Institute Of Contemporary Arts Research Articles

Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979)

The Journal of American CultureEarly View ORIGINAL ARTICLE Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979) Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13459Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Amin, Takiyah Nur. “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the 21st Century and Beyond.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 7– 15. Anderson, Jack. “Dance: Pearl Primus Presents 'Earth Theater'.” New York Times, 21 Aug. 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/21/archives/dance-pearl-primus-presents-earth-theater.html. Cleage, Pearl. “A Hollering Place.” Dramatists Guild Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 1994. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems, vol. 33, no. 6, 1986, pp. S14– 32. DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Dennis, Paul. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 18 May 2021. Dennis, Paul. “Pearl Primus, 'Omowale,' Child Returned Home.” The Massachusetts Review, 14 Feb. 2021. Dixon-Gottschild, Brenda. "The Power of Dance as Political Protest." Dance Magazine, 29 Oct. 2020. Elam, Harry and David Krasner. " The Device of Race." African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 3– 16. Escobar, Ninoska M'bewe. Wrought with Light and Dreams: Auto/body/graphy and the Persistence of Pearl Primus. 2019. The University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation. Estrada, Ric and Sigrid. “3 Leading Negro Artists, and How They Feel About Dance in the Community: 1. Eleo Pomare 2. Arthur Mitchell 3. Pearl Primus.” Dance Magazine. vol. 42, no.11, 1968. Gere, David. “Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope.” Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext), 1994. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “ Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom.” Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II, Basic Civitas, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2013. hooks, bell. “ Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition.” Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1995. Hughes, Langton. " On Leaping and Shouting." The Chicago Defender, 3 Jul. 1943. King, Martin Luther, et al. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. IPM (Intellectual Properties Management), in Association with Warner Books, 2001. Kisselgoff, Anna. "Pearl Primus Offering Program Of Dance Called 'Earth Theater'." New York Times, 24 Mar. 1979. ---. “DANCE VIEW,” New York Times (New York), 17 Dec. 1978, p. 2. Kourlas, Gia. "Could Dance Be a Weapon All Over Again?" The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2020. Krasner, David. "Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Allegory and Mourning in Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel." Text & Presentation, 1997, pp. 64– 80. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982. Pearl Primus #1363. Secure Media Network. Dance Heritage Coalition, Accessed May 2016. http://archive.danceheritage.org/. Pearl Primus, " Omowale," Child Returned Home. Directed by Stan Sherer. 2020. Robertson, Michael. “Pearl Primus, Ph.D., Returns,” New York Times, 18 Mar. 1979, 2. Proquest. Web. Accessed 18 Mar. 2018. Schwartz, Peggy and Murray. The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus. Yale University Press, 2011. Sitton, Claude. "Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls." New York Times, 16 Sep. 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/09/16/archives/birmingham-bomb-kills-4-negro-girls-in-church-riots-flare-2-boys.html. Schechner, Richard, and Willa Appel. By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Waithe, Mary. Interview. Conducted by Paul Dennis, 2020. Watson, Elbert. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 8 Apr. 2022. Wolfe, George C. " Performance Method." Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. edited by Carter Harrison Paul, Leo Walker Victor, and Edwards Gus. Temple University Press, 2002, pp. 4400– 405. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

An Interview with Marc Balet: A Lifetime in Design, Fashion, and Film, from Warhol to Scorsese

An Interview with Marc Balet: A Lifetime in Design, Fashion, and Film, from Warhol to Scorsese

Forensic Architecture in the Theatre and the Gallery: A Reflection on Counterhegemonic Potentials and Pitfalls of Art Institutions

This article examines the status of counterhegemonic knowledge in art institutions – such as the theatre and the gallery – by analysing Forensic Architecture's investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat in Germany. We argue for paying close attention to claims about art institutions’ inherent counterhegemonic potential. As evidence, we present a critical experiential account of our visit to Forensic Architecture's gallery exhibition Counter Investigation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Following this, we discuss how the investigation was presented at the civic tribunal Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen, whose organizers took over and reassembled the municipal theatre Schauspiel Köln in Germany (2017). Drawing on an expert interview, we explore how the tribunal actively positioned itself against the potentially violent structure of the theatre space. Ultimately, our discussion considers the requirements for supportive and effective political alliances by art institutions and thus contributes to the debate in performance studies on institutional critique.

