The architects Alison and Peter Smithson and the artists Eduardo Paolozziand Nigel Henderson developed the notion of New Brutalism in the early 1950sin the context of the Independent Group (IG), which was forged in the crucible ofthe austerity of postwar Britain, an austerity intensified by the bounty ofAmerican consumerism on the horizon. In a retrospect from the late 1980s, theSmithsons defined this “as found” aesthetic as “a confronting recognition of whatthe postwar world actually was like”:
In a society that had nothing. You reached for what there was, previous-ly unthought of things. . . . We were concerned with the seeing of mate-rials for what they were: the woodness of wood, the sandinesss of sand.With this came a distaste of the simulated.1
Implicitly, the Smithsons cast Brutalism as a realism against the simulacral aspect ofan emergent culture of advertising and marketing, of the becoming-image of things.Yet we know that the IG was also fascinated by this culture, and, with its echo of theobjet trouvé, the “as found” advanced its own version of image-making too. However, inthis case, the Smithsons claimed, “the image was discovered within the process ofmaking the work,” whether this be a building, a picture, or an object.2
In his influential definition of Brutalism from 1955, Reyner Banham alsostressed, along with “clear exhibition of structure” (a modernist value theSmithsons sought to reclaim), “valuation of material ‘as found’” and “memorabil-
1. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” in As Found: The Discovery ofthe Ordinary, ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers,2001), p. 40.2. Ibid., p. 44.
It would seem that mythological worlds have beenbuilt up, only to be shattered again, and that newworlds were built from the fragments.
—Franz Boas as quoted by ClaudeLévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage, 1962
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ity as an image.”3 Although Banham did not acknowledge it here, a tension existedbetween these two aims, and it ran through most activities of the IG. We needthink only of Parallel of Life and Art, curated by the Smithsons, Paolozzi, andHenderson at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the fall of 1953, a con-troversial array of 122 diverse photographs (aerial views, microscopic specimens,X-rays, art works, everyday events, archival images . . . ) that insisted, equally andoppositely, on the physical actuality and the imagistic virtuality of the prints. Orconsider the much-remarked contrast between the two IG exhibits in This IsTomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in the summer of 1956: where the Brutalistgroup of the Smithsons, Paolozzi, and Henderson constructed Patio & Pavilion, abare wood shed roofed with corrugated plastic and scattered with symbolic relics(as if “excavated after an atomic holocaust,” Banham commented), the proto-Popgroup of Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker contrived a franticfunhouse on the theme of the new sensorium effected by mass-media culture.4
This tension between material and image was a generative one, however, for itled Brutalist artists, in search of forms “discovered within the process of making,” to arenewed practice of collage, a tackboard aesthetic of juxtaposition, as advanced notonly in most exhibitions produced by IG members, but also in the work of Paolozzi,Henderson, and others.5 Collage is “my only method,” remarked Paolozzi (whoextended it to the word manipulations of his poetry), and the same is true ofHenderson, at least in his image-screens and photograms.6 Paolozzi and Hendersonwere familiar with Dadaist and Surrealist collage from their stays in Paris, where(largely through Wyn Henderson, mother of Nigel, who ran the Peggy GuggenheimGallery in London) they came into contact with key figures in both movements.Indeed, in Collages and Objects, a show curated by Lawrence Alloway at the ICA in fall1954, the two young British artists exhibited alongside Picasso, Schwitters, and Ernst.
