Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [27]
In the late 1970s, the ICA held a string of “shock shows.” The “Prostitution” show had transvestite guards posted at the door and featured strippers and snake-oil wrestlers. During a subsequent show, in a paean to motherhood, an artist hung tampons and soiled diapers in the gallery.
Predictably, the drumbeat of criticism against the ICA was relentless. The Daily Telegraph fumed that its shows were “publicly-funded porn.” The “Prostitution” show in particular was “an excuse for exhibitionism by every crank, queer, squint and ass in the business.” The Daily Mirror blasted the ICA as the home of “extremist art,” and one member of Parliament denounced the show’s founders as “wreckers of civilization.”11
The ICA’s government subsidies were supplemented by various foundations and philanthropists, but by the late 1970s many of them had ceased to be amused. The mansion on the mall was expensive to maintain and the ICA was in constant financial crisis. The building was an eyesore, often dirty and in dire need of repair. One member quit after complaining that he kept “tripping over hippies in the corridor,” according to ICA historian Lyn Cole. In 1977, Bill McAlister was hired to bring order to the chaos. He spruced the space up, installed a decent bar in the mezzanine, improved the food, and introduced a cheaper membership fee that attracted younger crowds. Over time he reaffirmed the ICA’s trendiness and reached out to new artists. As one reporter for the Guardian noted, patrons could now “read Baudrillard in the bookshop, munch a healthy lentil-carrot cake in the restaurant, and guzzle a Grolsch in the bar” before the show.
During McAlister’s dozen years at the helm, the ICA had seen a sharp increase in ticket sales and membership, but funding remained a constant headache, and his tenure was coming to an end. Before his departure, he wanted to get the archives in good shape, but in case he couldn’t find the money to do it, he opened negotiations with the Tate, which was interested in acquiring the ICA records. However, he felt the Tate was overly fussy in restricting access to its archives to scholars and serious researchers, and it was only interested in the visual arts, not the ICA’s records on film, performance, and literature. He thought the ICA’s complete history should be open to students and youngsters as well as to academics. The negotiations had dragged on painfully and had eventually broken down over the issue of access.
Now McAlister found himself sitting across the table from a wealthy scientist with a strong interest in the arts, someone who wasn’t part of the intellectual mafia and who recognized the ICA’s worth. Dr. Drewe also seemed to have a solution to the archives problem. He told McAlister that he had a team of university researchers, led by his colleague Terrence Carroll at the University of Westminster, who could update the archives and make them universally accessible by using computer technology and digital photography to collate, cross-reference, and store them. The system would change the way art historians worked.
Drewe spoke of heading up an ICA foundation of like-minded wealthy individuals who would promote the institute through a series of gala dinners and celebrity auctions. He mentioned the names of Jane Drew, Dorothy Morland, and Anne Massey, a young researcher who had worked on a history of the ICA.
McAlister was delighted. Drewe reminded him of another left-wing scientist with a penchant for the arts. The molecular physicist J. D. Bernal, a peace activist during the cold war era, had insisted that his fellow scientists were duty-bound to use their knowledge to benefit humanity. Bernal kept an apartment above his lab, where he entertained intellectuals and artists, including Picasso, who during one party in 1950 painted a large mural of a man and woman with wings and wearing laurel wreaths on their heads. When