Paul Laffoley
Encyclopedia
Paul Laffoley is a U.S.
artist and architect
. As an architect working for Emery Roth & Sons, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art
or outsider art
. Most of Laffoley's pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.
, to an Irish Catholic
family. His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, was also a lawyer
and taught classes at Harvard Business School
. Early in life, Laffoley, Sr. also did on-stage performances as a medium
.
According to Laffoley, he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts
, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his abstract expressionist teachers. After attending Boston public schools for a short time, Laffoley matriculated at Brown University
, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History
. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electroshock treatments.
In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design
, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. In a search for expanded opportunities, Laffoley came to New York to work with the visionary Frederick Kiesler
, and was recruited by Andy Warhol
, who wanted someone to watch television for him at all hours of the night. Laffoley watched television in the pre-dawn hours, before programming had actually begun. Following his dismissal by Kiesler, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center
Tower II (floors 15 to 45) with Emery Roth & Sons under the direction of architect Minoru Yamasaki
. Following his suggestion that bridges be constructed between the two towers for safety, he was summarily fired by Yamasaki and returned to Boston.
Returning to Belmont in 1965, he completed the first paintings of a mature style in the household basement against the wishes of his father. In Christmas, 1968, after a quarrel with a first studio partner, Laffoley was in immediate need of a studio and living accommodations. Having only one day to relocate, Paul found an empty room on the second floor of a downtown office building at 36 Bromfield Street in downtown Boston, and immediately moved into it. This studio would become infamously known as the Boston Visionary Cell. The Cell was formally incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary art genre.
Now clearly following his path as a painter, he began a highly original approach to the construction of the painted surface. Based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments, Laffoley began to first organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas that had captivated his interest in the spiritual. This format quickly developed into Laffoley’s three sub-groupings of work: operating Systems, psychotronic devices and lucid dreams related to them. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never works in series, but rather approached each project freshly, and individually.
Working in a solitary manner, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas can take one to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, perhaps similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge
or the Cathedral of Notre Dame and their spiritual aura. As a confirmed “utopia
n”, Laffoley is a prominent visionary artist.
Since 1966 to the present, Laffoley has exhibited on a regular basis now totaling over two hundred shows including the Ward-Nasse Gallery until 1984, then with the Stux Gallery (Boston/New York) in 1985, and since 1988 at the Kent Gallery, New York. In 1989, Kent Gallery compiled and published the first monograph on Laffoley entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. Laffoley also obtained his formal Architectural License in October 1990. His first museum retrospective was in 1999 resulting in the publication of the second Laffoley monograph entitled Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperiemente in Zombie Aesthetics: A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley Spanning Four Decades, 1967–1999, to the Brink of the Bauharoque.
After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Laffoley was one of a number of architects who, in 2002, submitted designs for the competition to plan the Freedom Tower
. Laffoley took his inspiration from the work of Catalan
architect Antoni Gaudí
. His conception was to plan a gigantic hotel in the style of Gaudí's Sagrada Família
church in Barcelona
.
British writer Michael Bracewell
, in his collection of essays, when surface was depth, has made some particularly eloquent observations about his work, such as:
"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."
And:
"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."
He works in many types of media, including oil, acrylic, silkscreen, and pen and ink, and include both images and text. Lately he has concentrated on large paintings with sculptural and mixed media elements.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist and architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
. As an architect working for Emery Roth & Sons, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art
Visionary art
Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.-Definition:...
or outsider art
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...
. Most of Laffoley's pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.
Biography
Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1940 in Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, to an Irish Catholic
Irish Catholic
Irish Catholic is a term used to describe people who are both Roman Catholic and Irish .Note: the term is not used to describe a variant of Catholicism. More particularly, it is not a separate creed or sect in the sense that "Anglo-Catholic", "Old Catholic", "Eastern Orthodox Catholic" might be...
family. His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, was also a lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
and taught classes at Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
. Early in life, Laffoley, Sr. also did on-stage performances as a medium
Séance
A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word "séance" comes from the French word for "seat," "session" or "sitting," from the Old French "seoir," "to sit." In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma"...
.
According to Laffoley, he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The population was 24,729 at the 2010 census.- History :Belmont was founded on March 18, 1859 by former citizens of, and land from the bordering towns of Watertown, to the south; Waltham, to the west; and Arlington, then...
, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his abstract expressionist teachers. After attending Boston public schools for a short time, Laffoley matriculated at Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electroshock treatments.
In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design
Harvard Graduate School of Design
The Harvard Graduate School of Design is a graduate school at Harvard University offering degrees in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design.-History:...
, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. In a search for expanded opportunities, Laffoley came to New York to work with the visionary Frederick Kiesler
Frederick John Kiesler
Frederick John Kiesler...
, and was recruited by Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, who wanted someone to watch television for him at all hours of the night. Laffoley watched television in the pre-dawn hours, before programming had actually begun. Following his dismissal by Kiesler, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center
World Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...
Tower II (floors 15 to 45) with Emery Roth & Sons under the direction of architect Minoru Yamasaki
Minoru Yamasaki
was a Japanese-American architect, best known for his design of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, buildings 1 and 2. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century...
. Following his suggestion that bridges be constructed between the two towers for safety, he was summarily fired by Yamasaki and returned to Boston.
Returning to Belmont in 1965, he completed the first paintings of a mature style in the household basement against the wishes of his father. In Christmas, 1968, after a quarrel with a first studio partner, Laffoley was in immediate need of a studio and living accommodations. Having only one day to relocate, Paul found an empty room on the second floor of a downtown office building at 36 Bromfield Street in downtown Boston, and immediately moved into it. This studio would become infamously known as the Boston Visionary Cell. The Cell was formally incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary art genre.
