To the Last of the Imaginary Solutions

Flanagan proposes a toast to Alfred Jarry’s vision of the irrational and absurd in this etching. Flanagan came across the French playwright’s work when given a copy of The Evergreen Review (no.13, 1960). He became an enthusiast, and in his sculpture , he courted the ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes that were central to Jarry’s science of Pataphysics. In the foreground is a drawing representing Flanagan’s early work ‘heap’, the anamorphic shape of sand-filled sacks, heaped on top of each other. The bloated figure in the top right, with a pointed head and spiral motif on his belly, can be identified as Ubu.