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Paul Laffoley

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Paul Laffoley
Laffoley in January 2015
BornAugust 14, 1935
Cambridge, Massachusetts,U.S.
DiedNovember 16, 2015 (aged 80)
Boston,Massachusetts,U.S.
NationalityAmerican
MovementVisionary Art
Websitehttp://paullaffoley.net

Paul Laffoley(August 14, 1935 – November 16, 2015) was an Americanvisionary artistandarchitectfromBoston,Massachusetts.

Biography

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Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1935, inCambridge, Massachusetts,to anIrish Catholicfamily. His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., was president of the Cambridge Trust Company, and alawyerwho taught classes atHarvard Business School.The elder Laffoley indoctrinated Paul, Jr. with his own religious philosophical beliefs, including aspects ofBuddhismandHinduismand what he called "mind-physics", but opposed Laffoley's pursuit of painting as a career. Laffoley, Sr. also taught Paul that there was "no gravity".[1]

Laffoley wrote that his first spoken word was "Constantinople"at the age of six months. He did not speak again until he was four years old.[2]As a child, he was diagnosed as havingAsperger's Syndrome.[3]According to Laffoley, he attended the progressiveMary Lee Burbank SchoolinBelmont, Massachusetts,where his talent as a draftsman was ridiculed by hisabstract expressionistteachers. After further studies at the Waldorf School, Laffoley would complete undergraduate studies atBrown University,graduating in 1961 with honors in classics, philosophy, andart history.[4]While at Brown in 1961, according to his "Phenomenology of Revelation", Laffoley was given eightelectroshocktreatments after the termination of "about a year of weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, who had treated [him] for a mild state ofcatatonia"[5]

In 1961, he enrolled at theHarvard Graduate School of Design,where he studied architecture because it consisted of diagrams that rendered objects in space with accuracy and precision. He also studied sculpture at Harvard's Carpenter Center withMirko Basaldellawhom he cited as an early influence. After one year, he was summarily expelled from GSD by the faculty for being "overly involved in his work". By chance, Laffoley was given an issue of Progressive Architecture by his uncle withFrederick Kiesleron the cover. Laffoley felt Kiesler's work was what he had been searching for and, after writing 17 letters, Laffoley went to New York and successfully entered an apprenticeship with Kiesler While canvasing the art scene in New York, Laffoley metAndy Warhol,who offered him a place to sleep at his 87th Street fire station if he would report on late night television between 1 and 5 am. It was from watching these Indian Head Test Patterns, along with his early exposure to a Hindu tutor, that Laffoley would arrive at a format for his large scale paintings that would dominate his work for five decades. On weekdays during this period, Laffoley found employment withEmery Roth & Sonswhere he worked on the plans for the yet to be builtWorld Trade CenterTowers before being terminated upon his suggestion of bridges joining the two buildings.

After the death of his father in 1963, Laffoley returned to Boston and eventually established his first dedicated studio space, at 36 Bromfield Street, on Christmas Day, 1968. It was there that Paul's career began to "connect" with an early show at the Orson Welles Theater, which was "hijacked" and taken to theWoodstock Music Festivalfor presentation by Dean Gitter, without Laffoley's permission. In an effort to recover his work, Paul took the bus to Woodstock, which exposed him to the then-current countercultures of the day. This was followed by numerous exhibition opportunities and curatorial projects that lead to the creation of his Boston Visionary Cell (1971). The Boston Visionary Cell, which Paul Laffoley founded on the model of an artists' guild, was a highly communal and curatorial undertaking. The charter of the Boston Visionary Cell underscores Laffoley's thought processes "to develop and advance visionary art".

By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to evolve from the spiritual and the intellectual to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engagingpsychotronicdevice, perhaps similar to architectural monuments such asStonehengeor the Cathedral of Notre Dame and their spiritual aura. Works such as Thanaton III (1989), The Orgone Motor (1983), and the Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from Earth (1990) followed this concept.

After the destruction of theWorld Trade Center towersin theSeptember 11 attacks,Laffoley was one of a number of architects who, in 2002, submitted designs for the competition to plan theFreedom Tower.Laffoley took his inspiration from the work ofCatalanarchitectAntoni Gaudí.His conception was to plan a gigantic hotel in the style of Gaudí'sSagrada Famíliachurch inBarcelona.[6][2]

After the Austin Museum of Art organized a traveling survey of his career in 1999, Laffoley became something of a cult figure for curators around the world. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris devoted an entire room to his work in its 2009 exhibition "Chasing Napoleon", and several of his works were included in "The Alternative Guide to the Universe" at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013. Other major shows include Premonitions of the Bauharoque at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (publication), Secret Garden at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (publication), and the recent monograph entitledThe Essential Paul Laffoleyedited byDouglas Wallaand published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2016.[7]

In 2001, Laffoley was badly injured in a fall.[8]Complications fromdiabetesled to his right leg being amputated below the knee;[9]at Laffoley's request,[8]Stan Winstonmade him a customprostheticwhich resembled alion's paw (because Laffoley was aLeo).[10]

About

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Following his formal education in the classics at Brown and architectural studies atHarvard,Laffoley began to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry. In a search for expanded opportunities, he went to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architectFrederick Kiesler,and was also recruited to view late-night TV forAndy Warholin exchange for a place to sleep.

