When Lynn Barber Met Phyllida Barlow

There's a comedy in the way objects fail.

Buster Keaton took objects and their function...

..as a starting point for their demise.

That is my relationship with materials.

And my relationship with making things.

Phyllida Barlow's precarious-looking

yet ambitious installation at Tate Britain in 2014

secured her art-world reputation.

At some point, things are going to fall over.

At some point, things are going to collapse.

And they're going to become something else.

I want to follow that trail.

For me, that was the moment where I thought, "Oh, God," you know,

"she's a really, really great artist."

And... Sorry, I hadn't thought that before.

No, that's fine!

It's over 30 years since I've been to Phyllida Barlow's house

in Finsbury Park, because I used to live near here.

And it's just great to be seeing her again.

We were young mothers with young children together.

We went to the same baby-sitting circle

and we went to the playgroup together.

SHE RINGS BELL

-Hello!

-Hello, how nice to see you!

-And you as well.

-And how funny to...

-be back in the neighbourhood, as it were.

-Yes.

Gosh. This is... This is very much as I remember it.

-Really?

-Yes.

Well, you haven't done any drastic redecorating, have you?

No, no. It's still falling down and...

-Yeah.

-..a kind of potential slum, I'm afraid.

Against all odds, Phyllida Barlow achieved art-world acclaim

after several decades of being ignored by curators and collectors.

Some of her sculptures look like an abstract theatrical set.

She provokes close encounters with massive forms

that threaten to topple.

She ignores the rules, by working on a monumental scale

with the most unmonumental of materials -

offcut wood, Styrofoam, chicken wire and plaster.

With a team of eight assistants, she's now up against the clock,

preparing for a major exhibition in Zurich.

But I think the top isn't big enough to take the roll of...

..that roll of material.

She's also been chosen to represent Britain

at the upcoming Olympics of the art world, the Venice Biennale.

As an artist who raised five kids on a part-time teacher's salary,

Phyllida Barlow is also a survival artist.

Joel, was there another of those?

Over there.

But anyway, big, big, big congratulations.

-It's great that you're doing the Venice Biennale.

-Thank you.

-And great that you're up for the Hepworth Prize.

-Thank you.

-Yes.

-And great that you've also got something big coming up in Zurich.

There seems to be a moment where... that something makes it known,

but in terms of the job in hand, it's...

-You feel you've been doing the same thing.

-Yes, exactly.

We're the same age, so I like to see oldies blossoming.

-You know, reaching peak... peak career success.

-Yeah.

Yes. We'll go into the studio now, which you may remember.

'In the back of Phyllida's house was her original studio,

'which I remember as a shed.

'This is my first visit in over 30 years.'

I had to do a lot of renovation of this studio here.

Got that slightly mouldy smell that I remember.

THEY LAUGH

But what I do remember is -

it's just really embarrassing to remember now -

is that I'd known you for quite some time and knew that you were

a sculptor, but never seen any of your work, so one day,

one bright day, I said, "Oh, do take me to your studio,"

expecting some sort of marble head,

or something that looked to me recognisably like sculpture,

and then I realised that these piles of wood or whatever WERE the sculptures.

I don't think I was...

-I think you were...

-Well, I probably TRIED to be polite.

-Oh, no, no, you weren't!

-THEY LAUGH

These are drawings all done prior to beginning the Zurich works,

but they were definitely the catalysts

for how the work gets produced.

These are the platforms that are between three and five metres high.

Does it make you sort of cynical that you've...

..sort of been discovered as if you were nowhere

in the last few years, and now suddenly you're famous?

Does that make you feel sour?

I mean, I know that that's not the truth, but to, as it were,

the average newspaper reader or... it will seem that

they are hearing the name Phyllida Barlow for the first time.

I couldn't have done the... attention bit

in my late 20s, early 30s.

-Oh, really?

-Like some.

You wouldn't have played the media game.

-I wouldn't have been able to.

-No.

I would have been...

..overridden by it.

-But what...

-In some way.

-Oppressed by it?

Yes, yes. I think I wasn't ready for it.

I don't know how else to explain it.

I think I needed a long, slow time to...

Yes, for confidence to build, is it?

Not confidence, but for the work to have some kind of...

..maturity about it.

'Making art was the only thing that I wanted to do,

'from about the age of 16-and-a-half,

'after I'd had a brief flirtation with being a zoologist.'

So what I'm interested in getting is make those folds a bit more present.

At 16, Phyllida enrolled at Chelsea Art School.

