Eduardo Paolozzi

LAWRENCE ALLOWAY

In this text on Eduardo Paolozzi, Lawrence Alloway makes specific reference to László Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, whose explorations of modern vision had informed much of Parallel of Life and Art . Of particular interest to New Brutalist discourse is Alloway’s emphasis on “new ways of seeing wholes,” as well as his early references to ideas later associat - ed with Marshall McLuhan concerning the connection between media and messages.—A.K.

A negative fact about the art of Eduardo Paolozzi is that it rejects much that modern art has needed in the past. His frame of reference is not a tradition or a studio, as these institutions have been understood; it is the great arena of visual material, art and non-art, typical of the twentieth century. Since 1953, Paolozzi has pursued the human image in art, but not exactly on the terms of traditional art. For example, though influenced by Marini at one stage in his career, he does not, as Marini does, refer to time-bound riches of our “art heritage.” Some of Paolozzi’s forms certainly refer to art traditions, but only in the way in which he also refers to ads in the New Yorker , exhibits in the Natural History Museum, or strips in a comic book. Paolozzi, more than any other artist working in England, integrates the modern flood of visual symbols, a primary fact of urban culture, with his art. The images he collects—of a sexy model girl, a mutilated war veteran, an aerial view of a city, and so on—do not in themselves set his imagination working. Rather, when he draws or models, his experience of visual symbols (art and non- art) is part of his way of seeing. The new reality revealed by modern photography, which Paolozzi uses, is current in modern art. It is closely connected, for example, with Bauhaus ideas, especially as developed by Moholy-Nagy and Kepes in the United States. These artists, among others, saw the field and defined it formally and theoretically. But Paolozzi approaches the material from the opposite direc - tion; to him motion studies, microphotography, illustrated magazines are “natural sources.” To him Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion is not a grammar, but just another collection of images, in line with Life .

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 29 –31. © Lawrence Alloway, from Architectural Design, April 1956, p. 133.

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Like everybody who has grown up with movies, newspapers, ads, Paolozzi has a different frame of reference from most artists who assert their professional sta - tus precisely by excluding most of this ephemeral material from their art. What characterizes images drawn from this kind of material? They combine variety and uniformity in a new way. The variety is the incredible extension of subject matter (literally everything can be given visual symbolic form now). The uniformity is in the quantity of images which enables us to see connections between unlikes. Paolozzi seems to get both properties in his art: the head is a head, a planet, an asteroid, a stone, a blob under a microscope; it is big and small, one and many. Any of these possibilities can enter his drawings and sculptures of heads without excluding others. The images are multi-evocative, not because of old-line surreal - ist incongruities but because of a new way of seeing wholes. That Paolozzi’s conditions of perception are not those of orthodox fine artists is shown by his technique. He avoids, like the plague, not only the virtuosity of Reg Butler, but the competence of Henry Moore. His is committed to lay-usage of his materials, whether in the spluttering pen and stained paper of his drawings or in the knobbly undifferentiated balls of his bronze heads. This appearance of casualness is essential to his art. He finds his images by making shapes. This con - cern with process, visible in his bronzes, drawings, and collages, culminates in his current sculpture in wax. These sheets can be bent in warm water, cut with a hot knife, and assembled with great flexibility. Exploitation of the physical properties of his material is characteristic of Paolozzi. He leaves it at an earlier stage than that at which the art user is accustomed to seeing it; it is “raw material” not “artist’s material.” It will be seen that a lay-usage of aesthetically unprocessed material and an iconology that has roots in all visual symbols rather than in the narrow sub-divi - sion of fine art are logically related. The humanist ideal of the statistically rare, above average human body is countered by Paolozzi. In his early work the question was: how little can a head be made from? The answer involved random conglomerations of small shapes. The question now is: how far can the disintegration of the head go without the head losing its identity? The consuming interest of Paolozzi is with the physiological and psychological limits of man. These limits have been widened lately, with con - centration camps, exposure at sea, the pressure of -45 gravities. It is to find an image of man tough enough and generalized enough to stand up to this environ - ment that Paolozzi is working. 1 The glistening and corroded forms of Man Looking

1. It is interesting to compare these comments with Alloway’s review of a Dubuffet exhibition held at the ICA a year earlier: “He works with the human being on a level below that of differentiation by identity cards and grading by psychological tests. His human beings, like Michaux’s are tough, inter - changeable, and struggling.” Lawrence Alloway, “The Facts of the Matter and the Figures Involved,” Art News and Review (April 16, 1955), p. 2. Indeed, Alloway will write something almost identical on Paolozzi two years later: “The human image he creates is a figure that obstinately survives violence and change. It is a human being below the level of dog tags, identity cards, telephone numbers, and street addresses.” Lawrence Alloway, “London Chronicle,” Art International 2 (December 1958–January 1959), pp. 36, 101—Ed.

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Eduardo Paolozzi. Man in a Motor Car. 1956.

Up investigate the limits of the human image in a way that parallels the manhan - dling of the material he is using. Close to this aspect of his work are images from horror comics and science fiction: Alex Schomberg, a cover artist for Startling Stories , for example, depicts a man in a space-suit at a limit of existence, the human schema just this side of disintegration. Another phase of Paolozzi’s recent work is concerned with man and technology. In Man with a Camera , for example, he symbolizes an aspect of the man and artifact relationship. The field work was done in Life and Fortune , but Paolozzi is not concerned with the increase in the operator’s efficiency by means of this extension of the body. On the contrary, the camera is not handled in a way that we read as efficient; it is a part of the features, and like them it is asymmetric and scatty. Paolozzi’s point seems to be that the clumsy, obdurate, exasperated humanity makes tools personal. The artifact gives in to the archaic nature of man. Man in a Motor Car , for example, a wax sculpture, belongs to the same phase. Paolozzi’s work, then, shows a way in which the limits of art can be extended even as an image of man is being pushed to new limits. These two activities are simultaneous, the media and the message being interrelated. For this stress on the act of making and on a popular iconology Paolozzi can be connected with Willem de Kooning in New York and Jean Dubuffet in Paris. —Architectural Design (April 1956), p. 133.

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