The March of Time

Much as I have tried (!) I have yet to find any of Eduardo’s sculpture or his graphic work post-Seventies, as satisfying and attractive as the Sixties series which are the main feature of this blog. 

I feel that Paolozzi himself had a similar view.  Like most significant artists, he constantly sought to develop his artistic practice and find new forms of expression/technique.  But, I believe his thinking naturally strayed back to the heady days of As Is When, UEV, etc, from time to time, and this guided his eye and hand.  As examples, look at these two prints:

 

Blueprints for a New Museum, 1980 

The imagery and subject matter are familiar from the Sixties work.  However, the representational images here do not function quite so well in juxtaposition as in the older work without the abstract pattern use, which somehow both unified the overall image and also defined sub-fields.  But, as so often in the Fifties and Sixties, I sense that Eduardo’s Science Fiction head was well and truly on and connected.  And yet some of the objects which would have been fantasies for the future not so long before, had become by 1980, relics to display as if ancient, in a museum. 

From 1998, nearing the end of his life, comes this lithograph, very much in the style of the early Sixties prints and sculpture:

September 1998 

Colour use and form are to me classic Paolozzi, and all the better for that!

For an aesthetic tea-time

As previously noted, Paolozzi often derived pattern from prosaic sources, for example the chequers on the Abba Zaba wrapper.  I could easily imagine his finding a pattern that inspired him on items of every-day crockery.  So it’s pleasing that his patterns have from time to time found their way onto tableware.  My thoughts on this have been prompted by the availability recently on eBay of this Rosenthal limited edition plate from 1984:

Courtesy of sconejamcream 

Possibly an appropriate plate on which to serve Mr Corbyn a smoked salmon and lobster on hand-made, organic, artisan wholegrain, sandwich? 

More recently Royal Doulton offered a terrific range of crockery featuring pure Paolozzi pattern in sumptuous saturated colours:

Courtesy of Royal Doulton 

I have some of this and it looks good as well as being nicely made.  Items from residual stocks are still available, for example from China Chaps: https://www.chinachaps.co.uk/index.php?filter=true&brand=0&category=0&type=0&colour=0&product_size=0&limit_start=0&limit=36&order=product_type.asc&order_dir=asc&keyword=Paolozzi

Cloud Atomic Laboratory

The schism that separates Space Age Engineering, technical photography, film making and types of street art from fine art activities is for many people/artists unbridgeable.  Within the grand system of paradoxes, the theme of this portfolio is the Human Predicament.  Content enlarged by precision.  History shaded into the grey scale as in the television tube. 

Skull of Test Dummy. Proton-Synchron Electrophysical Laboratory: Vacuum Pumps to the Electromagnet.

©The Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

Ever since I first set eyes on one of his prints in 1965, (would have been one of the As Is When series), as well as revelling in their sheer visual splendour, I have wanted to understand the meaning of Paolozzi’s imagery and texts.  This I have tried to analyse and explain throughout my writing on this blog.  During the course of the Sixties the complexity of Paolozzi’s thinking and expression progressed, peaking with Z.E.E.P. 

Then we come to Cloud Atomic Laboratory.  This is a series of eight etchings in an edition of 75.  It was commissioned by British Olivetti and was printed at Alecto Studios in 1971.  To my eye these are the least attractive images I have seen from Paolozzi.  I’m missing the usual multiple juxtapositions, the incorporation of pattern and the sheer pleasure of rich colouration. 

Paolozzi suggested that these photographic images were a top skim of the huge number he had been collecting since 1952.  Importantly, there was no modification of them beyond the rendering in a uniform, very bland photogravure-style printing.  That the printing method was etching was the only cue – apart from knowledge of who was presenting them – to their being ‘artworks’.  So really we are here concerned with the same Dada notion whereby Duchamp’s urinal became a piece of sculpture simply because it was installed in an art gallery.  An important milestone in art ‘history’, but not really worth repeating some 54 years later. 

I was prompted to write this post by the recent receipt of mailshot from GoldMark – this excellent gallery/on-line seller was offering a set of Cloud Atomic Laboratory prints at £1,200 each.

So what have we got?  It’s another cracking series title, hinting at sexy stuff like innovative, leading edge technology and space travel.  (On the downside, I do sometimes muddle this series up with the previous year’s Conditional Probability Machine.)  It is also a further example of Paolozzi’s willingness to keep trying new approaches/media, despite having found great facility and success with screenprinting and lithography. 

