This Is Tomorrow. Installation views, Whitechapel Gallery. 1956.

This Is Tomorrow

REYNER BANHAM

In this review of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, published just nine months after the appearance of his New Brutalism essay, Reyner Banham criticizes Henderson, Paolozzi, and the Smithsons Patio & Pavilion for its adherence to traditional values, championing instead the proto-Pop environment of Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker. Ringing a New Brutalist note in his conclusion, Banham says that despite these differences, both contributions ultimately deal with concrete images.A.K. The synthesis of the major arts is a consecrated theme in the Modern Movement, one of the shining abstractions that gather, halo-wise, about the heads of its Masters, though it has been left mostly to their followers to thrash out the practicalities that stand between wish and achievement. The most used threshingfloor so far has been CIAM, but a new and most instructive one has been provided lately by the exhibition, unfortunately labeled This Is Tomorrow, which continues at the Whitechapel Gallery until September 9. Collaboration between practitioners of the different arts was its only program; its aesthetics were entirely permissive, and anything could, in theory, have been done. The results were inevitably diverse, but so were the premises from which different groups of collaborators worked. Even the idea of synthesis was interpreted, at one extreme, simply as a requirement to house or decorate one anothers work, and at the other extreme, as an invitation to smash all boundaries between the arts, to treat them all as modes of communicating experience from person to person, as the Holroyd-Alloway-del Renzio group didmodes that could embrace all the available channels of human perception, as set out in a table, which appeared in the catalogue entry for the Voelcker-HamiltonMcHale section. But even if the concept is as wide and fluid as this, practical considerations tend to reduce the means employed to a set of recognizable elements, classifiable under the heads of Structure, Plasticity, Symbol, and Sign, even if pictures were merely hung on a wall these four elements were all employed, if only accidentally.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 3234. Architectural Review, September 1956, pp. 18688.

34

OCTOBER

Some concepts of structuregeometry clothed in substanceproved to be the basic, or unifying postulate of most groups offerings, and in one case, the partnership of John Weeks and Adrian Heath, structure was the totality of the exhibit, a wall of standard bricks which were displaced or omitted to give it the plasticity and symbolic significance of an abstract sculpture. More complex structure-sculptures were seen in the Catleugh-ThorntonHull screen, but a note of ambiguity, more consciously exploited in other sections, appears in the composition of curved planes on which Peter Carter, Colin St. J. Wilson, and Robert Adams collaborated. Normal scale-effects are reversed, and that part which is large enough to admit a standing man is clearly sculptural in feeling, while the manifestly structural element beyond is sited and displayed like a free-standing statue. This ambiguity was part of a general feeling of broken barriers and questioned categories that constituted the most stimulating aspect of the whole exhibition. And yet the technique of category-smashing could not be used as a basis for forming value-judgments about the exhibits. Thus, the Smithson-HendersonPaolozzi contribution showed the New Brutalists at their most submissive to traditional values. They erected a pavilion within a patio and stocked it with sculptures signifying the most time-honored of mans activities and needs. This was, in an exalted sense, a confirmation of accepted values and symbols. Voelcker, Hamilton, and McHale, on the other hand, employed optical illusions, scale reversions, oblique structures and fragmented images to disrupt stock responses, and put the viewer back on a tabula rasa of individual responsibility for his own atomized sensory awareness of images of only local and contemporary significance. Yet, curiously, their section seemed to have more in common with that of the New Brutalists than any other, and the clue to this kinship would appear to lie in the fact that neither relied on abstract concepts, but on concrete images images that can carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of novelty and technology, but resist classification by the geometrical disciplines by which most other exhibits were dominated. Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 18688.