Now clearly following his path as a painter, he began a highly original approach to the construction of the painted surface. Based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments, Laffoley began to first organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas that had captivated his interest in the spiritual. This format quickly developed into Laffoley’s three sub-groupings of work: operating Systems, psychotronic devices and lucid dreams related to them. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never works in series, but rather approached each project freshly, and individually.
Working in a solitary manner, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas can take one to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, perhaps similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...
or the Cathedral of Notre Dame and their spiritual aura. As a confirmed “utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n”, Laffoley is a prominent visionary artist.
Since 1966 to the present, Laffoley has exhibited on a regular basis now totaling over two hundred shows including the Ward-Nasse Gallery until 1984, then with the Stux Gallery (Boston/New York) in 1985, and since 1988 at the Kent Gallery, New York. In 1989, Kent Gallery compiled and published the first monograph on Laffoley entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. Laffoley also obtained his formal Architectural License in October 1990. His first museum retrospective was in 1999 resulting in the publication of the second Laffoley monograph entitled Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperiemente in Zombie Aesthetics: A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley Spanning Four Decades, 1967–1999, to the Brink of the Bauharoque.
After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Laffoley was one of a number of architects who, in 2002, submitted designs for the competition to plan the Freedom Tower
Freedom Tower
One World Trade Center , more simply known as 1 WTC and formerly known as the Freedom Tower, is the lead building of the new World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan in New York City...
. Laffoley took his inspiration from the work of Catalan
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
architect Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was a Spanish Catalan architect and figurehead of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works reflect his highly individual and distinctive style and are largely concentrated in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, notably his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família.Much of Gaudí's work was...
. His conception was to plan a gigantic hotel in the style of Gaudí's Sagrada Família
Sagrada Familia
The ' , commonly known as the Sagrada Família, is a large Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí...
church in Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
.
Works
As of 2004, Laffoley claims to have executed over 800 works. His work over the last forty years is a dizzying mix of precise architectural-quality painting and ideas (both societally accepted and far on the fringe) from ancient times to the present. Laffoley has called his work a blend of the purely rational, Apollonian impulse and the purely emotional, Dionysian impulse.British writer Michael Bracewell
Michael Bracewell
Michael Bracewell is a British writer and novelist. He was born in London, and educated at the University of Nottingham.-Bibliography:*Fiction**Missing Margate **The Crypto-Amnesia Club...
, in his collection of essays, when surface was depth, has made some particularly eloquent observations about his work, such as:
"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."
And:
"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."
He works in many types of media, including oil, acrylic, silkscreen, and pen and ink, and include both images and text. Lately he has concentrated on large paintings with sculptural and mixed media elements.
Major works
- The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as Shakti Urborosi: The Elimination of Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis(1965)
- Utopia: The Suspension between the Possible and the Impossible (1973)
- Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1974–1983)
- Temporality: The Great Within of the Universe (1974)
- Black-White Hole: the Force of the History of the Universe to Produce Total Non-Existence(1976)
- The Orgone Motor (1982)
- Color Breathing (1983)
- Thanaton III: Extraterrestrial Communication Portal (1989)
- Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990)
- It Came From Beneath Space: Lucid Dream Number 52 (1991)
- The Alchemy of Breathing (1992)
- The Fetal Dream of Life into Death (2001–02)
- After Gaudi: A Grand Hotel for New York City (2002)
- Pickman's Mephitic Models (2004)
- The Physically Alive Structured Environment: The Bauharoque (2004)
- Cosmogenesis To Christogenesis (2005)
Books and monographs
- Laffoley, P. (1989). Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology of Revelation. Boston: Kent Fine Art.
- Laffoley, P. (1999). Architectonic Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967-1999. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Fine Art.
Interviews
- The Viking Youth Power HourViking Youth Power HourViking Youth Power Hour is a podcast originating from Chicago, Illinois.As part of the first wave of podcasts to hit the internet, recording their first show shortly after New Years 2004, the Vikings, along with Madge Weinstein's "Yeast Radio" became the Chicago media's focal point illustrating...
interview Paul at the Esozone, August 11, 2007 http://www.thefeedlot.org/vikingyouth/show_show.php?show=95 - 2007 Feb 12th. 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, the Raelians, Buckminster FullerBuckminster FullerRichard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, nanotechnologyNanotechnologyNanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...
, living architecture and 2012. Link to archived MP3 stream of full 3 hour interview: http://www.mikehagan.com/2012/mp3/021207_PAUL_LAFFOLEY.mp3 - 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
- 1998 The 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
- Kossy, Donna. "Paul Laffoley: Third Generation Lunatic Fringe" in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, Los Angeles: Feral HouseFeral HouseFeral House is a book publisher owned and operated by Adam Parfrey. The publisher itself describes the books it sells as "pure information", and says the topics of the books are "forbidden"....
, 2001 (2nd ed. exp. from 1994), ISBN 978-0-922915-67-5 (interview reprinted from Kooks Magazine, No. 6, 1990, p. 20–28)
External links
- Laffoley's Odyssey, created by Rustbelt Films and Topsy Turvy Productions, producers of a documentary titled Laffoley's Odyssey
- Official Paul Laffoley site contains links to all activities
- Interview with Laffoley (focusing on H. P. LovecraftH. P. LovecraftHoward Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
, the nature of evil and many other topics) - Article about synchronistic events relating to Paul Laffoley's leg-breaking fall in 2001