Eduardo was sound on Europe

In the current Brexit context, good to see that Eduardo was a ‘Common Market’ man rather than a fan of the federal nightmare.  That’s not to say that he didn’t like Europe itself – after all, he spent a lot of time in Germany teaching and working.  But, as you see, like many others of us, he left Paris ‘with his tail between his legs.’  And, as a prophet of the Brexit global-trading philosophy, note that Eduardo was selling mostly into the U.S.  The cutting is from The Tatler, August 1962 – a publication which regularly reported on his work and exhibitions during the Sixties:

© Illustrated London News Group

More, NOT Less

Quite an unpleasant critique by Otto Saumarez of Paolozzi’s oeuvre in Apollo magazine, 4^th May issue.  Saumarez highlights Eduardo’s “willingness to embrace ugliness and discordance” in a negative sense.  I would suggest that this attribute, coupled with an ability to find and use images/objects of great beauty, was vital in Paolozzi’s achievements in creating artworks with multi-dimensional relevances and interpretations.

The critique suggests that Paolozzi’s modernism is, “far removed from the elegant smoothness of Henry Moore as it is possible to imagine.”  I’d say however that endless reiterations of that elegant smoothness leave us with a very predictable and non-stimulating oeuvre, whereas Paolozzi delights with ever-changing, fresh and thought-provoking work in a range of media.

Saumarez claims in regard to Pop that Paolozzi, “has none of the panache brought to the style by its best purveyors.”  I thought it had long ago been accepted that Paolozzi was never, simplistically, a “Pop Artist” and once you’ve reviewed the scope of the print series such as Moonstrips, you certainly won’t be thinking of its creator as someone lacking panache!

In this blog, and elsewhere, I’m happy to admit that I’ve never liked Paolozzi’s sculpture as much as the graphic work.  However, I would consider the Sixties/early Seventies pieces – often with echoes of forms/ideas seen in the print series – very evocative of the spirit of experimentation/use of industrial techniques which characterises that period.  To refer to, “the vacuous slickness of his aluminium and chrome-plated sculptures of the mid to late ’60s,” has no relationship to reality in my view.  I may be being a bit thick, but I don’t detect any vacuous slickness about this 1969 ‘Study for ‘Osaka Steel:"

Courtesy N. J. Cotterell

Back to History

Almost pre-history in fact – i.e. even before As Was When!

Making collages, Paolozzi was limbering up for his fabulous Sixties graphics series in the preceding decade.  Between these and ‘As Is When’ there were a few works of special significance since they ‘practised’ that series’ very particular format, style and content.

‘The History of Nothing’ was a short (12 mins) black & white film made by Paolozzi with the help of Denis Postle.  Inspired by Dada/Surrealist ideas, it consisted of an animated series of collages.  In anticipation of concepts for a new kind of interactive fine art which would fully emerge at the end of the decade, it is likely that Paolozzi hoped that by bombarding the viewer with unrelated images a new, self-contained perception of reality would be engendered.  This would be based on the notion that the human brain when presented with images without visually- or linguistically-indicated logical relationships will by default ‘invent’ connecting links intuitively.

In 1962 Paolozzi started working at Kelpra Studio with Chris Prater.  One of their first collaborations was a screenprint, ‘Four Stills from the History of Nothing’.  This was based on a collage he had made whilst teaching in Hamburg.  The main, central elements include items of mining machinery and a strange striped cat set in a constricted, striped environment.  This is the print:

© TheTrustees of the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

I believe that Paolozzi intended to ramp-up stimulation of our (the viewer) creative perception by confusing us with both the print’s title and the presentation of the component images.  With the word ‘history’ it is natural to think of information conveyed in a linear, progressive format, (often a ‘chronology’ or ‘timeline’).  Paolozzi’s style in overall picture composition and the juxtaposition of component elements denies such a perception.

Here, as in so many of the Sixties graphic works, images of machinery/technology feature prominently.  At that time the range and capability of technology was expanding at an unprecedented rate of progress, especially because of the invention of electronics.  Equally some more familiar technologies – from the Industrial Revolution for instance – had, by virtue of their relative simplicity and size, become ‘quaint’ and ‘olde-worlde’, (‘historic’).  But the functionality of contemporary, more ‘hi-tech’ machines and devices would revolutionise the potential for image manipulation; I guess that Paolozzi fully foresaw how computers would enable an artist to create imagery with a freedom and sophistication that was impossible at that mid-century point for him with his meagre ‘tool kit’ of hard-copy print source material, knife, scissors and adhesives.

From a 2017 viewpoint potential referencing is intriguing.  For instance, is that Schrödinger’s cat? (age 27: not bad for a Felis catus) – you know, the one that inhabits the box in the service of quantum mechanics theory? – a discipline that will not reach general ‘popular’ awareness until the end of the 20^th century; and what of coal mining, the basis for a technology that is seen as a major contributor to global-warming, a phenomenon which threatens to spell the end of history?

The magazine wrapper fragments provide a wry comment on the value of information.  Here packaging is the visual device used, with no sign of what would have been physically within, what should surely have been the object of interest, i.e. the magazine itself, and, in a further non-apparent layer, the informational content of the magazine.  In this way Paolozzi seems to have been practising the way of thinking with ‘pictures’ as would be a concern of As Is When, as well as rehearsing that series’ characteristic visual devices and their rendering.

Purely visually, this print looks to me to be a close relative of: Artificial Sun and Reality (As Is When); Protocol Sentences (Universal Electronic Vacuum); King Kong King Kong (Moonstrips Empire News) and The ABC of Z (General Dynamic Fun).

But, whatever its antecedents and ‘offspring,’ it’s yet another great one!

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.

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.

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!’.

The Portfolio and Conclusion

Just to round things off, here is the portfolio box in which the Z.E.E.P. prints were presented:

So that’s it.  In this blog I’ve covered all Paolozzi’s significant print media work of the Sixties.  I believe this has provided a view of a truly great artist at the peak of his powers – innovating, experimenting, challenging his own creative processes and the technical limits of the media. 

Paolozzi continued to create prints through the succeeding decades, but, to my mind never again with the success he achieved with his Sixties oeuvre.  Fifty years on I believe the work is as fresh and relevant as ever.

Busy and Brash

The next print is Agile Coin Gross Decision Logic. 

This image has a clear antecedent in an earlier series.  From 'Universal Electronic Vacuum', War Games Revised, is conceptually similar, as is the format and some of the componentry.  However, where War Games . . . is cool and sombre, Agile Coin . . . is busy and brash. 

All this weaponry repeatedly and banally depicted as goodies in a sales catalogue, yet capable of immense destruction and misery.  The simple, crude repetition of deadly imagery was a frequently visited theme in the Sixties.  Warhol in particular was fascinated by the idea that seeing something over and over again is desensitizing, eventually allowing horrific images to be viewed with indifference.  His Death and Disaster series from early in the decade thoroughly explored this concept. 

AGILE-COIN was a computer war game developed in the late Sixties.  It was an attempt to integrate a variety of types of conflict (rather than just a conventional battlefield scenario) to inform the development of new tactics relevant to the asymmetrical sort of warfare encountered by US forces in Vietnam.

Here is the print in two colourway versions, (the left hand version is an artist’s proof):