Sir Anthony Caro Mark Lawson Talks To...

In the history of British art, Sir Anthony Caro stands as a man of steel.

Literally so in his choice of the material that brought him to prominence in the 1960s,

when he began to weld together separate elements to create complex interlocking sculptures,

leading to a series of large pieces in rusted, painted or rolled metal called The Flats.

But he has also been metaphorically steely in the single-minded spirit of his career.

Departing from the example of his mentor, the great British artist, Henry Moore,

to sculpt in a variety of materials, including paper and different styles.

When you look back at those decades of completed pieces,

do you have a clear sense of where they came from or is there an element of mystery for you?

I think you put

yourself in a frame of mind to make art.

When I go into the studio, I don't work on the most difficult thing,

I start work on something I've almost got right and that gives me a bit of confidence and I go onto the next one

and by the end of the morning I'm beginning to do the difficult things.

Whether there is any mysteriousness,

I don't know where it comes from.

But I...I hesitate to invest

the practice of sculpture with more than

practical, down-to-earth things.

I think I was asked some time in the early days,

you know, "What do you think sculpture is?"

And I said, sculpture is something outside of which you are.

And then that made me think.

Why should it not be something inside of which you are, as well as outside?

Which is why I tried to make The Tower.

And then I made Halifax Steps and so on,

which is a work you can walk through.

And now I'm thinking, maybe it could be something with only an inside and not an outside.

All these are possibilities because you get trapped even by your own

assumptions, your own statements are something you have to watch out for.

They can... hold you like that, too.

So always I think, don't take anything for granted.

Do you feel always in control of what you're doing?

I hope not. I think it's a dialogue between me and the stuff.

And we've got to talk to each other and I have to listen

to what these pieces of steel, wood, paper, whatever I'm working in, suggest.

So, yes, I have a good idea of where I'm going

but I don't want to be bound by it.

I don't plan it ahead of time

and say, I'm going to make this.

I have an idea of where things are going.

I mean, the direction things are going.

But I let them talk to me, I let the stuff talk to me.

There's a play by Sir Tom Stoppard, a fellow member of the Order of Merit,

in which an artist is so worried about whether art can be justified

that he ends up in a world where so many people are starving that he ends up making edible art,

which he decides is the only solution, which is a very Stoppardian joke.

Have you had periods in your life of worrying that art cannot be justified socially?

Early on I felt that

being a sculptor wasn't enough

and that's why I was very keen to teach and I did teach.

I think that justification was a sort of social thing

but I don't think art needs that sort of justification.

I mean, in the end we should be justifying Shakespeare.

We should be justifying Rembrandt.

And it's not all great.

But...it's worth doing.

It seems to me that the spirit or the soul or whatever has to be fed.

And that decision early on to move sculpture off the plinth,

that was just an instinct you had?

No, I wanted to make it more... something like two people talking to each other

rather than looking up at something and never having any contact.

All the ones in Trafalgar Square, say, most of those...men on horses,

they're just...

..giving honour to these unknown generals.

And I wanted to stop sculpture being that and make it something

much more to involve us, to involve us personally.

So it was literally a levelling,

which some people would see as a political instinct, but was it?

You happen to get taken up like that a bit.

So much so that people were saying,

the Tate Gallery is wrong because it's got steps up to it.

It's bonkers!

It's what people now call democratising, in that it's more welcoming in that way.

I think what you're saying is absolutely right and how I hate that idea of democratising!

How you perceive a sculpture, whether you look up at it, whether you look down,

whether you walk into it, whether you walk through it,

all these are very important decisions.

But to start to talk in a political way about it is anathema to me.

'They want to even sit down, they'll sit down for a second, you know,

'and then get the feeling of what the space is like around them

'up again, onto the next.

'That sort of thing is what I want people to experience with this.'

The table sculptures you did, they, in a way, are part of that line, aren't they?

Because it's about putting a sculpture on something everyday and normal?

Well, it's a level.

And I want it to be on a level, like on a table.

And the difference between

putting things on a table and putting them on the floor is -

one, that the table's got an edge and the floor hasn't,

and two, is they attract your hand.

They're to do with the hand somewhere.

So I started by putting handles on the sculptures and then by making them go over the edge

and then, as I made more, I got freer and didn't even do that sometimes.

If we talk about your childhood.

Born in 1924, so if we look back historically,

you're in a country, we now know, between two World Wars

and you were growing up during a Depression.

How conscious were you growing up or looking back

of those tensions in Britain?

I think one is totally involved with oneself and growing up.

