Valerie Fletcher: The British sculptor, Eduardo Paolozzi, was like so many of his generation deeply affected by the realities of World War II. In its aftermath, Paolozzi began to make sculpture. He had started out years earlier primarily as a collagist; that is, he cut out images from various published sources and combined them into compositions. Often he combined images of classical sculptures with images of modern machines as an expression of the turmoil and conflicts caused by the old European order colliding with the new technological world. Paolozzi was profoundly impressed by the ideas of this clash of the old and new and it is expressed in the sculpture simply called Figure from 1957. He applied the technique of collage to sculpture.

So he took ordinary objects, bits and pieces of old machinery, household objects, nuts and bolts, things no longer working. He took them and he pressed them into slabs of wax. Wax is a very traditional sculpture material; very malleable, it takes the form beautifully. He then took these to a bronze foundry, had these cast into bronze, brought them back to his studio, and combined them together, built literally from these fragments, the figure you see before you. And so this figure made up of cast-off, burnt-out, used-up technological parts and then put together to resemble a human, clearly has a resonance with the idea of robots and automata and cybernetics. Such ideas had merged in 1920s and indeed before that in literature and it was very widespread in movies, in popular culture in the 1950s. But this is probably more of a reference to the serious science of cybernetics.

Cybernetics came to the public knowledge in the late 1940s when a man named Norbert Wiener who had been doing research at MIT published how he and his colleagues had attempted to combine neurological human physiology with mechanical function. This is of course is the basis of experiments leading to the development of computers. But this is what disturbed many people, including Paolozzi. How mechanical do we want our world? How much should we take technology as our paradigm? Are we as humans becoming subservient to a world that is increasingly controlled, ruled, and structured along the lines suited to technology rather than to the more human, organic, physical, and spiritual domains?