If Dadaist collage tends to a transgressive montage of high and low reproduc-tions located in the world, Surrealist collage tends to a disruptive montage of foundimages that, transformed into fantasmatic scenes, are referred to the unconscious. In
3. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118 (December 1955), pp. 355–61;reproduced in this volume.4. Banham, “This Is Tomorrow Exhibit,” Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 186–88;reproduced in this volume. These exhibits were but two of twelve included in This Is Tomorrow, most ofwhich were done by non-IG members. The material-image tension, which Banham did register in hisreview of Parallel, was also active within the Smithsons; in the same year as the Brutalist Patio &Pavilion, they presented the proto-Pop House of the Future. On this convergence, see Beatriz Colomina,“Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson,” October 94 (Fall 2000), pp. 17–34.Another tension would soon emerge in the thinking of Banham, that between Brutalist imageability as“memorability” and Pop imageability as “expendability.” 5. As Toni del Renzio commented in retrospect, “We all had tackboards in our homes or ourworkspaces where we constantly pinned things up, removed things, and they were always in odd juxta-positions. . . . Artists had always done that but we believed it was a technique”; quoted in David Robbins,ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1990), p. 37. 6. Eduardo Paolozzi, “Interview between Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton” (1964), inEduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, ed. Robin Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 125.
effect, Surrealist collage is patterned on the enigma of the psychosexual event, or, asErnst put it in his classic paraphrase of Lautréamont, “the coupling of two realities,irreconcilable in appearance, upon a place which apparently does not suit them.”7
“For me the found fragment, the objet trouvé, works like a talisman,” Hendersoncommented in the idiom of the Surrealist marvelous; it “intercept[s] your passage andwink[s] ‘its’ message specifically at & for you. . . .”8 “That French approach, the need,the passion, to consider and handle things at the same time,” Paolozzi added with theSurrealist encounter in mind, is “very necessary for me. . . . [T]he concern with differ-ent materials, disparate ideas . . . becomes almost a description of the creative act—tojuggle with these things.”9
At the same time, Brutalist collage transvalued Dadaist and Surrealist versions:rather than privilege either the social or the subjective, it explored the interminglingof the two, whether this confusion was prompted by the traumatic effects of the waryears or the seductive promises of consumer culture. “It’s no longer necessary for usindividually to dream,” J. G. Ballard once remarked to Paolozzi; “the fiction is all outthere.”10 In this light, we might relate Brutalist collage not only to avant-garde prece-dents in art but also to contemporaneous models in adjacent fields concerned withthe interconnection of the social and the subjective. The one I propose is familiarenough: the Lévi-Straussian account of the myth as a process of bricolage. Thebricoleur, Lévi-Strauss writes in a well-known definition of 1962, “makes do with‘whatever is at hand,’ which is to say with a set of tools and materials which is alwaysfinite and is also heterogeneous”; in contradistinction to “the engineer [who] ques-tions the universe,” the bricoleur treats “a collection of oddments left over fromhuman endeavors.”11 This posture resonates with the Smithsons reaching for “whatthere was, previously unthought of things,” and with Paolozzi juggling with “differentmaterials, disparate ideas.”12 Although the bricoleur is sensitive to the materiality
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7. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (1936; New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), p. 13. Also see myCompulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).8. Nigel Henderson, undated letter to Chris Mullen, quoted in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson:Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), p. 123. Henderson also looks back here(as did the Surrealists) to Baudelaire on “correspondences.”9. Paolozzi, “Memoirs” (1994), in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, pp. 70–71.10. J. G. Ballard in “Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation with J. G.Ballard and Frank Whitford” (1971), in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, p. 199.11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp.17, 19. This account has had its critics, most famously Jacques Derrida in “Structure, Sign, and Play inthe Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978). Among other points, Derrida sees the engineer as “a myth pro-duced by the bricoleur” (p. 285), a deconstruction that might bear on the modernist figure of theengineer. The Lévi-Strauss who concerns me here coincides roughly with the Brutalists; both wereinfluenced by Surrealism on the one hand and information models on the other hand; and theyshared an interest in art brut (Lévi-Strauss writes of “the mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’ on theplane of so-called ‘raw’ or ‘naive’ art” [p. 17]). 12. Paolozzi often writes of his process in terms suggestive of bricolage. For example, a “peda-gogical exercise” of 1957 calls for “the breakdown of known images . . . into partly symbolical or entirelysymbolical elements.” See Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, p. 79.
of his odds and ends, he treats them as “intermediaries between images andconcepts,” which is to say, as signs in which “the signified turns into the signify-ing and vice versa,” even as “operators” that “represent a set of actual andpossible relations.”13 Counterintuitive though it is to connect Brutalism, withits stress on substances as found, to structuralism, with its preoccupation withlanguage as system, Brutalist materials are often treated in this manner too.
