The Man Who Sculpted Hares: Barry Flanagan, A Life

I think everybody here knows that Barry can't be with us, on doctor's orders.

And, of course, it takes a bit of the joy out of the proceedings,

but he is so determined that this should be the celebration that he planned.

We both used to work nightshifts at Parker's Bakery

in Cotham in Bristol.

And I used to load up the machines with empty baking tins

and Barry used to put the jam in the doughnuts.

It amused me to think that putting jam into doughnuts was almost a sculptural act

in the same way as changing the shape of a piece of clay

or adding something to clay or stone in some of his later work.

That projection of the human

into the natural world, so to speak, through animals,

is something that goes back a very long way

in both art and poetry.

Barry has more than a...more than a touch of the shaman about him.

The way he can take something out of the world of the every day and transmute it.

He has this way of making a relationship between his body, his hand

and the materials. It's almost as if, in some circumstances,

he lets the materials lead his hand. He refers somewhere, doesn't he,

to the work "showing" his hand.

I love that idea that the work shows your hand,

rather than you're imposing something on the work,

the work and you are in some kind of relationship.

We had lunch together recently. He still has that eye,

that curiously...

..magical...way of picking up...

..everything that's going on around him

and seizing on the detail of the everyday particulars.

I remember Barry when he first came to St Martin's.

He didn't join the class to get some diploma or anything.

He just wanted to be there.

I think he'd heard it was an exciting place to be.

And from the word go, you know,

he was really a refreshing and important presence there.

At the time, Carlo had just made a breakthrough

and Barry was aware of the various tendencies in the art world,

and his first work was a steel work,

but it had many surprises which kind of flummoxed everybody. "Why are you doing this?

"Why are you doing that?"

And we had a good argument as to whether it could really...

It didn't fit in to the canons that he'd already been operating around.

He was a maverick. I think he's carried on being a maverick for the rest of his life.

Skill was not something you demonstrated.

You avoided it.

And Barry took it on and said, "I'm going to be skilful."

And he was.

And I think he sort of confronted skill

and went beyond it.

CHATTERING

It shows the artist thinking

and suffering and thinking again

on top of the anvil of struggling with people

and galleries and creativity

and then, on top of it, we have the wonder of this piece.

I own a sculpture of myself, done in terracotta,

which had Barry's finger marks on it. He didn't sign it.

He signed it with his hands, because he's a haptic sculptor, I think,

so it's his fingers, his fingers on the pieces.

Look, there's his fingers. That's Barry's fingers.

And what major lessons do you think Barry Flanagan gives artists

starting out today?

I think it's, "Go for it even when people are laughing at you

"and pay no attention whatsoever to what you have to say,"

which I do remember very well when Barry was young,

and he didn't talk a lot.

But what he talked about, people paid no attention to whatsoever

except stupid me and one or two other people.

And he was right. He had got it inside him but didn't realise that.

That's amazing, as well. Elephants.

This hare dynamic on top of three...

..four elephants, which happen to be the heaviest creatures,

you know, that walk the Earth.

And yet they're kind of dwarfed, supporting this extraordinary hare.

Whereas this has all this kind of amazing...

..length.

And height.

Black.

And then there he is.

Flying out.

It's something that's...

..completely joyous, really. There's an abandon.

There's a kind of madness.

It's like a risky enterprise...

..in the way they kind of exist and stand

and can carry on much more happily without us

cluttering up their feet. Their dance continues now we've gone away.

They've become more strong, mightier, really...

SOUND OF WAVES BREAKING

It's a very different reaction that one hears about Barry

in America to what is heard in Europe.

Completely different.

And it could be like you've just been in the Midwest.

It could be people in Midtown or it could be people in Washington DC.

They know, in America, Flanagan quite different

than the one that we know in England.

They're almost totally unawares of his early work,

they're very, very unawares of where he's actually coming from

or has been himself.

So it's curious how they perceive him here.

There is something charitable,

it would appear, about his whole approach to life, let alone...

Yeah, I totally agree.

Is it at all possible that he is due some kind of serious review

and celebration?

I think absolutely.

I've never known anybody else quite like him.

I have to say.

He doesn't give much away these days.

So even the people that work at the gallery feel they have no idea

where he's coming or going. They're totally confused by him.

I find it hilarious, as does he.

SOUND OF WAVES BREAKING

PLAINTIVE PIANO MUSIC

I'd just like to say, this is a real pleasure to see all these pieces,

all these hares scattered across the American landscape,

and that the journey continues.

We have the largest community college in the area.

And how many students are there here?

Over 37,000. That includes credit and non-credit,

so a lot of people see it.

Thousands of people every week.

It's become sort of an icon for the college and a landmark, too.

It's located right next to the library.

We'll often see students after class, in between class,

resting here outside by the sculpture.

