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

Human Fate and World Power

Last of the six prints in the Z.E.E.P. suite is Human Fate and World Power:

I find this one very forward-looking.  As the twentieth century drew to its conclusion, society radically – and quickly - changed, became fragmentary, as mass communications media and easily facilitated transportation eroded mono-cultural societies. 

And notice that in the blue background field two of the things – the car and the aeroplane - that have hastened the fragmentation of human experience are themselves rendered as fragments. 

Symbolising the ‘old’ model of the world, the Fitch vault key looks a bit pathetic – will such simple technology continue to enable the safekeeping/security of people, ideas, culture, information in the new world?  Clearly not.  Indeed by the twenty first century we will have laws forcing authorities to release information that previously was so closely guarded.

A parrot can speak and imitate human vocalisation, but – like a computer – not know why it’s doing it - discuss.

More of the day, rockets, submarines and fighter planes, (even comical ones), were reasonable images to portray the currency required for world power – how different today in the context of asymmetrical combat and the notion of ‘war on terror’. 

The Sixties and the Seventies were decades when human fate did seem to rest on the machinations of a ‘cold war’ between two world superpowers – the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.  Looking back they now appeal, ironically, as settled times – it was basically a stalemate and a related conflict, which would indeed decide the fate of the human race, was always unlikely.  How different today.