Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

"Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?"

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? is a small (26cm square) 1956 collage widely credited to Richard Hamilton that is an early example of Pop Art and is the first recognised artwork to feature the word 'Pop' in this context. The piece was intended as a poster and catalogue illustration for the exhibition "This is Tomorrow". The work was designed by John McHale while at Yale. It shows an interior of McHale's London living room atelier with "Zabo" the bodybuilder from Venice, California, who he identified over forty years ago, holding an outsized American lollipop with the word 'Pop' on its wrapper which was intended by McHale as a deliberate design reference to the fact McHale had coined the term Pop art in 1954. The bodybuilder is paired by an almost nude female figure who is posed on a sofa. The bodybuilding and the burlesque artist are iconically linked in McHale's design to the dual Warner/Minsky burlesque image. Other elements are a tin of ham placed on a coffee table, a newspaper, a reel to reel tape recorder and a framed page from a romance American comic book strip predicting the work of Roy Lichtenstein. The comic provided by McHale and affixed to the wall in his collage design is from Romance comics produced by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon of Crestwood Publications, and reflects autobiographic events in McHale's life. The Armour tin of ham in McHale's Armory Show inspired design has links to his ICA lecture on Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus, Walter Paepcke of American Container Corporation, 'windy city' Jazz, and to Ford assembly line armory system, and also to Yale New Haven. Raymond Loewry is noted in his Industrial Design to have designed the smooth form of the Armour Can in 1944, which shares the same sculpted streamline aesthetic as the vacuum cleaner and the industrial design of Ford. The interior of the collage uses a high altitude photo of the Earth as the ceiling oculus evoking a visual pun of both a theatrical 'canopy of heaven' and a 'skyscraper', an image of sunbathers on a beach as a rug, an advertisement for Hoover vacuum cleaners and windows that look on to a view of a Warner Brothers cinema advertising The Jazz Singer.

In preparation for producing the mechanicals for the piece Hamilton had written down all the elements that defined his interest "Man, Woman, Food, History, Newspapers, Cinema, Domestic Appliances, Cars, Space, Comics, TV, Telephone, Information". Hamilton's list only accounts for 18 of the some 36 visual items in the collage. Magda Cordell who assisted the Hamiltons in the cut up and paste up of the collage does not recall Hamilton using such a list to direct the production process. Hamilton's list does not include McHale's iconic Tootsie Pop. Hamilton himself had not been to America yet, but other members of the Independent Group had, including John McHale who was at Yale University and provided Hamilton with the POP Art collage design and the specific magazine images for the collage. These were accessed from McHale's black metal trunk in his private studio at 52 Cleveland Square by the Hamiltons and Magda Cordell. The title suggested by McHale came from a magazine article.

Interpretations of the work are various. Hamilton, like many of the Independent Group members, was interested in the new ideas of communication promoted by Marshall McLuhan and Cybernetics. The piece has all the human senses cast in various modes, and as McHale explained part of the purpose of the TIT was to "provoke acute awareness of the sensory functions in an environmental situation". The work is comparable to the "Arnolfini Wedding" in having a young couple surrounded by their worldly goods. McHale's Pop art collage design contains references to advertising, the Greek Golden Age, and to Dadaist style elements. In the same year McHale commenced designing the collage he discussed Avertising with the Independent Group, in 1955, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and delivered a talk on Dada as non-Aristotelians. As Brandon Taylor in Collage notes the very title of 'Dada as non-Aristotelians' implied Dada artists had summounted the logic of the law of non-contradiction: the clear message was that non-Aristotelians were enthusiastic to embrace contraries, disliked hierachies and were adversed to binaries, paricularly the subject-object distinction between perceiver and perceived. Taylor also came very close to discerning the perceived structural inconsistencies in Hamilton's tabular account about the actual design of McHale's collage, unfortunately he did not have all the facts at hand when he showcased the Pop art work on the cover of his publication.

