William Blake Newton 1795
Eduardo Paolozzi Newton (After Blake) 1993
I pass Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture Newton (After Blake) nearly every week. It’s outside the British Library. I often eat my lunch under it. It’s based on William Blake’s Newton, pictured above.
Next to Paolozzi’s Newton is a small shrubbery, an atrophied bed constrained by four brick walls. Organic life in front of the British Library is contained, measured off, quantified. There’s just one vestigial sign: the rumbustious King’s Cross of culture and noise gives way to the artery that is the Marylebone Road, the main bloodfare for traffic coming from the west.
Two hundred years lie between the two Newtons. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the omniscient author was God: totalitarian and monolithic. The twentieth century, with all its horrors, was more demotic. It took in people’s accounts: suddenly there were other views. In the natural sciences the twentieth century saw the disproving of Newton and the introduction of the notion of relativity. In those two hundred years we know that the observer always affects what is being observed. So now, as an artist, sculptor, photographer, writer, or whatever, you have to reveal your approach.
You have to look up to see Paolozzi’s Newton. His giant face is absorbed in his work. Gradually your eye starts absorbing the body attached. Unlike Blake’s Newton, this Newton is split open, bolted together like Frankenstein’s monster; intended to look like it’s constructed. Builders from the nearby St Pancras construction site read The Sun underneath his bronzed torso, munching on dessert apples. Tourists stop for a photograph. Paolozzi’s Newton is so taken by his schemes, he’s oblivious to it all.
Blake’s Newton is also focused solely on his calipers and the Euclidean geometric forms before him. Blind to everything else, including the ‘vast Deep sublime’ in the background and the rocks behind him, Blake seems to suggest that organic life is perhaps the only thing that can save Newton from himself, as a ‘Rehumanizing’ force. In Blake’s First Book of Urizen, Blake compels us to overcome limits to higher levels of perception that resides within all of us. In Blake’s thought, God is replaced by Urizen (or, ‘your reason’), a “dark power” and obstacle to spiritual life. Newton seems to represent him.
Just across the road, behind Paolozzi’s Newton (After Blake), is the dull steel of a Novotel Hotel. No organic life, just more construction. And what about the link between this Newton and the British Library? The reader in the library, like both Paolozzi’s and Blake’s Newton, is absorbed in his books, oblivious to life outside. Paolozzi’s Newton is the link between reason and rehumanising life. Newton also looks like he’s on the toilet. Even when mapping perfect geometric forms, Newton still has to shit.
Eduardo Paolozzi Newton (After Blake)
Behind Paolozzi’s Newton
Posted 1 year ago with 0 notesTags: My writing