Otherwise, we have a set of images which I find quite depressing.  Some of this is due to their style being very similar to that of illustrations found in the outdated encyclopaedias which were prevalent in the Fifties – the very poor ‘equivalent’ then for an information-hungry kid of today’s Internet. 

I’m sorry to say that for me these prints do not achieve the ‘bridging’ function Paolozzi cited in explaining their creation in his Introduction reproduced at the top of this post.

Upper Space

A very elegant installation of Paolozzi prints is currently to be seen at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, (until 12^th June). 

An excellent preview featured in Wallpaper - http://www.wallpaper.com/art/eduardo-paolozzi-politically-charged-printed-pop-art-works-at-yorkshire-sculptural-park#150944  

See how good the six Z.E.E.P. prints look side by side:

Courtesy of the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

 For more information see - http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions

Impossible Possibilities

This is an intriguing stand-alone screenprint from 1973.  Entitled ‘Quadrum Dax’, it was printed by Kelpra in an edition of 100.  Dimensions are 86cms x 64cms.

I see it as a very satisfying hybrid, recalling the mechanistic, painted sculptures of the early Sixties, the pattern componentry of As Is When and Universal Electronic Vacuum and looking forward to the more ethereal graphics style that would peak with Paolozzi’s prints of the late 70s.  It is an exemplar of what Paolozzi was talking about in his letter published in The Guardian, 6 March 1967:

By employing engineering methods the iconography of the sculptor can be extended far beyond the normal range of the traditionally trained and studio bound artist and the high technical standards of industrial commercial process, including screen printing, can provide a complexity and range of possibility impossible by normal art-craft printing methods¹. 

As to colour, I regard it as a halfway house between the use of high contrast, saturated hues – often of the primaries – in the Sixties’ print series and the much more muted schemes of the Kottbusserdam Pictures and Turkish Music series (1974), and Calcium Light Night series (1974-6).  The composition anticipates the four-block structure of the woodcut series of 1975, For Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 

The rendition of pattern and the geometry is much more clinical than in any other Paolozzi print I have seen. 

I suspect that Paolozzi selected the title mainly on the basis of his liking for the sound and/or look of quirky words and phrases.  It is not a notable Latin expression.  Quadrum obviously refers to ‘four’ and Dax can ‘mean’ anything from a proper name to the German Stock Exchange. 

The print does not feature in the relatively comprehensive Tate on-line catalogue and is missing from the lists in Kelpra Studio: The Rose and Chris Prater Gift. Artists’ Prints  1961-1980, unless it represents one of untitled items, DP4886 or DP4887.

______________________________________________________________

1 The full text of this letter is reproduced in Eduardo Paolozzi Writings and Interviews, edited by Robin Spencer, Oxford University Press, 2000

Abba Zaba Doo (with apologies to Fred Flintstone)

Abba-Zaba is an ‘artist’s book’ created by Eduardo Paolozzi whilst he was a guest lecturer at Watford School of Art in 1970.  The content continues themes from Moonstrips and General Dynamic F.U.N.

The production method and cost constraints limited the image content to black and white rendition.  Here is a sample page:

At one level of interpretation, given the title, Paolozzi, tongue in cheek, was perhaps presenting a compendium of texts and imagery which represented a neatly distilled A-Z of the World, (all in the course just 70 pages.)  In 1970 we were not yet nearing the brink of the new world of information technology but I believe Paolozzi had considerable foresight of this.  With this he envisaged the completely revised cultural situation in which we now live: a milieu abounding with information, images, concepts, speculation, news, junk news, soap opera, advertising, marketing, video, audio, virtual reality, noise, music, jingles, and dissonance.  This is a 24/7 world in which it is increasingly more difficult to be all-knowing/expert as there is just such a huge volume of data to be assimilated.  And it is certainly impossible to ‘sum up’ fields of information neatly in the sort of reference works/encyclopaedias we were still turning to in 1970.  With the inter-connectivity of information sources as well as the sheer volume of the stuff, any single - or body of - representation of knowledge is likely to be obsolete before you can re-transmit or print it. 

But what is Abba-Zaba?  It’s a brand of Californian confectionery manufacturer, Annabelle Candy Company.  The bar itself is chewy – like toffee – with a peanut flavour centre.  I don’t know if Paolozzi liked the taste, but I’m sure he was very attracted by the packaging, especially the chequer patterned wrapper – there is an echo here of the Cox’s gelatine packet design that he used in the As Is When series, see - http://paolozzi.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/tortured-life.html

Abba-Zaba also enjoys plenty of Paolozzi-friendly mass-media associations – name-checked in tv shows, movies and rock music; with the latter for example, Capt Beefheart’s LP, Safe as Milk was originally slated to be named Abba-Zaba.

