Richard Hamilton

London and Madrid

by JOHN-PAUL STONARD

The wistful melody of Doris Day singing the famous song ‘Che sarà sarà / Whatever will be, will be / The future’s not ours to see . . .’, recorded for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, is one of the jukebox songs greeting visitors to the retrospective of works by Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern, London (to 26th May).1 The jukebox is part of a recreation of the famous ‘fun-house’ display created by Hamilton and his collaborators for the exhibition This is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the same year that Hitchcock’s film appeared. It was the moment when Pop art went public. Visitors to the present retro­spective, however, are greeted by an entirely different aesthetic, with a recreation of Growth and form, an installation devised by Hamilton for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951, combining futuristic display modules and inscrutable scientific objects. Not so much Pop art as popular science, Growth and form proposed a future that could indeed be seen and imagined through the forms of science and technology. From the outset, the Tate retrospective makes clear that technology and design were the guiding impulses for Hamilton’s career. The Tate exhibition has run in tandem with displays at the ICA (closed 6th April), and a retrospective of prints at Alan Cristea (closed 22nd March).2 Together these exhibitions formed a grand linked survey that unequivocally proved Hamilton’s stature as one of the great innovators and image-makers of twentieth-century art.

The ICA was the most appropriate place to start, as it was here (in the old Dover Street premises, rather than in the current ones in the Mall), that Hamilton first engaged intellectually with science, design and technology. The opportunity to mount displays both here and at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, where Hamilton taught at the University during the week, meant that Growth and form was the first of a series of pioneering installations (as we would now call them), which established his reputation as a designer and curator. Reconstructions of two of the most important of these, Man, machine and motion (1955; Fig.35), and An exhibit (1957) were on display at the ICA.3 The more impressive, Man, machine and motion, is a large modular framework on which are hung a range of enlarged photographic images relating to four themes, ‘aquatic, terrestrial, aerial and interplanetary’. Moving around the display gives ever-changing views through layers of images, floating in space, a prophecy of our world of weightless digital images. Hamilton was a great anticipator of technological advance, from the peculiar look of digital brushstrokes, to the possibilities of the seamless montage and manipulation of photographs. He would often say that one of the greatest discoveries he made at the ICA, thanks to a lecture on information theory, was that all information could be coded in the form of a series of ‘1s’ and ‘0s’, the binary code that lies at the heart of our digital world.

How he turned these techniques into art, as more traditionally understood, is shown at the Tate by two concise surveys of his early paintings. The first, coming in the pre-Pop years of the early 1950s, shows Hamilton developing a scientific ‘look’ in works such as d’Orientation (1952; Fig.37), abstract marks and translucent fields deployed on a white ground, suggesting the exquisite tact of late Cézanne filtered through the labours of art-school exercises. The traditional academic training Hamilton received at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools was to this extent essential grounding: ‘I feel I can do what I want to do because I have this technical facility given me by an education in a very stuffy academic art school’.4 These early works provide the matrix for the Pop imagery of the late 1950s. From the elusive curves of the Plymouth and Pontiac cars in Hommage à Chrysler Corp (1957), to the pneumatic nylon forms of Pin-up (1961) and the images of space exploration, sport and male fashion in the four works in the series Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories, made between 1962 and 1963, the sense is of Hamilton standing at the forefront of a new world of images, a virtuoso in a new era of technology. ‘Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!’ sings Bill Hayes from the jukebox nearby.

The momentum is carried through to a display of works based on a still of Patricia Knight from the film Shockproof, including the Tate’s large Interior II (Fig.36) hanging alongside the pendant Interior I from the Kunsthaus Zürich (both 1964). The image is not so much painted as staged, Hamilton in the role of art director. Not only colours but also marks and styles seem chosen from a palette; everything is in quotation, available for sampling. In a 2002 interview Hamilton stated that having been through all the genres he was finally left with that of the interior – the interior remained for him a space in which he could assemble imagery and explore technique.

One of the most striking paradoxes of Hamilton’s character was that of the con­trolling, sovereign personality who loved collaboration, or was ready to sublimate his ego in the long labour of making copies. The replication of a number of Duchamp’s works on glass for the 1966 Tate retrospective of Duchamp’s work, curated by Hamilton, presented a set of technical challenges that he clearly enjoyed. Where Duchamp used a laborious method of scraping away at the back of a mirror with a razor blade, Hamilton used a technique of silk-screening an image onto glass, then biting away the image with acid, speeding up the process significantly. ‘You’re like Man Ray’, Duchamp told him, ‘doing everything in a hurry’.5 The reconstructions had Duchamp’s approval and, in the case of Oculist witness (1968) and Sieves (1971), are presented as collaborations. But these are less collaborations than approved replicas, and looking at them is disorienting – are we looking at a Hamilton or a Duchamp? Or an exercise in replication technique?