Our Cherished Moments of Involuntary Realism: Charles Harrison, Modernism, and Art Writing

In May 1969, Charles Harrison reviewed Morris Louis’ exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in London. Months later, he helped to install the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harrison also wrote the catalogue text, published in Studio International. Those two texts marked a significant point in Harrison’s career. They were indicative of his disillusionment with modernist criticism, and of his burgeoning interest in the work of post-minimal and conceptual art. In this respect, the two essays mark a transition from modernism to post-modernism in the space between a formalist analysis of the art object and a more dispersed field of artistic practice, where a changed relationship between art practice, criticism, and curating was taking place. However, in the 2000s, Harrison came to reflect upon this cardinal moment. Harrison referred to his recollected experiences of the late 1960s as a ‘cherished moment of involuntary realism’, opening up issues around art writing which remain pertinent to the practice of art history.

John McHale, Marshall McLuhan, and the Collage “Ikon”

Over the course of the 1950s, the Scottish writer and artist John McHale was committed to exploring the effects of fine art, advertising, and new media on the human experience. He was a prominent member of the Independent Group (IG), which met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1952–1955), and was among the first artists in the group to travel to the USA, returning with a tranche of advertising imagery that became influential for their thinking about the mass media environment. McHale was also an early advocate of Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology theory and responded to it in his own artwork and writing. Focusing on a formative period for McHale, between 1954 and 1960, when he developed his collage practice, undertook a scholarship with Josef Albers at Yale University, and became a leading voice in the IG, the essay considers McHale’s writing and art practice as an evolving response to McLuhan’s media ecology. It identifies McHale’s two-part essay “The Expendable Ikon”, published in Architectural Design in 1959, as a key text for understanding his artwork and writings on the relationship between the fine arts and the mass media during this period.

Feminist Interpretations of Witches and the Witch Craze in Contemporary Art by Women

This article considers feminist interpretations of the witch in contemporary art in relation to the witch craze: examples are by Georgia Horgan, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Mathilde ter Heijne, Monica Sjöö, Tania Antoshina, Helen Chadwick, Jesse Jones, and Carolee Schneemann. The argument explores the ways that the figure of the witch is analyzed in three different feminist critiques of patriarchy, and subsequently pursues how these ideas have been taken up in contemporary art by these women artists. The differences between three authors: Matilda Joslyn Gage (1893); Mary Daly (1984); and Silvia Federici (2004) are highlighted and contrasted to other historians’ analyses from the last thirty years of the fate of women accused as witches during the European Witch Hunt between the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. This was a paper given at Misogyny: Witches and Wicked Bodies, Institute of Contemporary Arts, (ICA) London in March 2015.

New Directions in Black British Art History

This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen’s 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists’ work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a “rescuing from obscurity” of important pioneering texts on black British artists.

A Room Within a Room Within a Room: AA 125 Travelling Exhibition or, the Period Room as Staging Device

The following paper takes as its starting point a posed photograph of the members’ room space within the Architectural Association’s AA125 exhibition. The image is one of the only published traces of this travelling exhibition, a show first installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, from April 5 to 29, 1973, to celebrate the AA’s 125th anniversary, which included a full-scale “reconstruction” of the institution’s members’ room at 36 Bedford Square. AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky’s staging of the AA members’ room, we argue, functioned as an inhabitable exhibition environment that simultaneously reinforced the enduring identity of the AA—one of the most important architecture schools in Europe—as an independent institution, while also signaling its recent reinvention under Boyarksy’s direction. Recent research on the institutional history of the AA has drawn attention to Boyarksy’s role in revitalizing the school through a series of ambitious teaching and publication initiatives. The paper builds on these studies by repositioning this underexplored exhibition and, more specifically, the members’ room installation as an important part of Boyarsky’s political and pedagogical project for the AA during the 1970s.

Cybernetic serendipity - did '60s art shape technology's future?

IN 1968, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London held a trailblazing exhibition of electronic and algorithmic art called ‘Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts’ that went on to wow audiences in Washington and San Francisco.

Considering ‘Impermanent Durations: On Painting and Time’

Abstract This article is an annotated response to the group discussions that occurred during the installation and exhibition of ‘Impermanent Durations: On Painting and Time’, held at LASALLE’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore in June 2016. The text includes an edited transcript of a panel discussion at the ICA Singapore, chaired by Guo-Liang Tan. This is supplemented by issues raised during the floor talk, chaired by Claire Watson at the second iteration of the project, which was exhibited at the Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne (BHAC) in August 2016.

