The Brutalism of Life and Art*

ALEX KITNICK

Eduardo Paolozzi

In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo
Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at London’s Hanover
Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed “a
scorn of bourgeois finish.”1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological
finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of sandy, textured plaster arranged in odd pat-
terns—rashes of bumps, clusters of squares, and sinuous lines. Though many had
titles such as Squid and Land and Sea, and thus claimed a relationship with the nat-
ural world, none bore easily identifiable subjects within themselves. Appearing
less worked by hand than weathered by nature, their textures were akin to encrust-
ed skeletons or long-dried tire tracks.2 They were not so much abstract as they
were artifacts, cast-off things and relics that spoke of a distant world.

Poised on inelegant pedestals, Paolozzi’s freestanding sculptures possessed
similar qualities, finding their forms in plaster of Paris, patinated bronze, Und
encrusted metal rods. All had a basic quality about them, their scorn of finish stress-
ing their physical properties, and in many cases there seemed to be a correspon-
dence between the medium used and the form an object took, as if each were a
study in the properties of its material. Where the bronze sculptures featured table-
top-like surfaces that gave way to alternately organic- and totemic-looking protuber-

* This essay derives from the first chapter of my dissertation, Eduardo Paolozzi and Others, 1947–1958
(Princeton University, 2010). I would like to thank Beatriz Colomina, Brigid Doherty, and Esther da
Costa Meyer for their close readings of my work. Special thanks are due to my advisor, Hal Foster,
whose incisive support of my project was crucial to its realization. The friendship and scholarship of
Annie Bourneuf and Craig Buckley inspired me as well.
Herbert Read, “New Aspects of British Sculpture,” in British Council, The XXVI Venice
1.
Biennale, The British Pavilion (London: Westminster Press, 1952), n.p. The exhibition Kenneth King,
Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull ran from February 21 to March 18, 1950.
2.
One of Paolozzi’s bas-reliefs had been shown previously in the exhibition Les Mains éblouies
at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1949. See Frank MacEwen, “Eduardo Paolozzi,” Derrière le Miroir 22
(Oktober 4, 1949), n.p.

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OCTOBER

ances, another set of objects built up
from metal bars—two sculptures
titled Forms in a Cage (1950)—pos-
sessed a dist inct ly architectural
dimension, suggesting something
between scaffolding, a playground
folly, and a prison.

Eduardo Paolozzi. Fish. 1948.
© Paolozzi Foundation.

In retrospect, it is this last set
of objects that now appears most
emblematic of its time, resonating
as it does with Herbert Read’s con-
cept of a “geometry of fear”—the
pathos -laden formalism that the
critic imagined to be ingrained in
the most important contemporary
British sculpture. For Read, solch
agonized form captured post war
anxiety: “Gone for ever is the seren-
ität, the monumental calm, that a
Winckelmann had imposed on the formal imagination of Europe; gone, zu,
the plastic stress of Rodin,” he wrote in a text for the British Pavilion at the
1952 Venice Biennale in which three of Paolozzi’s sculptures were included.3 As
Read saw it, a sea change was taking place in British sculpture. In lieu of the
sensuous masses of Henry Moore, a wiry language, indebted in large part to the
work of continental artists such as Alberto Giacometti, was coming to the fore.4
Despite his geometric declaration, Jedoch, Read was open enough to admit
that no one formal quality encompassed the entire spirit of the new sculpture.
In der Tat, the three works by Paolozzi included in the Biennale—Bird (1950),
Forms on a Bow (1950), and Study for a Larger Version in Concrete (1951)—do not nec-
essarily correspond to what we might imagine a “geometry of fear” to look like.
Eher, what they have in common is an emphasis on tactility, amorphousness,
and materiality. This is especially true of the last of these objects—the Study —
which virtually demands interaction from the viewer with its mysterious protu-
berances. In a review of the 1952 Young Sculptors exhibit ion, held at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Reyner Banham called this

Read, “New Aspects,” n.p.
3.
4.
In a letter to Nigel Henderson dated September 20, 1949, Paolozzi wrote from Paris, “Did
you see the ‘Horizon’ with photographs of Giacometti sculpture and text by Michel Leiris. I liked
the text enormously, this describing a phenomena by indirect images. I would like to be able to do
Das, but that is as far in the future as it can be placed.” See “Letter to Nigel Henderson,” in Eduardo
Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, Hrsg. Robin Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), P. 64.
See Michel Leiris, “Thoughts around Alberto Giacometti,” Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art 19
( Juni 1949), S. 411–17.

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

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Paolozzi. Study for a Larger Version in Concrete. 1951.
© Paolozzi Foundation.

work out for special attention, noting that Paolozzi makes “heavily wrought
plaster objects, carbuncular, pocked with sinister pits, of which that titled sim-
ply Study is the most stimulating, most suggestive of a subversive, autonomous,
non-human life.”5 Read seems to have sensed something of this “non-human
life” as well in his lament for a Europe passed. He understood that the new
sculpture was positioning itself outside earlier traditions of Western art, mark-
ing either a primeval beginning or an entropic dead end. As he noted in his
essay for the Biennale, “Eduardo Paolozzi has moved from skeletal hulks to
blind encrusted larvae, formless in mass, logs that seem to have drifted from
the primordial Id.”6

5.
Reyner Banham, “A Man and His Objects,” Art News and Review ( Januar 12, 1952), P. 5. In
the same year, Study was also reproduced in Michel Tapié’s anthology Un Art autre (Paris: Gimpel
Fils, 1952).
6.

Read, “New Aspects,” n.p.

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OCTOBER

David Sylvester

In a short essay written to accompany the Hanover exhibition, the critic
David Sylvester also called attention to this sense of “non-human life” in Paolozzi’s
production, though what interested him in particular was the way that the artist’s
subject matter demanded a new form of engagement from the viewing subject.
Sylvester described his encounter with Paolozzi’s works in blatantly physical terms,
writing that “a picture or sculpture of this kind is devoid of a focal point, und das
spectator reads it, not by confronting it as a scene detached from himself, but by
entering it and moving about in it.”7 In certain ways, this sentence provides an apt
description of the experience of viewing bas-reliefs in general, given the way they
imbue vision with a haptic quality, and yet, gleichzeitig, there was clearly a
difference between Sylvester’s engagement with Paolozzi’s work and the way he
would have looked at the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. Rather than
assuming a traditional contemplative distance, he described himself as entering
these works, navigating their landscape in a creaturely fashion. Though their
“principal source is the aquarium,” Sylvester wrote, in Paolozzi’s “submarine world
we do not swim, but pick our way through a maze of things and creatures at the
bottom of the sea.”

