The abrasive belts wrapped around the branches are broader in 'Troy', the third sculpture in the series.  Manufactured materials strangling natural ones is analogous to the environment's struggle for survival.  The underlying story of Laocoon and His Sons, and of the sculpture itself, is complex and has alternative plot lines which cast different lights on the same events.  What each version has in common is cunning, betrayal, and revenge.  As with Dismas and Gestas, no-one knows the names of Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, yet they played important parts in the drama - history too involves the 'beholder's share'.  Perhaps Alexander Calder's re-working of the myth was intended to marry the inherent instability of what Duchamp christened 'mobiles' to the uncertainty of the myth?  However this is tenuous and the work seems to do little to build upon the original, whether materially or conceptually.  On the other hand Eduardo Paolozzi's mash-up of man and machine in his sculptural collage certainly does so.   It takes the myth and reinterprets it through the lens of Brutalism and the struggle with mechanisation made human with Pop Art wit.  A focus on materials, whether 'found' or manufactured was a central concern of Paolozzi and The Independent Group, but narrative and figuration was important too.  This was a departure from the orthodoxy preached by the leading US critic Clement Greenberg who championed Abstract Expressionism.