The Independent Group's encounters with logical positivism and searches for unity in the 1951 Growth and Form Exhibition

Abstract

This study analyzes the intellectual and historical milieu of the Independent Group. Its point of departure is Growth and Form, an exhibition of scientific imagery, largely conceived and designed by Richard Hamilton, and the book accompanying the exhibition, Aspects of Form, edited by Lancelot Law Whyte and including a wide range of essays by leading scientists of the day, as well as by Konrad Lorenz, Rudolf Arnheim, and Ernst Gombrich. In tracing the discourses of "form" and "unity" to several distinct sources, my study charts the unmapped territory where multiple influential, yet previously unconnected art figures may be seen to cross paths. The models of perception posited by the writers discussed in this study-a Romantic organicism, a scientific and a scientistic unitarism, and the ostensibly empirical Gestalt theory-existed simultaneously and intermingled in the IG environment. The historical avant-garde's emphasis on method--such as El Lissitsky's call for "Gestaltung als Ergebnis wissenschaftlicher Untersuchung eines Problems," or Hannes Meyer's call for the "wissenschaftliche Erfassung und gestalterische Umsetzung der neuen Welt" --continued after World War II.

(cont.) But while those radical experiments were at times themselves totalizing-wanting to reform society, politics, and housing right then and there-scientific method or, in Habermas' term, a notion of "procedural rationality," now served as a means of somehow 'neutralizing' politics from practices such as architecture, design, and painting. The artist's role became one not of agitator, planner, or social engineer but of medium or seismograph as Moholy-Nagy's wrote in the 1947 Vision in Motion. This intellectual framework led the IG to see in mass culture an art form that fulfilled all the concepts of unity their milieu had to offer: it practiced a unity of art and life, constituted direct communication (unhampered by emotive speech or extra-textual references), and it practiced a cultural monism in which all perceptions were equally valid. Accordingly, the assumption was, one could decide whether something was successful or not, but ethical and political judgments could be left out as metaphysical, elitist, or, simply, old-fashioned.