As Advertised

Editions Alecto had a four page ad in the December 1966 issue of Studio International, featuring As Is When:

Here are the other 3 pages, illustrating the quality and depth of the Editions Alecto artist squad of the time!

Experience

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

Kelpra Studio; The Rose and Chris Prater Gift; Artists’ Prints 1961-1980   Tate Gallery   1980  Introduction by Pat Gilmour.

 

Tortured Life

Paolozzi closely identified on a personal level with Wittgenstein – he once referred to As Is When as a ‘combined autobiography’.  A major element of this was a mutual feeling of cultural alienation in Britain – Paolozzi with his rural Italian heritage, in Leith, and Wittgenstein from high society Vienna, in Manchester, Cambridge and London.  Against the grain of much of the fashionable thinking of their times, both Paolozzi and Wittgenstein considered their work to be matters of activity rather than abstract thinking/doctrine. 

Geographically, Paolozzi seems to have been especially interested in the Italian monastery at Monte Cassino, midway between Rome and Naples.  It was here that Wittgenstein was confined as a prisoner-of-war during World War 1. Paolozzi’s father had come from the village of Viticuso which is less than 10 miles east of Cassino. 

Although born in Scotland, (1924), Paolozzi was interned during World War 2 and his father, grandfather and uncle were lost at sea as a result of a U-boat attack en-route to Canada.  This may well have given Paolozzi heightened empathy with Wittgenstein in respect of his family tragedy – three of his brothers committed suicide.  Wittgenstein himself contemplated the act, especially at times when he felt disgust for the milieu of his occupation and way of life. 

Wittgenstein felt that his ideas were generally misunderstood and unappreciated in his time. This underlying theme was perhaps Paolozzi’s main reason for identifying – and here depicting – Wittgenstein’s as a tortured life. 

The texts in Tortured Life are from Georg von Wright’s writing on Wittgenstein: 

Wright, one day in a trench on the eastern front while he was reading a magazine in which there was a picture of the possible sequence of events in an automobile accident.  The picture, he said served as a proposition where parts corresponded to things in reality, and so he conceived the idea that a verbal propo 

sition is in effect a picture.  By virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world.  In other words, the structure of the proposition ‘depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs’. The Tractatus 

The proposition: ‘There is no hippopotamus in the room at present?’ When he refused to believe this, I looked under the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced.

Let us ask the question: ‘Should we say that the arrows > & < point in the same direction or in different directions?’  At first sight you might be inclined to say ‘of course in different directions’.  But

One other aspect of Tortured Life is Paolozzi’s interest in the Laocoon – a Trojan priest most notably depicted with his two sons in an ancient sculpture located in the Vatican.  The priest is shown fighting off an attack by sea serpents.  Paolozzi apparently especially liked the strong visual dynamic of the sculpture and saw it as an iconic paradigm of human struggle.

One of the components for the collage is the chequer pattern used on the box for Cox’s gelatine – something locally and topically familiar to Paolozzi, and making a nice contrast with the exotic aspects of a deceased Austrian philosopher and high art involving an ancient Trojan!

 Here is the print:
 

And this is Paolozzi’s sculpture, Wittgenstein at Cassino: https://www.flickr.com/photos/harryhalibut/6045613167/in/pool-paolozzi

And his sculpture, Towards a New Laocoon:

Artificial Sun - colour variation

At this time, Paolozzi was working on the leading edge of the relatively-new-to Fine Art medium of silkscreen printing.  This was facilitated by the expertise of Chris Prater and his Kelpra Studio. Chris’s greatest contribution probably lay in his prodigious skill with the knife.  As Richard Hamilton later commented: . . . ‘one only has to see the ‘As Is When’ series to appreciate Chris Prater is the greatest stencil cutter around’.   Eduardo enjoyed the collaborative aspects of working with Chris and his technicians, apparently valuing their contributions to the finished product – this being very much opposed to the traditional concept of the artistic genius working in splendid isolation and in sole control of his output.  Paolozzi was described as being a dynamiter, applying, a knee to the groin of genteel middle-class ideas about culture.  More than anybody, he was seen as having poured scorn on the romantic notion of the artist.  All his work – the sculptures which came together on the shop floor at Ipswich, as much as the graphics, realised for him by the skills of professional printers, was an indication of this attitude. 

A significant aspect of the approach was the variation of colour for each image.  In the colophon sheet included with the prints in the Portfolio this is referred to: ‘The image is built up by multiple printings through a colour chart, the final statement in each case varying according to the programme of colour selection.  This is possible only by the use of precision techniques and photomechanical aids.’  Paolozzi and Prater had first experimented with this concept in the 1963 prints, Metallization of a Dream (second version) and Conjectures to Identity; in As Is When this was developed into a systematic routine such that no two prints of each image are identical.    According to Pat Gilmour – author of several excellent books on printmaking – Paolozzi achieved this by devising a permutation of no less than 88 colourways.

This meant, paradoxically for a so-called’ mechanical’ process, that every image in each edition was unique, playing havoc with craft maxims about identicality.  With a resounding tinkle, the Guardian writer, (M. G. McNay), informed his readers that the secretary of the Printmakers’ Council of Great Britain ‘barely tolerated’ Paolozzi’s suite.  He also raised the stale Paris Biennale issue again, hinting that the British Council had been wrong to send only screenprints ‘in which photography was involved’ abroad and saying that in such matters, the Printmakers’ Council felt itself ‘more qualified to judge’.  This was typical of the constant barrage of uninformed critical writing that screenprinting engendered.

