technology – robert harbison's blog

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For a few years in the mid 1950s Eduardo Paolozzi stumbled into a magical zone where he got closer to the roots of sculpture (and of poetry) than any of his contemporaries.

He was a self conscious, but not a particularly intellectual artist. In his collages of the late 1940s he played with references to Hellenistic sculpture in violent activity or tangled groupings. Apparently he wasn’t too interested in archaeology, but he was profoundly drawn to ideas of physical ruin and dreamed of contemporary objects that had been mysteriously buried and then unearthed.

The paper collages can be a lot of fun, but in this thrilling little exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert in Bury Street they seemed a trivial backdrop to the depths of his sculptures, sculptures whose relations to surrealism were deeper and harder to fathom than the obvious ones of the paper work.

untitled 54 collage w screenprint 1951? DSC02843 copy.jpg Paolozzi himself drew attention to the diversity of his sources, even reading a list during a lecture at the ICA to show the whimsical range of all the various objects which had caught his eye. It’s amusing and deliberately alarming, but it sets us barking up a lot of wrong and non-existent trees.

Here is his full list, of which we can feel Paolozzi getting tired before he has finished:

Dismembered lock/ toy frog/ rubber dragon/ toy camera/ assorted wheels and electrical parts/ clock parts/ broken comb/ bent fork/ various unidentified found objects/ parts of a radio/ old RAF bomb sight/ shaped pieces of wood/ natural objects such as pieces of bark/ gramophone parts/ model automobiles/ reject die castings from factory tip sites/ CAR WRECKING YARDS AS HUNTING GROUNDS.

12 paolozzi figure 57 DSC02830 copy.jpg The trouble is that none of these things are there any more in the sculpture, only impressions such as you might capture in hot wax or castings in a single material that levels out the variety, as if you had buried them all in the same earth (or metal, for they are now all uniformly a messy, unbeautiful bronze). So they are like the things in Wallace Stevens’ poems, tantalising ghosts of their sisters in ordinary reality or even worse, barely recognisable, partly overlaid by something else, no longer nameless because turned to liquid and run out across the flat background sheet. And many of Paolozzi’s ‘things’ are only parts of things—handles, tubes, eyes (as in hooks and eyes), washers, circuit boards, many of them only vaguely familiar to un-mechanical man.

12 paolozzi figure 57 DSC02837 copy.jpg In some sense it is a true entry into this hidden realm of Paolozzi’s activity to plunge right into the phantasmagoric textures without allowing an overall orientation to start with, but it is also a misrepresentation because you do recognise the figure before you get swamped by the detail, which may be the essential experience of these works, but isn’t the starting place.

There have been times when I wished all the pieces had nice clear names like the first two do—Bird or Table–only bird in a travesty-sense, or table like a children’s toy, but starting out comfortably at home and not adrift.

2 paolozzi table 49 DSC02823 copy.jpg So I set about naming the strange beings: limping man, hideous puckered man, triangulated man (or lopsided man, semaphore man, glued-together man, splat-man—all names for one of my favourites, so a good place to start). He is off-centre, deliberately so, and seems to be sliding sideways. I can’t explain why this unworkable geometry is so compelling, or why I love the idea of an uncountable number of pieces so unreliably bound together.

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When you step to one side and get an end-on view it’s almost incomprehensibly different, an unexpectedness which happens so reliably in walking round these works that it comes to define them.

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8 Robot 56 DSC03300 copy.jpg There’s Robot, whom I know as toga-man or Roman senator, who unfurls a scroll in front view but shocks us from the side and behind where he looks uncannily like Snoopy the cartoon-dog, but then you notice punctures in the dog’s head which allow you to thread the object like a Chinese landscape on a scroll, where you get lost in a series of miniature interiors.

9 paolozzi shattered head 56 DSC02908 copy.jpg There are sculptures to which accidents seem to have happened, like Shattered Head, for whom I’ve invented a narrative, in which he was intact and harmonious to start with, but was dropped on a hard surface and smashed, after which he was carelessly reassembled, so that the openings in his face are no longer in the right places, but we read them as eyes and nostrils anyway, now grotesquely misplaced as we have sometimes seen with badly wounded veterans.

9a damaged warrior 56 DSC02912 copy.jpg There’s even one called Damaged Warrior, ambiguous name—is it the sculpture or the man who has suffered? He is Truncated Man, sliced in two by a bomb or by the artist’s decision, but how could you choose to cut this torso in just this way?

Moving around him, you come to a view in which he is a cabbage unfurling at the top, most beautifully and unexpectedly, yet completely shattering the figure’s integrity. One of the greatest joys of sculpture is finding unexpected views, and with the alertest workers it often seems there is almost no end to the metamorphic, kaleidoscopic shiftiness of the unfolding reality.

