I'd just stumbled collage and assemblage artist Peter Quinnell, who as it happens seems to live really close to me judging by his phone number and it reminded me of the fun I used to have as a kid when I encountered a pop-up book. Back in the 1970s life seemed to be filled with cardboard, glue and pictures from magazines. I dabbled in collage for a few years, although I quickly progressed to photo-montage as I just couldn't stand 'seeing the joins'. Even in my final year at university I produced a series of large scale subverts, using billboard posters from recent car and booze ads I created a series of rather strange pieces that disassembled advertising iconography. Perhaps they were the main reason that when I graduated and ventured forth into almost all of the ad agencies in London they wouldn't touch me with a proverbial barge pole.
Disco Devil by Peter Quinnell (Trojan Records)
The truth is I don't like advertising, I don't trust the medium, so anything that could sabotage its stranglehold on society was all right with me. If anyone tells you you have to change the system from within tell them I'm living proof you can't. If you hate a system, the guardians of that particular power game will be able to spot you as the troublemaker you are from a mile off. Still I did learn a lot about how the media and advertising through much of the forced reading list at art college, yes we did read from time to time, especially Umberto Eco, Baudrillard, Foucault and Derrida who all had a habit of disseminating everything including the image to its base elements. Much like the media, much like the mind of an advertising exec.
As a kid I remember being persuaded to play with a cardboard theatre with my sister and a few of the neighbours' kids, I found the 'play' stiflingly dull, but I was fascinated by the sense of flattened depth of vision the flimsy stage and figurines provided. I have a terrible sense of depth, not philosophically mind you but visually. When I first came across the cardboard theatre I stumbled on a vague notion that perhaps I was not such a freak after all, and that life, reality, as we see it in supposed 3D is in fact a world of layers, slices of 2D imagery laid over one another. Visual depth has fascinated and eluded me since, something I study in the way someone might grasp the English language from a crackling BBC World broadcast on the radio. The only reason I could see it is that I didn't believe my eyes, or rather my logic centre was extremely sceptical about the information it was supposed to unquestioningly decipher.
Since my recent father's death I've been doing a lot of delving into the darker recesses of my grey matter. Until the last few days the toy theatre incident had been archived in a long term memory dump, I hadn't remembered it because I had in all these years somehow managed to rewire my brain to stack slices of imagery as quickly as the next guy. Until I'd rediscovered this little gem I assumed that my lack of depth perception was all down to my acid laden late teens, but since I recall another event, listening to the words of my late grandfather telling me as a child that "I shouldn't think so much about everything all the time and just focus on what catches my eye". It was sound advice but it did mean I was left with a sense I was missing a "bigger picture", a wider vista borne out of necessity, a flicker book reality given depth in stackable layers that kept on rolling by.
The greatest example of a 3D world compiled from 2D slices has to be the pop-up book. Adding motion and relative scale to the mix appeals to me, they're both powerful clues to assess depth, the vast majority of us will do this subconsciously. But the surprise and wonder a great pop-up book brought me as a child has never truly faded, however caged the response I know it's still in there. It's the sort of medium that would really work on a far larger scale, although I suppose that's theatre design, although as a street art sculpture this method would be handy due to the speed of setting it up on locale.
Check these out…
A lot of people like to cite Warhol's Index book as a great piece of pop-up art. I don't. I love Warhol's work, but this sucks…
Michael Twyman's typographic delights include a few very fine examples of antique pop up books.
Irish performer Lisa Hannigan's video Lille features an amazing one…
To be honest I can think of one artist who'd taken the 2D/3D idea further both in scale and dramaticism and that's Mia Pearlman's cut out paper sculptures which you can buy and piece together at home. More info at her website.
Keep an eye out for more and give us your links in the comments section 
This post is tagged 2D, 3D, assemblage, collage, paper sculpture, pop up books
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