This exhibition of Pun-Sculptures is a reprise of my postgraduate diploma show last shown at the Slade in 1970.
In 1967 after reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, I decided to find out more about the connection between words and objects. This led me to linguistic philosophy, in particular Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view that the definition of a word lay in its use. Up until then I thought a word just meant what a dictionary said it meant.
I wondered whether it was possible to describe words in objects rather than in words which to me seemed a philosophical nonsense. So Pun-Sculptures came into being. At first these were designed and constructed out of sheets of writing paper supplemented as necessary by glossy white card and sometimes polystyrene. I scrawled titles and comments on these in black felt marker.
Pun-Sculpture was not liked by the external examiner at my previous college. He said that my final show, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Palace of Pun was ‘very thin’, which was right for it was made entirely of cardboard, paper and polystyrene and would pack down flat.
When I arrived at the Slade I set up Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Palace of Pun. Philip King said he would fetch a proper philosopher to look at it - Richard Wollheim, then Head of Philosophy at UCL. After that Professor Wollheim, no fan of Wittgenstein and thus favouring my ‘critiques’ of linguistic philosophy, would sometimes wander over to the Slade at the end of the day to see what I was up to. On one occasion he gave me a signed copy of his latest book, ‘Art and its Objects’.
There are three groups of Pun-Sculptures in this show: A Quirkish Radiogram, The Wittgenstein Lectern and A Case for Wittgenstein. By the late 1960s the objects on which they were based, were dated, which is why I chose them.
A Quirkish Radiogram was inspired by a piece of furniture which throughout my childhood, held pride of place in any aspiring lounge. Stacked with crooning and dance band records, the radio tuned to the Light Programme or Home Service, it was a symbol of sophistication and affluence. Yet by the early sixties it had been made pointless by the portable transistor radio and record player. Their rootlessness encouraged a subversive approach to what was played on them. The radiogram, now pointless, thus needed ‘a point’ adding - more so in this case as it was a sculpture of a radiogram and thus didn’t work.
The Wittgenstein Lectern stood for sermons, lectures and examinations. For those too young to know, sermonising, lecturing and examining played a major part in British life until the 1960s. The Wittgenstein Lectern serves up a linguistic philosophy ‘exam’ which includes references to some of my previous work and to A Quirkish Radiogram. Thus the pointless supports the pointless. I made my lectern shorter so a child could read it.
A Case for Wittgenstein was the last work in the show. By the late 1960s a suitcase and its tidy mind-set was the antithesis of what was required for that open-ended trip. When I arrived in London from Wolverhampton, with my own suitcase, I ran into the well-heeled hippy, lots of whom seemed to be hanging around London’s art schools. They were permanently shuttling to and from Katmandu. I was impressed with their confidence and especially their backpacks, or rucksacks as they were then called, which were covered with labels, tassles and scrawled messages such as ‘Love you Crazy Toby! Annabel xxx. Teheran 1967.’ ‘Gus - Keep your shit together man! – The Loon, Amritsar’. I was puzzled as to why they wanted to drop out of London at all, as I felt lucky to have been allowed to drop in. Their backpacks were not like my suitcase. They carried evidence of their travels and a record of the passing of time. I decided the furthest I should travel was to the staid British Home Stores in Oxford Street where I found two very un-cool white suitcases. I scrawled on one, photographed it, incorporated the photograph in a poster and screen-printed that on the other. This would be my evidence of passing time.
The greatest revelation for me at the Slade was discovering photography. At the end of my first year, I had my work photographed for a Slade/RCA travelling show to America by UCL’s ‘Central Photographic Unit’ which employed white-coated specialists armed with huge plate cameras. Much of their time seemed to be taken up by Egyptology and the Medical School.
When they showed me the black and white prints of my black and white sculptures, I was astonished. Although I had seen that a work and a photograph of a work could reference one another philosophically (Joseph Kosuth’s chair et al) their life-size photographs were simply much punchier than my sculptures – the whites were whiter, the blacks were blacker, the surfaces were shinier. Most importantly, all was immaculate and seemingly untouched by human hand. It was exactly what I was looking for. What had started out as a drawing of a sculpture had been returned almost to the drawing through the medium of photography. I felt that the camera strengthened my pun-sculptures because the additional context it provided offered more compelling visual evidence for Wittgenstein’s observation (expressed nonsensically by him in words) that the definition of a word lay in its use.
Jasia Reichardt, Exhibitions Curator at the ICA, saw my show and commissioned me to design a room for the exhibition ‘Ten Sitting Rooms’ which was shown at the ICA in October 1970. My room had walls covered in a black, light-absorbent fur fabric. The effect was of walking into a black and white photograph.
Gradually my Pun-Sculptures took on more political weight and An Indo-Chinese Pun-Sculpture, a large installation from 1973, was an important part of this development. It is now showing at the Ikon Gallery Birmingham in ‘This Could Happen to You’, a survey of the gallery in the 1970s. There was another political spin-off, aimed at the art world itself, which my 1970 Slade show contributed to - the cool and clinical The Gallery London, a gallery-as-artwork/ commercial gallery critique operated with Nicholas Wegner (also Slade) in the mid-1970s. Artists such as John Latham and Rita Donagh would show their work within the context of its ‘displays’ although normally we would dispense with artists altogether.
Looking at them now, my 1970 photographic Pun-Sculptures do not possess the telling patina of age of the objects leading to them. Furthermore, their manufactured look, forty years on, no longer surprises. That is because the use of professional fabricators by artists and curators has become commonplace in the last twenty years or so - a curious development largely overlooked by today’s art critics - except perhaps a PhD student somewhere?
Vaughan Grylls
The Slade School of Fine Art, July 2010