If many of Paolozzi’s works suggested an aquatic terrain, Jedoch, Sylvester
found other topographies in them as well; in their lurking geometries he also wit-
nessed “an aerial view of a landscape or town—either instead of or as well as the sea’s
floor,” and for Sylvester, this quality of doubleness gave the works much of their inter-
est, showing certain affinities with the work of Paul Klee, in which Sylvester had
recently located the workings of what he called the “multi-evocative sign.” “If Klee
had a genius for creating signs that immediately establish the identity of the object
they signify,” Sylvester wrote in a 1951 essay published in Les Temps modernes,

he was also unsurpassed in the creation of signs with multiple signifi-
Kationen, das ist, signs which signify two or more species of objects by
abstracting and exhibiting their common features. Among Klee’s
linear signs of this kind are one that is both flower and musical note,
one that is both boat and insect, one that is nipple and eye, one that
is dying water lily and snail, one that is tree and archer, another that
is tree and ostrich, another that is tree and antennae of a butterfly.
No other artist has used the multi-evocative sign—and the device
was not only one of the essential features of Surrealism, but has also
been used at times by Picasso and Braque, among others—to estab-
lish associations so unconventional and unexpected or to make his
associations appear so inevitable.8

David Sylvester, Kenneth King, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, exh. cat. (London: Hannover

7.
Gallery, 1950), n.p.
8.
2001), P. 45. This is an expanded version of a text that Sylvester had originally written in 1948.

David Sylvester, “Klee II” (1951) in About Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

Such similarities help establish a genealogy for Paolozzi’s practice. His trip to
Paris had been taken out of a wish to get to the heart of Surrealism, and he saw
Dort, amongst other things, the same Klee exhibition that initially inspired
Sylvester’s review.

If there are continuities between these two bodies of work, Jedoch, important
differences emerge as well. Where the Klees bind together distinctly graphic “linear
signs” (a tree and an archer, Zum Beispiel) in pen and ink, the Paolozzis compound
Objekte, textures, and points of view in cheap plaster. They are distinctly less graphic
than the Klees—not so much signs with multiple significations as textures with multi-
ple connotations. The Paolozzis do not change back and forth between referents so
neatly; as Sylvester noted, one has to wade around in them to establish one’s bear-
ings. Perspective, zu, is perpetually shifting in these works. We are either crawling
along them on the bottom of the sea or else we are in the sky, aloft above a town,
looking down at them. Letzten Endes, Sylvester saw something redemptive in the way
these works tug at vision. “Paolozzi brings us down to earth,” he concluded at the end
of his essay. “And when we get there we find it mundane no longer.”

But what does “mundane no longer” mean exactly? Has the world become
enchanting or horrifying—or simply more interesting? In a review of the Hanover
exhibition that similarly described Paolozzi’s work as “resembling an archaeologi-
cal excavation seen from the air,” we find a related, albeit different, conclusion.
Clearly writing with Sylvester’s final sentence in mind, this reviewer remarked
“that if we contemplate these curious artifacts—for so I think they should be
termed rather than sculpture—they begin to work a spell on us and stimulate our
fancy until we endow them with a super-mundane significance.”9 Where for
Sylvester, one took a rather belabored journey through these dense landscapes to
ultimately hit upon revelation (the world seen through new eyes), for this review-
er all the evocations that the bas-reliefs inspire are not able to hide the fact that
they are relentlessly material, earthly things, resistant to meaning. The reviewer’s
characterization of the bas-reliefs as “artifacts” then, rather than sculptures, Ist
quite to the point, endowing them with a materiality at odds with the typically
exalted status of the art object. These works are leftovers and remainders rather
than creations; outside of civilization, they are no longer vital or central to cul-
tur. Though one might see any number of scenes in them, just as one might envi-
sion any number of faces in the side of a mountain, ultimately they return to the
banal fact of their own materiality, proclaiming “a super-mundane significance.”

Over the course of the Hanover exhibition, Nigel Henderson, a close friend
and collaborator of Paolozzi’s, took a number of photographs of the works on view,
the scratched and worn quality of which captures something of the nature of the

Nigel Henderson

Maurice Collis, “Art,” Time and Tide (Marsch 4, 1950), P. 209.

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OCTOBER

bas-reliefs themselves. In der Tat, much of Henderson’s own work from the time, solch
as his Photogram to Suggest Microscopic Life (1949), shares similarities with Paolozzi’s
bas-reliefs, evoking images of the natural world by other means.10 If Paolozzi, zu,
was deeply invested in photography—his many scrapbooks of the time contain
images of aerial photographs and fossilized creatures that clearly affected his sculp-
tural production—he nevertheless began his work with the medium of plaster,
whereas Henderson, a photographer, turned first to a world of refuse and scrap.
Picking up pieces of rubbish and wire from London’s bombarded East End, Er
took them back to his darkroom, laying them on light-sensitive paper to make
what he called Hendograms—a play on Man Ray’s Rayograms.11 Mimicking mol-
ecules with mesh and metal, these works locate a kind of science in the street.
In der Tat, the specimen-like quality of Paolozzi’s bas-reliefs comes increasingly into
focus when seen alongside Henderson’s photographs.

As in Paolozzi’s works, the scientific reference in Henderson’s pieces is not
exclusive; other points of view (Und, similarly, ones characterized by a wildly differ-
ent scale) are embedded in them as well, perhaps the most important of which are
the visual properties of flight. Though Henderson first flew in a plane as early as
the mid-1930s, his interest in aerial vision was solidified—and traumatically so—
during his tenure as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II, which led
to the artist’s nervous breakdown. If the binding together of aerial and microscop-
ic views functioned as a recurrent theme in Henderson’s work, representing the

In 1956, Photogram to Suggest Microscopic Life was published with the following caption: “Made
10.
by contact printing ‘junk’ elements and projecting cellular texture from the enlarger probably by
using loose-woven bandage as negative. Then the print was reversed.” See Nigel Henderson,
“Photographs,” Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art 17 ( Juli 1956), P. 51.
11.
In one of Paolozzi’s scrapbooks from this time (ca. 1950), there is a photograph of a fish fos-
sil that bears a striking similarity to a number of Paolozzi’s bas-reliefs. There is also a photograph of a
stone on the same page that bears a remarkable resemblance to Study. Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria and
Albert Museum, AAD/1985/3/6/6.

Nigel Henderson. Photogram to
Suggest Microscopic Life. 1949.
Courtesy Estate of Nigel Henderson
and Mayor Gallery, London.

