Tilson, Joe: The Five Senses (1968-69)

Although Joe Tilson's work have made use of more individual craftwork than those of other Pop artists, he also applied techniques characteristic to Pop art and made series drawing on the image production of mass media. At the end of the sixties, he goes beyond the infantile clarity of Pop art and seeks to incorporate the phenomena into different structures. One of his favorite basic structures is the ABC, but the system of four elements, four seasons or the seven days of the week also carries a general meaning to him. The series Five Senses vary a topos known in European art for a long time and exploited in various ways. He produces large screen prints of body parts cut out from photographs, where the huge positives in transparent slide frames show the easily recognizable images of the five sensory organs while the inscriptions with coloured letters ensure the viewer that the body part s/he sees symbolizes itself. The surreal image of the starlit sky between the lips or the clock hands fixed on the fingertips, however, also refers to our “sixth sense”, the subconscious intuition. K. Ü.