And if this piece has an affect on you, what is the reaction you get?

I think the word whimsical comes to mind.

Just the fact that people respond to it right away.

They enjoy it, they find it fun.

There are many different layers to it,

so that's always good to start off with,

with a general good feeling.

You don't get any hares here.

Right, they're different to what we have, we have the cottontail,

called the eastern cottontail rabbit.

-And I think they're smaller.

-Yeah.

-And they're everywhere.

You've heard the term multiply like rabbits?

Which is... So they're all over here in Iowa.

And do a lot of the wilder animals feed on them?

Yes.

Coyotes, hawks,

eagles, the owls...

most of your bigger predators.

There's a light rail platform down there

and during the winter

or probably during the summer, they have concerts here,

there'll be hundreds, thousands of people coming by here.

Probably just glance over and look at the hare without ever seeing

who did it, but here it stands for their perusal.

BELLS CHIME

-It's interesting we're hearing a bell ring in the background...

-Yes.

..when, in fact, we have a bell.

Indeed, that's wonderful.

I like to read the piece almost like a sentence,

starting at the basis,

where we have these gorgeous limestone cubes

that serve as a pedestal for the most

incredible monumental bell

that resounds in history and culture.

So the bell is sort of sitting on top of the history of architectural form,

the building blocks of architecture.

And then on the very top we have the ultimate

in free...free-spirited animal form,

the hare leaping across the bell.

It's just a profound, profound piece.

It's almost a sentence reading about the universe or humanism

and bringing all of that together.

So Barry left you a note here the other day.

And he has presented you with this piece...

..which you said reminded you of your grandmother.

My grandmother,

like in England also,

at the back of the garden she used to have beehives

and in times of extreme emotional stress,

she would go and talk to the bees.

This, I just put there this morning.

And, Robin, have you known Barry on this island over the years?

Yeah, a long time. Long time. I've rubbed rabbits with him.

-Do people ever throw money in here?

-Yeah, for the upkeep.

For the garden of cigarettes.

Is there any way you think your community was one of the reasons Barry felt comfortable

when he came here, or was it a very separate kind of universe?

No, there's the enlightened and there's the other lot, aren't there?

Barry loved it.

I have buried many dead birds here in the garden.

What would you say was the initial,

beginning of the reason Barry felt comfortable here?

I guess it was mind over matter.

HE LAUGHS

He always had that sort of sense

of being incognito.

He reminds me of, "Everybody's talking at me,

"I can't hear a word they're saying."

Fast-moving car. HE LAUGHS

Most of my profound thoughts, they have gone up in smoke.

Literally.

Yeah?

Well, it's fun to finally... HE LAUGHS

No laughter on the premises, please,

life is a serious business.

OK. You published with him. Right. Yeah, OK.

I'm going... I'm going to note it down now.

Also, on the point of attitudes,

Theresa came across a load of photos recently

which she's going to scan for me.

They're not very well reproduced, they're just on photocopied paper,

but she's going to scan them for me cos I can't identify all the stuff

and it'd be very helpful. She doesn't know.

And if I could send them to you, if you know some of the things,

that would be brilliant.

It's from the Burn showing.

-GIRL ON SCREEN:

-He said this in spite of having untangled

thousands of hares himself

and of being familiar with them

over a period of 40 years as a keeper, an occupation

which his family had followed for at least three generations before him.

-MAN ON TV:

-So do you like the Barry Flannigan sculptures of hares?

Yes, I do a lot.

I'm looking forward to showing Barry the work,

the images of what people are saying about his work.

What other things has he done?

He did lots of more abstract sculpture,

he did lots of work on paper.

He did work with material, he did lino cuts.

He worked with stone.

One of them walked by saying,

"Do you think that hare's thinking about Easter?"

In any case, there's always things that people want

to talk about in front of the work.

Why is it you like him so much, do you think?

Well, he has a wonderful humorous quality to him.

He has a very sort of compassionate quality.

He's listening to us, he wants to know what we're doing,

what we're thinking. But his forms are so delightful,

they're sort of ropey, they're kind of floppy.

His ears are fantastic, they stick up out there.

His eyes seemed to really jump up out of his head.

But I think most of all it's sort of the idea being

that somebody that is a hare could have kind of a human quality to him.

-Is there anything you'd like to say to Barry?

-Well, um, one of it is...

You know, people often ask what the most favourite piece of work

here was, when the garden was dedicated about seven years ago,

and Hillary Clinton was First Lady at that particular time.

And the newspaper quoted her as saying

that the Thinker On The Rock was her very, very favourite piece.

I hope Barry likes that.

He's always playing with the language of, you know,

the language of sculpture as he did with his earlies,

these strange, very simple, beautiful early works.

And likewise, when he moved into this more figurative production,

you're never quite sure what his angle is and whether...

