Liquid Crystal Concrete:
Experimental Modes of Making

The fourth in a series of summer research seminars on The Arts of Postwar Britain 1945–1965 with Inga Fraser and Rosie Ram, chaired by Lucy Reynolds

Inga Fraser – Oswell Blakeston: The “Magic Aftermath”

Oswell Blakeston (1907–1985) was known as an experimental filmmaker and critic before the Second World War. Afterwards, he adapted to the newly fertile art scene(s) emerging in London, moving beyond film to experimental forms of painting and writing. He began exhibiting as a visual artist in 1958 with monographic shows at the Grabowski Gallery (1962), the New Vision Centre (1962 and 1964) and the Drian Galleries (1965). He worked with “crystalgraphs” (paint mixed with salt crystals grown on canvas), glass and high-speed photography, and exhibited in group shows alongside artists and friends including Halima Nalecz, Aubrey Williams, S. Xoomsai and Franciska Themerson. Unsure of how to place his newfound visual practice, Blakeston went on to embrace such non-specialist exhibition venues as the Mount Street Post Office, a Hampstead butchers and Great Yarmouth Central Library. In Blakeston’s archive we find evidence of an art world efflorescing. Through his work as both artist and critic intersecting with successive postwar countercultures, we are able to trace a path of fleeting affiliations, marginal spaces and fugitive works. Blakeston’s tendency towards inconsistency and immateriality is inherently at odds with traditional art historical methodology. This paper presents findings from research in Blakeston’s archive as a hypertext – linking his work to that of his contemporaries, as well as to more recent research projects, revealing more of the diversity, connectivity and idiosyncrasy of postwar British art.

Rosie Ram – The Negative Logic of Parallel of Life and Art

Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1953) is lauded as a landmark exhibition of the postwar period in Britain. However, the photographic logic that underpinned the display remains critically under-analysed. This paper argues that Parallel of Life and Art should be reconceived as constituting a collaborative, transdisciplinary and technologised form of research, one in which the photographic image was mobilised methodologically to offer disruptive and destabilising ways of studying the postwar world. Taking the most ephemeral traces of the exhibition as the focus, Dr Ram examines the photographic negatives that were generated by the organisers Nigel Henderson, Ronald Jenkins, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson to manage their inchoate research process. By analysing these negatives – conceived as the darkly translucent shadow of Parallel of Life and Art – this paper demonstrates the formative role of photographic negativity in the exhibition’s material, technological and conceptual base. Positioning Parallel of Life and Art across the inversional interface of the negative, she argues that the exhibition performs a photographic negation of artistic tradition, articulating a shift from the modernist forms of painting and sculpture towards more searching and uncertain research strategies within the nascent field of contemporary art.