Edward Allington, Bibliography,Drawing Towards Sculpture 1

Drawing Towards Sculpture

With The Fruit of Oblivion (1982), a gilded cornucopia expelling plastic grapes, Edward Allington began a series of sculptures which blended Romantic irony and kitsch. Popular yet mysterious, his work was identified as a contribution to current artistic debates about appropriation and recycling. Yet it was an oblique contribution at best; its marriage of value and waste, the divine and the excremental, seemed to shift the very terms of the argument. Operating on a double time-scheme, a familiar satirical device, Allington was reaching for a creation myth of his own: the birth of capitalist thinking. Implicit is a critique of Appollonian reason; sexual desire and orality seem determining factors in his psycho-history of Western economics. Yet interpretation is a tricky business; Allington's objects combine dream and tawdriness, leading viewers from Baroque decoration back through its classical roots to myth itself, in which high kitsch and high culture are one.1

Juxtaposing trivia and neoclassicism was no accident. Throughout his career he seems to have dwelt on the same cluster of ideas, changing his attitudes to them by taking cues from his drawing. Borrowing shapes which recurred in colored sketches such as Walking Instructions (1977), for example, he decided on a set he considered fundamental. In drawn form they appeared perfect. Sculpted, they were unsatisfactory translations of what was on paper. The problem was not a new one. As a ceramicist Allington had been more attracted to moulds than finished works. He decided to accept imperfection, however sadly.

"With Plato and his world of ideal forms one had a mental representation of the imagination, that projecting of ideas that goes on in the mind. But in his representation of the real world you had an image of the human being striving towards that ideal but failing all the time, and of that failure being quite significant."2

Perhaps, after all, perfection was impossible, even as an ideal, without its shoddy counterpart. On a trip to Greece Allington had reacted angrily to tourist abuse of classical culture. Later he read Plato. The genuine articles, Plato argued, were celestial forms and what we see partakes of these. So, is everything a reproduction? Perfect Pericles (1974), a collage of photographs of a Greek bust, shows it regressing into infinity. Marrying "standard" and "ideal" has seemed one way around the difficulty; immediately afterwards Allington had designed a planetary system which presented a knowable, unscientific model of the universe like the one he felt had prevailed in ancient Greece . But specifically Greek references were soon to be overlaid. From Forgotten Seas (1982), an arrangement of plaster "shell" shapes, was reworked to add gold highlighting — a "physical need," Allington explains, felt first in his drawings, where until this time he had been using blue ink on a white ground, with heavy cross-hatching to depict form. The Greek example, still and pale — as it had been handed down to us, at least — had been ousted by the Baroque.

From now on his procedure was the same in each drawing. First he created a surface by gluing together sheets of nearly identical waste paper, the flotsam of business life — receipts, ledgers, order-books, graph-paper, all discarded by their owners and retrieved by the artist. Next he divided his space into "rooms" with a missing fourth wall. As a boy he had been taken to see a diorama, an experience which left a lasting impression, perceptible in the slight curvature which is a particular feature of the larger drawings. By painting walls white the papers, arranged so that their repetitive design detracted from their previous use, became the floor of an imaginary museum, identified in Allington's mind with the "Platonic" realm of the imagination, in which perfection was possible. One aspect of this ideal world was the suspension of objects in mid-air. Another, perhaps, was the absence of mass-produced plastic dross. Instead the shadow of the object was shown in solid black, assuming the same shape that the worthless toys would. In reality a shadow is determined by its "original" and certainly an unusual degree of reciprocity exists between shells and their spilt bounty in the sculpture. One critic wrote: "The object sought, in the philosophical sense, at the source of the river is found, in the material sense, at the river's mouth."3 Yet disparity between shell and shadow becomes the focus of recent drawings such as The Temple of Apollo (1983) not hallowed with angelic presences but threatened by the grotesque, or The Shadow of Ulysses (1981) in which a shield, rack, quiver, bow and sheaf of arrows summon up the spirit of the dead hero. Though Heroics are no more than an arrangement of worthless accoutrements on a gallery floor, paradoxically this is the only way impossible ideals can be sustained. Like Allington's Pericles, Ulysses is "perfect" only as a shadow or a wealth of shoddy reproductions.

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	Drawing Towards Sculpture With The Fruit of Oblivion (1982), a gilded cornucopia expelling plastic grapes, Edward Allington began a series of sculptures which blended Romantic irony and kitsch. Popular yet mysterious, his work was identified as a contribution to current artistic debates about appropriation and recycling. Yet it was an oblique contribution at best; its marriage of value and waste, the divine and the excremental, seemed to shift the very terms of the argument. Operating on a double time-scheme, a familiar satirical device, Allington was reaching for a creation myth of his own: the birth of capitalist thinking. Implicit is a critique of Appollonian reason; sexual desire and orality seem determining factors in his psycho-history of Western economics. Yet interpretation is a tricky business; Allington's objects combine dream and tawdriness, leading viewers from Baroque decoration back through its classical roots to myth itself, in which high kitsch and high culture are one.1 Juxtaposing trivia and neoclassicism was no accident. Throughout his career he seems to have dwelt on the same cluster of ideas, changing his attitudes to them by taking cues from his drawing. Borrowing shapes which recurred in colored sketches such as Walking Instructions (1977), for example, he decided on a set he considered fundamental. In drawn form they appeared perfect. Sculpted, they were unsatisfactory translations of what was on paper. The problem was not a new one. As a ceramicist Allington had been more attracted to moulds than finished works. He decided to accept imperfection, however sadly. "With Plato and his world of ideal forms one had a mental representation of the imagination, that projecting of ideas that goes on in the mind. But in his representation of the real world you had an image of the human being striving towards that ideal but failing all the time, and of that failure being quite significant."2 Perhaps, after all, perfection was impossible, even as an ideal, without its shoddy counterpart. On a trip to Greece Allington had reacted angrily to tourist abuse of classical culture. Later he read Plato. The genuine articles, Plato argued, were celestial forms and what we see partakes of these. So, is everything a reproduction? Perfect Pericles (1974), a collage of photographs of a Greek bust, shows it regressing into infinity. Marrying "standard" and "ideal" has seemed one way around the difficulty; immediately afterwards Allington had designed a planetary system which presented a knowable, unscientific model of the universe like the one he felt had prevailed in ancient Greece . But specifically Greek references were soon to be overlaid. From Forgotten Seas (1982), an arrangement of plaster "shell" shapes, was reworked to add gold highlighting — a "physical need," Allington explains, felt first in his drawings, where until this time he had been using blue ink on a white ground, with heavy cross-hatching to depict form. The Greek example, still and pale — as it had been handed down to us, at least — had been ousted by the Baroque. From now on his procedure was the same in each drawing. First he created a surface by gluing together sheets of nearly identical waste paper, the flotsam of business life — receipts, ledgers, order-books, graph-paper, all discarded by their owners and retrieved by the artist. Next he divided his space into "rooms" with a missing fourth wall. As a boy he had been taken to see a diorama, an experience which left a lasting impression, perceptible in the slight curvature which is a particular feature of the larger drawings. By painting walls white the papers, arranged so that their repetitive design detracted from their previous use, became the floor of an imaginary museum, identified in Allington's mind with the "Platonic" realm of the imagination, in which perfection was possible. One aspect of this ideal world was the suspension of objects in mid-air. Another, perhaps, was the absence of mass-produced plastic dross. Instead the shadow of the object was shown in solid black, assuming the same shape that the worthless toys would. In reality a shadow is determined by its "original" and certainly an unusual degree of reciprocity exists between shells and their spilt bounty in the sculpture. One critic wrote: "The object sought, in the philosophical sense, at the source of the river is found, in the material sense, at the river's mouth."3 Yet disparity between shell and shadow becomes the focus of recent drawings such as The Temple of Apollo (1983) not hallowed with angelic presences but threatened by the grotesque, or The Shadow of Ulysses (1981) in which a shield, rack, quiver, bow and sheaf of arrows summon up the spirit of the dead hero. Though Heroics are no more than an arrangement of worthless accoutrements on a gallery floor, paradoxically this is the only way impossible ideals can be sustained. Like Allington's Pericles, Ulysses is "perfect" only as a shadow or a wealth of shoddy reproductions.