Free Provenance by Laney Salisbury Page B

menu and the wine list. Right away, McAlister felt that they had much in common. Drewe was a man of the Left, a former official with the Atomic Energy Authority who had quit after Margaret Thatcher began to privatize government programs. He accused her of wreaking devastation on the arts and sciences with her denationalization campaigns.
    McAlister was no Thatcherite either, and complained to Drewe that while bastions of the art establishment such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum still enjoyed government beneficence, the ICA got chicken feed.
    Cultural historians well understood official Britain’s arm’s-length relationship to the ICA. Ever since its founding in a small L-shaped room on Dover Street in 1947, it had been a constant irritant to the arbiters of art. When cofounder Herbert Read called for public funding, the prickly George Bernard Shaw declared that such funds “would be better spent on hygiene, since hygiene [and] not the arts was responsible for the improvement in the nation’s health over the preceding hundred years.” 9 But the ICA’s early members, who included Henry Moore, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Peggy Guggenheim, and Dylan Thomas, believed that the institute stood as a beacon to those who wanted to create and debate new art forms. The ICA organized poetry readings and “conversation nights” with Le Corbusier and “Bucky” Fuller, and opened a bar where patrons could buy a snack and a drink and discourse until dawn on the new postwar aesthetics.
    “It felt like a railway stop,” Dorothy Morland told an ICA historian. 10 “People passed one another without realizing that some would one day be famous and some would change the face of art beyond all recognition. But as with every station, everyone was in a hurry.”
    Over the years the ICA became a relatively safe haven for avant-garde artists from all over the world. In 1959, during a “Cyclo-Matic” demonstration of the mechanical nature of art, the Swiss Dadaist Jean Tinguely set up a machine operated by cyclists that dumped fifty pounds of drawings on paper onto the street. In the sixties, during an era of sit-ins and protests and the first stirrings of conceptual art, a young Australian artist taking part in a Destruction in Art symposium stood by the roadside waving an animal corpse and spattering the pavement with blood.
    That same decade, the ICA moved to one of the more incongruous locations it could have found anywhere in Britain: a Georgian mansion on the Mall, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. There, it held symposiums on horror comics, television culture, and rubber fashion, during which someone set off a fire alarm, and when the fire brigade arrived in their bright yellow plastic macs they became a ready-made instant hit.
    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