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

vast range of which photography was capable, it was also emblematic of an anxiety
about his position as a subject in the postwar world.12 That aerial and microscopic
photography could both create similar-looking images—scale, depth, and space
falling away to be replaced by an indefinite picture—was simultaneously a source
of interest and something deeply unsettling to Henderson. In such a comparison,
space collapses, erasing a haven for the subject as well. In an undated note from
his archive, Henderson paired these two points of view—something that he would
do many times over the course of his career—elaborating on their relationship:

Aerial Topography

Flight: People who have not been ‘UP THERE’ have missed an impor-
tant revelation. There is the world, a terrain pinned down as flat as a
tiger’s skin. The air view visually, as psychology mentally, has killed per-
spective. Perspective is the art of both feet on the ground & the eye 5ft
in the air.

Below this Henderson wrote:

ANIMAL & PLANT forms particularly sectioned and microsectioned.
The backbones of mountains, the rumps of hills, the kidneys of allu-
vials, the eczema of shales, the erosion of stones and gravel, Deltas &
creeks. Tripes, chitterbugs, seed pods & collarbones.13

In the first paragraph, one notes the decentering and flattening powers of aerial
vision; it can make the world look like a tiger’s skin. Such a viewpoint is said to kill
perspective much as the discipline of psychology might be said to “shrink” one’s
mental capacities. The classic Renaissance conception of the human—a being at the
center of the world—is troubled in both. In each case, the traditional spaces of the
subject—physical and psychological—are similarly foreclosed. These effects of aerial
vision find their match in the bizarre things that happen to “ANIMAL & PLANT
forms” when put under the microscope: shales catch eczema and hills grow rumps.
Both aerial and microscopic visions transform their subjects—beholder and beheld
alike. What is perhaps most striking, Jedoch, is that each category begins to assume
characteristics of the other. The world’s topography becomes like “a tiger’s skin”
while microsectioned plant forms give way to “Deltas and creeks.” A kind of equiva-
lence appears here that simultaneously functions as a form of collapse.

12.
An interest in the paired figures of the microscope and the airplane is not exclusive to
Paolozzi and Henderson. In Language of Vision (1944), Gyorgy Kepes wrote of the conflation between
these two modes of perception as well, stressing how man’s vision was being rewritten in line with tech-
nological advancements. See Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1951), S.
149–50, and Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames and Hudson,
2001), P. 21.
13.

“Notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.4.7.

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OCTOBER

Parallel of Life and Art

Acting on their shared interests, Henderson and Paolozzi began planning
an exhibition of photographic documents with the architects Alison and Peter
Smithson and the engineer Ronald Jenkins. All of the group members were
friends and colleagues: Paolozzi and Henderson had gone to art school together
at the Slade and had spent time together in Paris. Paolozzi had also worked on a
number of design projects with the Smithsons and Jenkins. In a series of notes
on the exhibition, Henderson stressed this working relationship, pointing out
that the planning process was an empirical matter rather than a theoretical
affair.14 When Paolozzi suggested the idea of putting together an exhibition,
each of the group’s members was already in the habit of collecting images—
plucking them from magazines and pasting them in scrapbooks.15 What the edi-
tors chose, Henderson stressed, was what moved them; no particular theory had
been mapped out beforehand. In taking such a tack, the exhibition planners
distanced themselves from the programmatic displays of earlier avant-gardes,
which created photographic spaces in the hope of giving rise to mass publics.16
In making public the private interests contained in their scrapbooks, Jedoch,
Henderson, Paolozzi, and the Smithsons nevertheless allowed an audience to
explore the impact that a new realm of images was having on contemporary
artistic and architectural practice. In der Tat, Sources served as the exhibition’s first
working title, which appears in Henderson’s notes next to a revision of the cou-
pled paragraphs we looked at earlier: “SOURCES: Animal & plant forms particu-
larly micro sections. Flying. Aerial Topography. The backbones or jawbones of
mountains. The Rump of Hills. The eczema of shales. The seepage, the drainage
of marshes. Alluvials, Deltas. Tripes, Chitterbugs, Flowers, Collarbones.”17 As
Vor, there is a doubling of terms at work here, and a conflation of species. Es
is as if two ways of seeing—aerial and microscopic—have once again been graft-
ed one atop the other.

The idea of doubling surfaces again in the exhibition’s final title, Parallel of
Life and Art. An early study for the exhibition by Henderson and Paolozzi, consist-
ing of two friezes of photographs pasted one above the other, takes the idea of the
parallel quite literally, even if the terms life and art are rather difficult to parse. In

“Notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.4.5.
14.
A number of Paolozzi’s scrapbooks cont ain imager y pert inent to this discussion.
15.
AAD/1985/3/6/5 (ca. 1940–1950) is filled with images of airplanes taken from cigarette packages and
magazine pages. It also contains one image of a city seen from the air, which bears the caption: “Berlin
seen by the night camera.” Another scrapbook, AAD/1985/36/3 (ca. 1948–1952), has an aerial photo-
graph of an estuary on its cover as well as a number of aerial photographs of bombed sites inside.
Wichtig, this scrapbook also contains a number of scientific images, mostly of insects. A third
scrapbook, AAD/1985/3/6/1 (ca. 1947–1953), contains aerial photographs of Hiroshima, lower
Manhattan, and before and after pictures of “Precision Bombing in Korea.”
16.
1928–1955 (Barcelona: MACBA, 2009).
17.

See Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man,

“Notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.4.8.

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

lieu of the news clippings and found photographs that would ultimately populate
the exhibition, Jedoch, the images come from the artists’ own work. The top reg-
ister is filled with miniature versions of Henderson’s photographs, a number of his
cameraless Hendograms as well as a variety of lens-based works—a solarized foot-
baller, an old lady, and an inverted motorcycle, all “stressed,” bent, and folded, als
part of Henderson’s darkroom manipulations. An interest in the physical proper-
ties of the photographic medium pervades these works—the ways in which pho-
tography can be manipulated so as to highlight worldly connections. As an editori-
al published a few years later noted, a “stressed photo” by Nigel Henderson “shows
the relation of figures to the spatial complex of the street, whose topological qual-
ities are greatly heightened by the distortions, giving one a visual image of the
whole scene.”18 Indeed, the parts of Henderson’s panel feed into one another—
conveying the sense of an environment, an uneasy feeling of connectedness—
much in the same way as his stressed photographs.

