Machined Mosaics

By ROBERT HUGHES

Machined Mosaics Every art show is an archive, but none more explicitly so than the retrospective now at London's Tate Gallery. It runs from elaborate silk-screen prints dedicated to Wittgenstein to a giant chrome-plated combat boot; from a stack of bombs to a sprawling collection of clippings, toys, scraps and Mickey Mouse emblems hoarded by the artist over the past 30 years. It has all been assembled by Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, 47, an amiable, lowering Scottish-Italian with lobster-claw hands and the build of a robot. The show, a melange of art work and subject matter, represents Paolozzi's two decades of involvement with Masscult.

The uneasy relationship between technology and "fine art" has become a crucial problem for artists over the past 20 years. It involves a chronic split between two modes of perception. On the one hand, the leisurely, selective, linear images on the museum wall; on the other, the shifting, promiscuous, more or less disposable flood of information and patterns that makes up most of our everyday visual experience. Much recent "novelty" art, as diverse as Pop and kinetics, is acutely conscious of that disjuncture. Indeed, the split itself has become a form of subject matter, and few men have made use of it more steadfastly than Paolozzi. For nearly a generation, he has been an indispensable provocateur.

Clanking Robots. Paolozzi's work has always displayed an obsessive consistency of theme, even to those who in the '40s and '50s could not stomach it. Massculture artifacts are common coin in gallery art today; they were not so when Paolozzi, working in Paris, produced a whole series of collages scissored from American magazines--cover blondes from pulp thrillers, bombers and Jell-O from LIFE. Fifteen years ahead of time he predicted the grotesque iconography of lushness, repetition and violence that American artists would eventually discover in their own culture. In 1952 he helped form the Independent group in London whose aim was to present mass culture as a source of art. In postwar Europe, this material seemed to come from a transatlantic dreamworld. "For the French intellectual," Paolozzi observed, "a Coca-Cola bottle was a phenomenon. In America it is merely a way of life." One of his collages, from 1948, contains the word POP issuing from the barrel of a gun: a prediction that amuses Paolozzi today. "People sometimes say that I missed the boat, that I should have made a career out of Pop art. But I was never keen on it. I felt there should be more to it than simple artifacts, consumer goods; and I'm still more interested in making layers of paradox and irony."

Paolozzi's sense of irony is summed up in his favorite image: the robot. His studio in London is crammed with movable models, winking and swiveling and clanking with pathetic obduracy across the floor: the prototype mechanical serfs of a democratic Utopia that never comes. Paolozzi's sculpture of the 1950s is full of such presences, which suggest movies about walking mummies and Frankenstein (whose creation, as Paolozzi points out, was nothing other than a primitive collage of human spare parts). A sculpture like Saint Sebastian, 1957-58, its bronze skin crusted with the shapes of reclaimed junk that Paolozzi had incorporated into the mold, balances neatly between golem and ikon. Its sources, including Dubuffet's art brut, are obvious enough but its lack of sentimentality has preserved it better than the work of most of Paolozzi's English contemporaries.

Implicit Paradox. Paolozzi's obsession with large machine images took full form in the '60s: in sculpture, with a series of works that have to be fabricated from his blueprints by an English metalworking factory. The shift was largely provoked by the two years Paolozzi spent in Germany. Like the pop image of America, it was a dream Germany, too, a vision of crushing technological ruthlessness first evoked by Fritz Lang in Metropolis--Prussia in stainless steel. The paradox implicit in such works as Imperial War Museum, 1962, is the tension between their precision-machined forms and their ambiguity--by turns robot, building, cityscape and machine, the sculpture ends up a generalized Moloch.

Screen prints, however, which Paolozzi has been experimenting with since 1964, have become his best-known works. They are customarily assembled from his "archive," without attention to chronology, so that, as Paolozzi says, "some of the images are separated by thirty years of yellowing in portfolios." The profusion of imagery in prints like BASH is like a fast ride through Times Square, or an hour clocking the color TV tuner. An overloaded mosaic of signs and metaphors is presented with deadpan exactness. What Paolozzi once said of his sculptures is equally true of his prints: "Rational order in the technological world can be as fascinating as the fetishes of a Congo witch doctor--scientific phenomena become significant images."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.