Reordering and Redistributing the Visual: The Expanded ‘Field’ of Pattern-Making in Parallel of Life and Art and Hammer Prints

Abstract

In August 1954, the artist–photographer Nigel Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi set-up Hammer Prints Ltd to sell and promote their designs for wallpapers, curtains and ceramics. Marginalised by art history as a category of applied arts, Hammer Prints was, however, inextricably tied into the ideas and experimental cross-media work of both artists at this time. This article resituates the ethos and designs of Hammer Prints within the wider aesthetic concerns and strategies of the Independent Group which the two artists were engaged with and, in particular, to the reordering of the visual first proposed by the artists in collaboration with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson in the seminal exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1953), the year before Hammer Prints was established. As the article argues, a more complex account of Hammer Prints exists once it is reconnected to both artists’ interest in gestalt principles of perception, contemporary theorisations of ‘pattern’, and ontological questions of art posed by Malraux’s idea of the ‘imaginary museum’ and Duchamp’s idea of the ‘portable museum’. It concludes by locating the designs of Hammer Prints within the new field of communication theory developed by Gregory Bateson.