Laid out below Henderson’s stratum, Paolozzi’s frieze, filled with an assort-
ment of photographic reproductions of his own projects, appears to have been
organized according to a similar logic. Es, zu, is a mini-retrospective. A number of
his bas-reliefs from the Hanover exhibition appear here as do others, welche, mit
marks deeply incised, look like archaic tablets. Two versions of Study for a Larger
Version in Concrete share the space on the lower left. Portions of Paolozzi’s extra-
artistic work turn up as well. An all-over wallpaper pattern that the artist produced
for the ceiling of Jenkins’s office—a blackened tangle of crude lines—takes center

18.
Planning Society 7 (Winter 1956–57), P. 2; reprinted in this volume.

Sehen [Michael Pearson], “Editorial,” 244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architectural and

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Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Untitled (Study for
Parallel of Life and Art). 1952. Courtesy Tate Gallery, London.

OCTOBER

stage. Endlich, two views of the fountain that Paolozzi designed for the Festival of
Britain the year before appear on the right. The heterogeneity of Paolozzi’s pro-
jects—his public commissions, his interior designs, his objets d’art—are all pictured
here as belonging to a common project, which is indicated, as in Henderson’s
space above, through formal suggestion. A particularly graphic quality, a kind of
primitive decoration, unites them, writing over differences in scale and function.
It is not clear if Henderson and Paolozzi imagined one of these registers to sig-
nify life and the other art. In der Tat, it would be hard to know which is which. Beide
terms are woven throughout the panels. Reproductions of artworks appear in each.
Darüber hinaus, each stratum makes some kind of claim on life, either through imaging
street scenes or depicting social spaces. In many ways, this study effaces the meaning
of the individual works themselves, sorting them into something like two layers of
geological strata sedimented one above the other. More than a way of establishing a
relationship between life and art, the study seems to be a way of disintegrating the
zwei. A subsequent mock-up by the artists takes this breakdown one step further,
bringing together a number of the same images with the structure of the parallel
erased. This second study is closer to what the exhibition eventually looked like—an
all-encompassing environment—and with its inclusion of two human figures, eins
standing behind the other, their faces implanted in a spread of crushed tile, it speaks
more to its intentions and effects. Letzten Endes, it was the effect that images had on
human subjects that Parallel attempted to register.

Both of these studies, Jedoch, were only a starting point. Taking them as a
Boden, Paolozzi and Henderson worked outwards. In the actual exhibition, their
artworks were erased. Rather than put their own work forward, Paolozzi and
Henderson aimed to look behind the scenes of their practices—to display the
images that influenced them and to which they believed themselves to be
responding. In so doing, they positioned themselves as receivers—artists who do
not so much express themselves as much as they are impressed upon by an out-
side world.19 The final exhibition was composed almost entirely of images taken
from newspapers, scientific manuals, and art magazines, culled from the private
collections that the five “editors” had put together. “Editor” was the appellation
they gave themselves, a mantle that conjures up a vocation of picking, selecting,
and consuming. Though four photographs by Henderson were ultimately tucked
into the exhibition—one of coffee grounds, one of a hand print, one of a distort-
ed Victorian lantern slide, and one of Paolozzi’s plaster blocks (these latter two
were featured in the study as well)—they could just as easily have come from else-
Wo. Their authorship and identity were effaced through the company they
geteilt.

The final incarnation of Parallel consisted of 122 photographic images
hung from various angles around the ICA’s Dover Street gallery. The plenitude

19.
S. 17–34.

I borrow this term from Kaja Silverman, “The Artist as Receiver,” October 96 (Frühling 2001),

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

of material was important to the exhibition’s overall effect. Images were every-
Wo. Some hung from the wall, some close to the ground, some above the
door; others were suspended from the ceiling, some perpendicularly, Andere
from acute angles. It would have been difficult to focus on one without another
coming into view. Positioned in different ways, the photographs asserted them-
selves as physical entities, simultaneously engaging the space of the gallery and
bringing about an increased emphasis on the subject’s position within it.
Shedding their status as solitary units, the photographs emerged as points in a
three-dimensional matrix, creating a kind of “architecture of images” or “image
ecology,” a space in which they were able to reach out to one another to form
v ar ious relat ionships of affinit y and difference. 20 Perhaps t hinking of
Duchamp’s 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, in which the gallery space was
shot through with string, Henderson described the Parallel installation as “a
kind of spider’s web” that “built up a pretty good nervous tension.”21 The images
caught in the web hung like specimens. Pulled out of their original locations, blown
hoch, rearranged, and with any text that may have previously accompanied them
removed, they were undoubtedly modified as a result of the new company they kept.
Reproduced in black and white, they were pictured as part of a common system.

Though aerial and microscopic photographs were included in the exhibition,
other types of images were integrated as well. As the press release explained, Parallel
was broadly concerned with the various kinds of images that photography was capa-
ble of producing: “In this exhibition an encyclopedic range of material from past
and present is brought together through the medium of the camera which is used
as recorder, reporter, and scientific investigator.”22 If photography gathered things
together, Jedoch, it also produced ambiguity, highlighting formal qualities in such
a way as to bring a new visual order into being, transforming things into a series of
glyphs. This transformation rewrote one’s understanding of the world, bringen, als
the editors put it, “a poetic-lyrical order” into being, “a series of cross-relationships”
based on form rather than the use or identity of the thing depicted. As images are
created, they cleave apart from that to which they originally referred and are reor-
ganized into categories “independent of [their] field.” “A common visual denomi-
nator” exerts its importance over depicted objects. A photograph of a burlap work
by Alberto Burri, Zum Beispiel, hung near a photograph of mud flats at Grigsby, Die
ripped and rugged edges of the former appearing to have been cut from the same
cloth as the congealed contours of the latter. An aerial view of a distant city hung
nearby, an image connected to the scenes that Sylvester spied in Paolozzi’s bas-
reliefs and that Henderson saw in his own photograms. As the editors stated in the

20.
Beatriz Colomina uses the former term in relation to Parallel of Life and Art in her essay
“Unbreathed Air 1956,” Grey Room 15 (Frühling 2004), P. 34. David Joselit uses the latter term in its
plural form—“image ecologies”—in Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT
Drücken Sie, 2007), P. xii.
21.
22.
Archives, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.5.1.2.

“Dorothy Morland interviewing Nigel Henderson, 17.8.76,” TGA 955.1.14.6, S. 2-3.
“PARALLEL OF LIFE AND ART: Indications of a new visual order (August 31, 1953),” ICA

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OCTOBER

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Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison Smithson,
and Peter Smithson. Parallel of Life and Art. 1953.

press release, these relationships were founded solely on the level of form rather
than the genetic structure of the objects the photographs depicted. Referents were
reduced to patterns, textures, and shapes.