When you're eight or ten-years-old,

you don't care about what's going on in the world, you care about just about living.

But, of course, when the war came along,

I was very... That hit all our lives a lot.

And you were the son of a Surrey stockbroker, you went to Charterhouse.

It looks on paper a very comfortable upbringing, but was it?

Yes, very comfortable.

We had a nice house, my parents used to ride a lot and they used to go hunting and things.

And we had a farm and a nice garden

and we used to play with the neighbours on bicycles and things.

It was very nice indeed. It was fine.

School was not so nice but I think those years are never so nice.

Why not so nice? Were you bullied?

A bit, yes. But...

I think the teenage years are tough years for a boy, they probably are for a girl, too.

But they're not nice, particularly.

Did they have any artistic interests, your parents?

My mother

did paint a little.

She did a lot of embroidery and a lot of work with

cloth and things like that.

And jolly well, she did it very well. She really was a sort of an artist manque.

My father had very good taste.

So he could judge paintings and things of art,

though he couldn't do it at all. He was very fumble-fisted.

He wasn't good with his hands.

But I think my mother's artistic-ness

was a big influence.

We're always interested with people who become artists,

whether there was ever a moment where an art teacher said,

"My God, you've got some talent here, boy."

Did that ever happen to you?

I don't think so. In fact, I was trying to think, certainly not at Charterhouse.

I used to attend Farnham Art School occasionally

but I was never...particularly... singled out.

And I don't think, really, that it occurred at all for me. Not really.

Some artists, when they look back, art was the lesson that

they really enjoyed but you didn't have that at all?

I did take the School Certificate in art.

I had to do Moses in the bulrushes.

And I didn't get a credit, I just got a pass.

OK.

It didn't put me off enough.

I obviously was quite, deep down, quite confident.

Did you always have a clear sense of what you wanted to do?

Not really because I had the impression

that being an artist was really a hobby.

And my family thought that artists were not serious people.

They used to say, don't be an artist, don't be a dilettante.

For a long time I didn't know what I was going to do.

I was going to try... My father said, you know,

"Do you like...you like drawing, you like mathematics.

"Try and be an architect." So I went to work for a little while in an architect's office.

And then engineering.

And I didn't know what I was going to do.

I think that was a big problem to my parents because I couldn't really make up my mind.

And at one time they said,

"Well, you're keen on reading aloud, perhaps you should be a newsreader."

You try everything like that and

finally, I think, I had sort of

been pushing to become a sculptor or an artist of some sort.

And finally I wrote to my father

and said, I would like to do it.

And we visited the teacher of sculpture at St Martin's, funnily enough.

And I had a sculpture that I'd made, a head.

And we went and looked at it, we jumped in a taxi and

he gave me an opinion about it,

he gave my father an opinion about it and my father paid a fee of £5 or whatever it was

and he looked at this thing and he said, you son's never going to be any good.

So my father was very delighted that I could go into his office then.

Which is something I didn't really want to do.

But finally he consented, my father consented and said,

"OK, if you want to be a sculptor, you're going to find life hard.

"You're not going to be able to afford to get married and have children, you know,

"but if that's what you want..." And he backed me to the hilt.

The art then becomes much more serious because you went to

Regent Street Polytechnic, the Royal Academy Schools.

Were you totally committed by then to becoming an artist?

I felt that I'd got approval and I was serious

and I was professional and if I was going to be a portrait sculptor or whatever,

I was going to do it as well as I could.

I wasn't going to be a dilettante,

I was going to show it was a real thing, not a game.

By 1949 you were married, by 1951 you had the first of your sons.

Was it a struggle to bring up a family while trying to become an artist?

Well, I was very fortunate in that my wife

took an awful lot of the work, of the bringing-up work.

And at the same time she was tremendously helpful with me and my work.

We would talk about the art I made, talk about where we were going.

And she would give me ideas. I mean...

I could show you one sculpture after another that she's had input on.

I am very lucky that way.

Artists vary in that way.

Some artists don't want any kind of outside help.

But you have always found it useful to have that relationship?

Absolutely, and I think...

I don't like the idea of being shut up in your inspiration box

because I think those inspiration boxes don't always work.

Or don't work at all for some people.

I love to play, have a sort of ping-pong

and throw ideas out and watch them come back

and work with people.

I mean, it's like TS Eliot used to ask Ezra Pound, "What do you think?"

And I have always felt, "What do you think?"

And a big question for the partners of artists is

how honest they can be.

