Collage part three: Pop Art and Paolozzi

Paolozzi 

I’ve just been to see the excellent Pop Art exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. It was fascinating to see a really good collection of screen prints by some of the best British Pop artists of the time in one place. Colour is of course vital to how these works are received, but without the idea of collage so much of this work would not exist.
Visit this earlier post to give more context to collage.

Collage as a drawing technique is central to the idea of drawing as an inclusive discipline, one that is the result of ‘things coming together’. Collage can be brought right into the centre of drawing theory, if you decide that a mark left by a pencil on a sheet of paper can also be thought of as a type of collage. Sticking bits of paper onto a flat surface is not so different to sticking a crumbly graphite powder onto another flat surface. This way of thinking also means that the idea of drawing as traces can be included as part of a definition of collage. Traces of the earlier life of these paper fragments, connect to their 'Ur-history'*, in a similar fashion to the way the material properties of other drawing materials shape the outcomes of encounters between surfaces and objects within an object orientated ontology. 
*Ur-history was a term used by Walter Benjamin that focuses on any manufactured object's complex social and political history. For instance the ur-history of the pencil includes the lives of workers who manufacture the graphite, or mine it. It would include the lives and working conditions of the people involved in the wood industry, the paint industry that supplies the colour coating of the pencil's surface, the people involved in the distribution of the pencils to the various shop outlets etc. etc. (What I'm getting at here is that drawing as an idea can be about the inter-weaving of social history, politics, material thinking, chemical differences and sub-atomic theory, and can be seen simply as lines following the various threads of the Wyrd, linked narratives that are at times the domain of inorganic objects, at others part of the domain of sentient beings)

Paolozzi collage from the 1950s.

Eduardo Paolozzi's collage's from the 1950s still came across as fresh and vital, and you could see clearly why silkscreen printing as a way to further his ideas was exactly right as a medium. The way that in print all the various elements can be brought together in one unifying format really helped Paolozzi's ideas. The technique in this case providing the mechanism that helped the artist achieve the image's 'gestalt', a term widely used when I began my art education, that was taken from psychology and was used to describe the importance of the totality or wholeness of an image, and how this was in many ways of greater significance or of greater value than the sum of its parts. In the image below both the rectilinear structure and the restricted use of cyan and magenta as key colours ensure a particular emotional colour tone and geometric stability draw the various elements into a totality. 

From: General dynamic F.U.N. screenprint

Screenprint allowed Paolozzi to add controlled colour to the process of collaging together images, as well as giving him more control over the composition of the images, as individual elements can be resized as they are taken through the various reproduction processes. 
He was working in both 2 and 3D. However in both cases the essential constructional tool was collage and a clear sense of how 'disegno' (a term that fuses together our two different words, drawing and design, which was used during the 16th and 17th centuries to designate the formal discipline required for the representation of the ideal form of an object in the visual arts) works as an underlying principle.

Left image: cast metal from wax original. Right image: silkscreen print.

Paolozzi: Saint Sebastian, bronze

The bronze above was made by pushing various found objects into wax and making sheets of these wax surfaces, which were then cast in metal and welded together to form the standing figure of Saint Sebastian. The drawing together of the various elements allows for new narratives to be developed, this Saint Sebastian is made of all the bits of life that surround us, its wobbly legs mean that it is only just able to stand, reminding us that at his martyrdom he was clubbed to death and the image Paolozzi has made feels as if this figure has just attempted to rise up from a recent clubbing. This three dimensional drawing expands our notion of 'drawing in space' and incorporates 'constructivist' elements into drawing, in the sense of carving, modelling and construction being the three key forms of sculptural practice, which can all be also thought of as approaches to drawing. (Especially if you think of drawing as thin sculpture.)


The Comte de Lautreamont's famous poetic line, “As beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”, is of course often cited as being the trigger to the Surrealists' growing awareness of the importance of collage, and we can open the idea out to embrace all things that are happening, things are “as beautiful as the honey on my toast meeting my teeth and tongue,” or "as significant as the itch on my leg caused by a change in the soap powder used to wash my socks." The significance of Jarvis Cocker's 'Common People' is due to the chance meeting of a Northern working class lad and a posh Greek woman on the St Martin's fine art course. Things come together and make new things and as they do rich patterns emerge, ones that as an artist you can reveal as you work with them. 

From Paolozzi's 'Moonstrips empire news'

Of all the various series of silkscreen prints produced by Paolozzi the series I was most taken with was his take on the life and writings of Wittgenstein. Each of the prints included a short extract from Wittgenstein's writings and the conjunction of text and image worked to not only 'illustrate' new ways to interpret Wittgenstein, but to also open out further approaches to thinking about the nature of languages themselves, and how the physical substance and different perceptual mechanisms needed to 'read' them were an integral part of both what could be said and what could be understood.   

Wittgenstein in New York

Pop seemed to be a radical movement when it first emerged in the late1950s, but it is easy to forget that Picasso was making colleges many years before. Here is one of his from the 1930s. 

Picasso

The exhibition 'POP! Art in a Changing Britain' is on at the Pallant House Gallery in Chicester until the 7th of May 2018


Nb
If you are interested in the concept of the Gestalt and how it can be applied to the reading of an image, one of the best introductions is: 'The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination' by Anton Ehrenzweig 

Richard Hamilton: Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Another 'father' of Pop Art in England was Richard Hamilton, his collage above from 1956, highlights similarities and differences between himself and Paolozzi, Paolozzi built and constructed from the world around himself, Hamilton deconstructed imagery and its messages that shaped the world he was immersed into. 

See also
Collage part one
College part two
College part four

Articulated collage