Imaginary Museum

Parallel of Life and Art opened on September 11, 1953. Though Herbert Read
inaugurated it, the editors had wanted André Malraux to do the honors, since the
French writer’s thinking on photography had been so important for their own.23 In
his essay “Le Musée Imaginaire,” Malraux had argued that photography embodies
many of the same powers as the museum: it was capable of aestheticizing all sorts of
cultural objects, from tapestries to religious icons, until they were stripped of their
original use values and signified nothing other than Art. If other writers, beginning
with Baudelaire, have taken the position that photography spells the end of art,

23.
9211.5.1.5.

Nigel Henderson, “Lecture notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA

The Brutalism of Life and Art

Malraux imagined the opposite to be true—only with photography, he thought,
would the spirit of art become fully legible. Unrestrained by walls and capable of
making reproductions ad infinitum, photography could gather things from far and
wide, bringing together works of art that could not otherwise be assembled. Eher
than simply putting together collections of treasures and masterpieces, it could go
beyond the traditional parameters of vaunted cultural institutions, setting its sights
on decorative objects and items produced by non-Western cultures. If photography
could expand the definition of that which was museum-worthy, Jedoch, Malraux
nevertheless envisioned its scope as stopping at the borders of cultural production.
His photographic museum was still an art museum, albeit necessarily transferred to
the realm of the book. Though whole new sets of objects would be assembled under
photography’s gaze, culture remained its primary object.

For Malraux, photography did not simply bring objects closer together, Wie-
immer; it necessarily rewrote them as well. “Thus the angle from which a work of
sculpture is photographed, the focusing and, über alles, skillfully adjusted lighting
may strongly accentuate something the sculptor merely hinted at,” he wrote.

Photography imparts a family likeness to objects that have actually but
slight affinity. With the result that such different objects as a miniature,
a piece of tapestry, a statue and a medieval stained-glass window, Wann
reproduced on the same page, may seem members of the same family.
They have lost their colors, texture, and relative dimensions (the statue
has also lost something of its volume); jede, in short, has practically
lost what was specific to it—but their common style is so much the gainer.24

By placing a first-century bronze plaque above a twelfth-century Romanesque
relief, Malraux did just this, liberating the “style” in both objects and allowing
their common aspects to come into view. “Nothing conveys more vividly and com-
pellingly the notion of a destiny shaping human ends than do the great styles,
whose evolutions and transformations seem like the long scars that Fate has left,
in passing, on the face of the earth,” Malraux concluded.25 For Malraux, photogra-
phy and fate were bound up with one another; photography made family visible.
Rather than an era of optical alienation, Malraux’s modernity was an epoch of
visualized community, with man standing in control above it all.

In many ways, Parallel might be said to have hewed rather closely to Malraux’s
dicta. Both projects affirmed the power of photography to rewrite objects along for-
mal lines; both created a “family likeness” between things that in truth had “but
slight affinity”; and both accepted the image as its primary form of currency. If there
are similarities between these two projects, Jedoch, there are vast differences as
well. Where Malraux envisioned his museum as inevitably taking the form of a book,

24.
Malraux’s Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale was published by Gallimard in 1952. A
version of this text was published a year later, in English, as André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans.
Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1953), P. 21. Italics mine.
25.

Ebenda., P. 46.

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OCTOBER

Parallel insisted on maintaining the art gallery as a site of display—a way perhaps of
challenging art’s institutional boundaries, if not the institution of art itself. Im
tiny ICA gallery, all different sorts of things were put on display, including reproduc-
tions of artworks by Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, and a Hans Namuth
photograph of Jackson Pollock painting. Most memorable, Jedoch, are the exhibi-
tion’s odder specimens: photographs of forest fires, steam engines, microbes, racing
finishes, and exercise sessions. The exhibition’s most important reversal of
Malraux’s tenets, Dann, was its recognition that as artworks entered the photograph-
ic apparatus, they inevitably became mixed up with the other things that went in
alongside it. Though one might see Parallel as a demand that works of art be under-
stood in terms of larger image ecologies, it also contains the more pedestal-toppling
claim that artworks are simply one source of images among many.

Despite the exhibition’s increased heterogeneity, Jedoch, a belief in pho-
tography’s transformational possibilities was nevertheless carried over from
Malraux’s “Museum.” If Malraux settled for lighting and close-ups in his rewriting
of three-dimensional objects, Parallel went beyond it, throwing its cards in with
macro lenses, aerial photography, and almost infinitesimally tiny shutter speeds.
The effect of such photographic production and reproduction, the exhibition
insisted, was to strip all things of their identities and transform them into purely
formal glyphs—what the editors of the exhibition called “images.” Where Malraux
saw photography as offering proof of a human spirit, delivering up common styles
as the mark of Fate, Parallel understood it as giving rise to a confounding, if at
times intriguing, order of images that lacked any traditional rhyme or reason—“a
new visual order.” The expansion of subject matter in Parallel revised Malraux’s
dearest claims regarding the power of photography. Rather than giving proof of
art’s spirit, it was now seen as giving rise to a newly incomprehensible environ-
ment. This new order might have been created by man, as Malraux suggested, Aber
it had just as quickly had gone out of his control. Rather than use its collection of
images to try and prove a transcendent principle about man’s interconnectedness,
Parallel focused on man’s alienation from a world he had ostensibly created.

In his review of the exhibition, Reyner Banham was quick to pick up on
Parallel’s alienating effects. While still valorizing photography to a certain
extent—he wrote that its ability to document “is one of the greatest services
which the camera has done for the Western man and the Western artist”—he
also noted its ability to create commonalities where none exist.26 Photography,
he understood, forms a world apart from the one that it ostensibly documents,
giving rise to “a new visual environment”—an autonomous world. “The photo-
graph, being an artifact,” he wrote,

applies its own laws to the material it documents, and discovers similari-
ties and parallels between the documentations, even where none exist

26.
reprinted in this issue.