There was a playwright's wife who famously said that all she was allowed to say was,

-"It's even better than the last one."

-Oh, no!

-Is Sheila allowed to say, "No, it doesn't work?"

Oh, very much so.

And she will come in and I'll say, "What do you think of that?"

And she'll say, "I think you've got trouble on the right-hand side."

Now, that's terrific, you know? So you pay attention.

But the funny thing is,

if there is an area

that I'm uncomfortable about, she'll pick on it without being told.

And so, obviously, our minds are getting...pretty close.

What about critics?

Is what critics say of any interest to you?

Well, in just exactly the same way, the American ones have given me a lot.

And I'm excited when they come to England and say...

And you say, "Let's have a morning in the studio," and they'll come in,

you show them the work, and say,

"What do you think about that?"

And they'll say, you know, "Ever thought of doing this?"

And I love that. I love that.

But for some reason, it hasn't taken on here very much.

And in those early figurative works, Woman With Flowers,

Woman On Her Back, Woman Waking Up - how significant were human models?

I mean, Sheila is in there somewhere, is she?

Not in those particular lumps!

I did a couple of heads of Sheila and so on, yes.

But I was trying to get beyond normal likeness,

so I did a little series of smiling heads.

And the smile was more important than the nose and the eyes and things.

It was the smile I was trying to portray.

And again, the lying down figure -

it was lying downness, the physicality of what it felt like,

with the weight of your body pushing onto the ground.

That was what I wanted to express.

In the 1950s, you went to work for Henry Moore.

There's a drawing in your back catalogue which has the intriguing caption,

"Seated Woman, 1951, with corrections by Henry Moore."

Did he give a lot of formal tuition in that way?

He was very generous to me.

I never understood drawing until I went to Henry's.

We'd talk a lot about art and he'd say, "Show me what you did."

And I would show him and he said... He would say,

"You must observe the laws of light.

"You need to pay attention to perspective,

"when things are closer to you, they're more intense. So the blacks are blacker."

I mean, all these things which I didn't know.

Nobody ever taught me this at the Academy Schools, which was where I did my drawing.

Because they were painters who taught drawing,

so they would try to get you to draw like Ingres.

But a sculptor doesn't see like Ingres.

He sees much more in a three-dimensional...

thing way.

And Henry taught me that and it was marvellous.

And those little drawings that he did on the sides of my drawings

are very revealing to me,

were very revealing at the time.

Henry Moore, according to biographies,

could be quite fiery and difficult with people.

-Was he ever so with you?

-Never. Never.

He was a really nice man.

When I was with him -

he wasn't really that big a success until after I'd left.

But I never saw him being fiery with anybody. Not at all.

He later became fantastically famous,

-almost on a level of Picasso, that kind of fame.

-Oh, yes.

He was on talk shows, adverts - the whole lot.

Is that a model you've tried not to follow?

You've lived more quietly as an artist, I think.

Well, I think it's a dangerous model to follow, and I didn't want to ever do that.

But I don't think anybody ever asked me to do it! But, I mean,

I think people have had their fill

with the sort of fame of Henry Moore.

I remember the article that was called The Greatest Living Englishman.

That's an amazing thing to say.

And Henry was in that position.

And he was one who had greatness thrust upon him.

It's tough to cope with that, I'm sure.

You taught for a long period of time at Saint Martins School.

Some of the students who later became very well-known -

Richard Deacon, Richard Long,

Barry Flanagan, Gilbert and George -

did you always know the ones who would come through to prominence?

No. No.

And a lot of very good ones...

never got prominent,

which is a real sorrow to me,

that these terrific works they made are in the basement somewhere,

'or broken up, or something. I mean...

'That's bad luck.'

I don't think you're thinking right.

Why not?

Well, have you tried assembling?

-Yes.

-You're succeeding?

I don't know, I was trying to find out.

Well, good luck. If you succeed... Well, good luck.

But it seems to me that...

you're going to be in a lot more trouble trying to sell your art

before you're really ready than if you were digging roads.

I'm not suggesting you should dig roads, but if you were teaching,

or if you were doing something that you could make some money at, you could, you know...

But not your art. Keep your art clean,

keep your art for what you do for yourself.

Don't do it for anybody else.

Saint Martins was a cradle of people

who took sculpture seriously and tried to...

refused to accept the assumptions

that a lot of the world was accepting, that a lot of other sculptors were accepting.

Are you conscious of having been influenced by Henry Moore?

I suppose particularly in that early, figurative work is the most obvious.

The early work was absolutely influenced by Henry Moore.

