Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group

Abstract

One of the difficulties facing cultural historians studying the Independent Group (IG) is to gauge its significance in the production of visual culture by those who attended the meetings. As a loose discussion group the IG can be seen as emerging from the same cultural forces that would, a little later, produce the academic counter-discipline of cultural studies. With its interests in consumer culture and in the social life of new technologies (particularly mass media technologies) and with a voracious appetite for the latest trends in science and art, the IG constituted a semi-formal extra-mural group of autodidacts filling-in the significant gaps of an official art education that was still framed by 19th-century values. A pedagogic agenda, though, does not necessarily generate a coherent project of aesthetic exploration and result in a consistent visual poetics. In this article the author argues that there is still value in attending to the IG as a cultural research group that produced a visual culture that was simultaneously pluralist (and perhaps contradictory and conflicting) in style but collective in orientation and sensibility.