As Lawrence Alloway notes about McHale's collages The details of the collages viewed close, refer back to their original states, but from a distance the individual images are subsumed in an impression of...lavish ambiguity. Later in 1956-57 McHale included similar semiotics iconic images with: black and white information text, heraldic motif, TV, ham, lamp, inverted skyline, windows, pipe tube, man, automobile, household appliance parts, tape reel, cinema projector, food, architecture, room, ceiling, composed within the structuralism of his Pop art collages, Machine Made America 1&11.

Richard Hamilton has reworked the subject and composition of the Pop art poster collage several times including a 1992 version featuring a female bodybuilder. The original collage is in the collection of the Kunsthalle Museum, Tubingen Germany. The original work should be officialy recognised as a creative masterpiece of Pop art design by John McHale. However because of Richard Hamilton's design misappropriations the work currently has the interesting but dubious distinction of being the first work of Pop art fake in the Twentieth Century.

John McHale attribution

There is a claim that the work should be attributed to John McHale. Hamilton acknowledges that McHale provided visual material and made other contributions but at the time the collage was made by Hamilton, McHale was in America. By the time McHale returned to England the creative and personal relationship with Hamilton had brokendown. This does not explain how the Hamiltons accessed McHale's black metal trunk sent over ahead of time by McHale from Yale to London full of his Pop art material with McHale's specific measured design and collage images which the Hamiltons used for the cut up and paste up of the collage. The attribution of the collage as an original piece by Hamilton is only supported by his using similar materials and subjects in his later works including paraphrasing the title. There is no documented evidence that Hamilton did any Pop art work until after the paste up of the collage, whereas McHale produced a considerable amount of collage Pop art work before designing the TIT poster collage.

According to McHale, the collage is an integrated design, with the breaking of the fourth wall, based on the layout of the McHale/Cordell atelier living room at 52 Cleveland Square, in London. When McHale was at Yale he studied with Joseph Albers, creator of "Homage to a Square", and author of Interaction of Color concerning chromatic interactions and the subject of colours governed by internal deceptive logic. Both Alber's pedagogical work and McHale's collage, a Homage to Cleveland Square, share a theoretical preoccupation with black and white figure ground visuals and the interation of colour field elements. McHale was familiar with the optical perception work of Adelbert Ames, Jr., known for his theories of 'equivalent configurations' and his eponymous room, window, chair. In discussing human symbolic cognition McHale cites Ames formative article "Experiments in Perception", Progressive Architecture, Decemember, 1947, page 20. It is also recognised that McHale was well versed in optical and matters of Gestalt. His iconic collage elements, repeated red colour scheme, and multi perspective images are held in visual and conceptual isomorphic integrated Gestalt ballance.

McHale's collage design integrates these theoretical works on perception and optical colour. At the same time he incorporates some of the structural and visual conventions of earlier Plain-an-Gwarry and English Renaissance theatre, in terms of raked stage, props, flats, astronomical canopy of heaven, elevated acting structures. The collage depiction also follows some of the optical conventions of Medieval icons with multi-perspective proto Cubist tilt space. The Ford heraldic logo affixed to the light/arms standard represents McHale's Pop art canting arms in his 'expendable icon' poster. The 'armory' logo is a synthetic corporate construct, yet a posteriori, and functions in the collage like the work of Marcel Duchamp , the Armory Show, and Appropriation (art). Ford contributed to the Arsenal of Democracy, and stood for freedom and mobility. Ford's main wartime production plant on the Home Front was designed by Albert Kahn and located at Willow Run . When McHale was designing the collage his Yale digs and mental amunition dump were on Willow Street at #324, up the road from Ford St., in New Haven, Connecticut. The lock shield blazon exemplifies McHale's coat of arms exploits at Lux et Veritas and in 'light arms' at Lochiel Commando Castle Achnacarry. It exemplifies his training in British Commandos, the defence of H.M.S Forward, and as a Royal Marine Light Infantry Medic in wartime Malta sited among the Knights Hospitallers, and Tournament (medieval). The crown device serves as an oath of fealty with Royal Marine allegiance to the Royal Crown, Elizabeth II. It also serves as an heraldic artistic symbol of McHale's modern home and fiefdom of Frank Cordell Englishman's castle castlefranco at Cleveland Square. It gives a Pop salute to his father's regiment the Highland Light Infantry (Duel elephants charge striking with both wild boars), along with the pals in 32 (Scottish) Signal Regiment (Crown on black fess amid white noise ), and to the L&B Barrons (blazon colours) soundly installed at the TIT, and to the Knights of Columbus (upright targes) lounging nearby McHale's favourite Duchess Diner close to Crown St. in New Haven. The ironic symbolism is intended to be both serious and humerously emblematic like Don Quixote with McHale tilting at windmills and the TIT. The Knight-errant emblematic logo is posted prominantly amid the crest-on-wood light stand, burnished and reflected in the Crestwood comic affixed to the wall like a banner to Pulp Fiction, and reverberating in the media laden din of the POP hurlyburly battle of the Senses. It is also in accordance with McHale's precepts for the TIT: to provoke an acute awarness of the sensory functions in an environmental situation. The Crown Ford jousting symbol is displayed on the light below the beams in recognition of Frank Cordell's wartime jousting with searchlights in the battle of the beams, and his peacetime Ford Zephyr beams. It echoes Ford's advertisement YOU'LL BE ON BEAM....There's a Ford in your future!