When I was at Henry Moore's,

I made things that were very much, you know,

bad Henry Moore's.

Well, not...

They were a bit different.

I mean, I made a standing figure,

but I learned a lot from Henry Moore.

And then later,

I remember one time, coming into London

and going to the Tate Gallery and seeing a Picasso and a Bacon.

And I thought to myself, "There is a different sort of art one could make.

"One doesn't have to make art so much like Moore."

And I think my work when I left Moore

was more influenced by Picasso and Dubuffet

and de Kooning than it was by Moore.

And when critics look back, they see you moving, particularly in that early phase,

from figurative work to abstract work.

Were you consciously making decisions, or was it a matter of instinct you were following?

When I was young, I always said, "The one thing I know I'm never going to do is make abstract art."

But, of course, what I saw abstract art as being,

was something very cold and something very clinical, and I didn't want that.

Well, I'd got as far as I could get with the figure.

I used to make the figure

using a lot of natural forms.

I would go down to Porlock Weir with a wheelbarrow

and pick up stones, which I would incorporate in my sculpture.

I even tried to take the casts of some of the rocks.

And I started by putting plaster on -

I used to have to wait until the tide came in enough to be able to release it.

But then I started using rubber moulds on those things.

And I would go back with a lot...

..of vocabulary, really, of parts.

And I would make them with figures...into figures.

But then I began to see that the figure was...

It was more the figure than it was sculpture.

And I really thought to myself,

"I must make sculpture essentially,

"not figure sculpture."

When you went to America and you met there David Smith -

an American sculptor who died tragically young -

he had a huge influence on you.

He was a wonderful sculptor.

Well, he and Henry Moore...

how I see them, they were my fathers in sculpture. And they were.

But with Henry, I was a student, I was a pupil, more like.

And a dogsbody in the studio.

With David Smith,

although there was a big difference in age between him and me,

every other sculptor was a competitor with him.

So he treated you as an equal, he treated me as an equal.

And I...

And I learned from him...

..but it was never like his teaching me.

It was when you went up there and you saw this amazing...

These two fields.

And he could look out on those fields and see 80 sculptures,

he'd make 80 sculptures, let's say, or 100 sculptures,

all of which were sitting out there.

Nobody liked them,

and you understood what his life was like.

I think he put them out to prove to himself that he was a sculptor.

When you began to exhibit, did Henry Moore comment on your work?

No, but when I left Henry, he bought a couple of my sculptures, which was wonderful.

But when I had my show at the Museum of Modern Art,

I sent him a catalogue but he didn't answer.

And, I mean, I saw him from time to time, but he didn't like that sort of work.

Henry used to say that sculpture is like...

It's about the pressures inside,

the pressures in the body, the pressure IN a fist.

All these knuckles pushing out is... that's what sculpture's about.

And I think the sculpture I was making

was a response to Cubism.

And so it was much more linear,

much thinner, much more plain.

And I remember looking at a book of sculpture with Henry,

and when we came to a David Smith, he said, "That's not sculpture."

So there was... It was a different world.

One of the key things that David Smith gave you, I think,

was the working with steel, the idea of welding.

But it wasn't really so much David Smith's example. A critic,

Clement Greenberg, said to me, "If you want to change your art, change your habits."

And I think that that was what got me going that way,

because I thought, "Well, I'll go down to the scrap yard and try and get some steel."

And I didn't even know how to stick it together.

You know, I'd say, "How do you stick it together?"

Well, you either bolt it or weld it.

So you learned welding?

Yes. Very badly. I'm not a good welder.

'I don't enjoy it that much.

'It's not... People say, "Oh, don't you love welding?" No, I don't.

'I love putting it there,

'if it doesn't work, taking it off.

'But I don't want...

'to be into sticking things.'

Well, I will join this to this, Charlie.

And exactly in the position it's in, and, erm...

No, I think we should... Would do you think we should do?

Have a plate under here?

Looking back, the sticking things together was hugely significant, wasn't it?

If we look at something such as Early One Morning,

that was one of your key decisions, that you could join a number of elements together

rather than have the single block

that Henry Moore had mainly worked with?

Yes, absolutely.

And it was, and that's what I mean when I say it was to do with Cubism,

it is a kind of breaking up of the object.

It's shattering the object.

And I think that...

that decision leads to a different sort of art...

and you are...

and when you're not necessarily working from the figure,

you tend to go towards painting or towards architecture.

And I think that in those early days,

it went very much towards painting, my sculpture.

