scattering’’: Marcel Duchamp and Richard 54 Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transi-
Hamilton’, in Richard Morphet, ed., Richard tional Phenomena’, 16.
Hamilton, 40–8. 55 For a work of art history that is attentive to the
44 The full article (and the article from October full range of figural elements, but particularly to
1956) is reproduced as a facsimile in Joel metonymy, see Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns,
Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, London, 1994.
New York, 1996, 55–67. The designer and writer 56 Magda Cordell McHale in Robbins, ed., The Inde-
were anonymous. For more on the continued pendent Group, 190.
relevance of Playboy for artists and architects 57 Richard Morphet, ed., Richard Hamilton, 15.
during this period, see Simon Sadler, ‘The Living 58 ‘Large-Scale Development of Nuclear Power’, The
City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the Architect as a Times (Annual Financial and Commercial Review), 24
Young Man’, Art History, 26:4, 2003, 556–75. October 1955, xvii.
45 The October 1956 issue ran an article titled 59 ‘Scottish Base for Polaris Submarines’, The Times,
‘Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment – A Second Look’. 17 October 1960, 12.

Richard Hamilton at The Ideal Home Exhib

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Richard Hamilton at The Ideal Home Exhib

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RICHARD HAMILTON AT THE IDEAL HOME

EXHIBITION OF 1958: GALLERY FOR A

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714 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

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more intimate, private space, a space fashioning the home-as-a-museum. That

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interconnections between anti-establishment avant-gardism and the vast finan-

718 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

machinery of critical approbation declares the patrilineage of pop art to start

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720 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

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6 Richard Hamilton, Hommage à Chrysler Corp.,

can simultaneously provide symptomatic examples of sensorial arrangements as

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And here Hamilton’s notes, while providing an inventory of the iconographic

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7 Richard Hamilton $he, 1958–61. London:

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trajectory of newly toasted bread. The creation of visual similes in Hamilton’s

726 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

8 Growth and Form, 1951. London: Institute

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1955, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Institute of Contemporary Art,

10 Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, and

728 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

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fragmented and intensified, amputated and amplified. The child’s over-loved

AND IN THE CONTEXT OF OBLIVION . . .?

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11 Richard Hamilton at the Holy Loch protest,

12 A US Navy’s submarines carrying Polaris

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