During the 'Earl Era' of 'Damsels of Designs' and 'Art and Colour Group', some of the proteges from Earl's group went to work for Ford, including Joe Oros and A. Gene Bordinat who teamed up with George W. Walker, Elwood Enger and Frank Hershey at Ford. Sir George Martin was Frank Cordell's sound man; and his namesake, George Martin worked at Willow Run on wartime plexiglass aircraft canopies and he brought his expertise to the Ford auto design team. The Crown Ford Fairlane hood ornament in McHale's Pop collage design maintains its mass produced automobile attributes of tailfins, automotive design car body styles, speed , personal comfort, convenience and identity with popular culture. Ford utilized the American System of manufacturing and 'armory' assembly line production system originally developed by Eli Whitney. Eli Whitney was an illustrious alumni of Yale, as was the artist McHale, hence the close creative relation within the iconic context of the collage. In addition, the Crown Ford auto also still shares similar aesthetic features of: plexiglass, interchangable machine parts, sculpted forms, and custom multi colour choices, as associated with McHale's Constructivism (art). In essence, McHale acknowledged the iconographic elements of the original corporate logo, then approriated them into his collage design, and thereby iconically transformed them with an infusion of new contextural meaning. As Reyner Banham noted none of us at the (ICA) really knew how to read the forms and symbols of the car: that was to come later when John McHale and Lawrence Alloway took over the running of the Independent Group...we could hardly help being amused by the claims of aristocratic goood breeding of this heraldry on the front here.

By the way, for self declared anti-Pop members of the ICA, Ford also produced wartime surplus Willis Jeeps, sans Pop cypher, for Brutalist members like Alison and Peter Smithson to run around mid Fifties London trying to post McHale inspired Pop 'lists' and collect unsent pleadings of Pop chain mail from Richard Hamilton.

It is apparent that Hamilton has dined out for years on the close indentification between the tin of ham in the collage and his own appelation, like some yon kipper below the salt. However, the Armour tin can of star ham is actually McHale's pop art rebus. It is intended as a direct comic reference to the fact that McHale designed and hung a Francis Bacon retrospective exhibit with Lawrence Alloway at the ICA. McHale's rebus also contains secondary references to both Hams at the ICA: Hamilton and Reyner Banham. In the case of Reyner Banham the iconic ham symbol also links to Banham's theories of the machine aesthetic and via the Ford logo to his keen insights into automobiles, as explained in his "Thousand Horse-Power Mink" at the ICA, and his other writings.

