THE NAMES OF THE HARE
Remembering Barry Flanagan
In 1983, Barry Flanagan illustrated Seamus Heaney’s translation of the thirteenth-century Middle English poem The Names of the Hare. Beneath three golden leaping hares, there is a roll call of the impish creature’s names, which the hunter could employ to get the better of it. Sometimes during conversation, Barry would strain forward, sniff the air, and look, with his finely etched features and straggly clumps of hair that the razor had missed, very like the animal he had made his trademark. Strong autobiographical elements imbue many of his hare-themed works, attesting to the way the animal’s protean nature chimed with his.
Until the end of the 1970s, Barry occupied a worthy but obscure position on the fringes of the art world. He disliked the way “money punishes art” and resorted to making lino-printed “funds”, Flanagan money, that could be redeemed against his estate upon his death, which he exchanged for jobs and materials. He had a wife and two young daughters, and a CV of casual labouring jobs and shows that left hardly a ripple. Riding a white bicycle around a gallery’s perimeter while visitors used scissors to remove Yoko Ono’s clothes for her Cut Piece did not pay the rent.
Poetry, not sculpture, was Barry’s first love. In the basement of Better Books on the Charing Cross Road, where the owner, Bob Cobbing, had installed a typewriter for impecunious writers, “the poet of the building site” produced a weekly magazine called Silãns. It was 1964. Barry was studying at St Martin’s School of Art and distributed some of the fifty cyclostyled copies every Monday morning. The rest were available in the bookshop.
He attended the seminal poetry festival at the Albert Hall in 1965 and publicly delivered a silent lip poem at another event. He was delighted to find a way to rhyme ‘cider’ with ‘crazy’, a breakthrough very much inspired by the former. His concrete poetry provided titles for the sculptural works he produced at Saint Martin’s, like aaing i gni aa: agroup of dyed hessian figures filled with plaster and sand. The upright biomorphic forms had the absurd appearance of characters in a play by Barry’s hero, the French playwright and founder of Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry. Another work, Four Casb 2 ‘67, seems drawn from the same inscrutable territory, but simply means four canvas sandbags number two 1967. The truncated title takes on mystery, just as Barry had transmuted the modest materials into art.
As Barry’s work became more figurative, his titles made more sense, though still imbued with poetry, such as a 1978 curved, stone piece ‘- if marble smell of spring -’, or a thick rope meandering across the floor of an art centre in Lyon in 1980: ‘Built like a tree, flows like a river.’ His observations could be equally lyrical. He reacted to the destruction of a public piece in Cambridge in 1972 with, “The storm came later, before the light of summer had a chance to play on the surfaces of shape, to dry to a husk the sadness of a hard winter.”
The gaffer of Barry’s East End foundry, Henry Abercrombie - affectionately known as “Ab”- cast Barry’s first hare in November 1979. The sculptor had glimpsed the animal on the Sussex Downs, bought one from the butcher and taken it to Ab to model. The hare allowed Barry to make the leap from pure conceptual art and embrace the “concept of trade.” As he remarked, “When out of the garret one no longer works alone but finds a place in the scheme of things.” He attended business courses and took to wearing a tradesman’s cloth cap and a bespoke suit with sketchbook pockets, attire he would persist with when he moved to the Mediterranean, no matter what the temperature.
With its mercurial, mythological resonance, the hare was an immediate success. Texan billionaires, French wine producers, and Japanese hoteliers queued up to buy one. Barry was photographed by Lord Snowdon for Vogue and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. Yet the irreverent prankster spirit that had prompted him to position a turd-shaped stone behind Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece in Battersea Park hadn’t left him. The hare, after all, was “the wild one, the skipper, the hug-the-ground, the lurker, the race-the-wind, the skiver.” It had a long pedigree in the same out-there territory as Barry’s early work.
Shortly after opening in 2000, Tate Modern placed Barry’s sculptures in a gallery adjoining that of his fellow maverick and shaman, Joseph Beuys. A celebrated 1965 piece of performance art by Beuys was called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. With his head dripping with honey and gold leaf, Beuys spent hours cradling the dead animal in his arms as he showed it his drawings and tenderly whispered explanations of their meanings. Barry’s often gilded, and commercially triumphant, hare might in fact pay homage to one of the more subversive moments in twentieth-century art, such allusions being very much part of the sculptor’s method.