There's a sort of tongue-in-cheek and wink. I think of him as winking.

One evening I was living on Bleecker Street

and I needed to post a letter to London.

It must have been about 1:30 in the morning.

We had a postbox on the corner and I went out to post my letter

and there, in the middle of the night, is Barry Flanagan.

And he was there moving back and forth, said, "Would you like a drink?

"Do you want to have a drink?" And I said, "That would be fantastic."

I'd only popped out, I actually had my pyjamas on under my trousers.

I can remember, I put a jacket on over my pyjamas.

And this is just tremendous.

I love the shape of it, and it makes me happy.

And it cheers me up,

whenever I come through, just to see it.

And you can see the kind of genuine eccentricity of this character

as opposed to so many artists who put on a show

of being unusual characters, he's a REALLY unusual character.

They're not just single-line gimmicks,

they're very sophisticated works of sculpture.

I mean, you know, a proper art historian could talk about Rodin

and the Balzac sculpture and could, you know, discuss this work

in terms of that whole French, late 19th-century lineage.

I'm just checking my bicycle is still there.

And, erm, and look at it from here.

Look at it from here.

You know, against this building, against these monstrous buildings,

you have this fantastic life and...

..humour and wit. You know, it's witty.

GROUP CHATTER AND LAUGH

MAN GROWLS PLAYFULLY

Is it very popular?

Well, I think so, yes,

it's the very last point before Holland.

There. There's the rabbit.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH TO CHILD

Do you enjoy seeing this work here?

Yes, it's very nice.

It fits really into the landscape

and it shows a really strong impression of nature.

And it really looks like it can move every second,

it can be gone in a second, if you see it like this.

-Have you seen this before?

-Yes. Yes.

I mean, almost every holiday when we're here,

we come and see the hare.

-It's popular with the children and adults?

-Yes. Yes.

And if you had a message to give Barry Flanagan,

what would you like to say to him?

I would like to thank him for making this piece of art.

It's really giving us a nice, nice impression of nature

and it's really a beautiful thing that he made.

It's very nice.

His work, to me, is just so delicate and it's so human

and it's so full of a sense of humour.

It's just wonderfully unusual, but yet simple.

Dubliners really do know his work.

Especially with the pieces that were in O'Connell Street a few years ago.

This was the very first piece of art that I saw when I came to Dublin.

You could imagine a whole scene of these magnificent

12 foot high hares,

all in some wonderful pagan dance that human beings have never seen.

You can see finger marks,

you can see where it's been fashioned by hand.

But when you actually really look at his wonderful little face,

especially this little drummer,

who really looks as if he's actually doing a dance

and is just about to strike that drum,

you can actually see the expression in his eyes.

-Dain, how are you?

-Good thanks, bud, yourself?

We're going off to see the sculpture that isn't there.

Yeah, I've been pretty excited but it's not there.

It's been a great walk so far, a great day. Beautiful weather.

Obviously, I've watched a bit of footage that you've shown me.

Everyone seems to be rapt with things that he's done

and everyone's always talking about what an effect it has on them.

I actually really enjoyed the fact that a lot of the work

was in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

How fantastic was that?

Having that type of sculpture, that type of feeling

that's coming off something that's a bit irregular,

could create a little bit of difference,

a little bit of... I don't know, humour.

-And here's to Barry Flanagan, yes?

-Yes, go Baz! You're a good bloke.

Is that an Apple balancing on his foot?

I think he's one of the greatest artists we've ever had.

APPLAUSE

I took him once to the Wag Club and he started dancing.

He was dancing in a chicken dance sort of way.

Chris Sullivan, the owner at the time, said,

"That man is great. He can come in here any time he likes.

"He doesn't have to be a member."

I first met him when I first had my gallery in the King's Road.

It was one Sunday and I was painting it up

and Barry came by, I think with Luciana Martinez.

-When would this be?

-About 1983.

Anyway, he came in. I think he actually helped paint the walls.

He was really dedicated in that way to help art being promoted.

He loved all sorts of different works of art.

I remember he told me he bought a Picabia.

I said to Barry one day, "listen, you should have a museum."

He said, "What shall I call it?"

I said, "You should call it the Barry Flanagan Museum."

About 1990, Barry said he would love to have a show in Moscow.

We thought it would be a fantastic idea,

because it was still the Soviet Union

and these huge, great statues, the Stalin statues of soldiers.

What would have been wonderful was to have Barry's hares

next door to these soldiers.

This was what we conceived to do.

About 1990, this man called Misha Mehave,

who was head of the Arts Promotion Department

of the Artists Union of the USSR, came to London.

I introduced him to Barry. Barry said, "Fantastic."

Barry said, "I'll tell you what, I'll get my car out of the garage

"and I'll pick you up."