Art-school politics in the 1960s were like a Cold War battleground,

where traditional art values fought tooth and nail

against experimentation.

I went to Chelsea Art School full-time, after my first term.

It was the beatnik era.

It was poetry and writing and working all night.

For me, at that time, as a 16-to-19-year-old,

some incredibly inspired teachers.

I had to think very hard what it was about sculpture

that was so attractive to me.

And it was the materials.

By the time I got to the Slade,

which was a much more established and fixed institution, in a way,

I was perplexed by authority

and authoritarian judgment of good and bad and right and wrong.

-You just say

-BLEEP,

-quite honestly.

I mean, it must have been very hard with five children,

and I don't seem to remember you having a Norland nanny or anything,

-did you?

-No.

And having to teach, and yet you still managed to carry on working.

I gather you worked at night a lot, didn't you?

Yes, yes. When eventually I had five children by 1981.

-Yes.

-I have to emphasise that it wasn't just me, you know,

it was Fabian and me, and I think that it was a double act.

Obviously, we're delighted to have five children,

but things needed to be managed, I suppose.

Fabian Peake is an artist, writer and poet,

who was also a part-time teacher for decades.

His father, Mervyn Peake, was the author of Gormenghast.

Fabian's artwork often incorporates language or poetry.

The cutout he's working on features

an excerpt from Milton's Paradise Lost.

I'm not sure how I'm going to use it yet,

but it might be something that is strapped to a tree.

You know, perhaps giving off sort of associations

with the tree of knowledge.

Phyllida and Fabian met at Chelsea Art School in the '60s,

while both were students.

I knew that our lives were terribly equal.

We were both serious artists and neither of us doubted

the involvement with their art of the other.

We came back for the autumn term and she'd grown her hair very long,

and it was terrifically attractive, you know, and...

-HE LAUGHS

-And...

So we got to know each other soon after that.

But in a way, we were lucky that we...

our lives were very similar, really.

Both artists, both managing to have part-time teaching jobs,

which could keep... it wasn't brilliantly paid,

but it kept the money ticking over.

We were struggling,

crazily struggling to keep everything afloat.

The two activities of being an artist and having children

are totally, completely incompatible.

Therefore, there is no method for how you survive.

There's only the hope that you have.

I mean, the only thing that you have is this incredible,

enduring love for them -

that is the one thing that...

..offers survival.

Across more than three decades of teaching, art trends changed,

art schools evolved and the YBA generation emerged.

A number of Phyllida's students gained recognition and acclaim.

Jealousy and competitiveness and strong emotional responses

to contemporaries who are getting recognition is very complex

and you can see how painful it is to young artists, you know!

And it was for myself as well.

Rachel Whiteread was a student of Phyllida's

and became the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993.

Her works often take the form of ghostly casts.

She was a YBA who exhibited in the pivotal Sensation show of 1997.

Phyllida was always

so completely and utterly delighted for my success, you know,

and, yeah, in a really special way, actually.

I'm not saying she's an angel,

because she's been very bitchy about some other people,

but that's quite understandable, and fine.

Embrace it. Just take it on.

Take on the green-eyed monster and absorb it

and get to know and enjoy the work

or the people who are having that acclaim.

Do you miss teaching, actually?

No. Not at all.

Good. Your work seems to me to have got bigger and bolder

in the last ten years. Is that right?

Since that time, since leaving teaching,

since coming on board with Hauser & Wirth,

has taken a much more intended and ambitious course.

I think that was the big shift. That there was someone there

to support and facilitate what she was doing.

We would be assisting her with loans for exhibitions,

we would be assisting her with production for new works.

And we would be maintaining her archive

and we would begin, basically... we'd bring her into the gallery

and begin talking about her as one of our artists,

so trying to form new collections for her with collectors,

with curators, with press, and so on.

In contrast to a back-yard shed,

having a gallery means having a studio the size of an airplane hangar.

To be able to see your work as it might possibly be in the space

is a very new experience.

And...

We can have then several works

all going at the same time, and that's also a new experience.

There's a lot of very sort of overt human playfulness

in some of your early works, and the ones I particularly like

are the objects for a television

and objects for an ironing board and all the rest of it.

Without galleries or museums inviting her to exhibit,

Phyllida creatively took matters into her own hands.

She invaded the living rooms of her friends.

These absurdist and playful sculptures turn a TV set,

an ironing board or an upright piano into plinths for her work.

-They seem to show great confidence as a sculptor...

-Mmm.

"Here is something,"

and great confidence in your own sense of humour?

What came out of those was my relationship with

the farcical side of making sculpture.