The book was published in a limited edition of 500 and nowadays it regularly comes up for sale, recent examples being offered for an average price of £195 – so it’s a very affordable way to own a signed/numbered Paolozzi printed work.

50 Years on and back in Albemarle Street

I have been a fan of Paul Smith’s sumptuous ties and socks for years.  Long ago I had a wonderful pair of stripy socks, looking rather akin to a 425 line tv screen suffering from, (maybe alien-transmitted from deep space), interference, which I referred to as my Eduardos.  So I was especially pleased to find this collaboration between the Designer and Emma Paolozzi:

Courtesy of Paul Smith

The details of this can be seen at: http://www.paulsmith.co.uk/uk-en/shop/stories/eduardo-and-emma-paolozzi-at-9-albemarle-street  

I’m only sorry that I was unable to get to London for this event last October.  It was at 9 Albemarle Street – I would have enjoyed the added nostalgia factor that this street was the location of the Editions Alecto gallery which I frequently visited in the Sixties.

The Subject is S.I.N.

I have always much preferred Paolozzi’s graphic work to the sculpture.  It is true, however, that it is the latter that has received the most general acclaim.  And some of the oeuvre – the Tottenham Court Road mosaics, ‘Four Towers’ and ‘Hamlet in a Japanese Manner’ for example – straddles the media.

(Part of) Hamlet in a Japanese Manner      Courtesy GoMA 

Of the sculpture, some of the Sixties works appeal to me as they relate directly to – and have the same ‘look’ as - the great prints, such as, ‘Wittgenstein at Casino’. 

Later in his career, Paolozzi became very interested in Sir Isaac Newton and William Blake’s monotype of him.  In the various versions Paolozzi succeeded in expressing the reality of human thinking, whereby apparently contradictory notions can – indeed, HAVE – to be accommodated.  Blake, from a traditional religious viewpoint disapproved of the Newtonian quest to scientifically account for the world, (in the Wittgenstein sense), and rendered him as myopic, whereas Paolozzi’s Isaac, in the version at the British Library in London, has Michelangelo’s David’s all seeing eyes. 

But I remain convinced that Eduardo should have stuck to printmaking – just look, below, at what happened when he was in the role of the sculptor - a suit (!) and . . . !

Courtesy Frank Thurston

Paolozzi Revealed

I have just finished reading Ann Shaw’s Paolozzi Revealed.  It’s an account of Paolozzi’s 10 day 1996 ‘masterclass’ in which 18 people participated.  Ann herself seems to have ‘got’ Paolozzi eventually, though there was clearly some animosity, especially because of an incident on the last day when he gave her a verbal dressing down in front of the class. 

Ann’s record of the ‘event’ has an ongoing theme wherein the ‘students’ feel dissatisfaction with the lack of instruction/direction by Paolozzi.  Coupled with his apparent lack of manners – what we’d now call ‘interpersonal skills’ – the Artist is portrayed as antipathetic, hostile even. 

It is said that the most technically gifted footballers cannot be good coaches because of a lack of patience: they just can’t understand why their pupils are unable to perform with the brilliance they themselves do.  And with Paolozzi you have a man who has spent a lifetime building up ideas/concepts and repositories of objects and imagery – component materials with which he is ready to work in novel and refreshing ways at the drop of a hat.  Little wonder that he was frustrated by a group of mature ‘students’ who seemed to be wanting to be told ‘what to do’! 

Paolozzi told the group that they would ‘learn’ by an osmosis-like process facilitated by being in his company.  That seems entirely logical.  All that is unfathomable to me is why Paolozzi would have agreed to conduct the masterclass at all – I can’t see what was in it for him. 

Incidentally, in response to Paolozzi’s suggestion that the class goes to the library to read what’s been written about him, Ann says that he hadn’t written much himself.  That’s not so – for starters you’ll be more than a day or two working your way through the book, Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews edited by Robin Spencer.  This book alone will tell you far more about Paolozzi than the recent monograph by Judith Collins which Ann advocates: it is a disappointing book for its superficiality and absence of fresh insight and interpretation of Paolozzi’s ideas and imagery. 

Ann’s account is fascinating and the photographs add immediacy.  If you already ‘know’ Paolozzi you won’t learn much you don’t already know, but it will add what used to be referred to in painting classes at my Sixties Art Schools as ‘local colour!’.