Striking, graphic and bold; Gerald Laing’s triptych, Three Incidents from the Shock Film of the Year, captures the intoxicating zeal of pop-culture during the Swinging Sixties. Executed in 1963, when the artist was still studying at Central St. Martins, the present work displays Laing’s fervent interest in the international rise of Pop Art and mass-media.
At the end of his first year at St Martins, the same year that the present work was painted, Laing visited New York City and was introduced to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana. Pop Art’s avant-garde sensibilities held heavy sway over the artist during this formative t.mes , and the influence of these pioneering New York Artists is evidenced in this bold triptych. But beyond that, the mirroring of commercial printing techniques in his innovative painting method evidences Laing’s skilled draftsmanship that pre-empts his success as a forerunner of the movement in Britain in the decades that followed.
Laing’s interest in contemporary iconography derived partially his studies under Richard Smith at St Martins. Having recently returned from New York, Smith exposed his students to the vivacious world of American advertising, imagery and cinema through his lectures. Taking its subject matter from the cult film, That Kind of Girl, released in 1963, Laing’s Three Incidents from the Shock Film of the Year points to this doctrine and the increasingly liberated generation of which Laing was a part.
‘Standing on the tube platform on my way to St. Martin’s in the mornings, I was transfixed by the crude but powerful printing processes used in poster advertisements, and the ambivalence between the whole image which they contained and the means by which it had been created – the dots and lines and cacophony of form and colour visible at a short range, and the reassuring integrity of the image at a distance’
By utilising only three colours against the sharp tonal passages of black shadow, Laing captures the explosive nature of these three moments within the film. Playing with different sizes of dots in order to encapsulate the contours of Margaret Rose Keil and David Weston, Laing plays with the comfortable idea of ‘the image at a distance’ and the less assuring reality when considered up close.