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Eduardo Paolozzi's Psychological Atlas*

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Eduardo Paolozzi's Psychological Atlas* Eduardo Paolozzi’s Psychological Atlas* JOHN-PAUL STONARD Eduardo Paolozzi compiled his collage book Psychological Atlas while living in Paris in 1949 and discovering, as he put it, the “relics of the prewar Dada and Surrealist movement.” Preserved as an archival item, Psychological Atlas is rarely seen; in a poor physical condition, it is kept together by yellowing scotch tape and desiccated glue. Its appearance approximates Paolozzi’s own definition of the modern relic as something “fortuitous and ephemeral, somewhat dusty, pathetic, and absurd, like the votive crutches and other macabre objects that the beneficia - ries of miraculous cures have left in a shrine like that of Lourdes.” 1 Psychological Atlas is clearly a homage to the remnants of Surrealism, made as Paolozzi was meeting such figures as Tristan Tzara and Alberto Giacometti, with the knowledge that the movement was drawing its last collective breath. 2 The psychology Paolozzi surveys in his collage book is that of popular imagery: robots, animals, landscapes, bodybuilders, politicians, ethnographic images, industrial architecture, film stars, and the whole assortment of sensa - tional or exotic material to be found in illustrated newspapers, from the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung to Life magazine. A number of montages evoke Surrealist ethnographic assemblages, but the tone is modified by the inclusion of a collaged television set on the opening page and a color image of an American city a few pages further on. Scenarios created by cut-out figures past - ed onto strange settings evoke scenes of contemporary life, using familiar methods of Surrealist disjunction. Other tableaux are more bewildering, show - * This essay is derived from a paper given at the Contemporary Art Workshop at the University of Chicago, February 2010. Thanks to Christine Mehring, to Jennifer Wild, and to all those who partici - pated, and also to the staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, London. 1. Paolozzi, quoted in “Interview with Eduardo Roditi,” in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews , ed. Robin Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 86. 2. Paolozzi arrived in Paris in June 1947. Undoubtedly, he would have visited the last major group exhibition of the movement, “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme,” which opened at the Galerie Maeght in July, and he would have talked to Tzara about his political condemnation of the movement, for - mulated in the lecture “Le Surréalisme et l’après-guerre” given at the Sorbonne in April that year. OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 51 –62 . © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 52 OCTOBER ing odd environments peopled by figures evoking the refugees and displaced persons of postwar Europe. The title Psychological Atlas derives from a book of the same title published the previous year, a now-forgotten anthology of psychological stimuli and percep - tual phenomena, collected by the popular scientific author David Katz, used to accompany public lectures on psychology. 3 Yet, despite the numerous copperplate illustrations that fall easily into the category of Surrealist source material, Paolozzi appropriated only the title of Katz’s book. 4 More striking is Paolozzi’s cannibaliz - ing of the exhibition catalogue Kunstschaffen in Deutschland (Art in Germany) as the material base of his collage book. 5 This 1949 survey of modern German art was the first of an important series of exhibitions held at the Munich Collecting Point, one of four locations in Germany where looted and displaced works of art were assembled in preparation for restitution. Paolozzi’s collaged additions to the 1949 catalogue obscure all the reproductions while retaining some of the titles and the text—just enough to reveal the nature of the publication, and to generate found captions to his image-assemblages. (Paolozzi used this technique frequently in subsequent work, as in his appropriation of illustrations from the 1948 autobi - ography of the German émigré painter Jack Bilbo). 6 Psychological Atlas echoes the work of the Collecting Points in gathering images for the purpose of salvage, sug - gesting a different context for Paolozzi’s early collage works, one that re-orders the existing connections to late Surrealism and considers the context of a ruined nature in postwar Europe, a historical situation wholly different from that in which Surrealism originally appeared. 7 Paolozzi described his Bunk collages, made around the same moment, as “radical Surrealism,” referring both to the diverse nature of the source material and his often deviously punning use of it, a description that is borne out by the works themselves. 8 With Bunk , the emphasis falls more obviously on images of con - sumer culture derived from American magazines such as The Ladies’ Home Journal and Life . But the radicalizing of Surrealism with which Paolozzi was engaged can be traced back to his 1949 book. Indeed, as a subtitle to his Psychological Atlas , 3. David Katz, Psychological Atlas (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948). 4. Whether Paolozzi used Katz’s book for later work, in his collage books, or in his short film The History of Nothing (1962), has yet to be established. 5. Using existing publications as both the support of the collages and the source of the titles was an approach in keeping with other collage books Paolozzi made at this moment. These include People in China (which Winfried Konnertz dates 1943–44), collaged into Ellen Thorbecke’s People in China (London, 1935), and Crane and Hoist Engineering (dated 1950 by Konnertz, but given a terminus ante quem of the next year by the source, G. A. Mitchell’s Crane and Hoist Engineering: A Complete Reference Book on Design, Construction and Application of Cranes (Muskegon, 1951). See Konnertz, Eduardo Paolozzi (Cologne: DuMont Verlag, 1984), p. 18. 6. Jack Bilbo, Jack Bilbo: An Autobiography (London: Modern Art Gallery, 1948). 7. Konnertz, Eduardo Paolozzi , pp. 44–46. 8. Paolozzi, quoted in “Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation with J. G. Ballard and Frank Whitford,” in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews , p. 199. The text was first pub - lished in Studio International 193 (October 1971), pp. 138–43. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Paolozzi’s Psychological Atlas 53 Paolozzi added the words “Histoire Naturelle” on the inner cover, assembled from different typographic sources. Yet this reference to Max Ernst, whose work he would have seen in Paris (probably in the collection of Mary Reynolds), accounts only in part for the image of nature conveyed in his collage book. Landscapes predominate, but in all cases the image is of a nature corrupted, invaded, and diminished by technology. In one collage, two GIs and a baseball player wander in a strange landscape, which we assume to be the European war theater, though we could also be looking at the surface of the moon. A clue is given by the small image of a farmer’s field, shown on its side, at the bottom right hand. By reorienting the military landscape, a strange, ravaged body, lacerated and patched, is revealed. An image of a rural landscape affixed below, the home counties perhaps, is more reassuring, but, though the landscape is intact, the figures are scarred and unrecognizable. Surrealist dépaysement is itself displaced on to a postwar landscape dominated by a catastrophic vision of nature, of terminally disrupted habitation. Ruined nature is nature denaturalized—this is what Brutalism recognizes—a disturbance in nature that presents itself as terminal. Paolozzi never got as far as environmentalism, a curious fact considering the principles of recycling, the “metamorphosis of rubbish,” and the transformation of waste material that gov - erned his later work (he also spent a good amount of time teaching in Germany, just as the Green Party was being established). There is nevertheless a prophetic discourse about nature lodged in his works of this period, developed “radically” from his earlier Surrealist allegiances. Tracing the transition of Paolozzi’s con - cerns from Psychological Atlas to Bunk , it can be seen that it was in the antagonistic notions of Pop and Brutalism that this prophecy most keenly arose. What follows is a selection from the forty-two numbered pages of the Psychological Atlas , most of which are conceived of as double-page spreads. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 All images: Eduardo Paolozzi. Psychological Atlas . 1949. Courtesy Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Paolozzi Foundation. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00042 by guest on 29 September 2021.
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