Culture Now: Anne Massey in Conversation with Ben Cranfield

What is to write a history of an institution dedicated to the contemporary? What can be gained from writing-in the history of non-museal spaces that have been the sites for the formation and display of culture? Can and should such histories be written?

Sharing their experiences of working with the traces of the ICA's early history, Professor Massey and Dr Cranfield will discuss potentials, problems and possibilities of working with the ephemeral traces of the post-war obsession with capturing the fleeting and the now.

Anne Massey is Professor of Design at Middlesex University. Her writing on interior design includes Interior Design Since 1900 (Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition, 2008), Designing Liners: Interior Design Afloat (Routledge, 2006) and Chair (Reaktion, 2011). She is the founding editor of the academic journal Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, published by Berg since 2010. She has researched and lectured widely on the subject of the Independent Group, including The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture, 1945-59 (Manchester University Press, 1995) and Out of the Ivory Tower: the Independent Group and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press, 2012).

Ben Cranfield is Director of the Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies and the MRes in Cultural Enquiry at Birkbeck, University of London. He is currently developing a book project, Chasing the Contemporary, investigating changing ideas concerning the relationship of art to technology, education and society in the post-war period through the lens of the ICA. This work will build on recent articles Between Consensus and Anxiety: Curating Transparency at the ICA of the 1950s (Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2012), ‘Not another Museum’: the search for contemporary connection (Journal of Visual Culture, 2013 forthcoming) and Students, Artists and the ICA: the revolution within? in Resurgence of the Sixties: The Continuing Relevance of the Cultural and Political Watershed (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2010). His work is concerned with questions of cultural memory, institutions, archives and curatorial form. In 2007-8 he curated the series 60 Years of Curating at the ICA, London and was contributing editor of How Soon is Now, the ICA’s 60th anniversary publication.