Richard Hamilton. From June 27 to October 13, 2014
In May of 2012, Matthew Weiner and the U.S.-based television channel AMC did the unthinkable and played a Beatles song along with images of the fiction series Mad Men. The price-tag of this little operation was $250,000.
You won’t be hearing any Beatles here.
- Audio: Cole Porter. "Anything Goes" en Cole Porter's Anything Goes, Smithsonian Collection (1977)
This is a podcast about Richard Hamilton, about his work on design, television, technology, money, war and people such as Margaret Thatcher.
It is about the self-portrait by Richard Hamilton that features a vacuum cleaner, a car and a refrigerator.
It is about how television, advertising, objects, pop music appear in Hamilton’s work within a broader aesthetic framework characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon world following the war: the capacity not so much to produce dreams and desires but rather to copyright them and to sell them wholesale.
And it is about the capacity to de-contextualize the consumer item, to describe it as the dream of a generation and then present it as a work of art.
When Richard Hamilton designed the cover of the Beatles’ White Album in 1968 he insisted on adding a certain detail. Each one of the millions of copies of this first edition had to be numbered. The first five copies would go to the members of the band, and of them John Lennon took two. That fifth copy was auctioned in 2013 for 28,000 euros and what gave it such a high value, ultimately, was the number 5.
As a good follower of Marcel Duchamp, Hamilton understood that a signature is important but that in a culture of serial production, numbering could be even more important. And Hamilton’s manoeuvre demonstrated this to be true 45 years down the line.
The rights to this album are controlled by the most powerful record companies in the world, which receive from thirty to forty million dollars every year just as royalties for Beatles songs. Now there’s a good reason not to use a song by that group.
The truth is that what surrounds pop culture more than anything else, more than an interesting sound or image, is money. This, in the words of another famous Brit, Margaret Thatcher, is what lies at the base of Western post-war culture; money. Reality understood by levels of income.
- Audio: Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as public money"
The creation of wealth is not something that belongs only to the “free world” from Cold War times. It is something that has to do with economic and political control, which translates into the domination of electrical and atomic energy. It would not be possible to understand the work of this artist without acknowledging the growing importance of electricity at that time.
- Audio: Thomas Alva Edison. Electricity and progress, Edison Gold Moulded cylinder EDIS 39835 (1908)
- Audio: Marisa Anderson. "Electricity" en Electricity, Free Music Archive (2012)
We are used to thinking of the atomic era, in which Western art of the second half of the 20th century is inscribed, from a macropolitical framework, in a framework of submarines, airplanes, satellites, missiles and nuclear power plants. But there is another energy spectre that occupies everyday life and the consumer lifestyle, the focal points of the pop aesthetic. A spectre that filled houses and yes, made them attractive and desirable.
In What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? we find two elements of the Hamilton aesthetic and even of his own autobiographical definition. One is the poster of The Jazz Singer and the other is the vacuum cleaner in the upper left-hand corner.
Robert Bresson said that "the soundtrack invented silence" because the revelry of the cinema had been replaced by a group of persons listening respectfully to what the stars on the screen had to say to each other. Dialogue and soundtrack did away with musical accompaniment in the cinema, the viewer’s gaze was focused through a series of technologies that made the audience more and more attentive and silent.
Hamilton had been in contact with record companies since the 1940s. In 1942 he organized a music club at EMI (Electronic Music Industry) where he held sessions to listen to musical recordings from His Master’s Voice record label archives.
In 1959 Hamilton gave a lecture entitled “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound" after some lines in a Cole Porter musical. The equivalent nowadays might be something like “Glorious 3D, Dolby Atmos sound and high definition.”
This lecture starts this way: “The headphones were put on my pillow, the Cat's whisker was twiddled and I listened enraptured to the strange noises; it became dark and I fell asleep with the sounds still scratching out of the circular boxes. A few years later, at about the age of eight, my father took me to see the The Singing Fool – of this I remember only the moment when the sound of a voice from the gramophone coincided with the opening and closing of Al Jolson's mouth in a moving photograph” (A Lecture in Collected Words Thames & Hudson 1983 p. 111)
In the lecture Hamilton reconstructs film technology to explain how Hollywood appeal is generated. This decomposition of the image and sometimes of stereophonic sound technology will be present in some of Hamilton’s work dealing with television.
The lecture’s name comes from a song by Cole Porter. The song talks about how the story told is no longer interesting to the audience if it is not accompanied by a series of technological effects.
- Audio: Cole Porter. "Stereophonic Sound" en Silk Stockings (Fred Astaire, Janis Paige y MGM Studio Orchestra), MGM (1957)
Hamilton said that design is a sales weapon. In a 1962 issue of the journal Architectural Design, Richard Hamilton asked himself. "How many important pieces of 20th century art have a car in them? How many have vacuum cleaners in them?" (Hamilton and diseño in Hamilton, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2014 p. 125)
The domestic noise of electricity, electrical appliances, are filling the houses that will interest Hamilton from the 1950s up through the end of his life. People did not need just stereophonic sound and Technicolor to be attractive in their domestic space. Advertisements show sexualized bodies that must also relate harmoniously with the machines that surround them.
“We must all have found that contact with the fantasy world is made all the more memorable when the bridge is newly experienced technological marvel” (A Lecture en Collected Words Thames & Hudson, 1983 p. 113)
As if in a dystopia by James Graham Ballard, the body melts with the car or engages in dialogue with the vacuum cleaner. In 1963 the artist creates Self-portrait for the cover of the Living Arts 2 magazine. His self-portrait consists of a Ford Mustang upon which the desirable bodies of two people are arranged, along with a refrigerator, a typewriter, a telephone and a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner. It was the one that appears in his most widely-known work, What is it about today's homes that makes them so different, so appealing?: a Hoover constellation 867A.