You like those slapstick films?

Yes, yeah.

Were there any particular things that you remember or that were...?

Yes, I think Buster Keaton's relationship with inanimate objects

and how his extraordinary antics are just, again,

a kind of proof of the farcical relationship we can have

with inanimate things.

And then in particular, maybe Laurel and Hardy,

when they're commissioned, so to speak,

to rebuild somebody's house,

-and in the process of doing that, they actually destroy it.

-Yes!

There is something about sculpture

that isn't just about perfect craft and perfect technique.

It's about mistakes.

-And the battle with the object!

-Yes. Yes.

Which is absolutely my relationship with making,

-that it's a tussle.

-Yes.

So, there is something about the endeavour that I find comical.

-Yes.

-You know, that I would have this relationship

with making something that has nowhere to go...

Yes, and ends up on the ironing board!

..and is useless. Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

I don't even know what's under here, actually.

Welcome to Phyllida Barlow's sculpture graveyard.

Her sculptures may fall apart, but they never really die.

I don't know what's wrong with this, really.

SHE LAUGHS

They await reincarnation as new sculptures,

or are left to weather.

I'm curious about the interplay between

the fancifulness of stage sets and the hardcore reality of sculpture,

where the two have some kind of meeting.

This was the... This is the system

by which it would be hung off the gantry.

Phyllida has made several boulder-like sculptures

which hang from ceilings.

One was called Hanging Monument.

They playfully defy monument logic.

They look as though they weigh tonnes,

but it could be Styrofoam with cement make-up.

I'm changing my mind about it the whole time, and eventually next year

I think we'll bring it back into the studio and work on it again.

Phyllida relates obviously very much to her own generation -

you know, Gormley and Deacon and Cragg,

the new British sculptors of the 1980s.

Her roots, in some ways -

it sounds odd now - are in surrealism,

the idea of dissonance and bringing opposing things together.

I didn't find the Duveen space intimidating at all!

The determination was there.

Phyllida Barlow's show at Tate Britain's Duveen Gallery in 2014

was one of the most audacious installations

that that prestigious gallery has ever encountered.

It was a monumental shout with the most unmonumental of materials.

It seemed to be having a laugh at the very idea of monumentality.

Some of the works there looked as if they might collapse

on top of me at any moment,

but the overall impact was jaw-dropping.

The idea of making things that have 100% stability, that don't break...

-Fall down!

-Yes, and are absolutely functional...

-Yes.

-..is something that can be challenged

by the way I make sculpture and the accidents that happen,

and the fact that in some ways I encourage those accidents,

-things do fall over.

-Yes.

-Things do break.

-But I'm interested...

-Do they for real?

I mean, because they look as though they might,

but then I thought how clever that actually they don't.

-But have you had sculptures fall apart?

-Yes! Oh, yes.

-Yes.

-Yes.

-Yeah.

Adam Burge was the manager of the team

that installed Phyllida's sculptures

in the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain.

The look of the work presenting itself as being precarious

is not the case.

Precarious it may look, but precarious it isn't.

There are strict rules and regulations,

so if something appears to be about to fall, it's not.

For me, the Duveen show was the moment, because...

-..it's a wonderful space, isn't it?

-Mm.

And then you filled it so commandingly

but also without changing your style, in a way.

I mean, it was more Phyllida Barlow sort of falling over!

-You know, toppling over.

-Yes.

And I... Well, for me, that was the moment where I thought,

"Oh, God," you know, "she's a really, really great artist!"

And... Sorry, I hadn't thought that before.

-No, that's fine!

-THEY LAUGH

The Duveen show was more like a performance

than a lasting sculpture.

Most of its ingredients now await recycling.

These are all the units that when they're put together vertically

formed the posts or the lintels

for the Tate Duveen show.

There was a family of foxes somewhere in here!

I'm not quite sure where she set up home.

All this is fodder for future works.

These are... A lot of the timbers that were used in the Duveen work

are now being used for the Zurich work.

The show will be on two floors.

The lower floor consists of three large spaces,

and I want the work to link between the three spaces.

I mean, do you think that there are other, as it were, Phyllida Barlows

-out there who do, you know, really good work?

-God, yes.

-But not being recognised?

-I think my curiosity is that

I work in a visual medium, yet most artwork is invisible.

-It doesn't get seen.

-Unless it's exhibited?

Exactly. Yes, there are many artists

who do not manage to get their work seen or...

So in the end, is it all to do with grit?

With being willing to keep on keeping on keeping on

long enough, or do you think luck comes into it?

