Eduardo Paolozzi
Writings and interviews   

Edited with an Introduction and Supplementary Texts by Robin Spencer

Published by Oxford University Press, December 2000. 367pp(Colour & BW).

This compendium is essential reference as a microcosm of late 20th century culture. The immense reach of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s intellectual and creative spectrum is not readily grasped: only this book, today, can lead one into the circuitry of the artist’s remarkable mind. Nor can Paolozzi in any way be categorised or grouped within or without his culture. In Studio International, Volume 182, October l971, pp136—143, Eduardo Paolozzi was the subject of a remarkable interview, or rather a ‘conversazione’ with his great friend and close contemporary, the author J G Ballard, and the historian and critic Frank Whitford (the full published text of this discussion can be sourced from the select archive). In the course of the discussion Ballard was dismissive of the relevance of Surrealism to his own writing, while by contrast, Paolozzi admitted the connection, disassociating himself from ‘Pop’.

This interview had occurred at the time of the notorious Tate Gallery l971 retrospective exhibition, which carried a message inherently critical of the institution: for which Paolozzi was ‘struck off’ the inner sanctum of the then Tate Gallery, and 30 years later has yet to be reinstated. One does not bite the hand that feeds one. Publicly, the exhibition was successful and memorable. The three friends met to tape the interview in just such a critical backlash, with some amusement. In the catalogue for the exhibition, the Director of the Tate Gallery at the time, Sir Norman Reid, had recognised Paolozzi as ‘the most volatile of 20th century sculptors’, but while focusing on his influence on ‘Pop’, had signally failed to relate Paolozzi himself to precursors that Paolozzi greatly admired in the Surrealist movement, thus denying him that historical precedent. This is dealt with in the attached interview by Paolozzi directly.

Wittgenstein in New York. Print from series 'As is when', London 1965. Eduardo Paolozzi

Curatorially, however, there were to be further repercussions following this disenchantment. Paolozzi found recognition, understanding, and a kind of artistic asylum simultaneously in both Germany and Scotland. Major projects followed swiftly in both countries. Paolozzi’s great friend and patron, Gabrielle Keiller, an active friend of the Tate at this time, later left her superb Surrealist collection to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (where today it is exhibited adjacent to Paolozzi’s own Archive in the Dean Gallery) and Paolozzi continues to live and work in London, as always, recognised at least by the Royal Academy, of which he has long been an Academician.

It is clearly within the European Surrealist context that Paolozzi’s work can be seen partly to lie. Yet it is so wide in its perspective and range of source material, much of which has both eulogised and parodied the emergence of consumer-led society, that this is only part of the story. It is to Spencer’s massive compendium that we can now look to provide a broader and more comprehensive grasp of the main field, and its steady and all-embracing expansion, through various media.

Cleish Castle ceiling, Eduardo Paolozzi

I am very pleased to be invited to review this book, since I had the opportunity, as architect for Cleish Castle, Scotland (l970—l973), to commission from him the Cleish ceiling and tapestries — the former now expanded and installed in the main hall of the Dean Gallery at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (a specially converted annex to the National Gallery of Modern Art). This gave me the opportunity to observe Paolozzi at work on a major project from initiation to completion. The ceiling — then and now — defined a primary architectural space, providing and defining a communal area, and incidentally allowing almost perfect acoustic conditions through the casting of metallised GRP moulded panels. Then, as with the Tate restrospective, Paolozzi’s highly skilled assistant, Artur Laskus, enabled the fulfilment of Paolozzi’s idiom and compositional complexity to be achieved to perfection. In the original Cleish eight-metre cubic space, as at the Dean Gallery, it has been possible to view the intricate, shallow relief modelling of Paolozzi’s chosen visual language of form at an upper level as well as at ground level. Paolozzi was fascinated by the shallowness of certain Renaissance and Classical relief carvings, and achieved the same degree of formal control (including of light and shadow) which such precedents had exemplified in history. But the imagery remains wholly contemporary.

Michael Spens, Artur Laskus and Eduardo Paolozzi

During the meals, coffee sessions, expeditions, and chance encounters — as well as studio sessions — that characterised Paolozzi’s evolving and all-embracing design process, an encyplopaedic taxonomy of contemporary life occurred, as in some massive time collage. The American master architect Lou Kahn was on his way to see the installation just before he died, prefiguring his visit with a congratulatory telegram.

The ceiling lives on, more publicly available than ever. The original site, in typical Scottish historicist mode, has been desecrated, stripped, and recreated in Victorian style — which says something about Scotland and the retreat from modernism there. Now, in the Dean Gallery, as one surveys again the mechanistic and formal language expressed in Paolozzi’s Cleish reliefs, adjacent to a reasonable facsimile of his London studio (it lacks only his actual telephone); and as one takes in the graphics, ceramics, ‘ready-mades’, and sculptural masterpieces ranging over 50 years; it is excellent to have to hand Spencer’s publication, which alone opens up for our access that rich inner circuitry of Paolozzi’s mind.

