Richard Hamilton; Man, Machine and Motion and an Exhibit

Man, Machine and Motion and an Exhibit 

Richard Hamilton was strongly influenced by early twentieth century developments in art and design that had mainly taken place outside of Britain. These included the radical theories and display experiments of Surrealist and Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Picabia, the Modernist design principles of Bauhaus and the architecture of Le Corbusier, which was premised on geometric modular systems. 

The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) unveiled a reconstruction of two of the artist's early installations—Man, Machine and Motion and an Exhibit—both first shown in London at the ICA's former Dover Street home in the 1950s. 

In 1955, Hamilton conceived the exhibition Man, Machine and Motion. He collected around two hundred photographs and reproductions of drawings showing vehicles and equipment that ‘extend the powers of the human body’, enabling aquatic, terrestrial, aerial and interplanetary movement. The three-dimensional piece is organized by a metal grid made of units (each four feet wide) on which hang images on horizontal and vertical planes so that a viewer could walk through and see images below and above them. . It's a kaleidoscopic historiography of travel technology from Leonardo da Vinci's fantasy flying apparatus to dream-vacation diving ads. The non-hierarchical arrangement of images, plucked from a wide array of sources, is a key component of Man, Machine and Motion. The exhibition was mounted first at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, and then at the ICA. This collision of cultural spheres—inherited from Dada and Surrealism—was to become a central tenet of Pop Art.

Two years later, working with the artist Victor Pasmore and the critic Lawrence Alloway, Hamilton re-visited the grid system used to display the photographs and created an installation of hanging sheets. It looked something like a three dimensional Mondrian; a collage disassembled. Is a maze of gray, white, and brown acrylic sheets hung on thin wires, and interspersed with the odd Indian red panel. It was an icebreaker in its day, no objects, no images, just An Exhibit (its title) to make your own; yet it feels spacey and blank. The installation was conceived as ‘a game / an artwork / an environment’, because The panels both define space and stand as morsels of space themselves, each infused with its own mood. The artists in turn spur on and lose their viewers, sometimes directing their steps with a corridor-like arrangement, sometimes stopping them dead in their tracks with a completely see-through panel. an Exhibit pursued the Modernist ideal of art as  accessibleThis exhibition also premiered in Newcastle before being reconfigured at the ICA.