Consider again the example of Parallel of Life and Art. Its play with mean-ing was not a matter of Dadaist negation (which Paolozzi and the othersabjured): rather than too little sense, the panoply of photographs offered toomuch, a text of imagist ic “parallels,” of unexpected pseudomorphisms andunlikely analogies (e.g., a mud flat seen from above is like the structure of amolecule is like a Pollock drip painting). In short, it exhibited an excess of thesignifier not unlike that which Lévi-Strauss imagined, in his 1950 essay onMarcel Mauss, to have occurred at the birth of language.14 As its curators wrote,Parallel was intended to form “a poetic-lyrical order where images create aseries of cross-relationships”; and as though with the axial structure of lan-guage in mind, Henderson added, “We looked at the material to reveal its ownprinciples of selection.”15
Of course, the primary subject of Parallel was the expanded field of vision per-mitted by new image technologies; in this respect, it took its cue from the “NewVision” of Moholy-Nagy (the X-ray image on the catalogue cover was borrowed fromVision in Motion [1947]). Yet another key reference here was the musée imaginaire ofMalraux; Henderson noted how the curators exchanged “images from [their] ownprivate ‘imaginary museums,’” and Banham also alluded to this notion in his review.“In our cases, however,” Henderson continued, “the contents of these museumsextended beyond the normal terms of art to include photographs produced for tech-nical purposes (e.g., of cell structures, geological formations), or for their news-value,their importance as permanent records of transient events, and so forth.”16 Greatly
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13. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, pp. 21, 18. On the “multi-evocative” sign in Brutalism, seeAlex Kitnick, “The Brutalism of Art and Life” in this volume.14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 59–64. “A fundamental situation perseveres which arises out ofthe human condition: namely, that man has from the start had as at his disposition a signifier-totalitywhich he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified. . . . There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inad-equation’ between the two, a non-fit or overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up” (p.62). This is the thesis of the “floating signifier,” of which the word “mana” is one example for Lévi-Strauss. “The image” is a mana term for the IG, as Banham once suggested: “‘Image’ seems to be a wordthat describes anything or nothing.” 15. Nigel Henderson, et al., “Parallel of Life and Art,” reprinted in this issue; Henderson, in a pre-sentation to the Architectural Association, quoted in Walsh, Nigel Henderson, p. 103. Henderson also wroteof his search “for a punchy visual matrix that triggered off a number of associational ideas” (ibid.). For hispart, Paolozzi assembled his notes and poems in a “combinatie” of “free assoisassational [sic] random col-lected pre-selected” words (Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, p. 137).16. Henderson, “Lecture Notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate G, TGA 9211.5.1.5; also seeKitnick, “The Brutalism of Art and Life.” The IG discussed Malraux’s The Voices of Silence on May 4,1954, in a session led by Henderson and Alloway.
extended as the Malrauxian museum was, it was still a museum of art, its het-erogeneous works affined by an elastic sense of styles, and it subsumed allcreations under a humanist conception of a unitary mankind. Parallel forsworethe control of both art and style and threatened the transcendental signified ofman. To adapt Derrida on Lévi-Strauss, it suggested a different condition, onein which, “in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse,”and in principle its bracketing of transcendental signifieds—not only of art andstyle but also of subject and author—did extend “the domain and play of signi-fication indefinitely.”17
Although Lévi-Strauss and Derrida modeled this field of substitutions on lan-guage, it can be a matter of images too, as it was in Parallel and some otherexhibitions related to the IG. For example, at least two shows curated by Hamilton,Growth and Form (1951) and Man, Machine & Motion (1955), were presented asgrids of image-texts without words, as if in a proto-structuralist transformation ofthis quintessential device of modernist display. It was this structure that distin-guished these exhibitions from ICA shows such as 40,000 Years of Modern Art(1948), which only extended the historical scheme of the conventional survey,
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17. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 280.