At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family home inBelmonton the weekends, completing his first fully mature vision: TheKali-Yuga:The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. From this point forward, Laffoley began to formulate his unique trans-disciplinary approach to a new discipline combining,philosophy,science,architectureand spirituality to the practice of painting. Laffoley first began to organize his ideas in a format related to easternmandalas,partially inspired by the late night patterns he watched for Warhol on late night television. This quickly developed into four general subcategories of paintings:operating systems,psychotronic devices, meta-energy,time travel,andlucid dreaming.Conceived of as "structured singularities", Laffoley never works in series, but rather approaches each project as a unique schematic. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas would take up to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, a modern approach to trans-disciplinary enlightenment and its spiritual aura.

From an early age, Laffoley manifested an obsessive interest inUFOs.He had seen the movieThe Day the Earth Stood Still873 times. He explains that his obsessive interest in the film derives partly from a fascination with the architecture of the space ship in the film which, early on in his life, was subconscious. While he was still a child he made a vow to become an architect so that he could design flying saucers, although he did not become a registered architect until he was 50 years of age.

Two years later, in preparation for a major oral surgery, I was subjected to a routine cat-scan of my head. As a result, a miniature metallic-like "implant" was discovered in my brain near the pineal gland. A local chapter ofMUFON(Mutual UFO Network) declared it to be a "nanotechnological laboratory" capable of accelerating or retarding my brain activity. I have come to believe that the implant is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation of my ideas and theories.[11]

Work

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Painted on large canvases, the majority of Paul Laffoley's paintings, combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation that addressed concepts like dimensionality, time travel (through 'hacking' relativity), connection of conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.[12][13][14]

Laffoley's writings as well as works of art were published in May 2016 by theUniversity of Chicago Pressin a new book entitledThe Essential Paul Laffoleyedited and texts by Douglas Walla, with further texts byLinda Dalywimple Henderson,Arielle SaiberandSteven Moskowitz.

British writerMichael Bracewell,in his collection of essays entitledWhen Surface was Depthobserved: "If Laffoley's work within the Boston Visionary Cell can be said to have one principal preoccupation - a common denominator of his eclectic scholarship and practice - then that preoccupation would be to understand the process by which one goes from becoming to being." Bracewell has also written that, "The Boston Visionary Cell, as a concretized manifestation of its inhabitant's work and preoccupations, describes the way in which a chaos of data - no less than a chaos of marble - can be sculpted by research to release the perfect forms within it."[15]

The Estate of Paul Laffoley is represented byKent Fine Artin New York.

Death

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Laffoley died on November 16, 2015, in South Boston, Massachusetts, of congestive heart failure.[16]

Exhibitions

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Major works

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  • The Kali-Yuga: the End of the Universe at 424826 A.D.(1965)
  • The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as Shakti Urborosi: The Elimination of Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis(1965)
  • The Ecstasy of Revulsion(1966)
  • The World Self(1967)
  • I, Robur, Master of the World(1968)
  • The Visionary Art Process(1969)
  • The Final Descent From Hyparxis(1970)
  • The Promethean Sinner(1970)
  • The Visionary Point(1970)
  • Utopia: Time Cast As A Voyage(1974)
  • Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe(1974)
  • Temporality: The Great Within of the Universe(1974)
  • The Visionary Artist’s Studio(1974)
  • Get Thee Behind Me, Satan(1974–1983)
  • The Third Living Creature(1975)
  • The Kyklos of Hermocrates(1975)
  • Black-White Hole: the Force of the History of the Universe to Produce Total Non-Existence(1976)
  • The Secret of Life Lies in Death(1976)
  • The Living Klein Bottle House of Time(1976)
  • The Comet Kohoutek(1976)
  • The Renovation Mundi(1977)
  • A Proposal For A Pinball Museum(1978)
  • Cosmolux(1981)
  • The Orgone Motor(1982)
  • Color Breathing(1983)
  • Thanaton III(1989)
  • Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth(1990)
  • It Came From Beneath Space: Lucid Dream Number 52(1991)
  • The Solitron(1997)
  • Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate(1999)
  • After Gaudi: A Grand Hotel for New York City(2002)
  • Pickman's Mephitic Models(2004)
  • The Myth of the Zeit-Geist(2013)

Books and monographs

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  • Laffoley, Paul, edited and texts by Douglas Walla, with essays byLinda Dalrymple Henderson,Arielle Saiber and Steve Moskowitz. "The Essential Paul Laffoley" Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2016
  • Laffoley, Paul, and Jeanne M. Wasilik. "The Phenomenology of Revelation". New York: Kent Fine Art, 1989.ISBN978-1878607058
  • Laffoley, P. (1999). Architectonic Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967–1999. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Fine Art.
  • Paul Laffoley: Secret Universe. Walther König, Köln, 2012.ISBN978-3863350888(catalog)
  • Croquer, Luis. (2013) "Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharoque". Seattle: Henry Art Gallery.ISBN978-0-935558-52-4
  • Laffoley, Paul. (2016) "The Essential Paul Laffoley: Works from the Boston Visionary Cell." Chicago: University of Chicago Press.ISBN9780226315416

