Licking the pants off magical ads

This text appears in the forthcoming ARK: Words and Images from the Royal College of Art Magazine 1950-1978, published by Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art. It introduces ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ an article by Alison and Peter Smithson that was published in ARK 18, 1956.

In its compactness, ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ reads like the pop aesthetic it describes. The article by the British architect couple Peter and Alison Smithson appears in ARK 18 from 1956, the first issue under the editorship of design student Roger Coleman. As a friend of the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, Coleman brought to ARK the influence of the Independent Group, of which Alloway was a leading figure. The group was formed in 1952 and would meet both formally and informally throughout the 1950s to discuss and produce contemporary culture ‘as found’.

Alloway is widely credited with the first use of the term ‘Pop Art’, and it was central to the Independent Group’s conversations, however ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ contains the first published use of the term that marks this new sensibility. It was a vision of the cheap, the throw-away, the ordinary and the mass-produced as providing opportunities for new ways of living. A heightened image consciousness characterised this shift in thinking, as well as an awareness of space increasingly defined by, as ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ tells us, “the piece of paper blowing in the wind, the throw-away object and the pop-package”.[1] Pre-fabricated structures, the Smithsons said, “lick the pants off the fine-art architects operating in the same field” for the ease with which they can fit into a community.[2] The Smithsons spoke not of a machine for living, but a structure that would “welcome its appropriation by inhabitants, their patterns of use, their art of inhabitation”,[3] and so prompt a reciprocal activity.

Members of the Independent Group formed the core of the 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The Smithsons’ contribution, along with Paolozzi and Henderson, was titled the House of the Future. The home consisted of a plastic structure that could be mass-produced, and contained futuristic details such as a self-cleaning bath and remote-controlled lighting. Actors inhabited the home during the exhibition, dressed in clothes designed by sportswear designer Teddy Tinling, who, according to Peter Smithson, spoke the “language of movement”:[4] the clothes were made of nylon and both man and woman wore tights with fitted rubber soles. Importantly, the house included a sewing machine and a space to cut out dress patterns to support a lifestyle in which clothing was not ready-made but could be invented and customised by the inhabitants. In their own lives the Smithsons aspired to this forward-looking sensibility. Alison made outfits for herself and, thinking of cars as something worn rather than just occupied, the Smithsons chose as their car a Citroen DS 19 with its futuristic body design and plastic rear window.

The House of the Future expressed a fascination with an approaching era of over-consumption – even the ‘plastic’ surfaces of the house exceeded this vision of expendability, actually being made of coated plywood and assembled in a brief ten days before the show. In a letter to the Smithsons dated January 1957, Richard Hamilton reveals this new attitude, declaring a definition of Pop Art: “Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass-Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.”

As the mass arts and the ordinary background of life – and crucially, advertising – were becoming ever-present and at the forefront of the visual field, their relationship to the ‘fine arts’ came under question. From its birth, ARK was a site for questioning this context. In the first issue editor Jack Stafford stated that the “relationship between the arts and the social context are the real objects of our enquiry through the pages of ARK”. In ‘But Today We Collect Ads’, the Smithsons echo a version of this sentiment, describing the dislocating relationship of dependence between the fine arts and the popular arts, and the rapidly decreasing role of the fine artist to “bring forth” this background material to a culturally significant existence. In accordance with this, as friends of the Smithsons’ Charles and Ray Eames said, the pair “spoke of the wide-eyed wonder of seeing the culturally disparate together and so happy with each other”. [5]

The changing scene described in ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ collides in ARK 18 with the effects of the introduction of photography to the Graphic Design programme in 1956. Photography had been derided by preceding students and professors, but ARK 18 marks the beginning of a new sensibility, presenting an Americanised and image-driven attitude. Turning distinctly away from the characteristic Englishness of the earlier ARK, ARK 18 switched form to become more inclined towards the printed image. Coleman’s ARK left behind the small landscape format suited to illustrated text, to become a larger format that, anticipating a new phase in British graphic design, provided the space for experimenting with typefaces, layouts, overlays and paper stock.

In fact, the Graphic Design course comes to the fore in understanding this transitional moment. The department had been named Graphic Design in order to purposely stand between the respectability of the fine arts, and the so-called useful arts. The suggestion of naming the course Publicity Design was deemed too vulgar, because in the early 1950s, as Graphic Design professor Richard Guyatt attested, the fine art students were “the absolute bloods, they were the aristocrats, they set the pace, people followed them”.[6] But by the mid-1950s the situation was different, with Coleman’s ARK presenting a future with the pace set by what was seen as an ever-increasingly open and multi-valued background. With ARK placing such importance on pace as determining culture, ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ points towards a throw-away aesthetic seen to be more virtuosic and making a greater contribution to the visual field than anything traditional or ‘respectable’. To the Smithsons, advertisements “are good images and their technical virtuosity is almost magical”.[7]

The way was made for a new kind of respectability, defined not by the fine artists or the ‘traditional’ arts, but increasingly, as the Smithsons say, by the artist’s patron’s wife “flipping through magazines” and the mass standards set according to this desirability and its strength of pace. Advertisements were providing “data of a way of life they are simultaneously inventing and documenting”[8] and the recognition of this intervention with which the Smithsons begin their article – “but today we collect ads” – becomes by the end of the article the situation at hand, and the very background itself – “for today we collect ads”.

Despite the pop values in ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ being in accordance with the Smithsons’ outlook, they express a hint of reluctance within the article. It is in this same vein of commitment that ARK began, as Jack Stafford the first editor of ARK writes in the very first issue in October 1950: “It is better to be serious without being solemn.”[9] The Smithsons’ incomplete submission seems to be, as they finally propose, to get the measure of this intervention in order to match it, and maybe ‘lick its pants off’.