At the Carnival of Pop Culture
A festive future had
beckoned as the utopian goal for British Pop art since
its inception at Richard Hamilton's seminal 'fun house'
in the exhibition 'This is Tomorrow', at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery in London in 1956. The pleasures of modernity
had yet to arrive in the still authoritarian, post-war,
Neo-Elizabethan Britain of the late nineteen 'fifties,
but every aspect of Hamilton's contribution to 'This is
Tomorrow', suggested an imminent advent, an apocalyptic
cultural de-regulaton of British culture. It was not for
nothing, perhaps, that Hamilton presented, as the
dominant figure in a giant collage of Pop imagery,
Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments
, leading the people of Israel to the Promised Land. But
the moment of metaphoric cultural exodus into the land of
Pop did not arrive until 1962.
The Beatles materialised
in the second, re-painted version of Adrian Henri's Entry
of Christ into Liverpool(1962-4), filling the empty
place around his transcription of Alfred Jarry's Pere
Ubu, signifier of twentieth century mis-rule, and a
definite stranger to the streets of Lancashire. A student
of Richard Hamilton, Henri gathered, in the genre of the
celebratory group portrait, some of the insurgent
cultural forces that would transform the nineteen sixties
in Britain: the impulse of the radical politics of
unilateral nuclear 
dis-armament
(CND - which claimed the allegiance of Hamilton, Hockney
and Henri) in the 'Ban-the-Bomb' banners; the ambivalent
embrace of promotional culture, (the advertisements); pop
and jazz music personified by The Beatles, Charlie Parker
and Charles Mingus, (themselves signs of a certain
anti-racism). Local Liverpool painters and poets join
these culture heroes at the front of a vast demonstration
which has echoes of the panoramic socialist triumph of
Pelizza da Volpedo's Il Quatro Stato (1901).
Like that painting it is a portent of an ineveitable
coming-to-power: in the case of Adrian Henri's picture it
is the carnival emancipation of representatives of a
popular culture; an emancipation which is simultanaeously
bohemian and media sophisticated; adept with juggling
citations as it looks back to a sardonic modernity- Ensor
as culted figure in sun-glasses -which had never fully
arrived to transform Imperial and post-Imperial British
culture. Thus an epochal cultural and social liberation
is mimed as a popular, carnivalesque event in Liverpool's
city centre, in a scene of civic transformation that
forecasts Peter Blake's design for Seargent Pepper
in 1967.
As he concluded his great
gathering painting in 1964, Adrian Henri honoured and
centrally inserted The Beatles, not only because they
were local celebrities, but because they had been the
chief agents in effecting that cultural liberation, on a
national- and -as 1964 proceeded- an increasingly global
scale. By the summer of 1964, the Beatles had
definitively re-located from Liverpool to London, in an
uncomfortable acknowledgement of British
metro-centricity. Peter Blake's group portrait of them
had begun in 1963, their annus mirabilis,and
completed in 1968; it contained an immediate nostalgia
for a climactic moment of Pop, arguably at the point of
the exhaustion of this utopian trajectory in British
culture. It invokes, in the circled Art Deco-vernacular
centre 
of the four compartmented
composition, their talismanic name and the year 1962, the
moment of advent, their unveiled, originating
self-constitution and also Year One of the Pop art
revolution in London, inaugurated in March by Ken
Russell's BBC TV film of Blake, Pauline Boty, Peter
Phillips and Derek Boshier, Pop goes the Easal .
These artists were depicted by Russell as part of a
youthful group, visually and sonically at ease with mass
culture, moving through a festive London of parties,
circuses, wrestling matches and street markets to the
background of Pop music, the first use of such a
soundtrack in an arts documentary. Blake's Beatles are
manipulated colour screened photo-images from their
publicity repertoire, painted using the disfiguring
pictorial structures of Francis Bacon: they are already a
hybrid part of the fine-art/pop-art continuum, that 'long
front of culture' which Lawrence Alloway had theorised at
the turn of the decade. As with Andy Warhol's analogous
revolution with silkscreening promotional photographs in
the summer of 1962, the essential vehicle and currency of
publicity- the half tone and screened photograph -now
acquired centrality within a displaced and drastically
re-defined field of figurative painting, whose
iconography had migrated to the dramas of the 'low' zones
of TV, cinema and pop music.
