This is an extract from a much longer essay on the reception of Romanian artist Paul Neagu in the UK, his home from the beginning of the 1970s. It appears in Magda Radu and Georg Schöllhammer’s monograph on Paul Neagu published by JRP | Editions in 2023. It is a beautiful book and does a remarkable job of understanding a little-understood artist.
GENERATIVE ART GROUP / G.A.G. – was founded in 1972 by Paul Neagu and his four friends, Husny Belmood, designer Philip Honeysuckle, painter Edw. Larsocchi and poet Antoni Paidola – five artists concerned with open-axiomatic art forms. They individually create units which can be conjunction with each other as components of a complete structure – a whole with its own life, a self-regulating system of suggestions and transformations.
… so begins a book published by Paul Neagu in 1973. Entitled Generative Art Group, it catalogued the activities of an international fraternity of artists. The Group’s members appear in enigmatic photographic portraits on its monochrome pages: Belmood feeds pigeons in a grainy shot apparently taken in Paris; Neagu, himself, is shown naked astride an exercise bicycle atop a chest of draws with the caption “Silent event”; and a long-haired Honeysuckle turns his back on the camera and directs his brush to a roughly plastered wall in an image described as an “open action”. Much less a declaration than Neagu’s “Palpable Art Manifesto” published four years earlier,[1] the 1973 publication is esoteric, literally. Artworks and portraits are accompanied by philosophical texts exploring “hidden” order in the universe: short passages from Russian mathematician and mystic Pyotr Ouspensky’s 1912 text Tertium Organum. A Key to the Enigmas of the World appear in typeset paragraphs, and a transcription of a passage from astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1619) features as a careful handwritten script.
Writing in the late 1980s Richard Demarco, a gallerist who had played a key role in drawing Neagu from Romania to the United Kingdom at the end of the 1960s, recalled the different themes and approaches of the group’s members to making art, as well as their internationalism:
Philip Honeysuckle was the only thoroughly British member. He was in fact Scottish and born and educated in Perthshire. His work was memorable, concerned as it was with drawn images of his own right hand and arm becoming the instrument of drawing and the quintessential gesture of markmaking.
Eduard Larsocchi was a Corsican artist. His very surname came from the Latinised root eye or occhi. His paintings and drawings concentrated upon the image of the human eye as a pool of cosmic energy and its dilating pupil representing the constantly exploding and imploding movements of far distant terrestrial bodies beyond the limitations of human vision unaided by the power of the imagination.
Husny Belmood was a Parisian artist. He concentrated his attention upon images reminiscent of flying saucers moving so fast through space that their physical reality was defined by an unutterable stillness and quiet. It was a relief for me to discover that the source material for these unforgettable drawings was to be found in the basic form of a tablespoon observed frontally.
Anton Paidola was a certain poet and philosopher, reminiscent in life style and character, of a mutual friend of both Paul Neagu and myself – the Barcelona-based painter and theatre director, Iago Pericot. Paidola’s contribution to the group was that of a conceptual artist who dealt exclusively in the presence of the written word.[2]
Despite their evident differences, most of the art produced by the Generative Art Group is presented as collective work in the 1973 publication, often in the form of drawings by the group’s members arranged on grid. “Everything is A is not – A” features twelve drawings pinned to canvas and derives its title from Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, a thesis about the unknowable in the age of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Formed from interchangeable parts, its elements – including a sketch of Honeysuckle’s hand, Larsocchi’s irises and Neagu’s box-like construction of a foot – could be positioned and repositioned. “Everything is A is not – A” is a segmented body in close up, each sense organ or body part in close proximity to one another, each in its own rectangular container.
Organised this way, the Generative Art Group was an expression of a concept that Neagu had advanced through art since arriving in Britain in 1969 (and indeed in embryonic form in Romania before); namely the idea of the human body as a condensation of the universe. In drawings, installations, sculptural works and performances, he reproduced images of the human form structured with cellular compartments. In May 1971 Neagu had an exhibition at the Sigi Krauss Gallery in London. Maps and charts presenting this cellular being were displayed as well as what he called “palpable” objects – tactile tables and edible figures made from sweet stuff – that could be touched, smelled and eaten. The centrepiece was an event entitled “Blind Bite” in which a figure, made from a honeycombed grid of waffles (themselves grid-like forms), was consumed in a ritualised performance which carried associations of sacrifice but also of pleasure too. Neagu called this figure, one which reappeared throughout his art, an anthropocosmos, a term borrowed from the French anthropologist Gilbert Durand that combines the Greek words for man and universe.[3] In his writing, Durand was drawn to an ancient view of the universe in which the part and whole are interchangeable: the human body is itself a cosmos, and, conversely, the cosmos is a body. Embedded at the core of much philosophy and religious thought, this idea had been expressed by Plato;[4] it underpins various religious traditions, not least Buddhism and the Upanishads;[5] and it marks the writing and images of sixteenth century English scientist and alchemist, Robert Fludd.[6] Neagu summarised his own understanding of this concept in 1979: “I believed myself as a coordinator of diversified and multileveled materials, with one foot in microcosmos of perception and intricacies, and the other in the macrocosmic and philosophical implications of abstract evolution of thought.”[7] As such, Neagu’s cellular structure was a visual metaphor for the interrelated nature of the human senses, society and our universe. It functioned much like an organising principle for the Generative Art Group publication too: Belmood, Honeysuckle, Larsocchi, Paidola and Neagu formed “a whole” which appeared to generate its own existence as an art group.
