The Independent Group's 'Anthropology of Ourselves'

• Autores: Catherine Spencer
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 35, Nº. 2, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Art and the Cultural Field, 1939�69 Edited by Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett), págs. 314-335
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Following the critic Lawrence Alloway’s assertion that anthropology represented ‘a way out of regarding art as antagonistic to the rest of life’, this essay offers the anthropological analogy as enabling and encapsulating the work of practitioners associated with the Independent Group in Britain during the 1950s. Their work, particularly that of Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson, can be understood as an attempt to establish an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, manifest in their rejection of formalist aesthetics, conception of culture as network rather than hierarchy, and treatment of images and objects from their immediate environment as artefacts imbued with socio-cultural and psychological meaning. This anthropological affi nity refl ects the infl uences of surrealist ethnography, documentary practice, British sociology and the advent of structuralism. It informs the vision of the embodied human subject that emerges through their works, with effects that are limiting as well as liberating.