British Museum Press, 1985
While I was looking up the history of the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh yesterday, I found it contains a large number of works by Eduardo Paolozzi, who was born in Leith in 1924. Italians in small Scottish and Irish towns — it is a culture that includes Paolo Nutini, born in Paisley, a third generation of Italian-Scots and hopefully more accepted than those of Paolozzi's generation who were interned at the start of WWII. Paolozzi's grandfather, uncle and 446 other internees died when the ship taking them to internment camps in Canada was sunk by a U-boat.
However, Eddy Paolozzi, maker of collages, dense works of many layers, assembled the Krazy Kat Arkive, thousands of items that represent popular culture, the machine age and the iconography of the hero, and gave it to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
It is all of a piece with his collages: assemblages that act as archives, illogical collections of diverse things assembled within a certain era. He once was given free rein in the Ethnography Museum in London, to take things from the collections and to curate an exhibit from them, in which he intervened with material of his own. I saw this – it was in the mid-1980s, with an accompanying book, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl. Not dissimilar to Picasso's discovery of artifacts at the Trocadéro in Paris in 1907, it is the kind of appropriation of cultural property that can't be done today; the material culture of the world is not curious material for the making of European art.
But there is an enchantment in looking at things that through one's own ignorance are pure sensual form without a cultural reading. Lost Magic Kingdoms was perhaps the last instance of this, not that Paolozzi was unaware of cultural meaning, but he was a sculptor whose work used component parts according to different rules. Krazy Kat rules.
George Herriman. Detail of a Sunday page in which Ignatz, disguised as a painting, hurls a brick at Krazy Kat who interprets it as an expression of love. Published November 7, 1937