The motorized vacuum cleaner was an important device in British technological history, so much so that it was presented in the Empire Music Hall in London in 1901, becoming from that point onward an element of British pride. In 1981 BBC Channel 4 dedicated the first episode of the series The Secret Life of Machines to vacuum cleaners. This documentary explains that the introduction of the Hoover model made this machine a common and desirable sound in any self-respecting home of the period.
Advertising, a direct descendent of propaganda, rapidly gains strength as a mechanism for the production of desire, even the desire for a noisy and unpleasant device like the vacuum cleaner. The control wielded by television, it is said, began about the time that Hamilton began his artistic production and it had lost its hegemony by the time of Hamilton’s death.
"In 1969, Marshall McLuhan pointed out that “television is the most important electric media, because it permeates nearly every home in the country, extending the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and moulds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message.” (Mark Godfrey Television Delivers People in Hamilton Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2014 p. 237)
In 1984 Hamilton created the art installation Treatment Room, which features a television screen continuously playing a silent video of Margaret Thatcher. This image of surveillance and spectacle brings together some philosophical issues that continue to be pertinent. It talks about how technologies of the gaze exert control over us not just by watching our movements but also by controlling those movements by feeding us images, such as advertising or cinemascope.
The text that accompanies Hamilton’s work poses the following question: “Is the vision of Mrs Thatcher patronising a victim of the Health Service part of the future we once thought so bright”? (Mark Godfrey Television Delivers People in Hamilton Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía 2014 pag. 245)
As Mark Godfrey said in his Television Delivers People:
“The treatment in Treatment room is subjection to this new form of images politics, and the final horror of the piece is that this footage intrudes in a space recalling the public institutions that Thatcher did so much to dismantle.” (Mark Godfrey Television Delivers People in Hamilton Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía 2014 pag.246)
The art of Hamilton is coetaneous and thus has a certain complicity with the work of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, and like him he spoke of another television event that was not recorded in Technicolor and stereo, and that, perhaps for that reason, Baudrillard was quick to say had not taken place.
- Audio: Notsensibles. "'I'm in Love With Margaret Thatcher" en I'm in Love With Margaret Thatcher, Redball Records (1979)
War Games is Hamilton’s last television-based project. In it he makes it clear that in the news aired in 1992 about the Gulf War no people were seen. In 1991 Jean Baudrillard had published some essays on the Gulf War in the newspaper Liberation, describing a change in paradigm regarding fighting. The Cold War had disappeared and conflict and the representation of conflict were changing radically.
“In this forum of war which is the Gulf, everything is hidden: the airplanes are hidden, the tanks are buried, Israel plays dead, the images are censored and all information is blockaded in the desert: only TV functions as a media without a message, giving at last the image of pure television. “ (Jean Baudrillard The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Indiana University Press, 1995 p. 63)
The televised image analysed in these works by Hamilton is not a glorious mechanism for a shining image, but rather a shoddy concealment that fills screens with far-away flashes.
Last of all, we must underline that through television and exhibitions, Hamilton also had a certain relationship with music. In a BBC Channel Four documentary called This is Tomorrow, Richard Hamilton speaks of his relationship with Bryan Ferry, another Pop figure, one on whom the artist apparently had a huge influence.
- Audio: The Bryan Ferry Orchestra. "This Is Tomorrow. 20's Jazz Version" en The Jazz Age, BMG (2102)
The two showered praise upon each other during their lives, ever since Hamilton had been one of Ferry’s teachers. That is why the musician dedicated Hamilton the song This is Tomorrow, whose version by the Bryan Ferry Band we are listening to right now. Could this version have something to do with Richard Hamilton’s declared interest in the music of the 1920s and 30s? As has been said elsewhere, swing, jazz and calypso were the first types of popular music to be distributed on records and Hamilton had shown interest in them even before developing a relationship with major figures of British pop, such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Bryan Ferry.
Hamilton had made music an accessory at the inaugurations of some of his shows. For the opening of Exhibit 2, in 1955, the artist wrote lyrics to a calypso song that played during the event. It seems that using this musical form along with other elements of the exhibition were part of the effort made by the artist to maintain the intellectual and creative dynamism between art and culture.
Also, as Victoria Walsh wrote in Seahorses, Grids and Calypso: Richard Hamilton’s Exhibition-making in the 1950s, the artist was especially interested in calypso because it combined improvisation with “the refrain’s ‘call and response’ structure, similar to the ‘attraction and repulsion’ discussed in Gestalt theory and the analysis of shape perception in visual communication.” (Seahorses, Grids and Calypso: Richard Hamilton’s Exhibition-making in the 1950s in Hamilton Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2014 p. 72)
The other possible interpretation pointed out by the author is the popularity attained by this style, especially by Harry Belafonte, who in that period had sold a million records.
“An ideal culture, in my terms, is one in which [...] each of its members accepts the different groups and different occasions, one in which the artist holds tight to his own standards for himself and gives the best he can to who he can without priggishness and with good humour, whilst facing his historical situation honestly.”
(Popular Culture in Collected Words Thames & Hudson 1983 pp. 113 and 151)
- Audio: Harry Belafonte. "Jump In The Line" en Jump Up Calypso, RCA Victor (1961)