9a damaged warrior 56 DSC03289 copy.jpg I can’t remember any work by other sculptors which goes further or gets separated more radically from likelihood. Yet Paolozzi soon grew tired of the endless transformations. Perhaps the various discontinuities are too great to go on thinking up new ones forever, and there’s an almost inevitable urge to return to the world of everyday possibility, but while it lasts, Paolozzi’s 5-year excursion into fully three-dimensional surrealism is without equal.

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Go on to 10, 12, 13, 14, 16–more to come, I hope

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Writing is so familiar that it takes a real effort of imagination to remember that it needed to be discovered or invented. The Writing exhibition at the British Library put us back in the time when writing lay in wait for us, before we had stumbled upon it. The early stages remain obscure, images on cave-walls that we find expressive, a handprint surrounded by dots, at Pech Merle in France, for which the book of the exhibition supplies a literal translation, ‘I was here, with my animals.’

That might be regarded as proto-writing. What does the earliest true writing look like, then? Little pictures scratched on the shoulder-blade of an ox and standing for what the cracks and fissures in the burnt bone are trying to say?—this is a widely shared idea of the beginnings of writing in China, written characters springing out of the same natural forces that reveal themselves in animal remains. So writing keeps a flavour of the divine and never loses, however abstract it becomes, its strong link with the visible world.

In Mesopotamia writing appears more mundanely in fixing boundaries and accounting for possessions. There’s a persistent effort (a wish?) to trace these beginnings to Egypt. In 1905 this little sphinx was found, on which a British archaeologist thought he saw the first inklings of an alphabetic order, an ox-head facing left who was an early striving toward the letter A. His theory was refuted, only to rise again, with new evidence, in the 1990s.

The contest between syllabic and alphabetic systems reappears periodically in the exhibition, one of the most striking outcomes being the Chinese typewriter of the mid 20c, which instead of 40 keys has 4000+ characters lying on a flat bed, which must be picked up individually, pushed against the paper and then put back. Twenty characters a minute is the maximum speed achievable in this language, which can’t easily be atomised.

Apparently, switching alphabets is easy. Stick-on Hebrew, Thai and Tamil keyboards appeared in the exhibition. Above is an Arabic keyboard, which I cannot evaluate for completeness or attractiveness. It seems to double-up along different axes from the cap/ lower case mode of Roman keyboards.

The evolution of the letter A was traced through five stages, and we cheered them on as they got closer to the truth. We also delighted to learn that the last known inscription in cuneiform occurred in 75 AD and the last hieroglyphic text in 394.

The Vai language of Liberia and other parts of West Africa waited until the 1830s to find a written form, which was revealed to its discoverer Momolu Dwalu Bukele in a dream. This is syllabic not alphabetic; the text below tells part of a family history.

It is easier to believe that writing is intrinsically magical when everything about it is as foreign as it is here, but even Latin in cursive form, explained by the need to produce texts quickly, becomes mysterious again, all the more because it is clearly not fine writing striving for an artistic effect. This comes from the record of a sale of property in Rimini in 572.

Latin turns up again in coded form recording conventional material in 9^th century shorthand, which again achieves prosaic savings of time and space. A slave of Cicero’s is credited with the invention of this system of abbreviations originally devised for preserving his master’s speeches. One wonders if the strange variety in the length of the strokes isn’t a form of play or mystification, throwing decoders off the track.

One of the most tantalysing exhibits was a Burmese album of tattoo designs in an intricate folding form. The images, all in white on black, were often obscured or interfered with by inscriptions in gridded lozenges, one letter or character per compartment, which made the text eat up large areas of the image. A horse-like animal’s head and chest were completely consumed by twenty-four characters in an 8 x 3 grid. Presumably the words that seem defacements to us were charms for which the whole project existed, and which only took effect when they were written on the body of the tattooee by a miracle-worker, equivalent to or more special than a priest.

It is apparently a respectable theory and not just a Wordsworthian fantasy that the idea of the alphabet first appeared in the mind of a child. It is now a commonplace that the very young are most adept with the new forms of communication, which carry their oft-mooted threat to old forms of writing (by hand, for instance) or of dissemination (by printed books, above all). These changes inspired the present exhibition, which reminds us of a long and precious history but isn’t blind to such thrilling new forms of expression as eL Seed’s (a version of a medieval hero’s name, el Cid) calligraphy on an urban scale, an inscription urging us to cleanse our sight that stretches over fifty buildings in a despised district of Cairo populated by garbage collectors. The casual scribbles of teenage graffitists lie somewhere behind this enormous work, finally brought to pass in 2016, writing which transfigures the ruinous fabric of the city.

Another teenage ‘writer’ (the technical term in New York for a graffiti artist) was among the group of Syrian boy-graffitists whose arrest and torture for covering walls with slogans sparked off the Syrian revolution. Against this new outdoor form of writing we can put the old indoor, solitary form represented by an old white novelist, another breaker of moulds in his time.

Writing: making your mark at the British Library until 27 August 2019

Category: technology

Early Paolozzi: Hollow Gods

Writing: an exhibition at the British Library