Richard Hamilton. Man, Machine & Motion,installation view, Hatton Gallery. 1955.
and so did not challenge the transcendental signifieds of art and man—indeedit exalted them all the more. Paolozzi often reached for linguistic analogies forhis own work (in lecture notes from 1958 alone he mentions “directory ofmasks,” “alphabet of elements,” “grammar of forms,” “encyclopedia,” and “dic-tionary”), yet, like Henderson, he favored one trope in particular, that of “theatlas,” which effectively mediates between words and images.18 Today we mightsubstitute “archive,” and Brutalist bricolage can be understood as an act of col-lage performed on select materials from personal archives.
Lévi-Strauss turned to language in order to model cultural productions, such
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18. Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, p. 83. Nevertheless, he is ever insistent onmateriality; e.g., “mud language written with object trouvé [sic] and broken toys.” For a survey of theatlas in prewar and postwar avant-garde practice, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’sAtlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999), pp. 117–45.
as myth, which are collective and objective, yet not entirely conscious. This wasalso the nature of the world of Parallel proposed by its curators:
The exhibition will present material belonging intimately to the back-ground of everyone today. Much of it has been so completely taken forgranted as to have sunk beneath the threshold of conscious percep-tion. . . . The exhibition will provide a key—a kind of Rosetta stone—bywhich the discoveries of the sciences and the arts can be seen asaspects of the same whole.19
Might we consider Parallel, then, as a mythopoeic enterprise in a Lévi-Straussiansense, one that suggests, as one reviewer put it, “a set of basic patterns for theuniverse”?20 This hypothesis could be extended to other Brutalist projects aswell. “Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society,” the Smithsonsdeclared famously in April 1957, “and drag a rough poetry out of the confusedand powerful forces which are at work.”21 What is myth for Lévi-Strauss if not aworking over of confused forces, an attempt to resolve real contradictions in asymbolic register?
Again, formed in the interregnum between old and new orders, the IG was dri-ven by contradictions—not only the conflict between an old notion of a hierarchical“great tradition” of art and literature à la F. R. Leavis and a new notion of culture as a“pop-art continuum” à la Alloway and others, but also the divide between the worldsof art and science, the “two culture” thesis posed by C. P. Snow in 1959, which theParallel curators seemed to anticipate when they pitched the show, optimistically, as ademonstration that “the discoveries of the sciences and the arts can be seen asaspects of the same whole.”22 Above all, the IG faced the contradiction between asocioeconomic order based on industrial production (to which much modernist artand architecture had responded) and one based on mass consumption (which muchpostwar art and architecture scrambled to address).
This is the primary reason that the mythopoeic aspect of Brutalism wasJanus-faced. Some of its projects looked to the immediate past; thus, for example,the survivalist updating of the primitive hut in Patio & Pavilion represented “the
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19. Undated, unedited notes in the Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, London; reprinted in AsFound: The Discovery of the Ordinary, p. 39. 20. Tom Hopkinson, Manchester Guardian, September 22, 1953, quoted in Walsh, NigelHenderson, p. 89. 21. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design (April 1957), p. 113;reprinted in this volume. “Up to now,” they continue, “Brutalism has been discussed stylistically,whereas its essence is ethical.” I want to read “ethical” in part as mythopoeic. Certainly their interestin “habitat” suggests an extended—anthropological-—frame for architecture. (Is there an echo ofYeats, of his “rough beast,” in “rough poetry” here? If so, this is a different mythopoeic call for a dif-ferent historical moment.) 22. In his 1971 conversation with Paolozzi, Ballard suggests that the role of the contemporaryartist is to connect the two cultures. He also likens Paolozzi to “a scientist on safari” (Eduardo Paolozzi:Writings and Interviews, p. 205).
