The Great American Dream

Paolozzi was first subject to major external influencing artistic culture when he took himself to Paris in 1947.  There he became immersed in the traditional fine art milieu of the Twentieth Century, especially impressed by the works and concepts of the Dadaists and Surrealists.  However, by early the following decade, he had tuned in to transatlantic influence through his interest in mass media output, and then, certainly, nowhere was such imagery being generated in greater variety and volume than in the USA.  He was showing collages of this material at The Independent Group events as early as 1952.  This activity has given rise to Paolozzi’s and the Group’s branding as Pop Art pioneers, although Paolozzi’s ideas and sensibilities went way beyond those of the mainstream Pop masters of the Sixties.

Moonstrips and General Dynamic F.U.N. burst at their seams with images which typify the consumer society of Sixties America.  It’s likely that by the time Paolozzi was assembling these prints, his view of what the component imagery represented culturally had become jaded.  In the relative austerity of Fifties England we saw most things American as exciting and we aspired to have them here, to own the goodies, copy the styles.  Beyond that generality, Paolozzi was intrigued by the new information technologies developing in the USA.  He had a clear vision of how they could enhance the scope of his artistic practice.  He wrote:

. . . computer graphics in the UK remain on a primitive level. . . .In the case of the last series, Universal Electronic Vacuum, the images were based on ‘Ready-mades’ from various journals, in some cases the same image was enlarged and repeated. The final collage was re-adapted by photo-stencil into various colour combinations for screen printing.  Computer graphics offers much more sophistication than the above method.  The library of raw material to be scanned and stored – programming aimed at conversion combination technique assimilation.  (Extract from a letter to TRW Systems, California, 1969, reproduced in Eduardo Paolozzi Writings and Interviews, edited by Robin Spencer). 

However, by this point, outside purely artistic considerations, Paolozzi had no doubt come to see America in a less attractive light; in lefty England the perception of things like The Vietnam War, race relations and junk quality/disposable goods had taken the shine off the Great American Dream and many of Paolozzi’s image juxtapositions seem to express this, for example: 

EA # 724 Decency and Decorum in Production:

EA # 733 Pig or Person, it’s the same, Fortune plays a funny game:

Some more on collage

Robin Spencer, in his Introduction to Eduardo Paolozzi, Writings and Interviews, expands on the Paolozzi quote in my last post: 

Paolozzi’s account of collage as a ‘symbolic art, like life itself – a tangle unravelled’ – describes not only its magical properties, but also the fundamental purpose of making art.  Collage, a ‘projection of experience denied’, enables both artist and viewer to make sense of themselves and of a world which is chaotic and meaningless.  Collage embodies the revisionary nature of art, because the artist has to destroy before he can create; he constantly reviews his material by adding to and subtracting from it.  The ‘damage, erasure, destruction, disfigurement and transformation’ process to which Paolozzi subjects things to make collage is necessary before new metaphors can be given life.  The creative act of collage, which embodies the destruction-creation myth, is ‘a method of taking the world apart and reassembling it in the order that one understands, and that order is ruled by one’s emotions, intuitions and intellect. That is Surrealism.  And that is perception’.

EA # 708 Why children commit suicide . . . read next month’s issue:

EA # 709 An Empire of Silly Statistics . . . A Fake War for Public Relations:

Paolozzi on collage and two more great examples from General Dynamic F.U.N.

For a 1977 exhibition catalogue Paolozzi wrote: 

Making collage can be a symbolic art, like life itself – a tangle unravelled.  Experience denied or an iconographic interpretation divorced from the niceties of formal analysis.  As in a painting by Carpaccio or Bosch improbable events can be frozen into peculiar assemblies by manipulation – time and space can be drawn together into new spatial strategy.  Dream and poetry can be fused without the usual concessions to graphic limitations.  Figures from a Turkish landscape trapped by cruelty may be released and find themselves perplexed and frightened in a French nursery flanked by the mechanical sphinx. 

I would hope that for anyone perhaps confused by the General Dynamic F.U.N. prints, that statement will help them understand the creative concepts. 

The Suite is an exemplar of the times – when the availability and broadcast of imagery from each and every cultural source was suddenly expanding exponentially.  General Dynamic F.U.N. showed how such diverse imagery could be utilised to evoke responses based on innovative, non-linear thinking, (that's you, the viewer, doing a lot of the work!). 