Misha was with his wife, Olga.

I think we were in Soho and Barry arrived in his Rolls-Royce.

The Rolls-Royce, the passenger side had been dented,

so they couldn't get in the passenger side.

They had to get in from the driver's side,

which didn't really impress the Russians.

If it was a brand-new Vauxhall Vectra,

they would've been more impressed.

The Rolls-Royce was dented in the side.

Barry took them off to see his studio and they thought,

"Great, let's do the show."

But, again, in those days,

there wasn't the sponsorship as there is now for art.

Sadly, it never happened.

Just like part of a machine.

When you think of that...

..thing in Felix Randall, the farrier -

the Hopkins poem about how this great, strong man,

who forges things out of metal.

The blacksmith dies and he ends with this extraordinary line

where he says of his death, he says,

"How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years...

This marvellous line when he says,

"..the grim random forge didst fettle,

"for the great, grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal."

He brings tears to the eyes and they're tears of absolute delight,

of finding...

God! It always sound pretentious,

but what he's doing is he's finding the living thing

within the living creature,

the living thing within that creature that's not living.

It's a sort of...

I keep coming up with this idea of the glorious machine,

the machine that's come to some consciousness,

that can be aware of itself.

The hares are doing it in one way with their gymnastics.

He's doing it in another way. He's just caught in a turn.

His horse reduced to his absolute horseness.

He's got an agenda we simply don't know about.

He's not there to amuse us or to be beautiful.

This horse has eyes no more than any horse is capable of.

They're surveillance eyes, they're Computer Age eyes

and these diabolical ears almost seem to be horns

and this almost unicorn crest.

It's like a flambeau, isn't it? Like flames on his head. He's much more.

People think he's a sort of rather pedestrian, simple,

straightforward horse with none of the fantastical imaginings

of the hares, the bunnies.

There's an awful lot more to this horse.

I don't know, he's very moving

but he's not moving in the sense of, oh, what a beautiful horse

or oh, what a beautiful representation of a horse.

He's saying something about our relationship

and it's true of all Barry Flanagan's stuff.

He's saying something about our relationship with animals.

What happens in your mind when you look at this work?

Well, I see they're two different types of animals -

not animals, but it's like morphous animals

that are just waiting for something and just watching.

I like them because they're like nothing

but they're something at the same time.

-Si.

-Si?

Si, si.

Ma certo.

-Grazi, signor.

-Prego.

Do you find any humour in this?

Maybe mat...

maternal or maternity?

Emotion?

It's very different

than I know before.

It's a delight to see it

and I look forward to showing Barry

this particular part of the ever-increasing journey.

When I heard that he'd just died,

I was at an opening in Paris. I'm now living in Paris.

And a woman came up to me

and she said, "Didn't I meet you with Barry Flanagan?

"Do I know you through Barry Flanagan?"

Completely out of the blue. And I told her that Barry had died.

I'd heard the news that day

so it was a strange kind of direct connection.

And then I realised that the bedroom I'm staying in Paris,

that I'm living in, actually backs onto his gallery,

so he's still a living presence. It's as though his vibration,

you know that theory of the Big Bang, the vibration that stays with us,

his vibration is still very much here in the world

and you can feel the Flanagan vibration,

perhaps standing by one of his works.

Maybe all of his works are a kind of network of places,

sounding stones, where you can feel his spirit

or the reverberation of his...

his big bang. The big bang of his vanishing.

If I ever look back on my own life,

it's always saying, "Truly, I wasn't kind enough."

I never look back and say, "I was too kind to this or that person."

I always say I was not kind enough.

I look back mostly and say

"I should have been kinder, should have been kinder."

But I don't think he left such a mistake.

He did so many things for me...

So many things.

He would turn up at the most unexpected places, at shows.

Just before he got ill, in fact, I had a show in Marseille

and he drove right through the night,

I think there was some problem with the plane or something,

for 24 hours, just to arrive at Marseille for the opening.

And he would do that and never say a word,

he'd never ask for thanks or compliments or anything,

and then just quietly leave,

but you must have found that with so many people.

Countless acts of kindness

in a very small way that he never mentioned,

never breathed a word of those to anybody else.

When I met him first, I was just doing installation work at that time

and he would sometimes say to me, "If you'd start doing bronze..."

I'd say, "I'm not ready for that."

He had a van at the time, took me out to his studio

and he had a pot and wax and all the materials there and tools,

and he gave me everything that he had, his own tools

and his own pot and his wax,

brought them back to my studio and said, "There, you have it all now.

"On you go, get on with it, you've no excuse. You should start."

That's the reason I started doing bronze.

-The question I haven't asked anyone...

-Yeah?

Is...

Did you ever have a conversation with Barry

about the hare?

Yes.

MOURNFUL ARABIC SINGING

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd