ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi's repeated use of a kit of forms provides the viewer with an interactive role. It suggests that an understanding of Guston and Paolozzi’s studio methods allows the audience to step beyond the finality of the art object to play with the narrative life of forms. The chapter explores method by which both artists’ use of unresolved narrative places form within change. Functioning without a drive towards finality, emergent narrative will be seen to provide characters with independence from a plotline. In offering the audience an active role in the construction of narrative, artworks are seen to exist in a mutating present. If one were thinking of emergent narrative in terms of form, one might imagine a spinning top, an endlessly shuffled pack of cards or a continuous process of sedimentation and disintegration.
