Vulcan

Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a Scottish proto-pop artist of Italian parents. He designed a lively mosaic for Tottenham Ct Road Central Line platform on the London Underground, was a keen collector of advertising ephemera and a prolific pop-collagist. He spent his mature years as a sculptor producing lumpen, mechanical-looking sculpture. These were often overly illustrative works which yoked the human form to the mechanical. I wish he hadn't. They are ugly and outdated (this kind of approach was far more successful, even exiting and dynamic in the early 1900s, when it was new – in the work of artists like Jacob Epstein and his 'Rock Drill'). It has always been an easy call for local councils and developers to call on the established well,tried names and commission one of Paolozzi's unsmypathetic, brutal pop-cyborgs or mechanical collages in an attempt to offset and even culturally validate an already over-commercialised and brutally designed cut-price-modernist concrete square or office block. Although such projects are usually devoted to anything but art and culture, this one, strangely enough houses the offices of Arts Council England's NE regional office. Arts Council and other workers in the building are greeted each day by this figure. Paolozzis – bin-'em! They just make the ugly uglier!