Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Bunk

Bunk no. 2 - Will Man Outgrow the Earth?

Bunk no. 5 - See Mom? A Baby's Life is not all Sunshine

Bunk no. 7 - Take-off

Bunk no. 17 - Has Jazz a Future?

Bunk no. 18 - Vogue : Gorilla with Miss Harper

Bunk no. 20 - It's Daring, It's Audacious

Bunk no. 22 - Wind Tunnel Test

Bunk no. 23 - New Life for Old Radios

Bunk no. 24 - 2000 Horses and Turbo-powered

Bunk no. 30 - A New Brand of Brilliance

Bunk no. 32 - You Can't Beat the Real Thing

Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was "a British sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer" according to the Tate, where a large collection of his work is preserved. In 1972 he produced a screenprint series called BUNK. The prints from that series (as sampled here) were based on Paolozzi's extrapolations from already-out-of-date magazines given to him by American soldiers stationed in England during and after World War II. The series title was based on a quote from Henry Ford  "History is more or less bunk ... We want to live in the present."

My own observations over a long lifetime lead me to suspect that British Pop artists like Eduardo Paolozzi have mostly been forgotten today (while American Pop artists like Warhol remain hotter than ever) because the British Pop movement took a sarcastic stance toward its source material  the detritus of mass consumerism  while American Pop accepted the same subject at face value.