Reyner Banham, “Parallel of Life and Art,” Architectural Review 114 (Oktober 1953), P. 259;

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

between objects and events recorded. Daher, between a head carved in
porous whalebone by an Eskimo and the section of a plant stem from
Thornton’s Vegetable Anatomy, there is no connection whatsoever except
their community of outline and surface texture (even matrix of alveoles
with symmetrically disposed roughly lenticular irruptions) in photograph-
ic reproduction. They come from societies and technologies almost
unimaginably different, and yet to camera-eyed Western man the visual equiva-
lence is unmistakable and perfectly convincing.27

Photography is a lawmaker, Banham makes clear, and it legislates identically no
matter its subject. It does not document things as much as it translates them into
homogeneous code, establishing “a community of outline and surface texture”
emphatically ignorant of both context and culture. Banham’s phrase here brings
Malraux’s rhetoric to mind once again—a common spirit is brought into being—
except that Banham finds this community dubious at best, a superficiality more
than anything else. Though both Banham and Malraux relate photography to a
particularly Western way of seeing—Banham’s “camera-eyed Western man,” we
might say, is an extension of Malraux’s museum-eyed Western subject—the two
draw rather different conclusions from this common point of departure. Wo
Malraux understands photographic vision to be a positive thing—it is what brings
Art into being after all—for Banham it brings about misrecognitions that never-
theless appear perfectly convincing. As such, nothing is revealed to him in
Parallel’s assemblage of images except for a form of vision that emphatically
excludes traces of history and particularities of culture, and which has now
become the dominant vision of the Western subject.

Banham made no attempt to hide his feelings about this situation. He ended
his review on a rather mournful note, lamenting the incorporeal and passive posi-
tion of this alienated “camera-eyed” subject. “We should recognize that if the cam-
era has increased our visual riches,” he wrote, “we are richer only in bills of credit,
most of which cannot be cashed—there can be no direct visual apprehension of
scenes which have passed, or of those which exist only on the photographic plate
of instruments like the electron microscope.” He continues:

The camera, with its strong moral claims to truth and objectivity now over
a century old, has established its manner of seeing as the common visual
currency of our time, and we come to think of the photographic experi-
ence as the equivalent of personal participation. But we should ask our-
selves who would be truly richer—one who possessed photographs of
every surviving building of the Classical world, or Sir John Soane, WHO
had measured every stone of the orders of the Coliseum and could quote
its intercolumniation even in his old age.28

27.
28.

Ebenda., P. 260. Italics mine.
Ebenda., P. 261.

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OCTOBER

Banham’s question here is blatantly rhetorical. At this moment at least, he pre-
ferred an active agent of measurement and memory to a passive subject—a kind of
mechanical archive—totally beholden to the image. He understood camera vision
as a loss of memory and tactility alike, one that offered only an illusion of partici-
pation and involvement. Though photography delivers a glut of visual riches, es ist
in a form of credit that cannot be redeemed.

Anomic Atlas

Like Banham, David Sylvester also found himself feeling rather anxious
before Parallel’s scattering of images, and in his review of the exhibition, he com-
municated a comparable sense of loss. Though he sensed something of the ambi-
guity he found in Paolozzi’s bas-reliefs, here he was more disgruntled than
intrigued. As if he were trying to save the editors from a childish mistake, he did
not provide their names in his review, which he began with a hurried list of what he
believed himself to be seeing, as if the act of naming would ease the cacophonous
and jarring effect instantiated by the exhibition:

News photos, aerial photos, Victorian photos, X-ray photos, kinetic pho-
tos, photo-finishes, photo-montages, photograms, photographic illus-
trations from manufacturers’ catalogues; and photographs of antique
sculpture, Japanese scripts, Leonardo drawings, Blaue Reiter drawings,
children’s drawings, classical temples, figures from text-books ancient
and modern of botany, geology, mechanics, and anatomy.

All of this led to a “consummate inconsequentiality.”29

In Sylvester’s view, as in Banham’s, photography did not place the world at
man’s disposal; it made the world incomprehensible by erasing the differences
between its elements: “Thanks to the camera, which must reduce all things to a uni-
form texture, and the enlarger, which can blow things up beyond all recognition, Das
exhibition is a vocabulary of visual metaphors which shows that a thing can be almost
anything once you have removed its name.” This too hews closely to Banham’s per-
spective, but in this last fragment Sylvester provides an additional insight: photogra-
phy removes names from things. Opening up onto the space of the arbitrary, it allows
them to shift identity and become almost anything else. Sylvester’s claim here is an
assertion of biblical proportions. The Old Testament begins with God giving Adam
the power to name the world, and thus to take control over it, a power that photogra-
phy here overturns. For Sylvester, the homogenizing power of the camera takes things
“beyond all recognition”—not simply by removing their names but by undermining
the very possibility of naming. In so doing, photography returns the world to a state
of nature without man, a world outside of man’s control, a world without language.30

29.
30.

David Sylvester, “Round the London Art Galleries,” The Listener (September 24, 1953), P. 512.
In his great essay on photography, Siegfried Kracauer makes a similar point in regards to the

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

The catalogue that accompanied Parallel did make some attempt at coun-
tering the homogenizing and disorienting powers of the photographic appara-
tus. It identified the various images in the exhibition and disclosed their
sources, grouping them under various headings arranged, for the most part, In
alphabetical order.31 Despite this information, the catalogue did not exactly
function as an explanatory guide. For Sylvester, it added yet another layer of
mystery to an already opaque display of photographs.32 From even the briefest
of glances at the exhibition’s leporello-style checklist it quickly becomes clear
why Sylvester was so confused. The section titled “Anatomy” included

a watch, two radio valves, under side of TV chassis, dissection of a frog,
sections of a tree, bark drawing of native spearing a large black rock kan-
garoo, locomotive, sections of an insect, female bulb scale mitt, diverticu-
lum of colon X10 (photo-micrograph), dismembered typewriter, feature
of coniferous wood (micro-photograph), radiograph of a jeep.

In addition to a building by Le Corbusier, “Architecture” included a detail from
the mask of Quetzalcoatl and “different types of vegetable cellular tissue.” “Art”
contained a painting by Alberto Burri and “racing cyclists crash (news photo).”
“Landscape” was imagined broadly enough to encompass marbled paper, A
handprint, a “fossil fish,” “Zyggurat, remains of an ancient temple,” and a “burnt
out forest in California.” It is not only the sundry collection of images included
within these categories that draws our attention, Jedoch, but the odd nature of
a number of the categories themselves. “Calligraphy”? “Date 1901”? What is hint-
ed at in this organization is the fact that the information provided in the cata-
logue—the names and sources of the images—is not enough to compensate for
the dedifferentiating effects to which they had been submitted. The images, In
other words, had already been sufficiently estranged from the things to which
they were ostensibly supposed to refer that even with the names of their refer-

medium’s powers: “For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; für
the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings. Photography shows
cities in aerial shots, brings crockets and figures down from the Gothic cathedrals. All spatial configura-
tions are incorporated into the central archive in unusual combinations which distance them from human
proximity.” According to Kracauer, as photography exposes a world previously hidden from man’s vision, Es
forms a world independent from human beings as well. Man may produce photographs but as he makes
them he loses control over what he captures, thus becoming alienated from his own production. Sehen
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press, 1995), P. 62.
31.
They are: Anatomy, Architecture, Kunst, Calligraphy, Date 1901, Landscape, Movement, Natur,
Primitive, Scale of Man, Stress, Stress Structure. These are followed by: Football, Science Fiction, Medicine,
Geology, Metal, Ceramic.
32.
The editors, he wrote, “have been equally unhelpful in the arrangement of the catalogue,
in which the items are classified under headings, but in so arbitrary, inconsistent, and perverse a
fashion as only to confuse, and in which no explanation is provided, beyond a handful of quotations,
of an exhibition whose meaning and purpose seem as obscure as its title.” Sylvester, “Round the
London Art Galleries," P. 512.