The pivotal question posed by Hamilton’s career, and implicit in the Tate retrospective, is what happens to this unquestioning engagement with technology and technique once the optimism of the 1950s and early 1960s begins to subside. In using his own name as a trademark, for example on the assemblage work Toaster (1966–67), which might be a very sophisticated advertisement for a ‘Hamilton’ brand of toasters, Hamilton showed his full embrace of industrial design and branding as a source for art. When it came to the forms of traditional art, he was critical and circumspect – his ‘shit and flowers’ series, wisely given a gallery at the Tate, makes clear this sense of holding something at a distance. ‘Art’ itself seems a matter of citation and of sampling. It is far harder to see how Hamilton was critical of the technology that he was using and appropriating, or that he was making any concessions to the negative effects of this technology on the world. Benjamin Buchloh’s elaborate catalogue essay offers a strong reading of the set of fibreglass reliefs from the mid-1960s based on the façade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, arguing that they embody the ‘double destiny’ of the work of art, moving from enlightenment to entertainment; and also becoming institutionalised within institutions that were themselves ‘radically’ transforming. The result of this seems to be that Hamilton’s reliefs (scaled down) might easily find themselves in the design section of the museum shop, subject to the phantasm of the ‘enforced practices of consumption’ invoked by Buchloh.

This ‘double destiny’, obscure in Buchloh’s description, might well describe the twin trajectories of art and technology in Hamilton’s work (perhaps what Buchloh does in fact mean). The stylishness of his works from the mid-1980s, for example the super-cool installation Lobby (1988), incorporating a painting of a hotel lobby based on a post-card (a common source for his work), signals the confidence with which he has drawn these disparate worlds together. The citizen (1982–83; Fig.38), on display at Tate with the accompanying works The subject (1988–90) and The state (1993), shows this fusion of subject-matter with technique brought to a new level of seriousness, to produce one of the great politico-historical images of twen­tieth-century art. Only Gerhard Richter’s Baader–Meinhof paintings, made at the same moment, stand up to comparison.

Despite this assurance, Hamilton’s late works, made from the mid-1990s until his death in 2011, might still feel too new and strange to place with confidence in relation to the rest of his work, and fin-de-siècle art in general. The religious themes that were brought out so strongly, and with such success, in an exhibition of the late paintings at the National Gallery, London, at the end of 2012, were downplayed in the Tate display. Many of the late works show images from Hamilton’s house and studio at Northend, in the Chilterns, north west of London. One of the best of these, The passage of the bride (2004), for example, shows a nude reflected in a framed drawing for Hamilton’s rec­onstruction of the Large glass, hanging on an upstairs landing in his converted farmhouse. These works are private in their subject, and fascinating for this reason (they could not be further away from the public statement of The citizen), and solid proof that, although he may have become disillusioned with politics, Hamilton’s enthusiasm for questions both of art and technology, and his strong desire to communicate this enthusiasm, never abated. Even in this late stage of his life he was capable of marathon day-long conversations about his life and work, taking in detailed descriptions of the outdated Unix operating system (which he was overjoyed to discover he could use once more on the Apple Mac using a simulator), or the exact translation of the adjective ‘capitonné’, used by Duchamp in his Green Box notes (Duchamp preferred ‘tufted’, but Hamilton opted for ‘dimpled’).

Although by no means the last word (Hamilton studies have barely begun), these three exhibitions formed a memorable survey of Hamilton’s work, inevitably weighted with sadness at the absence of his animating presence. They capture his enthusiasm, but also his great stylishness and powerful intellect (it is baffling that his volume of writings Collected Words is out of print). How interpretations and presentations of his work will evolve without his sense of design is hard to tell – the future now seems just that little harder to see.

1     Catalogue: Richard Hamilton. Edited and with essays by Mark Godfrey, Vicente Todolí and Paul Schimmel, further contributions by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Alice Rawsthorne, Fanny Singer and Victoria Walsh. 352 pp. incl. 250 col. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2014), £29.99. ISBN 978–1–84976–259–5. The exhibition, curated by Mark Godfrey, Vicente Todolí and Paul Schimmel, travels to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (24th June to 13th October).
2     Catalogue: Richard Hamilton: Word and Image Prints 1963–2007. With texts by Alan Cristea, Richard Hamilton and Jonathan Jones. 156 pp. incl. 71 col. + 1 b. & w. ills. (Alan Cristea, London, 2014), £25. ISBN 978–0–9575085–2–1. A new history of the early years of the ICA has been published alongside the exhibition on the Mall: Institute of Contemporary Arts 1946–1968. By Anne Massey, with a foreword by Gregor Muir. 208 pp. incl. 156 col. + b. & w. ills. (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Roma Publications, Amsterdam, 2014), £20. ISBN 978–94–91843–13–6. Concurrent with the ICA exhibition, a display of archival images was installed at the original premises of the ICA on Dover Street, now a fashion emporium.
3     The recreation of Man, machine and motion was made by the New Museum, New York, on the occasion of the exhibition Ghosts in the Machine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari in 2012. The version of An exhibit was created especially for the ICA exhibition, in collaboration with Hamilton’s studio.
4     R. Hamilton: ‘Talk at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1971’, published for the first time in the catalogue to the current exhibition, pp.201–07.
5     Related to the present writer by Richard Hamilton in 2007.