Could you say something about the way in which you use titles?

Early One Morning is a good example.

There could be an Edward Hopper reference there, and yet it's an abstract word.

-But was that intended?

-No, I think I was thinking of Early One Morning, the song.

But I mean, then, for example, Prairie I called Prairie because the colour of it was Prairie gold.

Pompadour, the colour was Pompadour pink.

I mean, somebody else has given the colour a name and I took it.

I'd never know how to name sculptures.

I've got a book of racehorse titles.

I look at those, you know, and sometimes something rings a bell.

I hope it does, but, erm...

It's like in the old days, the colour and the title were the two last things in the sculpture.

And in a way,

I think, you know, there's a little, a little signpost there, that's all.

And do you really sometimes take them from a race horse?

Oh, yes. I have some sculptures that I've just been making,

and I have to give them titles.

I rather dread it. It's difficult.

You know?

And this last show I had, I call them "up" something

because they were all upright.

But that was a problem. You know, are they all part of the same thing?

It is a sort of whole literary edition.

In the 1970s, some major works,

Great and The Flat, and The Flat was a huge series of works, but that,

particularly at that stage, you were working in factories.

I mean, the significance is the scale of those pieces and the use of heavy-lifting equipment.

I don't think they're very heavy,

but I think it's not scale, it's size of those, really.

They're still the same human scale as the earlier pieces but I think in the '70s, it was very different.

The '60s were about...dreams.

About going to the moon.

And when the '70s came along, and this was the time,

that was the time of Kennedy.

And when the '70s came along, it was down-to-earth stuff.

And Richard Nixon?

Well, later, yes.

But it became very much to do with the reality of things.

So I think that did have an influence on not painting a sculpture so much

as letting them be steel, letting them look like steel.

They were steel, let them be steel.

They'd got rough edges, let them have their rough edges.

I don't think I said all this...consciously,

but I think it was at the back of my mind. I'm looking back.

I've seen sculptors who work with rock or with wood, agonising between different pieces.

But do you have that?

It's that selection process?

Oh, I think I select a piece out of what I call my "piece pit".

My scrap stuff there.

And then I will go along later on and say, I've got just the piece that goes there.

And I may not have used it,

I may have got it ten years ago.

But I remember it. Oh, I know that piece, that can go in there, that's just what I'm looking for.

You know, that happens to me.

Even within steel, there are variations. Rusted steel.

At one point you've got soft roll-end steel from County Durham, I think.

Were you constantly reading Steel Today magazine, if there is such a thing, or do you research materials?

No, I got into those roll-ends because I worked for a little while in Italy,

and they used sculpture which had these rolled ends.

And they're the bits that normally get thrown away

in England or America.

I realised that they were chopping off these rather nice pieces which I could use.

You know, rolling steel out is very much like rolling out pastry.

And it comes in very thick and big and white hot.

And as it cools, they push it through and it gets thinner and thinner,

until in the end it's only as thick as that.

And in the process, the end obviously doesn't keep its squareness

and those are the pieces that I found I could use.

So I said, don't throw those away, I'll have them.

And the range of materials, for a viewer it's to do with

the expectations we have of the physical world.

So we think of steel as something very solid and paper as something very flimsy.

But a sculpture can play with those expectations?

Why does it have to be? Yes, exactly.

I mean, I remember making a steel sculpture early on

and an architect friend said, that's not how you use steel.

Well, let's use it in a different way.

And I've found by using paper

that the paper specialist chap could make a piece of paper

bend like that and it held the bend because he put something into it,

I think some plaster or something,

that, next morning when it was dry, it took up that position.

And he knows about the memory of paper and that sort of thing.

And you learn a lot by working with these people

because they know about the material.

I was going to say that throughout your career it's a very broad

range of materials but also forms and practices.

It's again about not closing off avenues.

Absolutely. I mean, to make the same sort of thing

or to have a format that was laid down for you, I think, would be boring.

It would bore me to death.

It also means, however, that also your work is very hard to recognise.

Well, that's the decision you've made, but if, for example, Antony Gormley,

you could show a lot of people an Antony Gormley

and they'd spot it immediately, whereas your... you'd be much more elusive.

Even people that know quite a lot about art might not say it was you.

I'm delighted.

When somebody comes to my studio and I show them something new,

they say, gosh, that looks like a new artist did that,

a new painter that I've never heard, new sculptor I've never heard of, that pleases me very much.

Two particular works from the 1990s - the Trojan War and The Last Judgment,

there's a range of materials in those.