SOUND((ING))S

SOUND((ING))S takes place at sea. It constitutes part of an ongoing poetic sequence, the first sections of which were text-based: Collecting Shells (2011), The Sea Quells (2013) and CONT. (2015). The latter was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of Poetry and Sound on 5 February 2016. This section will be played as a sound-based installation on board a chartered vessel as it crosses the English Channel, sailing between Dover and Calais with provisions for refugees based near the French port.Human crisis at sea demands a poetic practice that is prepared to go to sea as a form of research and witness. This installation ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea, across the Channel and underneath the seabed, through the Channel Tunnel. It invites a process of ‘reading’ that is informed by the scientific process of echo sounding, or ‘sounding the depths’, which is used to measure depth in liquid and to recover bodies lost at sea. Layered auditory patterns and increasingly heavy rhymes simulate traditional sounding methods, whereby weights were lowered down piano wires. Listeners can ‘dredge’ for submerged—and suppressed—content relating to the killing of migrants by neglect across Europe through programmes like Frontex’s Operation Triton in the Mediterranean Sea in 2014, which replaced search and rescue procedures with a mission ‘to control borders and not to rescue at sea’. The installation’s bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny migrants movement across the English-French border.The work offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the human body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts and the asylum-seeking body within the EU. Drawing on a secondary meaning of the phrase ‘to take soundings’, which is ‘to canvas opinion’, the installation includes a petition calling on the UK government to provide legal, safe passage for a greater number of refugees.

Review: The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 and The Brutalist Playground

The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 Tate Britain, London 24 November 2014–4 October 2015 The Brutalist Playground Royal Institute of British Architects, London 10 June–16 August 2015 Brutalism has never entirely been out of fashion since Reyner Banham published The New Brutalism in 1966, but the term has become trendy again in the past five years as most of the movement's iconic buildings in Britain have been swept away.1 When eighteen years ago I began work on my own book Space, Hope and Brutalism (published in September 2015), I did not expect to catch the crest of a wave.2 Yet what does Brutalism actually mean? Banham's book coincided with the generation of great concrete housing blocks and shopping centers, to which the label stuck. But the initial New Brutalism (the adjective is important) was a more discrete movement of architects and artists who looked at the sources of art in nature, at basic geometries, and believed in expressing building materials and structure as naturally as possible, whether in timber, brick, steel, or concrete. One can see parallels in the work of Aldo van Eyck, himself inspired by artists, and even Louis Kahn, but the term New Brutalism is wholly British—although the movement's revival has been led largely by historians from abroad. The Tate exhibition focused on collaborations among sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, photographer Nigel Henderson, engineer Ronald Jenkins, and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. While much of its content had been picked over since the major exhibition on the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1991, including a small retrospective on the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA …

Histories of the Future: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Reconstruction of Modernism in Post-war Britain

Histories of the Future: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Reconstruction of Modernism in Post-war Britain

In the Ruins of the University

My title is a conflation of two sources that would appear to mark two ends of a cycle between promise and petrification. The first a bowdlerization of Bill Readings’, now two decade-old work, The University in Ruins published after his untimely death. The second the title of a course taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1954-1955. By reaching back towards Merleau-Ponty's exploration of meaning, how meaning in instituted, how it is transformed, how sense is ‘deposited’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it in beings and institutions, and importantly how innovation can arise in such relations, I would wish to historicise a moment of threat to any such expectation of innovation, any hope that institutions might be expected to institute anything. Bill Readings’ eloquent work chimes with that accord for a ‘threatened field’, it echoes for me and in me, still, in its insights for the University today: “We have to recognise that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” There is, as Claude Lefort explained when considering Merleau-Ponty's course, but equally might have been channeling Bill Readings’ principle theme: ‘[ … ] no call to the future which does not imply a decline of the past.” In this essay I would like to put Merleau-Ponty's lecture within a University, and Bill readings’ book about a University into play with each other to understand something about my own institutional history, working alongside the theatre makers Forster & Heighes, at Dartington College of Arts, at Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, at the London International Festival of Theatre, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Roehampton University, and at King's College London. Institutions where nothing need happen, but something, apparently, did.

ROTOЯ Transdisciplinary Dialogue and Debate: A Public Engagement Case Study

In 2011, the University of Huddersfield commenced a partnership with Huddersfield Art Gallery, to offer a public engagement exhibitions programme, entitled “ROTOЯ”. Featuring the art and design work of University staff, this series of exhibitions, public events and talks acts as a platform for disseminating and communicating practice-based-research, showcasing a community of artists, designers and curators whose ideas and connective practices migrate and span art and design production. For ROTOЯ, interpretation acts as a pivot between academic research, interpretation and public engagement, where points of intersection are considered and debated from multiple perspectives. In 2013, we hosted a symposium at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, which questioned how we measure the role and effects of public engagement in art and design. This paper presents the ROTOЯ public engagement exhibitions programme as a case study of public engagement in light of these questions.