fundamental necessities of the human habitat in a series of symbols” for a perioddevastated by world war and threatened by nuclear annihilation.23 Meanwhile,the funhouse display of Hamilton and company looked ahead to the imminentfuture, which is where most IG members also looked as the IG dissolved: it wasequally a “necessity” to propose symbols—myths—for this order too. “Today weare being edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomenon of the pop-ular arts—advertising,” the Smithsons declared already in November 1956. “Wemust somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its power-ful and exciting impulses with our own.”24 “Popular culture [has] abstractedfrom Fine Art its role of mythmaker,” Hamilton agreed in a text from 1961. “Ifthe artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose he may have to plunder thepopular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance.”25 For hispart, Paolozzi dotted his notebooks of the early to middle 1960s with such cuesas “historical images re-interpreted to modern requirements” and “iconologicalanalysis keeping pace with our century.”26
For Lévi-Strauss, “the savage mind” is mythographic as well as mythopoeic.The IG was also both, a “cargo cult” of canny native-informants, making mythsby unmaking myths, proposing icons through analyzing icons.27 For its incipientpractice of cultural studies, the IG had local precedents in Mass-Observation, asociology of everyday British life produced by Humphrey Jennings and othersthrough various documentary means. There was also the example of such idio-syncratic texts as Mechanizat ion Takes Command (1948), in which SiegfriedGiedion attempted an “anonymous history” of “the slow shaping of daily life”through “humble things” like locks and keys.28 More immediately, contempo-raries had begun to address consumer culture in mythographic terms, as didMarshall McLuhan in Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), andRoland Barthes in Mythologies, the short texts of which were written between1954 and 1956. The IG knew the McLuhan but not the Barthes, yet his ideology-critique of consumer-culture myth as an “appropriation” of signs that calls out
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23. Statement for Patio & Pavilion in the This Is Tomorrow catalogue: “The first necessity is for apiece of the world, the patio. The second necessity is for an enclosed space, the pavilion. These twospaces are furnished with symbols for all human needs.” 24. Alison and Peter Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark 18 (November 1956), p. 52.25. Richard Hamilton, Collected Words 1953–1982 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 42.Hamilton adds: “Epic has become synonymous with a certain kind of film and the heroic archetype isnow buried deep in movie lore.” 26. Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, pp. 110, 137; these notes are dated ca. 1964. 27. In retrospect, Donald Holmes commented on the IG: “There was a bit of cargo culture atthe ICA, both with respect to emergent disciplines and of things North American” (see The IndependentGroup, p. 33). A semi-ethnographic approach is evident enough in the ways that Henderson document-ed Bethnal Green (where his wife, anthropologist Judith Stephens, worked), that Paolozzi drew onmuseums of anthropology and science, and so on. 28. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948),pp. 2, 3. “For the historian,” Giedion writes, “there are no banal things.” Another IG favorite,Mechanization Takes Command inspired Hamilton to do a series of etchings of reapers.
for counter appropriation (“if myth robs language . . . why not rob myth?”) is notunlike the approach of some of these artists, even if their posture was often lessskeptical than seduced.29
Yet Lévi-Strauss remains the most suggestive analogue, not only for his res-onant reading of myth as both “science of the concrete” and “memory bank,”but also for his account of a “savage mind” that seeks parallels where they areleast to be expected, parallels that might also be turned into connections:
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beakdoes in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of viewfrom which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as“going together” . . . and whether some initial order can be introducedin the universe by means of these groupings.30
The Brutalists were also motivated by a search for correspondences in the world,which they undertook less as subjects overwhelmed by the expanded repertoire ofimages around them than as mythographers curious as to how these images might“go together”—and what groupings might begin to order the postwar universe.
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29. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 135.30. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 9. “Magical thought . . . can be distinguished from science notso much by any ignorance or contempt of determinism but by a more imperious and uncompromisingdemand for it” (p. 11).
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