Oh, luck, enormously. Yes. Yeah.

Phyllida wasn't institutionalised

in the way some of her male peers were,

and that may be partly because of her gender,

partly because of bringing up a family meant that

she was slightly under the radar

in terms of being on the scene and being present.

Partly perhaps because there's always been, I think,

a prejudice against teaching,

that teaching has never been seen as as important as making,

and many of the artists who've made it

have made it once they distanced themselves from teaching.

It's institutional neglect.

I think that if you're an artist,

it's also your job to go out and interest people in it, or...

not necessarily to sell it, but to engage the public.

I mean, I like the shouty artists, the Tracey Emins, the Damien Hirsts.

-Because actually...

-And so do I.

-Oh, do you?

-Oh, yeah, no.

I haven't got... I wouldn't want to be misrepresented about that.

I haven't got a problem with any artist's position.

I can accept the whole lot, because I think...

But you're saying it's not your way?

Well, I don't mind being a shouty artist,

but it's not necessarily going to be heard,

and that's what interests me.

You know, is that you can...

..you can want to your heart's desire to be seen

and attain that kind of visible recognition,

but it may not happen.

The art world doesn't like to admit it,

but it has waves of fashion,

and it must be hard for artists...

Obviously, you've developed, but basically you've kept on

doing your thing through, as it were,

-failure and success, or recognition.

-Mm.

And that probably is the right way to do art, isn't it?

-It's

-a

-way.

I mean, you know, being a young artist now,

I think, is tougher than it's ever been before.

Things have come full circle at the Slade School of Art for Phyllida.

She was an art student at the Slade,

was a long-time teacher at the Slade,

and is now a source of inspiration

for some of the young students having their graduating exhibition.

They will soon be confronting the challenges and uncertainties

of being an artist in the real world.

Well, she came to do a talk last year,

and I think that really got a lot of people talking.

She talks about the sort of struggles as well as the...

which people don't sometimes want to talk about,

you know, how difficult it is to actually get the work there,

or to install it or to realise what's in your head.

The armature is polystyrene, and I know she does that a lot too,

so maybe I've stolen a trick there!

Pretty much anybody who makes things,

I think she becomes an easy reference.

Of course, people have this inkling, that you do hear of stories that

people suddenly become this overnight success,

but I think with people like Phyllida, the fact that it does take a long time,

there's actually almost comfort in that,

that you can spend your time with your work

and take a longer time just kind of making the art,

rather than worrying about having a level of commercial success.

Now I think the emphasis is on how the work is seen,

where and to whom, et cetera.

And that's a tough call.

-Yes.

-There's no... It seems to be very unforgiving

about the artist who goes under the radar because they need to.

We may like shouty artists,

but they also need their moments of...

-you know, I think rest, or...

-Yes.

-..reflection.

I don't necessarily think just because a work's hit the gallery,

-it's the best work. And I speak for myself...

-Yes.

..as... Or the worst work, you know.

It's uncharted territory,

-because in the end, there is very little way of judging it...

-Yes.

-..in the way that will guarantee...

-Yes.

..that that judgment is right or wrong.

Oh, that's really kind. Thanks. Thanks.

I notice that you've got the complete correspondence

of Charles Darwin, which I have read too.

Mm, but your book should be there.

Yes, it should!

'By coincidence, around the time I met Phyllida,

'I wrote a book called The Heyday Of Natural History,

'which was about the Victorian obsession with natural history,

'and in particular the impact of Charles Darwin.'

Would you say that your great-great-grandfather,

Charles Darwin, has been an influence...or a presence, maybe,

-is a better word, in your life?

-A presence, yes, definitely.

And my mother was very severe about how we as children

might relate to him and that we shouldn't use it

as some sort of leverage for our future ambitions.

Where could you have done that?

I suppose, maybe... in any circumstance, you know,

it can be a kind of show-stopper.

-You know.

-Oh, really?

-And she was very keen to put an embargo on that.

You seem to have survived a lot of challenges.

Do you think being the great-great-granddaughter

of Charles Darwin helped?

I do think when I read the diaries that you saw earlier,

there are letters that are extremely compelling.

And I suppose there's something about

his descriptions of family life

and how those two things can come together and fall apart...

-And suit you, as it were...

-Or there's an empathy there.

From very small humble things to great national museums,

here's Phyllida, she can do it.

My ambition is to make an unnameable thing.

You've come a very long way from that wood shed in Finsbury Park

-when I first saw...

-Is that on my school report?

Yes! THEY LAUGH