For José

For José Nao Bustamante (bio) There’s a place for us to be, for us to goWhere we can hold hands and spin and swingOur handssoft, so soft Where our enormous cocks dangle outjust below our silk hemlinesoft, so soft Our faces are painted with butterfly flock and we laugh in the sunshine at our silly animal selvesWe waltz with our ungraceful feet We’ll do that dance that I endlessly made fun of you forWe recline on the mosssoft, so soft There, we are drinking from the cool springAll the birds singWelcome home, welcome home, we thought you’d never come Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 427] Nao Bustamante Nao Bustamante is associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2013 she was awarded the CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. Copyright © 2014 The American Studies Association

The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group

The historiography of the Independent Group, dominated at present by art and architectural history, positions it within the trajectory of modernism. This Themed Issue demonstrates that there are other readings of the Group, which foreground both its multidisciplinary approach and contestation of cultural boundaries. The author is concerned here with the ways in which the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and its Director, Dorothy Morland (1906–1999), acted as a catalyst for the Group. As an arts administrator rather than a practitioner, Morland’s contribution is often overlooked in the histories of art and architecture. Using the disciplinary approach of visual culture, a more inclusive view is opened up. Claims for prescience are in themselves, problematic, but by positioning Morland as the ‘Mother of Pop’, the commonly accepted view of the Independent Group as the ‘Fathers of Pop’ is contested. Morland trained as a singer at the Royal College of Music, and this background gave her a non-specialist and inclusive approach towards the visual. She managed to facilitate certain kinds of interdisciplinary debate and made it possible for certain kinds of art, design and architectural practice to flourish within the context of the ICA. She also facilitated the exhibition and dissemination of this interdisciplinary practice, acting as a bridge between the ICA management and the Independent Group, as well as being key to the preservation of the ICA’s history and archives.

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

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.

‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection

This article considers the site of the Independent Group’s formation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA), as a discursive proposition, using the institutional level (understood as a meeting place of the pragmatic and ideal) as a vantage point from which to re-encounter a plurality of positions that defies the congruities of thematic analysis. To this end, the author examines how the ICA was formed, in relation and distinction to the institutional designation ‘museum’, through an analysis of the three terms that make up its title. He argues that the ICA was a rhetorical space that emerged from a complex negotiation between extant possibilities and understandings of artistic value held within the fragmenting, but hegemonic, discourse of the museum and demands for technocratic, productive relevancy. He proposes that this space impelled, and was, in turn, made manifest by, the declaration of the Independent Group, as a response to and negation of the ICA’s particular formulation of the contemporary.

Review: Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable

Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable . Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris. 23 March–11 July 2011 Landscape architecture—or perhaps the landscape—features prominently in contemporary design discourses. Seemingly all-encompassing, landscape practitioners intervene on post-industrial sites and regions; they envision scenarios for shrinking cities, hypercities, informal settlements, and shifting riparian zones. It should then come as no surprise that the frequency with which landscape is addressed by curators has recently increased, with Rising Currents at MoMA; Stadtgrun at the Frankfurt Architecture Museum; ManMade Environment initiated by Oslo’s DogA and later shown in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and now Helsinki; and La Ville fertile and Roberto Burle Marx at the Cite de l’Architecture in Paris. This sampling reflects not only the wide range of scales—garden to waterfront—that characterizes designing with/in the landscape but also the competing claims on landscape, greening, and sustainability by landscape architects, architects, and artists. In this fuzzy context, Roberto Burle Marx: La Permanence de l’instable , to whose catalogue this reviewer contributed an essay without in any way participating in the organization of the exhibition, reasserts blue-chip values by viewing the garden as an art form. Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) is a darling of architects and garden lovers, alternately championed as a painter with plants, a preservationist of Brazilian flora, and the inventor of a modernist landscape idiom. He first gained visibility in the 1930s and 1940s from his association with high-profile architects such as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. By the 1950s his fame had reached international audiences. He exhibited his landscapes at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and designed the Brazilian garden at the Brussels world’s fair. MoMA acquired a Burle Marx gouache plan for the 1953 Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo, and included his work in Henry Russell Hitchcock’s 1955 exhibition and book Latin American Architecture since 1945 .1 More than thirty-five years later, …