At the time Eduardo Paolozzi was working, screenprinting was considered merely a commercial process for cheap advertising rather than artistic prints. MOONSTRIPS, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s current exhibition focusing on Paolozzi’s collages, presents the artist’s pioneering work in printmaking to explore the evolving relationship between fine art, technology and mass culture.

The exhibition, pulsating with colour and vitality, displays some of the collages by Paolozzi, which are today seen as either precursory works or highlights of Pop Art. Moonstrips Empire News (1967), General Dynamic F.U.N. (1970), Cloud Atomic Laboratory (1971) and Bunk! (1972), all fully convey Paolozzi’s artistic creativity within the collage form. As he would declare later on in his life, “all human experience is one big collage”. By re-using cut-out images and words taken from various sources, such as newspapers, comics, technological journals, adverts and even his own prints, he was able to harness popular culture with innovation. 

In particular, the influence of American popular culture is wildly evident in General Dynamic F.U.N. and Bunk!, where there is less verbal accompaniment. The two portfolios represent a kaleidoscopic concert of juxtaposing images, patterns and bright colours. In the introduction of General Dynamic F.U.N., J.G. Ballard describes his friend’s work as: 

“A unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds… Here the familiar materials of everyday lives, the jostling iconographies of mass advertising, and consumer goods, are manipulated to reveal their true identities.”

There, we are confronted with humorous observations on mass culture, capitalism and daily interaction with the visual media, which still resonate today. The recurring leitmotif is that of the California girl sunbathing on her car. The titles, on the plates provided by the Museum, are as witty as the images themselves. A few examples are ‘Sex Crime Wave Rolling High’, ‘Careers today…How children fail’ and ‘Fifty Nine Varieties of Paradise’.

The portfolio Moonstrips Empire News, however, focuses on the close relationship between image and language. Paolozzi, following the theory of language proposed by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus, believed that the fundamental connection between language and reality is via a picturing relationship. In his prints, the artist assigned great importance to the way we visualise text, and we see examples of pages where the textual elements are disposed in such a way as to form a cross or a spiral and where chromatic contrasts play a significant role. We really get a sense that Moonstrips Empire News wants to involve the viewer from both the conceptual and aesthetic point of view. The portfolio, published in a set of loose prints contained in a fluorescent acrylic presentation box, gives the viewer total control over the order of the sequence of prints.

Finally, the collages displayed highlight another central concern of Paolozzi: that of art’s relationship to technology and originality. In the 1960s screen-printing was nothing more than a cheap advertising process. However, Paolozzi saw it as a highly innovative technique, which “can provide a complexity and range of possibility impossible by normal art-craft printing methods”. The technical innovations of the space age, which appeared to be in opposition to fine art and originality, are now considered as integral to artistic process thanks to artists such as Paolozzi. His collaboration with the printers at Kelpra Studio in London and the support from Editions Alecto, an enterprise founded by two Cambridge students, Paul Cornwall-Jones and Michael Deakin, enabled the production of new visual challenges in Britain. The interaction between reality, creativity and technology is particularly visible in Cloud Atomic Laboratory, where the photographic element is combined to fantastical inventions with an extraordinary precision.

Whether these collages can be considered as prototypes of Pop Art or not, it is certain that they have contributed greatly to shaping the artistic and printmaking scene. Scottish sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi was a man who believed that his work should feed off of and respond to contemporary culture and this certainly comes through from the dazzling collages in exhibition. It is worth the trip to see the influence of an artist whose creations are much integrated into our culture, as the public appreciation of his mosaics at Tottenham Court Road Tube station have recently shown us.

MOONSTRIPS: Eduardo Paolozzi and the printed collage 1965-72 is open now and runs until the 7th June 2015.