EA # 704 Calling Radio Free America:

EA # 707 Cary Grant as a male war bride:



General Dynamic F.U.N. - first two selected prints

The June 1968 issue of Studio International announced: Eduardo Paolozzi’s new series, General Dynamic F.U.N., given a recent preview at the ‘Obsessive Image’ exhibition at the I.C.A. will be issued in three editions: on film, as a paperback book and as a limited graphic edition.

The graphic edition – sometimes tagged as part 2 of Moonstrips – was published by Editions Alecto in 1970; it had been 5 years in the creating.  The suite included 50 image sheets collated into 5 version sets – 70 prints of each, making for a total edition size of 350.  Some prints were photo-litho, some screenprints. 

The first print, a photo-litho, with EA stamp # 700 is Transparent creatures hunting New Victims:

EA # 703, also photo-litho is Early mental traits of 300 geniuses:

Pattern

The final look at Moonstrips here is at the pattern-rich picture prints, six of them below:

It would be difficult to overrate the value of pattern in artistic practice.  It enables the creation of visual harmonies, symmetry and rhythms.  These can be highly instrumental in manipulating the viewer’s mood, (usually towards calmness), as well as their visual experience.  And, where a pattern is interrupted/disturbed, a sense of unease can be evoked.

Pattern helps establish order and solidity – in traditional painting think for example of how Vermeer’s tiled floors underpin the 3D effect of his interiors.  In modern art, where there is no concern with perspective, pattern has often been used to ground and integrate disparate imagery within a single painting/print – this is a technique of Paolozzi’s.  His chequers and squares and stripes slosh about on a print like the stock of a soup in which the diverse chunks of pictures/words can be seen and appreciated as part of something which overall is more appealing than the individual ingredients. 

Whilst the use of pattern for integrating purposes is so notable in prints such as A formula that can shatter into a million glass bullets in the Universal Electronic Vacuum suite:



that portfolio also included continuous pattern images such as Memory Matrix, (below), similar to those seen in Moonstrips.

Paolozzi collected patterns as raw materials for his collages – as he did all sorts of images/objects – from a vast range of sources:  food boxes, sweet wrappers, crochet patterns, engineering drawings, etc.  It is pleasing to see that these often mundane visual devices live on beyond their original context in some of the very best artworks of the mid-Twentieth Century.

Monkey Business

Monkeys and apes figured across the years in Paolozzi’s ‘image vocabulary’, for example: a chimp in The Dynamics of Biology, (Bunk!), 1952; another in uniform in Gina Lollobrigida, (General Dynamic F.U.N.), 1970; a pair in Pop Art Redefined, 1971. 

Among the unsigned picture prints of Moonstrips one of the most striking is ea 782 King Kong King Kongking Kong:

Here is Paolozzi’s expertise in deriving and combining patterns deployed to great effect.  As for this specific ape, I can’t help but wonder if there’s an echo here of ‘Tortured Life’ from As Is When – the poor old misunderstood creature; persecuted and apparently unpleasant, but, as Hollywood showed us, also capable of the most tender feelings! 

That tenderness is perhaps evident in ea 763 The Windmills, he murmured, . . .

Paolozzi had first used this image in an early Bunk! Collage.  Here it is below as featured in the facsimile series printed in 1972 and published by Snail Chemicals:

And, it’s the words that indicate an unseen, but possibly lurking ape in ea 750 My Pal the Gorilla Gargantua:

How’s that for colour vibrancy!

For more on 60s prints, please have a look at http://davidbuckden.wordpress.com/

The Elephant in the modernised room and some secrets

Formica was a key material for DIY dads, (mine especially), in the Fifties and Sixties; whapped over old table tops, shelves etc., its groovy patterns helped turned Edwardian homes like ours into spaces fit to watch Juke Box Jury in on a Saturday evening.  Invented as far back as 1912, it was a laminate made from kraft paper with a melamine top surface.  Formica-Formikel is the seventh signed print:

Final signed print is Secrets of the Internal Combustion Engine.  Paolozzi was fascinated by engineering and loved related imagery.  Back in the Fifties/Sixties understanding of technology was limited outside specialist communities.  When cutaway drawings of cars and aeroplanes began to appear more frequently in comics/general interest magazines, it really was like letting light in on magic.