'Not Another Museum': the search for contemporary connection

This article considers the site of the Independent Group’s formation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA), as a discursive proposition, using the institutional level (understood as a meeting place of the pragmatic and ideal) as a vantage point from which to re-encounter a plurality of positions that defies the congruities of thematic analysis. To this end, the author examines how the ICA was formed, in relation and distinction to the institutional designation ‘museum’, through an analysis of the three terms that make up its title. He argues that the ICA was a rhetorical space that emerged from a complex negotiation between extant possibilities and understandings of artistic value held within the fragmenting, but hegemonic, discourse of the museum and demands for technocratic, productive relevancy. He proposes that this space impelled, and was, in turn, made manifest by, the declaration of the Independent Group, as a response to and negation of the ICA’s particular formulation of the contemporary