Experience is the third print
in the As Is When suite.
In
her book, Eduardo Paolozzi, Diane
Kirkpatrick says of Experience:
What is the artist’s
subject? ‘The world is all that is the case’.
‘The structure of the proposition “depicts a possible combination of
elements in reality . . .”’ ‘All
experience is the world and does not need the subject’. In the print, the
visual pattern is a series of horizontal strips, each filled with an intricate
and richly varied collection of pattern fragments. The patterns appear to
blend, shift and even oscillate backward and forward in space. They might be visible thoughts, symbols for
experience unlimited by a finite physical subject.
Diane
refers to the viewer not simply perceiving a visual image, but undergoing a
distinct, physical experience, (like, for instance, an electric shock),
triggered by the work – something I have encountered most markedly by standing
in front of one of Bridget Riley’s very large paintings.
Paolozzi used elements from
Artificial Sun in creating the Tortured Life collage and subsequently cut
up a proof of that print into horizontal strips on a guillotine and
re-collaged them together again to make Experience,
while bromides of the same image became soldiers’ uniforms in a later sheet, (Wittgenstein the Soldier).
Five prints from As Is When still hung in the kitchen of his country home in 1980. Among them Tortured Life and Experience were the sheets that he said had given him the most pleasure from among his many graphic works. ‘These are the ones I like best,’ he said in 1976. ‘These are ones I keep looking at.’
Quotes from:
Eduardo Paolozzi Diane Patrick Studio Vista London 1970 SBN 28979756 x
Editions Alecto Tessa Sidey Lund Humphries Aldershot 2003 ISBN 0 85331 877 8
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