The Enigmatic Photographer
Adrian Henri had placed
the photographer Phillip Jones-Griffiths, a future
chronicler of the Vietnam war, on the front row of his Entry
of Christ... and the figure of the male
photographer- in fashion and reportage -was to take on
heroic connotations in the changed landscape of London in
the mid-nineteen sixties. Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up
fused the practices and mannerisms of David Bailey's
acidic libertinism and Don McCullin's abject horror. Like
the nineteen forties detective of hard-boiled fiction,
the sixties London photographer was licensed to intrude
across cultural and class boundaries with an
unprecedented mobility: photographers were perceived to
be close to the heart of the new society which was in
formation and pre-occupied with image making. The
marriage of photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones' to
Princess Margaret, in 1960, confirmed this, as had
literary fictions such as Colin McIness's Absolute
Beginners (1959). Ralph Steadman's ironic caricature
'New London Cries' displayed one such
'class-less', T-shirted, photographer
abusing his female model:- "I said I'm going to put
your face on the front page of Vogue , you
stupid old cow". The film director, Michelangelo
Antonioni, shooting the film Blow-Up in London in 1966, imagined just
such a Bailey-esque young photographer, thrown into an
existential maelstrom , as a 'Swinging London' parkland
pastoral became the scenography for a murder that was
elusively visible on his 35mm. film- but only as a
blurred, fugitive, untrustworthy image. (The painterly
homologues used in the film were abstract paintings made
by another of Richard Hamilton's ex-students, Ian
Stephenson).
The photographer's view upon the world had become the site of profound ontological enquiry and as a culture hero he became, in the London of the nineteen sixties, the dandified -but re-masculinised -heir to the great modernist explorers of visual doubt. Richard Hamilton had been assured of this since 1963, when he apostrophised a colour close-up shot of female lips by Richard Avedon. With his Fashion Plate series of 1969, Hamilton scrupulously negotiated terrain between the promotional activity of contemporary fashion photography modelling and the deconstructive strategies of early modernist cubism. But doubts over the coherence and signification of observed phenomena, supplemented by photography and the experience of human identity, were brought to a pitch by him in his painting People (1965-6). Here, photo-mechanical screening processes are blown-up- in anticipation of Antonioni's Blow-Up -to arrive at grotesque and phantasmic forms, where doxical human representations disappear in the allusive technical veils of the media.
The Choreographed Image
It was the interstitial
professionals in 'image-making' areas such as magazine
and editorial photography and design - that constituency
which Hamilton admired and still belonged to - who surged
to the forefront of that triumphant entry into a utopian
prospect of youth and modernity in London in 1963-5.
Nowhere was this more salient than in the juncture
between TV and the pop music industry exemplified by the
ground-breaking Associated Rediffusion TV programme, Ready,
Steady, Go! , which began in July 1963 and ended in
December 1966. The Slade School trained artist, Nicholas
Ferguson, acted as designer for the series, which
showcased pop groups in the surroundings of a small TV
studio with a live audience. His acheivements, in
pressing into service the developing visual languages of
the London-based Pop artists, for a nationally networked,
mass youth audience, were crucial to the fashioning of a
synaesthetic of TV fragmentation, Brechtian theatrical
space and commercial pop music. Influenced equally by the
East End stage experimentations of Joan Littlewood, the
Berliner Ensemble and the pictorial collage aesthetic of
Peter Blake and Derek Boshier, Ferguson deployed gigantic
photomontages amongst rostra on which the
musicians performed, in the midst of a participating
audience. The spectacle, as realised by the TV director,
Michael Lindsay Hogg, was a vivid vision-mixing of
montaged signs, performers and dynamised, dancing,
consumers- the negation of the established TV pop music
display format of segregated audience and performers, on
stage with cycloramas. Youth was seen to be inextricably
attached to media technologies, possessed by a kind of
nihilism according to it's derogators and lampooned by
Lewis Morley's portrait of the transistor radio clutching
teenager with their head in a brown paper bag, the mute
and nugatory Spotty Muldoon (1965).