Except … the Generative Art Group was Neagu’s own invention, created partly to persuade the Arts Council to fund a catalogue of his own work. None of the other members of the group existed, bar as his heteronymic creations. As the group’s acronym hinted, there was humour in his scheme, and sometimes absurdity too, as the unlikely photographic portraits of the members show. This was a characteristic of much of his work at the time: “Hyphen Ramp” performance at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1976 involved, for instance, attempting to run “up” a vertical wall repeatedly, while his blindfolded collaborator, Perry Robinson, recorded the height of each failed effort by sensing Neagu’s impact with her hands or ear on the masonry. All the while, a metronome clicked away in the echoing space. Although he’d already had major exhibitions in Edinburgh and London, Neagu’s art was hardly saleable at least in terms of the art market, and it belied easy explanation too. And, as such, a publication promised practical purpose despite its lyrical and esoteric content.
Although the Group was a “secret” for two years and Neagu had to furnish credible explanations why its members could not attend an interview with Arts Council officers when called,[8] it was no deception. The book made this clear by including this statement credited to the “Group Manager”:
The content of this catalogue is meant to be timeless for the use of the spiritual worker. Nevertheless, dates and localities are given all along among fictitious material, this conscious amalgam is functional in a certain level. That is the cross-section between self-signals and adherent signals, in a work of art.
Escaping easy explanation, Neagu’s book was itself an artwork (or perhaps a highly portable group exhibition): it was an example of what he called “a whole with its own life”. Indeed, newly arrived in the UK, the Romanian artist had attempted to form such an artists’ collective in the early 1970s, but had failed to persuade others to accept the loss of creative control that common work required. Twenty years later he recalled that the birth of the Generative Art Group “meant I had to invent twice: first the art works to stand for the artist, second the artist to stand for the art work.”[9] In fact, Neagu’s inventiveness went much further; with the Group “presenting” interchangeable works at events such as the John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool in 1974, Paul Neagu and his “Generative Art Group” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and in Gradually Going Tornado! at the Sunderland Arts Centre, both in 1975.[10] In the same year, the Generative Art Gallery opened in a Victorian office building on London’s Shaftsbury Avenue. Ostensibly Neagu’s studio, it was also a space for temporary shows and performances including works by Joseph Beuys (“Bits and Pieces”, March-April 1976) and landscape paintings by his compatriot Horea Bernea.
The Generative Art Group might be understood as a parafiction, a term which has had high currency in the last decade or so to describe artistic “interventions” into life which trouble easy understanding of what is fictional and what is “real”?[11] Parafictions stake a claim to politics by asking how “facts” are constructed (a question which did not seem to greatly interest Neagu). The Group might also be understood in psychological terms. Writing in the late 1970s, art critic Paul Overy described it as “a splitting of [Neagu’s] creative personality into several branches. A way of dividing himself by means of others, or dividing himself in order to understand himself more clearly, as a certain type of novelist does by creating characters which are extensions of their author, different facets of his persona, an awareness of the many ‘I’s’ of the author or artist.”[12] Overy’s diagnosis may well be true, but the group might be considered an oblique portrait of the art “system” in the United Kingdom too. With a keen ability to coin a vivid phrase, Neagu called the Generative Art Group a “gyroscopic system of maintaining balance among multimedia and plural tendencies”.[13] This is a description which applies just as well to the new waves washing through British art in the first half of the 1970s as it does to the Romanian artist.
…..
[1] Paul Neagu, “Palpable Art Manifesto” (dated July 1969), published to accompany the exhibition of his work at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh – available at www.demarco-archive.ac.uk (accessed November 2021).
[2] Richard Demarco, “Such is the Dance,” in Nine Catalytic Stations: Paul Neagu 1975-1987, ed. Angela Wrapson, (Edinburgh: The Scottish Sculpture Trust, 1988), np.
[3] Sarah Kent, “The Flavour of the Olive,” in Paul Neagu: Sculpture (exhibition catalogue, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1979), np. For a recent discussion of the concept in Neagu’s work, see Magda Radu, “Paul Neagu: ’Anthropocosmos’” in Palpable Sculpture. Paul Neagu, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2015), 33-9.
[4] “… this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related”, Plato, Timaeus, 30b-c, 33b.
[5] “Fire is His head; His eyes, the moon and sun; The regions of space, His ears; His voice, the revealed Vedas; Wind His breath (praṇa); His heart, the whole world. Out of His feet. The earth. Truly, He is the inner soul (Atman) of all”. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. Robert Ernest Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 370.
[6] “Man is a whole world of its own, called microcosm for it displays a miniature pattern of all the parts of the universe” Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmic Historia, II, cited by Pierre Riffard in Dictionnaire de l’ésotérisme (Paris: Payot, 1983), 34.
[7] Paul Neagu, “Gradually Going Ahead,” Artscribe, no. 16 (February 1979): 49.
[8] Paul Neagu interviewed by Mel Gooding recorded for the National Life Stories project “Artists’ Lives” (199495) and available at https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Oral-history-curator-s-choice/021M-OH1CD0189136-0028V0 – accessed September 2021.
[9] Ibid.
[10] On the history and activities of the Group, see Jon Wood “Paul Neagu and His Generative Art Group” in Palpable Sculpture. Paul Neagu, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2015) 41-49.
[11] Carrie Lambert Beatty, “Make Believe. Parafictions and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009): 51–84.
[12] Paul Overy, Paul Neagu: A Generative Context 1965-1981 (Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1981), 44.
[13] Neagu cited by Overy, Paul Neagu: 46.
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