Remembering Paul Laffoley on what would have been his 89th birthday
Today would have been the 89th birthday of my good friend, the great genius artist and thinker Paul Laffoley. It’s been nearly a decade since he died, and the world is a much less interesting place without him in it. Our home has so many visual reminders of Paul, including an extraordinary horoscope he did for me with tiny, tiny handwriting, that’s in my office, that I am always quasi-thinking about him. Not necessarily consciously thinking about him, but nevertheless, he’s always there in my everyday life. Knowing Paul was one of the best experiences of my life.
William Alderick wrote a terrific essay about Paul on his Substack that I want to call your attention to:
Encountering US artist Paul Laffoley for the first time at a Disinformation weekend in upstate New York back in 2004 has left an indelible mark on me ever since. Somewhere between Buddha and Back to The Future’s Doc Brown, Laffoley gave a slide show of his works, lecturing with a lion’s paw in place of his left foot on his various theoretical subjects encompassing alternative histories, blueprints for future human development, Goethe’s Ur-plant re-articulated into genetically engineered living architecture and his design for a working time machine. As collector Norman Dolph puts it in his foreword to Laffoley’s book The Phenomenology of Revelation, Laffoley could be the ‘spokes-painter of a consciousness yet unborn’.
The problem is that the ideas presented in Laffoley’s science fiction visions are so far removed from established reality that by definition they’re insane. His mandalic architectural blueprints of metaphysical ideas regularly pay homage to and draw on such a diverse range of intellectual ingredients that no one person can possibly be capable of properly evaluating it all: Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Madame Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, Nikola Tesla, H.G Wells, Claude Bragdon, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Teilard de Chardin, to name a very small and under-representative selection. Much of Laffoley’s lack of attention within the mainstream art industry can be put down to this. As Disinformation host Richard Metzger muses, Laffoley’s ‘singular erudition’ and transdisciplinary auto-didacticism, almost entirely self-taught and thus free of academic compartmentalization and categorization, is so over most people’s heads that he’s misunderstood to the point of tragicomedy.
Read more of “Enter the Bauhauroque.”