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If the collages pasted on Orton and Halliwell’s bedsit walls were largely enabled by the cultural prominence of Do-It-Yourself in the later 1950s, then it is equally interesting that for Jane Gaskell writing for the Daily Sketch in 1966, its component images should be naturally presented as having been cut out from magazines. In 1962—the year of the pair’s imprisonment— the Sunday Times would issue its first color supplement, announcing a new type of weekly lifestyle magazine that would serve to disseminate the latest trends in metropolitan culture and consumption to an increasingly affluent national readership. That the Noel Road murals could be framed so easily through these publications, apparently both providing the source material for Joe’s youthful creativity and mimicking the kind of modish interiors on show within their pages, adds another layer of meaning to these collages and to the library book defacements with which they were aligned. In fashioning their own domestic environment out of the canonical images from the history of art—literally tearing them from the pages of London’s public archive—Orton and Halliwell had engaged in a process of decontextualization and chic appropriation very much in accordance with those transient modes of consumption celebrated within the new Sunday supplements. c o n c l u s i o n city of any dream It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances. One might for instance have a rule that one is to stop when one sees a red traffic light, and to go if one sees a green one, but what if by some fault both appear together? One may perhaps decide that it is safest to stop. But some further difficulty may well arise from this decision later. To attempt to provide rules of conduct to cover every eventuality, even those arising from traffic lights, appears to be impossible. —alan turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 1951 247 248 conclusion To this end, it is enlightening to compare the duo’s efforts with another domestic collage that had been produced in London only three years beforehand. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? was an image created by the artist Richard Hamilton for use both in the catalog and as a publicity poster for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956 (Figure 41).1 Often misread as a satire on consumerism or else as a simple wish list after postwar austerity , Hamilton’s collage marked his sustained attempt to grapple with the consequences of an expanding popular media and the attendant visual economy of mass-market advertising. Gathering together a profusion of commercial imagery and forcing it into a new disjointed unity, the collage sought to impel the viewer toward an evolved perceptual apparatus more suited to the overloaded visual environment of late-1950s Britain.2 Hamilton ’s image, then, was a form of visual assault, conceived as a provocative aid for successfully navigating the semantic prolificacy that was coming to characterize the modern urban world. Of course, in choosing to make a living room the subject of his collage, Hamilton also revealed how the expanded mass media of a consumerist economy was challenging the very possibility of impermeable private space. Here, the domestic realm had been invaded not only by new types of commodity (the tin of ham, the vacuum cleaner) but by incessant flows of information transmitted via a plethora of modern media technologies. The newspaper, tape recorder, television, comic, and telephone now rendered this interior profoundly porous, bringing in a cacophony of sounds, words, and images from the outside world. Suggested in particular by the nighttime cinema, its bright lights and signage imposing through the uncurtained window, Hamilton’s living room is no longer a refuge from the seething metropolis—a private domain of sentimental training and managed domestic citizenship—for it is now engaged in a series of ongoing dialogues with the city’s commercial entertainments and its insistent flickering surfaces. All this, of course, had also rendered domestic space an ambiguous site of sexual instability. Hamilton’s interior is no longer a suitable domicile for those confident nuclear families that had once inhabited the Furnished Rooms at Britain Can Make It. Instead, we find a near-naked bodybuilder (in fact Irwin “Zabo” Koszewski, cut out from...

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