Thrown on a wall at the ICA

Paolozzi made this in 1947 and showed it to essentially no one for five years. It was not painted to hang in a gallery. It was private material, part of a growing pile of these glued-up sheets. The collage only met an audience in 1952, and not on a wall, but on one. Paolozzi projected it, with a run of dozens of his other collages, using an epidiascope (a projector that throws an enlarged image of a flat object, like a magazine page, onto a screen) in what became known as his “Bunk” presentation, mostly a wordless flood of projected images, with little spoken commentary. The pictures did the arguing.

The setting matters. That session, at the ICA (the Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London, opened the Independent Group, a small, restless circle of British artists, architects and critics who met through the early 1950s to argue about exactly this: the flood of American advertising, science fiction, Hollywood and product design, and whether it was beneath serious attention or the most alive thing going. Paolozzi flicking up images of soda ads and pulp covers was, in effect, the opening shot. The name “Bunk” he took from the American industrialist Henry Ford, who had once said “history is more or less bunk”, a fittingly all-American shrug for a body of work made of all-American trash.

On his own method, Paolozzi put it this way: where a classical artist might make hundreds of drawings, he was choosing among hundreds of ready-made images, picking one to act as a metaphor for a feeling, but, as he warned, “unless one emphasises and arranges the images into patterns of irony the point will be lost.” That is the key to it. The cutting is easy. The arranging (gun over pin-up, pie beside bomber) is where the meaning lives.