Ceramics, steel, terracotta, wood.

But also, we talked about titles earlier.

Those works, they invite people to think that you,

as someone who came out of the Second World War,

has lived to see other wars,

to see you as commenting on the century that you've lived in.

I do think they were influenced.

I think that The Last Judgement was influenced by the fact

that every day, I was looking at pictures of Bosnia and Serbia, and so on, on the television.

And I do think it got to me, that.

The Trojan War started by my going down to the south of France

and working with a ceramist called Hans Spinner.

And we went into the studio and Hans said,

"Start away, Tony."

And I said, "I don't know what I'm going to do. You start."

He said, "Nobody's ever said that to me before."

But he took up a piece, a lump of clay,

which he called a bread, which is a great block.

And he picked it up and he threw it down onto the floor.

I said, "OK, now I know. Now I know where I am."

I could see that that his way of working was a very physical way of working.

I started pushing things into it

and putting my fingers in, putting sticks in and so on.

And when I'd done a lot of them, I said, "Fire them, Hans, and send them to me in London."

And I went into the studio and there they were,

in their boxes, these fired things.

And I said, "They are warriors.

"They are warriors and they are gods."

And so that was how The Trojan War came about.

In the last couple of decades, there's been the rise of something

known as "public art", these big, visible commissions for works in cities or beside roads.

Is that an idea that appeals to you, public art, in that sense?

There is a place for good art in public places.

The trouble is, it's very often so large and not very good.

And we have to watch that, because it's so visible.

And I tried to pull art off its pedestal,

off its position of being a monument,

to being a high... A work of high art.

Like a painting.

And so really, in a way, I think what I did

was to put it more into the gallery or the house and out of the streets.

I assume you don't want to give examples of the bad ones?

I can't give examples of the bad ones,

but just look at our streets.

And I'd rather give examples of the good ones.

I mean, there's a wonderful statue of Charles I looking down Whitehall,

which is just marvellous.

You go round that at 20 mph, you can't see it properly.

It ought to be on a place where you could look at it as a pedestrian.

And in fact, I am thinking at the moment about a sculpture for Park Avenue in New York

which is good to be seen from a taxi or car going to it at 30 mph.

So it's a very, very long sculpture, it will be.

But something like Gormley's Angel of the North, is that something you respond to?

I think the great thing about the Angel of the North

is that everybody sees it and notices it and it is a tremendous...

..thing for the eyes. It captures you and that's great.

And when those big commissions have come up in Britain,

There's the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and various commissions.

-Have you been approached, have people tried to tempt you to apply for those?

-Early on, yes.

Early on, they tried to get me to do something on the fourth plinth.

And that's a heck of a difficult problem.

And I don't think anybody's really solved it yet.

And I thought, I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking in that direction,

and I decided not to do it.

But people have asked me to do these things

and sometimes I've responded,

for example, in the Millennium Bridge.

But the original idea goes and it gets watered down

and various reasons...

The thing is less so than one would like.

And so by and large, I would prefer to do my own stuff.

Your big recent commission, the Eglise de Saint Jean-Baptiste in France, the church,

was that artistic or religious interest in that work?

No, it was an art project.

That whole area has been fought over so much,

I thought maybe that I should do something about war and mutilation

and the horrors of war.

But when the Bishop...

I said that to the Bishop, he said, "No, don't go that route if you can help it."

Because there's so much of it, you know, there's all these cemeteries all round.

I wanted it to be a place

of quiet contemplation and worship.

And for that reason, I insisted that there was a way into it

which didn't necessarily lead you through the church,

but went straight to the street.

It was religious in a sense,

but isn't art religious?

Isn't making art about being quiet,

and looking at art about being in a tranquil state?

A place where you could worship God

or you could think about your own role in the world

or all the things you'd think about, you know, in a church?

And I was given a very free hand.

And therefore, it was a pleasure.

But usually, it's somebody else's dreams, not your own.

I was going to say, on that question of a free hand,

because in some of these public commissions,

the public are encouraged to vote on the one that they most want.

In general, in your career, it's difficult to use that term "the public",

but do you take any interest in what the public wants or do you do what you want?

No, absolutely none at all.

I'm very sorry, but the public doesn't...

I mean, it's like asking the public to judge a piece of music.

How can they do it? They don't know the language.

In the old days, Lorenzo de' Medici was the one who made up his mind,

didn't ask all the courtiers, what do you think, chaps?

This is a sculpture by world-famous sculptor Anthony Caro.

