ART REVIEW : The Young Boy Network That Went ‘Pop’ : ‘Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty’ at the Temporary Contemporary profiles Pop beginnings.

Some folks limp through the galleries thinking today’s art still embodies new ideas. A visit to the Temporary Contemporary’s latest exhibition deflates that illusion. One of its sculptures actually depicts a burst bubble.

Very apt.

The show is called “The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty.” A traveling pop-up lesson in contemporary art history, it will stay on view through Jan. 6, which is probably too long.

It addresses the beginnings of an art bubble conceived in London in the ‘50s. The orb came to envelop the popular, commercial and fine arts. At first it was a bracing Pygmalion affair between the sassy Eliza Doolittle of popular culture and the theoretical reformer Henry Higgins of elite aesthetics. The result was the healthy, energetic Pop style that grew up in the ‘60s.

The Independent Group was a loose gaggle of students in and around London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts circa 1952-55. Always including more writers and architects than artists, the group functioned as a kind of 3-D think tank.

Today its best-remembered members are writers Lawrence Alloway and the late Reyner Banham, architect James Stirling and artists Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. Their collaborative exhibitions had a marked theoretical bent and produced a weird style that could be called Didactic Dada, at once cheeky and pedantic.

Their activities conjoined significantly with politics, sociology and the general cultural drift. In 1955 the Labor Party came to power. In theater and literature this was the era of the Angry Young Men. In the streets it was the time of the Teddy Boys, a kind of Neo-Edwardian combination of dandy and zoot-suiter. London was gearing up to become the swinging city of the ‘60s and to export its own brand of rock ‘n’ roll.

The Independent Group met with some regularity in classroom, pub and private digs to forge their vision of what art ought to be like after World War II. Despite the sumptuous coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, austerity, scarcity and rationing continued. Not surprisingly, Britain’s less was not more for these students, America’s plenty was more.

The group turned its back on continental elitism and embraced the energizing and cocky vulgarity of the conquering Yanks. They adored American adverts, movies, comics and science-fiction. They were not dumb about it. They read Klee, Gropius, Ozenfant and Giedeon. They didn’t want to debase fine art, they wanted to absorb, broaden and energize it. They wanted to give the popular arts the respect they deserved. Like Higgins, they would make a princess out of a common girl.

Their generation was increasingly fed up with traditional British class distinctions, verbal and otherwise. For them the Establishment was the ICA, a new school run by the likes of Sir Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, who represented an Establishment that looked to older European art and culture. Their idea of the latest acceptable thing in modern art was Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.

Symbolic signs of trouble for the old boy network emerged in 1951 when two ICA members, double agents Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, defected to the Soviet Union. Years later the revered art historian Anthony Blunt would be unmasked as a spy. The artists wanted something better than an Establishment turf riddled with moles.

The exhibition looks at once complex and flimsy. A partial recreation of the 1956 Independent Group exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” includes a kind of Russian Constructivist sideshow pavilion festooned with a giant collage that includes Robbie the Robot carrying a sexy girl, a big stout bottle that prefigures the work of Claes Oldenburg, Marilyn Monroe with her skirt ballooning and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Perfectly remarkable the way it predicts Op, Pop, and environmental styles. Perfectly ordinary today for its trafficking in cliches. At least there is a neat jukebox playing 45-r.p.m. records like “Runaround Sue.”

A raw-lumber-and-sand installation by architects Alison and Peter Smithson houses plaster fragments that could as easily be primitive as modern. It reflects the Dubuffet style art brut of the time but it also strikingly foreshadows ‘70s earthworks.

A partially re-created Richard Hamilton installation of 1956 is called, “Man, Machine and Motion.” Its photo blowups of everything from diving suits to cigarette boats were intended as an encyclopedic rumination on human relations with moving machines. Today its juxtapositions recall nothing so much as the present with ideas very close to those of John Baldessari and the CalArts crowd. We see that the use of stock photography put together to investigate the language of vision is some 40 years old and not aging especially well.

The ensemble is far more memorable for what it teaches than for its artistic frisson. Significantly, the best artists to grow from the British Pop movement, from Ron Kitaj to David Hockney, were not associated with the Independent Group. The big distinction is that they transformed their material artistically while much of the independents’ art remains purely informational in character. What did Higgins really want from Eliza? He wanted to civilize her. That’s what the Independent Group did to popular culture. That’s what British pop music did, too. It borrowed our music and returned it a little classier, finalizing, among other things, a white takeover of a black art. Such homogenization is not good for the popular arts but they always recover because they live in the real world.

If the ideas of the independents look a bit wan in their fourth generation that’s because the fine arts recently got the notion it could repeat the rejuvenation it got from pop culture by having an affair with commercial art-media culture.

Everybody knows that commercial art exists by copying all forms of originality and rendering them into harmless, amusing handmaidens of the soft sell. Advertising had already copied the fine arts’ versions of the popular arts. When artists began to copy the media they were trying to breathe life in watered down second carbons of themselves.

Put in perspective, the Independent Group show proves that the various art forms can only cannibalize one another for so long. After an infusion of hybrid vigor the product turns to characterless mush. Then it’s time for everyone to reject the whole mess and go back to doing their own thing. This exhibition shows that after 40 years Henry Higgins can no longer play Dracula with poor Eliza.