The Alienation Effect

Emigrants, Aesthetics, Politics - the 1930s to the 1970s, caught between London and Vienna

This talk, drawing on the author’s recent book The Alienation Effect, will discuss the politics and aesthetics of the migration from Central Europe to Britain in the 1930s, concentrating particularly on how visual art workers and thinkers with roots in the ‘Red Vienna’ of the 1920s and early 1930s - like Otto and Marie Neurath, Oskar Kokoschka, Edith Tudor-Hart, Wolfgang Suschitzky, Siegfried Charoux, Egon Riss, Ella Briggs, Erich Fried, and Walter Neurath - adapted, or didn’t adapt, to British culture and politics, with its apparently conservative values and distrust of modernism. Was this closely linked group of migrants drawn to Britain because of that conservatism - as influentially argued by Perry Anderson - or was it a marriage of convenience? And were the migrants able to drag British cultural life into more radical directions? We’ll try to answer some of these questions, arguing that a hybrid form of modernism with a strong social commitment was the main artistic result of the migration, helping bolster a political settlement which was significantly dismantled from within under the significant influence of other Austrian migrants committed to an anti-Hegelian, Anglophile cultural politics, like E.H Gombrich, Karl Popper and F.W Hayek.

With: Owen Hatherley, writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture; owenhatherley.co.uk

Moderation: Michael Klein / ÖGFA