I first met Barry on “this haunted, blessed place”, as he described Ibiza, in 1987. In his dusty green corduroy jacket and baggy denim trousers, he looked like just another scruffy artist drawn to the island by its climate, tolerant host community and cheapness. It took me a while to realise Barry had an international reputation and significant wealth. While based on the island, he kept a house in London and a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Over the next few years, he would rent or buy properties wherever his burgeoning career took him—Barcelona, Dublin, and Amsterdam. He also acquired a few places on Ibiza, even buying back his first house on the island from the person he had sold it to, who was also Richard. Several people congratulated me on this windfall. Coming from a theatrical family, Barry was nomadic by nature, but instead of pitching a tent, he would acquire property wherever he happened to be. This, he told me, tallied with his sense of place.
I would often find him in loose-fitting Japanese robes in the overgrown garden of his rambling house, mulling over titles for mild steel works, which looked to my untutored eye like rusting, triangular scrap metal. Inside, he would ask me to help him position a set of architects’ blocks, a torso of his wife, Renate, and an almost featureless black head—the components of a new work which he never seemed to find the right arrangement for. Most of the time, however, he seemed not to do much at all. I wondered if he always operated like this or if the island was having its well-known lotus-eater’s effect. He drank, whisky mainly, but made it plain he was a “pissed artist,” not a “piss artist.”
He was fond of analogies drawn from cricket or tennis. “When I lob a ball, I expect a decent return,” he would say. Certain words pervaded his speech like riffs: “civility”, “address” (the verb), “as a student”, “practice”, “trade”. He could be just as sculptural with language as he was with bronze. “Don’t pay homage to a dead weight!” he once admonished me, referring to an exacting muse. Enquiring after his health or mentioning the weather would elicit cryptic observations about the Fluxus Group or Buckminster Fuller. Initiating a discussion on art, and he would tell you he was “well, thanks,’ or it was a bit windy. His listener’s familiarity with the people or places he alluded to did not seem to matter. He delighted in wordplays and puns. A 1970s drawing, ‘keeping one’s own tracts open,’ consists of the phrase on a sheet with the same phrase spelt backwards beneath it. He was playing with ‘tracts’, the most dogmatic and prescribed of written forms. Barry was very much keeping his tracks open.
He pencilled haikus and aphorisms on the walls of his Ibizan house. True judgment resides in the heart was one. Another was Just because we’re not at war doesn’t mean we’re all jumping into bed together. A third consisted of a rejoinder he had made to a belligerent tax inspector: Is it my fault I chose life over employment? My favourite was The hues of the ripple, which seemed to encapsulate his multidimensional approach.
One day, he gave me a shoebox containing five clay pots and instructed me to take it to the museum, without specifying which one. There was an art museum and an archaeological museum in Ibiza Town. His pinch pots had a prehistoric appearance, so I plumped for the latter and spent half an hour of mutual bewilderment with the director. More fruitful was a connection I established with the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Dalt Vila, which led to Barry being offered a show there.
The first meeting was at his house, and though it was an exceptionally warm day in May, the sculptor made a fire. With exquisite courtesy, he drew the sofa as close as possible to the blaze. Soon, sweat was streaming down the director’s face.
Compared to London, Paris or New York, Ibiza was relatively modest, but he did the hang with gusto. The gallery occupied the cellar of the Renaissance building, which itself jutted out like an outcrop from the city walls, and had originally stored the gunpowder, armaments and animal feed of the garrison. Barry filled the walls with drawings and hangings. He placed the mild steel triangles in the bays, dazzlingly ringing them with crystalline salt from Salinas. He recreated a work called Light on Light on Sacks, first shown at the Hayward Gallery in 1969. This consisted of a heap of thirty hemp or flaxen sacks stuffed with carob beans, which we had acquired, on a sale or return basis, from a puzzled farmer in San Carlos. A projector shone a square of light onto them, seemingly creating a door to another world. Unfortunately, after the exhibition had been extended by popular demand, rats ripped the sacks open and feasted on the contents.