Interviews

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  • The Viking Youth Power Hour interview Paul at theEsozone,August 11, 2007[21]
  • February 12, 2007. 3 hour interview on Mike Hagan's "RadiOrbit" show. Very broad range of topics covered including Laffoley's early life, working on the World Trade Center in the 1970s, developing his time travel theories, theRaelians,Buckminster Fuller,nanotechnology,living architecture and 2012. Link to archived MP3 stream of full 3 hour interview:[22]
  • 2001 Thanaton III produced for Channel 4. (original broadcast January 28, 2001. Interviewed by Richard Metzger)
  • 1999 Pseudo.com Online Network interview with Richard Metzger of The Disinformation Company
  • 1998The Mystery of Genius(two part series) for the Arts & Entertainment Channel produced by Robert Fiveson. (broadcast in 1999). interviewed by John Metherell
  • 1997 Paul Laffoley on the Time Machine,Strange Universe(original broadcast September 10, 1997). interviewed by Alisyn Camerota

Notable public collections

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References

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  1. ^Marquard, Bryan (December 1, 2015)."Paul Laffoley, 80; his art depicted portals - The Boston Globe".BostonGlobe.com.RetrievedJune 24,2019.
  2. ^abLarroque, Jean-Pierre."The Mad One".Doublethink Productions.Archivedfrom the original on December 13, 2021.RetrievedOctober 13,2013.
  3. ^Staff, Wonderland (September 24, 2009)."Paul Laffoley".Wonderland.RetrievedJune 12,2024.
  4. ^"Paul Laffoley Bio".Kent Fine Arts LLC. Archived fromthe originalon October 21, 2013.RetrievedOctober 12,2013.
  5. ^Lafolley, Paul (1989)."The Dream As The Initiation" from The Phenomenology of Revelation.New York, NY: Kent Fine Arts. p. 15.ISBN1878607057.
  6. ^Collins, Glenn (January 21, 2003)."Postmodern, In a Manner Of Speaking; A Shape Out of 1908 Is Offered Downtown".New York Times.RetrievedOctober 13,2013.
  7. ^GRIMES, WILLIAM (November 21, 2015)."Paul Laffoley, Painter Inspired by Time Travel and Aliens, Dies at 80".The New York Times.RetrievedJanuary 5,2016.
  8. ^abPaul Laffoley,by Rupert Howe,Wonderland Magazine;published September 2009
  9. ^Paul Laffoley,at theWynn Newhouse Awards;retrieved June 24, 2019
  10. ^A party for the thinking Angeleno,by Shana Ting Lipton, in theLos Angeles Times;published February 19, 2004; retrieved June 24, 2019
  11. ^Laffoley, Paul (2000)."Disco Volante" from the UFO Show.Normal, IL: University Galleries, Illinois State University. pp. 34, 36, 24–27.ISBN0-945558-30-9.
  12. ^Outsider Art Sourcebook.New York, NY: Raw Vision. March 2009.ISBN978-0954339326.
  13. ^Johnson, Ken (January 17, 2013)."The Boston Visionary Cell".New York Times.RetrievedOctober 12,2013.
  14. ^Johnson, Ken (April 6, 2001)."ART IN REVIEW: Paul Laffoley, 'Portaling'".New York Times.RetrievedOctober 13,2013.
  15. ^Bracewell, Michael (July 9, 2002).when surface was depth.London: Da Capo Press. pp.346–353.ISBN0306811308.
  16. ^"VISIONARY ARTIST AND GENIUS PAUL LAFFOLEY HAS DIED".Dangerous Minds. November 16, 2015.RetrievedNovember 17,2015.
  17. ^"Kent Fine Art".Archived fromthe originalon October 15, 2015.RetrievedOctober 10,2015.
  18. ^"Chasing Napoleon".e-flux. September 25, 2009.RetrievedJune 2,2014.
  19. ^"Paul Laffoley: The Boston Visionary Cell. New York: Kent Fine Art, 2013".Archived fromthe originalon March 22, 2015.RetrievedMarch 18,2015.
  20. ^Paul Laffoley at the Henry Art Gallery April 6 - September 29, 2013ArchivedMarch 20, 2015, at theWayback Machine
  21. ^"Chicago's Favorite Podcast.:. VIKING YOUTH POWER HOUR.:. Chicago Podcasters with Nuts Like Mothballs".Archived fromthe originalon September 27, 2007.RetrievedAugust 24,2007.
  22. ^Interviewmikehagan.com
  23. ^"Pérez Art Museum Miami announces landmark acquisition from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry".Knight Foundation.RetrievedAugust 23,2023.
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