Here are two further versions of Artificial Sun to demonstrate colour variation:

As Is When begins . . .

In February 1964, (the month in which The Beatles were recording Can't Buy Me Love), Paolozzi made a work-note:  collage called the artificial sun; series of collage based upon Wittgenstein precepts.  The resulting images, published the following year, comprise the As Is When suite of screenprints – a ground breaking masterwork. 

At this time, Paolozzi was 40 and best known for his sculpture and involvement with the proto-Pop Independent Group in London in the mid-Fifties.  He had formed an interest in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early-Fifties and this developed significantly and with great personal empathy when he read Norman Malcolm’s Memoir, published in 1958.  Paolozzi found himself closely identifying himself and his art both with Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his, (problematic) life journey.  Initially, this resulted in sculptures such as Wittgenstein at Casino: the photograph below shows Paolozzi in 1964 in New York where this piece was on exhibition at MOMA:

Artificial Sun is the first of the 12 prints (plus Poster) and is dated 13^th May 1964.  It is one of the nine prints in the Suite based on Wittgenstein’s thinking; (the other three depict events/aspects of Wittgenstein’s life).  The incorporated statement: The world is all that is the case is a proposition from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only work published, (in 1921), before Wittgenstein’s death in 1951.  In this reflection of his early philosophical thinking, Wittgenstein contended that a verbal proposition is a picture of reality.  So now consider the reality of Artificial Sun:

Contemporary comment on Universal Electronic Vacuum

The December 1967 issue of Studio International featured a detail from Computer-Epoch on its cover:

Inside, in the Magazine's London Commentary section, Charles Harrison wrote about Universal Electronic Vacuum: 

One of the more dazzling exhibitors in ‘Transatlantic Graphics’, Eduardo Paolozzi speaks of the screenprints in his new series as failures. (Universal Electronic Vacuum is on exhibition at the ALECTO GALLERY).   If we can free ourselves from the spell cast by images with a visual appeal and impact as strong as these have, we may come to agree with him.  The failure is in the process, which, in reproducing the mental excitements of an age in which so much information and so many stimuli are there to be absorbed, can yet find no precise equivalent, in visual terms, for the activities of scanning and digestion.  This is of course only a failure in comparative terms.  No one has travelled further than Paolozzi in search of a solution to this particular problem nor come closer to finding one.  For us it is the evidence of restless search that makes these prints so intensely exciting.  Paolozzi has constantly pushed at the frontiers of printmaking, acting as an ideas-man in a technological context.  Collage elements from all sources – Woolworths table cloths to computer circuits, five and dime store cutouts to fine art reproductions – are manipulated into a series of total images, constructed like nests of Chinese boxes, in which the artist is involved so far as they are critical assessments of a given situation.  These collages are ‘translated’ by the screenprinter and printed in a range of colours decided by a part-arbitrary, part systematic process which guarantees tonal balance.  The printmaker acts as a servo-mechanism for the ideas of the artist.  The employment of computers as means of reproducing episodes in the process of scanning is an obvious next step upon which Paolozzi is already determined. 

Meanwhile there is much to learn from the Universal Electronic Vacuum.  The content of the prints is one man’s singular consciousness in an age of multi-media, expressed through the language of that age.  The artist feeds us with stimuli which we, so far as we respond to them, can use to establish an image of his idea.  These gorgeous colours and dazzling shapes are not solely for our delectation.  An understanding of the things he does – of his behaviour in a visual sense – gives us insight into the experience of the artist and enables us to share his idea.  The printed sheets of the Universal Electronic Vacuum are not records of visual insights but ideas expressed in visible form.  The sets are printed in such a way that no two runs of the same print produce the same arrangement of colours.  It is less important that the colours are arranged as they are than that each print is different within the same edition.  What matters is the idea of infinite difference, with its far-reaching implications for the structure of our thinking about the art object.  The actual colours printed are no more than the record – the visual evidence – of this idea.  If the artist could convey his ideas without needing to create objects which embody them, he would be no less an artist.  In human terms the artist is the man whose ideas are most energetic.  He is no less than that and no more. 

There is a real possibility that the rapidly developing involvement with the screenprint, often to the neglect of other, more fine art media, will have the effect of forcing us to look more closely at the real content of art.  It is a paradox that the artist may well be able to reveal more of himself by leaving the execution of his ideas to the technician.  If the object itself, seductive as it often is, can be so accurately specified and so easily duplicated, perhaps we shall come at last to value its physical substance less that the idea for which it is no more than a clothing.

The Poster and Text Page

Final limited edition screenprint in the Universal Electronic Vacuum suite is the Poster:

This, and the other UEV screenprints, were printed by Kelpra Studio.  Editions Alecto, which had published the As Is When (1965) and Moonstrips Empire News (1967) suites, also produced a version of this poster.  This was in a lithographed edition of 4,000, unsigned, unnumbered and unstamped.  Image/paper size for this item is 903 mm x 565 mm whereas the limited edition prints are 1000 mm x 675 mm.  The lithographed version is shown below:

  

The June 1968 issue of Studio International carried an ad by American Art Posters offering a 940cms x 635cms version of the poster, signed $25, unsigned $5.

The suite also includes a text page: