Paolozzi's Lost Magic Kingdoms: The Metamorphosis of Ordinary Things

Nicola Levell

Box 11: A photograph of three boys in uniform, a camera (Rank), a radio, one bicycle chain, two knives [...] two plastic beetles, one wax snail, a plastic fly [...] one metal hubcap, stripy multi-coloured umbrella, part of a road-works beacon, a plastic hand-grenade, a picture of Christ on the cross, bundle of 13 green feathers, a metal fitting, a toy plastic dagger, two plastic bananas, one toy handgun, one toy plastic space gun, one rubber toad, one rubber skeleton, ten rubber locusts, five [light] bulbs, and a small wooden box with metal clasp.

(http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/)

Exuding a romantic sensibility, John Keats (1994: 208) wrote of the loss of magic and the dissolution of poetry at 'the mere touch of cold philosophy'. He lamented the emergence of the empirical science of being that anatomizes mysteries; dissecting the rainbow, for instance, into a prismatic palette that is then entered into a 'dull catalogue of common things' (Keats 1994: 209). The opening citation, listing the contents of Box 11, is a museum catalogue entry for a portion of the Eduardo Paolozzi Collection that was gifted to the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (Glasgow) in 2004. Before being catalogued and stored away, these mundane, partial and discarded objects were exhibited. They were juxtaposed with over 200 ethnographic objects from the British Museum's collections, archival photographs as well as artworks originated by the Scottish sculptor and visual artist, Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). Configured as twelve idiosyncratic installations, they formed the touring exhibition, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons of Nahuatl (1985–89).

Curated by Paolozzi, Lost Magic Kingdoms is acknowledged as the first exhibition in the United Kingdom that employed a contemporary artist as curator within the museological realm of ethnography (McLeod 1985, Malbert 1995; Pearce 1999; Shelton 2001; Schneider 2006). It marks the efflorescence of not only the ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice but also, I propose, a parallel artistic and performative turn in anthropology and ethnographic museum practice (Ames 1994; Phillips 1994; Marcus and Myers 1995; Gell 1998; Gonseth et al. 2005; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010; González 2008; Marcus 2010). From the late 1980s onwards, contemporary artists have been intervening in and expanding the interpretative space of anthropology, its museums and ethnographic collections. Following Paolozzi, in the British context, artists include Faisal Abdu'Allah; Marina Abramovic; Maria Amidu; Ansuman Biswas; Sonia Boyce; Shirley Chubb; Godfried Donker; Chris Dorsett; Jane Grant; Romauld Hazoumé; Hew Locke; Rosanna Raymond; Joachim Schmid, amongst others (Arnold 1995; Dorsett 1995; Malbert 1995; Scruton 1995; Boyce 1995; Hilty et al. 1995; Edwards 2000; Putnam 2001; Salmond and Raymond 2008, 2010).

Despite the precedent set by Paolozzi's commission and the longevity of his exhibition, mentioned in the literature on museology, art and anthropology, Lost Magic Kingdoms has not been subject to detailed critical attention. Although its catalogue survives and provides a rich and incisive portrait of Paolozzi and his project, it clearly operates as an independent product rather than a documentary index to the exhibition concept, contents and displays. Like all catalogues, it is an eccentric space; a 'glamorizing' accessory that does not correspond to but rather proceeds and transcends the exhibitionary form, in both time and space (Harbison 2000: 153).

In this article, I examine the space between the exhibitionary form and the catalogues — the dull list, the guide and the glossy copy — and engage other agencies to explore and historicize Lost Magic Kingdoms as an idiosyncratic expression of an artist's passionate engagement as a maker and curator within the realm of anthropology. Although there has been a critical proclivity to subsume the exhibition under the interrelated categories and discourses of Primitivism and Surrealism, such a tendency overlooks its more expansive curatorial philosophy, ideas and intents. My intention, therefore, is to reveal some of the concealed or overlooked dimensions of Paolozzi's curatorial preoccupations and practice. I seek to offer another perspective on his curatorship that brings into focus his anthropological imagination; his fascination with other cultural epistemologies, values and practices; his political and ecological concerns; and his new brutalist ideals and aesthetics.

Opening: The Limits of Objectivity

Despite being attributed to Paolozzi, the conceptualization and contents of Lost Magic Kingdoms were expressions of the collaborative dynamic between the artist and Malcolm McLeod, the Keeper of Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind (the Ethnography Department of the British Museum), who commissioned the project. From the beginning of his directorship in 1974, McLeod – a passionate anthropologist and Africanist – had striven to revitalize and develop the ethnographic collections and temporary exhibitions of the Museum (Houtman 1987; Houtman 2009). He instigated an active collecting policy, largely contingent on staff area researches and field-working anthropologists. Through appointments and strategies, he nurtured the reintegration of museum work and anthropology: two practices that had grown symbiotically but radically fractured and diverged in the inter- and post-war periods in the western world (Frese 1960; Ames 1992; Shelton 1992, 2006; Bouquet 2001). With the institutionalization of anthropology in the universities and the de-privileging of material culture studies, the sub-field of museum anthropology and its objects and subjects — ethnographic collections — as well as the institution of the museum were marginalized and much maligned. Museums with ethnographic holdings were vilified in print as 'colonialist, racist, maleficent, misogynist, and even irrelevant institutions' (Kaplan 2006: 166). As the politics and processes of decolonization intensified, indigenous peoples and other groups rose to challenge the museum's authority to represent their histories and narratives. From the early 1970s onwards, both anthropology and museums moved to reflect more critically on their histories, relations and representational practices, with a view to...