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Lot Essay
As its classically derived title suggests, Itaca (Ithaca) is a work that provides a lyrical thread through the creative wanderings of Giulio
Paolini’s past. Executed between 1974 and 1975 - the year in which Paolini published his first book Idem (a self-referential compendium of essays, articles and other writings about his work to date) - Itaca is a similarly mimetic and self-reflexive work looking backwards at Paolini’s previous work.
Itaca comprises twenty-five separate images of some of Paolini’s most familiar and famous earlier creations. Over the centre of each of these photographic records of his work he has now placed a square piece of blank, white card. Hung together in a 5 x 5 square sequence, each of these twenty-five collages forms a square that Paolini intended to be read in a spiralling pattern that runs first across the top and then down and along the remaining sides of the spiral to end at the centre of the composition. This last, central, twenty-fifth work is a simple, white square that is itself comprised of twenty-five squares of blank card. In this way the sense of a spiralling thread existing between the beginning and the end of the work as well as between all the disparate works contained within it, is visually established. It is also, of course, a thread that can be seen to run in the opposite direction, beginning at the centre of the work and spiralling outwards.
Mimesis, tautology and a fluid confusing of the past with the present are familiar tools in Paolini’s open-ended approach to the making of (and the reading of) an image. Here, given the work’s title – which refers to the island where Odysseus’s wife Penelope forever wove and then unpicked a tapestry while waiting for her husband to come home – Paolini’s use of a spiralling thread of connection between the origin of the work and its completion serves as a metaphor for this open nature of his work. It not only connects Paolini’s current creative actions with those of his past and establishes a lineage between this work and those which preceded it, it also establishes the artist as being someone, who, like the viewer, is a reader or observer of his own work and activity. Paolini has explained this aspect of his work as follows:
‘I have always said and done things which tend to give the spectator the same qualities as the author of a work. This is an argument which should be interpreted with some caution; if not, it can become ridiculous. However there exists in my work the intention that the author or artist of a given work is nothing more than a privileged spectator. It is because of this factor that I say the work is something that reveals itself to the author in a somewhat Platonic sense. The work already exists; the author intervenes to unmask it, to render it credible. The author is someone who raises the curtain on a scene which awaits revelation…There is a cultural/geographic character in my work. I know that a foundation, a repository of traditions, exists in our culture for the way we conduct relationships, for the way we interpret the efficacy of a work of art, in short, for the way in which we communicate…. More than anything I want to give my work a formal definition in the moment it is realised and therefore I am not able to take responsibility for the effect that a work has.’ (‘Giulio Paolini : Interview with Susan Taylor in The Print Collector’s Newsletter no 5, New York, November/December 1984.)
Paolini’s past. Executed between 1974 and 1975 - the year in which Paolini published his first book Idem (a self-referential compendium of essays, articles and other writings about his work to date) - Itaca is a similarly mimetic and self-reflexive work looking backwards at Paolini’s previous work.
Itaca comprises twenty-five separate images of some of Paolini’s most familiar and famous earlier creations. Over the centre of each of these photographic records of his work he has now placed a square piece of blank, white card. Hung together in a 5 x 5 square sequence, each of these twenty-five collages forms a square that Paolini intended to be read in a spiralling pattern that runs first across the top and then down and along the remaining sides of the spiral to end at the centre of the composition. This last, central, twenty-fifth work is a simple, white square that is itself comprised of twenty-five squares of blank card. In this way the sense of a spiralling thread existing between the beginning and the end of the work as well as between all the disparate works contained within it, is visually established. It is also, of course, a thread that can be seen to run in the opposite direction, beginning at the centre of the work and spiralling outwards.
Mimesis, tautology and a fluid confusing of the past with the present are familiar tools in Paolini’s open-ended approach to the making of (and the reading of) an image. Here, given the work’s title – which refers to the island where Odysseus’s wife Penelope forever wove and then unpicked a tapestry while waiting for her husband to come home – Paolini’s use of a spiralling thread of connection between the origin of the work and its completion serves as a metaphor for this open nature of his work. It not only connects Paolini’s current creative actions with those of his past and establishes a lineage between this work and those which preceded it, it also establishes the artist as being someone, who, like the viewer, is a reader or observer of his own work and activity. Paolini has explained this aspect of his work as follows:
‘I have always said and done things which tend to give the spectator the same qualities as the author of a work. This is an argument which should be interpreted with some caution; if not, it can become ridiculous. However there exists in my work the intention that the author or artist of a given work is nothing more than a privileged spectator. It is because of this factor that I say the work is something that reveals itself to the author in a somewhat Platonic sense. The work already exists; the author intervenes to unmask it, to render it credible. The author is someone who raises the curtain on a scene which awaits revelation…There is a cultural/geographic character in my work. I know that a foundation, a repository of traditions, exists in our culture for the way we conduct relationships, for the way we interpret the efficacy of a work of art, in short, for the way in which we communicate…. More than anything I want to give my work a formal definition in the moment it is realised and therefore I am not able to take responsibility for the effect that a work has.’ (‘Giulio Paolini : Interview with Susan Taylor in The Print Collector’s Newsletter no 5, New York, November/December 1984.)