It cost £15,000, but as far as the students

of this college are concerned,

it makes a far better bicycle rack than it does a work of art.

The first day I came in, I thought it was a bike rack.

The main thing is whether you get some pleasure and whether you get some...

Whether it lifts your heart a little bit as you walk out of that building there.

Does it lift anybody's hearts?

Not really, no. Do you...

Do you object to it having a use, I mean, people putting bikes on it? Do you object to that?

Well, I think as you get more used to it, you'll respect it more and you won't put bicycles on it.

Is there a correct response to one of your pieces

or can people literally read in whatever they want?

I think there's no reading into it at all.

I think it's a question of going with it.

And kind of leaving yourself out of it.

And I don't want the art to be used.

I want the art to stand in its own right

and you come to it

and it comes to you -

you're working together.

It's interesting that when you go to

the National Gallery,

or somewhere, and you see people looking at paintings.

And they move from one foot to the other.

They're trying to get comfortable physically

with the picture, they're trying to get in touch with the picture.

And that's what I think I would like

people to do with my sculpture -

to get in touch with it.

So, it's going to say some things.

I don't quite know what, but it's like music, it's like music.

Where you're talking about, that we shouldn't be thinking about democracy or feminism,

We should be, literally, getting above that?

Well, I don't want to give any rules to anybody,

but, no, I agree with you, it's about the spirit...

..hopefully.

And I think that our lives are not about the spirit, at the moment.

They're very much about the body and they're very much materialistic, and we've got to get above this.

And I remember earliest times, going to New York,

where people were so busy - rushing about the streets,

doing jobs and so on,

making money...eating.

And I thought to myself, "Why do they need the Met?

"Why do they want to go into the Met so badly?"

Well, they want a few minutes of looking out to their minds, their souls.

Another possibility that has arisen in the later part of your career

is computers, which some artists, and particularly some architects and designers, use.

Have you ever been tempted by computers?

No. I wish that I could.

I wish that there was something that I could make,

a hologram of a sculpture, and change it, without it being real.

But the holograms didn't catch on. They didn't seem to catch on much.

I think architects do use, quite a lot, computers,

for walking you through buildings and so on.

But I can't use a computer,

because I haven't found a way that it could help me with my work yet.

I mean, some people are using computers...

I know somebody who sets his computer up,

switches it on and goes to bed

and, next morning, he's got a piece of sculpture.

It's amazing what a computer can do,

but I don't want to work like that.

I want it to be more hands-on, I want it to be more me in it.

I think sculpture is a physical job

and it's about being in the world and it's about ourselves,

our bodies, and what it feels like to be in the world.

Some sculptors work with their own body, from their own body,

but you've never really been in that direction, not obviously?

No, I think that size is terribly important.

The width of my arms outstretched, the height, my height, and so on.

These are really a lot of the things, the parameters, that you work with.

You shouldn't try to get, sort of, at least,

I think, this is one of the difficulties

with monumental sculpture, is it gets outside that

and I don't want to get outside that, if I can help it.

To remain within the human scale?

Yes, somehow.

And that's hard to do with outdoor things, because

the air eats into the sculpture and reduces it,

so you have to tend to make things fatter, bigger,

more "there" than...

You can't take anything for granted with outdoor sculpture.

How significant is it to you, because it matters to some people

and particularly some journalists, how much of the work the artist

does himself or herself?

No, I'm delighted I have people working for me. Not a lot.

I have students come for two or three after they've finished at art school.

They come and do an apprenticeship here, really.

They learn to weld very well, they learn that sort of stuff.

They learn how a studio works - all the stuff I learned at Henry Moore's.

After you finish school,

it's very good to have a while

learning how it's going to be in the world.

You have to pay attention to doing things in a professional way.

You can't be sloppy,

especially with sculpture.

You can't run in the studio, because it's dangerous.

And you have to, you know, you have to be careful

that things can be demountable and if they're too big to go

in one piece, they have to come to pieces, and so on.

So you've got to have a bit of savvy about practical things.

'I'm very happy that people should make the sculptures that I want,

'but I have to watch everything.'

I don't ring up on the telephone and say, "I want a 6-foot box" or something. Well, no.

I want to feel it and to see it and to look at it.

And so when I...

You know, if somebody says...

.."Perhaps... How would it be if that happened?"

"Let's try it Let's try it."

Then I can tell.

The latter part of your career has overlapped with the rise

of the so-called "young British artists" - Tracey Emin,

Damien Hirst, and so on.

Do you look with interest and/or pleasure at their work?