McHale supplied the integrated advertising image of the 1954 Hoover "Constellation" vacuum cleaner with the arrow and woman on the stairs. Hoover vacuum 'bagpipe' products were known to have a skirl and beat as they sweep, rather like the swing beat of the Pop Jazz singer. For some it may visualy conjure Magritte Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Others may detect the subliminal vacuum tube connection to McHale's Transistor collages and the vacuum bi-line in his Why I Took To The Washers In Luxury Flats collage. The iconic Hoover "Constellation" Vacuum Cleaner has Henry Dreyfuss design links both to Ford, and the ergonomic Model 302 telephone hand set, originaly inspired by Henri Matisse and modernism. The artist Jean Heiberg studied with Matisse, and worked on the prototype telephone hand set with the engineer Johan Christian Bjerknes as part of the Ericsson design team that influenced Dreyfuss in his Model 302 Bakelite design and the subsequent later version Model 500 telephone. The later version handset has a similar appearance to the telephone depicted in the Stromberg-Carlson TV in McHale's phonetic sound art design. Stromberg-Carlson sold equipment to the first public telephone exchange that opened in New Haven. The "constellation" design conceptually links and maps to the "star" ham icon and to McHale's Forbidden Planet "readymades" and the 'star fix' Space installations at the TIT, and also has advertized links to Warner; and to the World of Tomorrow featured at the 1939 New York World's Fair. There was a Futurama transport theme and also a robot at the World of Tomorrow, like McHale's readymade Robby the Robot that he installed at the This Is Tomorrow artistic fair. The Ford 'wheels' Fairlane logo in McHale's collage design is also linked to a fair, which reflects some of the theme of the TIT.

Warners was originally founded by Sam Warner based on his early experience watching a train movie in a fair ground pleasure resort, in a town of 'Hope' Sandusky near Cleveland known for its Underground Railroad. McHale's father also ran an underground railroad, and McHale lived at 52 Cleveland Square. Kilbourne designed the city plan of Sandusky, Ohio, and McHale previously lived in Kilburn, London. McHale selected for the collage one of the first "Talkie" sound film black and white 'anemic cinema' trompe l'oeil evoking film noir images of Warners, which subsequently became Minsky's Burlesque pleasure 'wheel'. Warners was located on 52nd Street in New York known as Swing Street, not far from Tin Pan Alley, the subject McHale's jazz musician friend Frank Cordell lectured on at the ICA. Note "Zabo" is taking an artistic POP "swing" in McHale's collage design and Zabo appeared in a famous burlesque review with Mae West with links to Minsky's and to Al Jolson Swing (genre) Jazz and to Yale. Al Jolson the jazz singer in McHale's collage design sang TOOTSIE train, and Zabo the 'candy pitchman' is also linked to the Tootsie Pop icon signifying McHale's coining the term Pop art. The Jazz Singer opened on Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement, and Al Jolson the 'atonal' singing cantor's son is depicted in the movie invoking Kol Nidre, and this informs McHale's collage with an existential iconic deeply contemplative dimension. Thus the macher in the film transforms the modern collage makar. Al Jolson was a member of the Cotton Club and also sang "Mammy" in the movie, and Warners was situated around the corner from the MoMA , in the neighbourhood of Time Square with its large Waterford crystal ball used to celebrate New Year and scrying the future of Tomorrow. The artist's mother "Mammy McHale" is evoked in the song 'windae-hingin' in the collage 'Large Glass'. Mammy lived in Glasgow Maryhill known for its stained glass and The Lighthouse, and she was from Waterford celebrated for its cut glass. Mammy lost her father in a train accident, and she was employed as a member of the gun cotton factory 'club' that exploded in Wales, almost wiping out the past and the artist's existence in Tomorrow. Warners was located just a few blocks down from 52nd and Lexington where Marilyn Monroe was filmed on the subway grate in her Warners in The Seven Year Itch. Ford also used Marilyn in her breezy skirt as the poster girl for advertising its cars, and McHale installed Marilyn Monroe as a Pop art "readymade" found art with the TIT. Marilyn starred in burlesque in Ladies of the Chorus and sang Everyone needs a DADA Daddy, the film poster has affinities to the dance girl chorus line poster McHale also positioned at the TIT. Marilyn appears to have shared the same photographer that made the TIT collage burlesque artist a famous pin-up girl. Her reflection may also be seen in the The Large Glass window of Warners. The burlesque femme fatale theme in McHale's work is reminiscent of Rudolf Schlichter with his edgy wife and New Objectivity, Raoul Hausmann, the cabaret era of Club Dada, and the Berlin Dadaist Group.

The B&H tape recorder in McHale's collage design subtley reflects the same central position and aspect as the gramophone image located in a published photo of the athletics room of a teacher's Berlin modular house designed by Marcel Breuer. The tape machine thereby connotes additional design references, as well as an implied humerous reference to the Bauhaus athletics program exemplified by Zabo and the burlesque artist. The B&H tape recorder is a look-a-like tape recorder with magnetophon and Scotch reel-to-reel links to one that appears in a Marilyn Monroe movie. The look-a-like version of the tape recorder has inventive and corporate links to the tape recorders used by Louis and Bebe Barron to make the experimental electronic music for Robby the Robot and the Forbidden Planet depicted in McHale's Pop art readymades at the TIT. McHale was introduced to the Barrons through John Cage, and the Barrons Sound Studio was located on 9th Street in the New York neighbourhood of the Abstract Expressionist community that McHale frequented with its Cedar Street Tavern and the Club. The comic on the wall in McHale's collage design has incipient links to New Haven, also a nod to McHale's menage and to the Arnolfinis, and a humerous reference to his artistic friend William Turnbull, of Fellows road, who liked comics and worked early on as an illustrator for D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd in Dundee, and whose recognized "ability to communicate the essence of form in direct paired down moves underpins all his works".

According to McHale his collage design and iconic images for the work are also based on Giorgione the Tempest in the disposition of the bodybuilder and the woman burlesque like 'Tempest Storm in a D-Cup' figure, and Frank Castelfranco Cordell motif, which in turn is linked to Shakespear The Tempest and the long winded basic theme of the Forbidden Planet. Castlefranco is 'different and appealing' because it is Giorgione's home town and is depicted in the Tempest, and is an Italian town where the streets are named after famous intellectuals and musicians. The woodwind vendor of the B&H tape recorder sold sheet music to Frank Cordell and was located at # 295 close to where Frank Cordell worked in London at Broadcasting House, which is adorned with Vorticism sculptures from Shakespear's Tempest, and is close to Duchess Street like the iconic Duchess Diner McHale hung out at Yale, New Haven. His favourite Diner with the Jukebox was off Crown at the intersection with Howe on Chapel, like in Whitechapel. The Duchess was down the hill along Orange Street, a Pop in from McHale's student digs at Gael Force 'Wind in the Willows' street.The Yale Lux willows in the high-lands recall McHale's earlier times in the Luxe Willow Tearooms of Catherine Cranston with spent youth on the Bank of Scotland, wandering among the willowy lasses of Sauchiehall in Glasgow. Sauchiehall, Scots for Willow street, was a mile long 'strip' in cinema-mad Glasgow known for its shops and consumerism , cinemas, the Locarno dance hall where romances began , and art deco cinema style 'skyscraper' designed by William Beresford Inglis. The tempest Blast and Pound stirred the artistic storm of Vorticism, which motivated McHale's Op art panels at the TIT. The pivotal theme of The Tempest is magic which is used by Prospero with his staff to control Ariel. McHale had a tempestuous affair with a well known actress who starred as Ariel at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon among the willows, and McHale was well versed in both camouflage magic and black magic. When McHale first arrived at Yale, on a Fellowship in August 1955 in New Haven, the whole State of Connecticut had been declared a State of Emergency having been racked by two devastating hurricanes, Hurricane Connie and Hurricane Diane, so most of the low ground was under water. Connecticut was one of the centres of comic production in the USA, and the Charlton Comics printing company was under water that produced the Romance comic seen affixed to the wall in McHale's collage design. McHale being Scots, a Knight-errant and a Royal Marine chose the highlands of windy willow and took the 'high ground'--unlike some of his peers at the TIT, who maybe 'peaked' but still take the low way out. Some of the other autobiographic aspects of the collage relating to the Tempest, the Bell phone, Book and the Candle, and the portrait of Mr Sideburns have yet to be disclosed. The total collage matrix work and images in artistic vector space conceptually link and map to Yale and McHale's life, and to some of the POP Art "readymades" McHale provided at the TIT. Contrary to Hamilton's erroneous claims, John McHale remains "in direct touch where ever you may be"...just in case Hamilton claims again to borrow a few ideas from John McHale's Pop art work.