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OCTOBER

ents assigned, the photographs could not be assembled into their original onto-
logical categories; they had already been remade and hence refiled.

With its interest in classification, Parallel appears as an Enlightenment pro-
ject unraveled, or perhaps exacerbated—the discipline of natural history gone
awry. In the scientific atlases that were natural history’s primary medium, Foucault
writes in The Order of Things, “creatures present themselves one beside the other,
their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features . . . stripped of
all commentary, of all enveloping language.”33 Such a clinical way of seeing was
made possible by scientific advancements, such as the invention of the micro-
scope, which allowed new sights to come into view, but which also had the effect of
excising much else. The emphasis that the editors of Parallel placed on X-rays, aer-
ial photographs, and the like brought about a similar interest in structure and
form at the expense of other signs and meanings. If natural history tried to make
nature speak and find its hidden order, it often had the effect of rendering nature
still and lifeless, flattening and pinning things down. Ähnlich, the various things
pictured in Parallel’s images—natural and man-made alike—were eventually
trumped by their status as photographs and “artifacts.” Each image was figured as
a kind of ruin in which the muteness and resilience of nature were once again put
on view, emphasizing its obstinate opacity in the face of man’s attempt to make
sense of it. Assembled together, they signified disorder more than anything else.
In many ways, Dann, Parallel represents the science of natural history at its absur-
dist conclusion—in the throes of “second nature.” Entirely beholden to images, its
editors looked only at structure, excising all other information. In a way, the edi-
tors of Parallel were victims of visuality. They could only see, and they were over-
whelmed, affected, and taken over by what they saw. For them, the whole world
had become a vast sea of images.

“Image” was an oft-used term at the historical moment we have been survey-
ing—oft-used, and ill-defined. The editors of the exhibition used it in their press
release (“the editors . . . have selected more than a hundred images of significance for
them”), and Nigel Henderson incorporated it as part of the title of another exhibi-
tion of his, Photo-Images, which was held at the ICA a year later.34 In 1955, Reyner
Banham, made it central to his definition of the New Brutalism, which focused on
the architecture of the Smithsons and included Parallel in its scope; the image, Er

Image

33.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), P. 131. For more on scientific atlases, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
34.
Henderson’s exhibition, Photo-Images, was held in the Members Room of the ICA from April
1–May 15, 1954. Bedauerlicherweise, little is known about this exhibition; the only documentation available
is a negative of the title placard, which shows bits of frayed fabric and graffiti-like scratches. Nigel
Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.9.5.33.

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

schrieb, was something both “visually valuable” and suffused with “human association.”
The word broke through the boundary separating high and low, opening up onto a
wide cultural continuum. Despite these frequent invocations, Jedoch, no particular-
ly concrete definition seems to have been worked up as a support. The word was as
much an enigma as it was a “mana” term. In a list of questions Henderson posed to
himself at the time, he asked, “What do you mean by ‘IMAGE’?”35

Today the currency of this word in the artistic discourse of the 1950s is
often seen as foreshadowing the advent of Pop art, with which many artists in
this milieu, including Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, would come to be identi-
fied in the 1960s. In his essay “The Development of British Pop,” published in
1966, Lawrence Alloway stressed the word’s importance at this early moment:
“‘Image,’ a powerful word by this time, was used to describe evocative visual
material from any source, with or without the status of art.”36 By 1972, the group
of young artists that gathered around the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London, including Henderson, Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and Hamilton among
other s, would be patr iarchally dubbed the Father s of Pop.37 At this later
moment, “image” was synonymous with “pop culture” and was thought to func-
tion on the order of language.38 In his seminal text of 1964 “The Rhetoric of the
Image,” Roland Barthes stressed this linguistic aspect; für ihn, “image” essential-
ly meant “advertisement,” a condensed site of visual codes.39 Codified and rei-
fied, the parameters of the image were imagined to be both fastened and set, its
contours well-honed and intended to elicit a specific response.

Though there is certainly a kernel of this later moment at work in this period, Es
should not overshadow the differences at stake. If the artists involved in Parallel were
presaging Pop art (if not popular science), they were also invoking the precedent of
Surrealism, welche, schließlich, was their principal point of artistic reference. Surrealism,
as its spokesman André Breton emphasized, was in the business of making images as
well. “It is true of Surrealist images as it is of opium images,” Breton wrote in his
“Manifesto of Surrealism” of 1924,

that man does not evoke them; rather they ‘come to him sponta-
neously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is pow-
erless now and no longer controls the faculties.’ It remains to be
seen whether images have ever been ‘evoked.’ If one accepts, as I do,

“Notes,” Nigel Henderson Collection, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.4.7.
35.
36.
Lawrence Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” in Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art (Neu
York: Thames and Hudson, 1966), P. 33. In his chronicle of Britain in the 1950s and ’60s, Der
Neophiliacs, Christopher Booker also makes “image” a central term in his argument. See Christopher
Booker, The Neophiliacs (Boston: Gambit Incorporated, 1970), especially p. 36.
37.
38.
(Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969).
39.
Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), S. 21–40.