Robin Spencer has managed with distinction a complex editing process. He has divided the book into nine thematic chapters, allowing the reader an awareness of the basic chronology without excessive ordering, so as to make more evident the range of retroactive and connective interaction that enables past and present to coexist in the work, as in Paolozzi’s work as a whole. Spencer recognises basically two types of writing here. Paolozzi’s own writings are revelatory (which will completely surprise many readers, especially those familiar with Moonstrips Empire News, l967). Secondly, there are included more conventional and formal interviews and statements which make valuable markers of his creative ingenuity over the half-century.

Yet there is a secondary biographical template which, wherever appropriate, also becomes autobiographical. Various episodes from childhood and teenage experience (as at the outbreak of war) relate the internment of family, the torpedoing of his father and other internees drowned en route to Canada, and are directly described — all the more movingly for Paolozzi’s distinct lack of pathos.

It has been said that for Paolozzi, ‘all human experience is one big collage’: Spencer admits that the book is thus inevitably composed of ‘fragments of a constantly sought-after, but similarly unquantifiable reality’, but all are conjoined. Indeed, this book can also play an ongoing role now as a permanent catalogue for the exhibition of Paolozzi’s life, or for that exhibition that never has been, or at least still may be. There is a certain well-thumbable austerity in this book that cannot go amiss: the only colour pages form a section illustrating the series of 12 screenprints that form the ‘As is When’ series, based by Paolozzi upon the life and writings of the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The impact of this section in the book is rather like a great stained glass Gothic window in an otherwise austere cathedral. The publisher has achieved perfection of colour, origination, and reproduction here (even rejecting one printing entirely in this quest). This exemplifies also the artist’s extraordinary and myriad range of colour, and its deployment throughout his career in every medium he has chosen.

The full extent of the book, a kind of Paolozzian thesaurus, runs to 368 pages; including in all some 300 illustrations, and embellished with Paolozzi’s own endpaper design. So does the assembled material, combined with Spencer’s own scholarly and fascinating footnotes, constitute a complete reference work, which can be entered accordingly at any point in the sequence of pages, in an informative yet wholly inspirational manner.

The book reveals that from the earliest trip to Paris, Paolozzi was in search of a true theoretical basis for all his work, rooted in everyday reality, probing the materialism of contemporary culture. He emerges as both a processor of the flotsam of consumer society as well as the precursor of its electronic definition in cultural terms. Much of Paolozzi’s work of the l960s and l970s prefigures the typology of cyberspace. Through that morass, Paolozzi has hoped that theoretical discourse would establish relevant meaning and purpose. Accordingly, in those early days he seeks out Leger, Brancusi, Giacometti, and Arp, finding their names in the Paris phone book.

Like a phone book, this book needs to be available in some surreal condition, in kiosks, with a chain attached, allowing passers-by to make their calls. But that heritage of an earlier generation deeply influenced Paolozzi and so he was also able to deploy effectively the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, for example, in the ready-made objects with which, cryptically, he confronted eager Pop enthusiasts. Yet as early as l976 he had distanced himself: ‘The Pop period was rather disturbed and immature,’ he said that year in a Times interview with Roger Berthoud, ‘I was a great ready-made man in those days. I’ve tried to bypass that now and rely on total invention. It’s rather like the difference between pornography and eroticism.’

Professor C H Waddington, a pioneering geneticist and art theorist in his time, in his seminal work, Behind Appearance (Edinburgh University Press, l968) recognised with particular prescience Paolozzi’s long-term importance, and quotes him with reference to the concept of the sublime: ‘It is the sublime of everyday life (my own conception); I seek to stress all that is wonderful or ambiguous in the most ordinary objects’. Paolozzi submits objects elected to a kind of transformation: ‘I suppose I am interested, I, above all, in investigating the golden ability of the artist to achieve a metamorphosis of quite ordinary things into something wonderful and extraordinary that is neither nonsensical nor morally edifying.’

Through the writings so comprehensively and perceptively presented here, it is possible to identify in Paolozzi’s written texts the connective tissue of thought which unites all his works within a solid theoretical basis. The logical succession to this publication is a full monograph on the artist, by Robin Spencer, who has established a unique understanding with him. But this cannot be delayed. Meanwhile, it is also time for a major international retrospective of this artist’s work, which perhaps we may be permitted to see in London too, after a long interval of scarcely credible curatorial soul-searching.

Michael Spens