The artist had finally worked out a satisfactory arrangement for the architect’s blocks, placing the freshly gilded torso on them, alongside the round black head resting on a photocopy of a poem. Barry was fond of being read to, which is how I introduced him to Head of the Goddess in my Hands, which I found in The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse. The poem treats of the way sculpture endures beyond the life of its creator:
It is a higher mystery, this of seeing how her body accumulates centuries while ours loses youth. The mystery of two clays that have been born from a single pit beneath a single fire. But only to one of them did Art give the virtue of being divine and, so, of never dying.
Beneath the title is a date, 654 BC, which was the year of the foundation of the city of Ibiza by the Phoenicians. The Goddess, I realised, was Tanit, the presiding deity of the island in Punic times. As it turned out, the poem’s author, Antonio Colinas, lived on the island and visited us during the hang. He told us a photocopy would ruin the exhibition, so Barry used my copy of the book instead
Barry went AWOL a couple of times the week of the hang. It seemed touch-and-go whether he would be there for the opening. The day arrived, and a morning of fruitless searching ended when I found him asleep on a couch in the cellar, surrounded by his treasures, like a pharaoh or a knight at his vigil.
In September 1992, we took the show to Palma and visited the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló. At that time, Miquel spent four months on Majorca, dividing the rest of the year between Paris and Mali. Barry drove us along the rugged west coast, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road because, as he explained, he disliked being dwarfed by the mountains. One of us invented the term “invertigo” to describe this. Later, this chimed with something Barry’s mother, Monica, told me. Her son was born during the Second World War, and his two older brothers and a sister were evacuated to North America, leaving him effectively an only child. Their return and the accompanying decline in attention from his parents came as a terrible shock. Nothing riled him more than being ignored or made to feel underestimated. As we continued along the winding road of the Serra de Tramuntana, Barry declared there was enough stone to give a sculptor indigestion.
I left Ibiza for London in 1994 and had a very bumpy landing. Barry sometimes chided himself for neglecting old friends, but this was not my experience. A survivor of ‘troughs’ himself, he sent me on a tour of quarries, which resulted in a report called ‘No Stone Unturned.’ I did this with another ally, the actor Oengus McNamara. We visited Doulting Quarry, source of the honey-coloured limestone that built Wells Cathedral, Edgehill Quarry, where the locals still maintain blood from the battle accounts for the deep red of the ironstone, and Ham Hill Quarry, with its Saxon forts. It gradually dawned on me that there was a biographical subtext as Barry directed us to Beer in Devon in pursuit of Fred Newton, an apprentice mason at the local quarry in his youth, who had given Barry a job on the beach in 1959. Then to Banbury, where Barry had a brief apprenticeship as a dental technician with the exquisitely named Mister Mold; and to Oxford, where the sculptor had blocked out one of the “Emperor Heads” that sit on pillars around the Sheldonian Theatre. Always a fan of added value, Barry had found a vicarious means of connecting with the touchstones of his youth, while at the same time helping me.
I met a fourteen-year-old girl at a reunion of old friends in London who turned out to be my daughter. She had a flair for art and needed more help to fund her studies. Barry’s contribution arrived with a single line on a sheet of headed notepaper: ‘Long a moving line.’ This was a ‘hues of the ripple’ moment. Did ‘moving line’ refer to my plea or to my family? Probably both.
In the early stages of our friendship, Barry was prone to volatile and incendiary states. The night before an opening in Madrid, he had to be talked out of demolishing his work with a hammer after a row about the hang. We had a couple of bust-ups. During one, I accused him of being a despot, which made him even more furious, though later he recommended I read Daniel Farson’s Sacred Monsters, which provides a useful map of the territory.
With the onset of the new millennium, he mellowed considerably, finding contentment in his private life with a new partner and establishing a harmonious equilibrium with Renate to raise their son and daughter. He padded around his green-carpeted house like a benign wizard in his black fedora, robe and sandals, as warm as the green Aga bubbling away in the kitchen. This made the motor neuron disease that felled him in 2009 especially cruel. When helping my daughter, he told the college to fund another student if she did not complete her studies. A hare’s heart is up to 1.8% of total body weight compared to a rabbit’s 0.3%. “Great-hearted, life enricher, selfless giver.”
Guardian article: ‘Hare Today, but not Gone Tomorrow’
Very good read.