I look at their work a certain amount,

but they are talking a different language from me.

I belong to a different time from them.

It's not for me to judge them.

Is it inevitable that the one generation will dislike the work of the next?

Well, I think, probably, it is.

Because our thinking in the '60s and '70s is so utterly different from our thinking now.

And in a way, I belong to those,

to the end of the last decades of the last century,

when there was a sort of tide and I was riding it.

I was riding it like surfing on that.

Now it's not the same, but I have to go on my own way, so in a way,

my vision gets more tunnel-visioned - gets less interested

in what young people are doing all the time.

But I'd be interested and I hope to see, and occasionally, I've seen things I like very much.

-Do you want to specify?

-No.

MARK CHUCKLES

When you look at the work of some of the people you taught, are you conscious of having influenced them?

Can you see connections?

I mean, Gilbert and George, I think, is hard to see.

No, not Gilbert and George.

I think that where I had a connection with them was when we were thinking,

in the very earliest days, we were thinking

all along the same sort of lines.

When Gilbert and George gave us all

baked beans in ice-cream cones, and things like this, I mean,

it was a joke.

It was great fun and it was a joke.

And nice people, but I didn't have anything to talk to them about, art wise.

Especially in recent years, we've seen huge sums of money paid for art.

Can that be justified, perhaps, particularly, in a recession?

I've no idea.

Can you put a value on a Rembrandt?

A real value?

A money value?

Its value is not a money value.

I think it's very extraordinary tha you can take two pictures

and one is worth three pounds and the other is worth three million

and they are so similar. I mean, that is extraordinary, but it's just a fact of life.

And I think, you know,

I go with all those things that are happening like that.

They don't bother me too much.

I think that's the world we live in, you know.

Ageing has different effects in different professions.

It would be difficult to be a professional footballer

at the age of 86, but it doesn't matter in art or in writing.

But are you conscious of ageing changing what you can do?

Well, I think not actually in what I make.

But of course, one's conscious that you get tired more easily and...

..you know, you can't lift things as much.

But I'm lucky because these other younger people do and they spoil me.

But I want to look forward, I don't want to think about,

"My God, I'm 86."

You don't feel different at 86.

You just...the body is not quite as efficient as it used to be.

I mean, your inside is the same inside.

We're all given a slice of time to live through.

When you look back, are you glad to have lived through the times you did?

I'm glad that I lived...

..in the same times as Matisse and Picasso.

They are giants, they are giants.

And they really did change our lives a lot.

Picasso broke so much open,

made so much happen.

I remember coming back from America...

..and my wife greeted me with the words,

not, "Did you have a good flight?" or something, but, "Picasso's dead."

It was so important to us.

Picasso was so important.

And, yes, there were great sculptors, well, great painters at any rate, in the century before,

but every three or 400 years you get people as great as that.

So I'm very glad about that.

I'm not terribly happy about what's happening now.

I don't see... I don't see this as a very fruitful time...

..in painting and sculpture.

It's not as fruitful as it used to be.

In the old days, when you had a show,

people would talk to you about the work in great detail.

Now the tendency is to say, "Did you sell anything?"

And I think that's a loss.

The government say that the arts have to be cut

in the same way as every other area of the public sector.

Do you accept that or should, as some people argue, the arts be protected in some way?

I don't want cuts...

..but there are more important things than art.

People's lives are more important.

Whether we are fighting in Afghanistan is more important,

whether people are getting pushed out of their houses.

There are many, many things about life that are more important.

Art is, it's not exactly a luxury, but it's not the meat.

The meat is us and being alive and living in freedom.

Do you care, or think about, the future judgment on your own work?

No, obviously, I do.

Obviously, I want my work to live...

..and to go on giving pleasure and lifting people's spirits.

But you can't do anything about it.

It either happens or it doesn't.

You get on with it, you make it and you let it go out into the world

and then it's on its own, like a child.

It's not something that you keep on rewriting history.

Are there still pieces that you dream of making that have eluded you over the years?

Not over the years, but there are pieces I dream of making and I hope I'll go on and make them.

I think in moments of uncertainty and depression,

you start to think about your life and you start to think about,

"Maybe I'll make a centre

"for...sculpture" or something.

I did think of those things and then I thought to myself,

"That's not really what I'm about. What I'm really about is making art."

So I'll go on making art till I drop.

And it may get worse or it may get better or it may...

I don't know what's going to happen.

But it's my activity

and it's the thing I want to keep doing.

It's fun.

-Anthony Caro, thank you.

-Thank you, Mark.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]