Gerald Laing 1936-2011
Hybrid, 1966
Mixed media
6 1/8 x 2 x 7 1/8 in
15.5 x 5 x 18 cm
15.5 x 5 x 18 cm
The 1960s was a period in art when the lines between different mediums and the labels of ‘British’ and ‘American’ art were becoming increasingly blurred. This sculpture, created by Philips...
The 1960s was a period in art when the lines between different mediums and the labels of ‘British’ and ‘American’ art were becoming increasingly blurred. This sculpture, created by Philips and Laing in 1966, could be seen as an embodiment of this time.
The pair termed Hybrid their ‘art consumer research project’. They were fascinated by art’s potential to convey information and present data. Together they spent ten months compiling, analysing and averaging, with the help of an IBM computer, the artistic preferences of over 130 of mainly London and New York based critics, gallerists, curators and collectors. What resulted was a distillation of different ideas into one form, a funnelling of opinion through Laing and Philips’s skills as engineers into one unifying piece of art.
This sculpture is a hybrid of the art scenes of New York and London, of painting and sculpture and of its two artists. It can also be understood as a physical manifestation of data, and of symbolising the huge broadening of possibilities that the technological and creative revelations of the 1960s brought.
The pair termed Hybrid their ‘art consumer research project’. They were fascinated by art’s potential to convey information and present data. Together they spent ten months compiling, analysing and averaging, with the help of an IBM computer, the artistic preferences of over 130 of mainly London and New York based critics, gallerists, curators and collectors. What resulted was a distillation of different ideas into one form, a funnelling of opinion through Laing and Philips’s skills as engineers into one unifying piece of art.
This sculpture is a hybrid of the art scenes of New York and London, of painting and sculpture and of its two artists. It can also be understood as a physical manifestation of data, and of symbolising the huge broadening of possibilities that the technological and creative revelations of the 1960s brought.