See Fathers of Pop, dir. Julian Cooper (1979).
Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Christopher Finch, Image as Language: Aspects of British Art 1950–1968

Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard

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OCTOBER

Reverdy’s definition it does not seem possible to bring together, Bd-
untarily, what he calls “two distant realities.” The juxtaposition is
made or not made, and that is the long and short of it.40

The Surrealist image, Breton notes, comes into being through the juxtaposition
of “two distant realities” brought together in the artist as if by magnetic force.
No intentionality is involved. The subject, for Breton, is not active but mediu-
mistic. He urged his Surrealist colleagues to put themselves “in as passive, oder
receptive, a state of mind as you can.”41 As Rosalind Krauss has argued, howev-
er, if such a collision of realities was to take place in the space of the subject, Es
ultimately occurred nowhere more frequently than in the space of Surrealist
photography. There it assumed a logic of morphological doubling, creating
signs that suggested two things at once (a woman and a phallus, Zum Beispiel),
much like the ones that Sylvester detected in Klee’s drawings. It is this doubling
that sends the Surrealist image, like its Pop counterpart, into the realm of lan-
Spur: “In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a para-
dox: the paradox of reality constituted as sign—or presence transformed into
absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing,” Krauss argues.42
“Surreality is, we might say, nature convulsed into a kind of writing.”43 If Parallel
is indebted to Surrealism, it is on this point that it departs from it. The concep-
tion of the image we encounter in 1953 is immeasurably more ambivalent—less
written, we might say—than the one placed before us in 1924. The images that
comprise Parallel are less signifying objects than they are objects stripped of ref-
erences, less juxtapositions of things than ambiguities of form. As distinguished
from a sign, which binds together signifier and signified in the service of repre-
sentation, the image lacks such a composite dimension; it is simply a presence,
an enigmatic appearance, a “thing itself,” and as such, it possesses a visceral
quality as well.44

At the end of his Parallel review, David Sylvester traced a short genealogy
for the ideas behind the exhibition, picking out some of its precedents in addi-
tion to claiming some of its contemporaries. He began with a disavowal. Der
exhibition, he wrote, “does not relate to surrealism, in which unexpected analo-
gies are drawn between things that are recognized as such, which is to say,

Figur

André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver

Ebenda., P. 29.
Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the

40.
and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), P. 36.
41.
42.
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Masse.: MIT Press, 1985), P. 112.
43.
44.
reprinted in this volume.

Ebenda., P. 113.
Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118 (Dezember 1955), S. 355–61;

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

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named (and this, surely, is why the editor s have not made juxt aposit ions
between similar images).”45 Separating Parallel from Surrealism, Jedoch, did
not leave the exhibition alone in the wilderness. Sylvester asserted that it “does
relate to Giacometti and Francis Bacon.” Despite Paolozzi’s frequently professed
interest in the work of Alberto Giacometti and the fact that Francis Bacon is
widely known to have used photographic images in the making of his paintings,
Sylvester’s comment is nevertheless a rather provocative thesis.46 What do these
two artists who are so preoccupied with the figure—one who renders it impossi-
bly impoverished and the other affectively contorted—have to do with an exhi-
bition that on the surface does not seem to have any particular interest in
human form? Though we catch glimpses of bodies from time to time—most

Sylvester, “Round the London Art Galleries," P. 512.
45.
46.
For more on Bacon and photography see David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (Neu
York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), and Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Incunabula (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 2009). It seems worth mentioning that Bacon had a number of photographs by
Henderson in his personal collection.

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Henderson. Installation View of “Parallel of Life and Art.” 1953.
Courtesy Estate of Nigel Henderson and Mayor Gallery, London.

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The Brutalism of Life and Art

often in the form of a sculpture—it is not privileged any more than the large
image of a leaf, Zum Beispiel, or the news-photo of a bicycle crash.47 In a way,
Jedoch, the entire exhibition points toward the figure—it is what is caught in
its image ecology.

Over the course of the exhibition, Henderson returned to the ICA at differ-
ent times to take installation photographs. In one series, Henderson’s daughter
appears in different locations around the room. The selection of a child as model
here—and, In der Tat, the artist’s own child—is significant; everything pictured is
the result of reproduction. If the child performed an important function in post-
war England as a sign of new life after a period of destruction, it also served as a
monitor by which one might gauge the media’s inventory of effects.48 Indeed, mit
the child’s body as measure, we feel for the first time the truly distorting sense of
scale at work in Parallel. The girl is as big as a molecule as she is as a mountain; sie
is on discombobulating terrain. In one particular image she stands in constella-
tion with a crouched figure and a disassembled typewriter, among other things.
Apparently, she had to hold the pose for a long time—and perhaps as an effect of
Das, she looks like an image herself. She is smeared and ghostly, alternately trans-
parent and darkened; she does not look altogether unlike the photographs that
surround her. She has become like them, and is beholden to them. She has been
brought into the matrix of images. In his book on Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze
described this phenomenon as the “Figure,” an entity that does not have so much
to do with figuration as it does with coming-into-being. In the Figure, Deleuze
writes, “an intense movement flows through the whole body, a deformed and
deforming movement that at every moment transfers the real image onto the
body in order to constitute the Figure.”49 To put it bluntly: body plus image equals
Figur. Where for Deleuze such an equation added up to a vital being, here it
gives off the semblance of calcification and deadliness.

This photograph gets to the heart of the Parallel exhibition and to the
heart of what the image meant at this time. In it we see the new photographic

The cover of the exhibition catalogue features an image from Lászlo Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in
47.
Motion—an X-ray of a human skull immersed in the act of shaving. If this image has everything to do
with the interest in imaging technologies that was the purported subject of the Parallel exhibition, es ist
also a depiction of a human skull. Implicitly, it draws a connection between the pervasiveness of photo-
graphic technologies and the death of the subject, a challenge to the latter’s traditional position in the
Welt. See Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), P. 252.
48.
In einem 1959 Text, “Child Art and Image,” Paolozzi wrote, “Today an increasing number of chil-
dren learn through the medium of television, often in an environment which pays homage to the mod-
ern movement in architecture. During the middle forties this was impossible to imagine. Battering
ceaselessly on the Mind’s Eye through the medium of magazines, cinema, advertising techniques, usw.
in the every-day world of our period, IMAGES pour forward in a Niagara of experience like the endless
fruits of a technological cornucopia.” See Eduardo Paolozzi, “Child Art and Image,” Sunday Pictorial
National Exhibition of Children’s Art (London, 1959), P. 4. I thank Robin Spencer for bringing this docu-
ment to my attention.
49.
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), P. 18.

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Schmied (Minneapolis:

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Thema, a subject that has assumed the qualities of, and is disoriented by, Die
photograph. The Figure is a surface, impressed upon by the outside world, Und
it is in this respect that Parallel most clearly breaks with Surrealism. Though
equally passive, the human subject here is not pictured as harboring an uncon-
scious—an interior that can be flooded with juxtaposed realities—but is rather
imagined as a bombarded exterior pummeled by images. In the Figure, we also
see the precedent of Pop we have been looking for. For ultimately, what else was
Pop besides a conflation of image and body?