Sculpture: The Assembled Line

Is it a computer, silenced by the cold?

A piano fabricated by a plumber? A slightly addled robot? The imaginary machines of English Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi might be any of these—he makes them in a machine shop rather than a studio. There was a time when he scoured junkyards and assembled sculptures; now he builds them from scratch and then casts them in aluminum alloys.

He has brought constructivism full cycle. Now on view in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Robert Fraser Gallery, his sculptures are shiny and symmetrical, linear and still—functionless art objects that seem to invite the viewer to turn them on.

But the starting switch is in his mind.

707 as Totem. Sir Herbert Read, the British art historian, contends that Paolozzi’s “new images, functionless machine-tools or sterile computers, derive not, like his previous work, from the debris of industrialism, but from the rational order of technology.” They go beyond dada, surrealism or assemblage in accepting and celebrating the machine, yet dominating it by giving it a soul.

Many recent sculptors—Chamberlain, Stankiewicz, César, for example—have plundered the scrap heap for its rusty riches. Their assemblages look back on Marcel Duchamps’ “ready-mades,” or store-bought hardware, and Picasso’s “found objects.” Paolozzi also once combined bits of cameras, clocks, toys and bombsights into figures that looked like archaic idols or, as he said, “the fetishes of a Congo witch doctor.” Now his work sets up a more modern paradox between engineering and art, and his breakaway from traditional values has made him spiritual uncle (where Henry Moore is spiritual father) to younger British artists. Says Paolozzi: “People still think of sculpture only as bronzes. It’s unconceivable to them that a Boeing 707 can have anything to do with sculpture.”

Drainpipe Laocoön. Blunt, thickset Paolozzi, 40, son of Italian peasants who wound up in Edinburgh selling ice cream, has the mien of his bulky monsters. He practices judo with a passion. “There comes a split second in judo,” he says, “when absolutely everything matters. It should be the same in art.” He is fascinated by Greek mythology and, indeed, has wrestled 4-in. pipe into torsos, titling it Towards a Laocoön.

Paolozzi also reads the analytic philosophy of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, an eccentric Cambridge professor who, in brief, believed that what in logic was nonsense could be meaningful to man. The artist has made multicolored silk screens based on collages following Wittgenstein, but that is only half his homage. His cool sculpture, welded collages made of objects that do not exist, are themselves contemplative nonsense. Their aim in art, as Wittgenstein defined his in philosophy, is “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”