Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Sculptor and Turner Prize winner, best known for the Angel of the North and body sculptures cast from his own body.
On the island
Eight records
For me this period is about me in a way escaping from the confines of of home. becoming aware of a wider world in which sex and drugs and rock and roll uh were all part of the blandishments of uh growing up. And I think it has the most fantastic surreal lyrics that obviously are to do with sex, but they're also to do with violence. There's also a wonderful moment in it. which describes The touch. like a velvet hand on a Window pane. In a sense this this Something about that that connects with sculpture for me. Something about touch. Something that invites touch, something that engages us physically.
Raga JaijaiwantiFavourite
This is just the most wonderful sound in the world and it reminds me of my time in Adya, which is in South India near to Madras. I stayed for three months in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, which has a wonderful park, and in the middle of the park is a great banyan tree. And every evening a flute player would come and sit and play this kind of music.
This record uh reminds me of Andy Warhol, of The Velvet Underground, of in a way my first tastes of New York, of the merging of boundaries, of transsexuality, of I guess All of the Puritan moral values that in some senses cripples America being countered by this fantastic, iconoclastic spirit.
And the first time I came across this instrument uh played live was uh when I was walking across Weno Park and I saw this white dressed figure with a basket over it uh its head, with a with a flute coming out of it, and it was somebody playing the shakahachi. And I think there's nothing quite like it, this minor key, this haunting, misty, immediately or in this misty Japanese rocky landscape. Immersed in an elemental world.
I've been lucky enough to spend some very, very happy times in Brazil, both in in the Amazon making field and in Rio. And uh I just think it's one of those blessed places on the face of this earth.
is Martin Hayes. I'm playing Brown Coffin, which is a traditional jig, but played by somebody who became a very accomplished jazz musician. And that lilting, wonderful plungency of the Irish very Celtic feeling, is slightly, slightly modified by a kind of modernist jazz idiom.
Now I first heard this at the Chisholm Hale Gallery when I went to see an installation by Pippolotti Rist, who's a Swiss artist who makes videos. And the video projection was of this fantastic blue undersea world with shafts of sunlight and Pippolotti herself swimming about with pink teacups coming from one side or the other and ever since I saw that video I can't hear this music without thinking of that watery world.
From a very small boy I've always been really moved by that head at the Museum of Mankind and the f the the fact that it is an example of those heads that stare up into the sky, in some way witnessing the fact that human life is not the only life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:19Why does it have to be your body [that you use for the plastercast]?
I want to make my work about Life about the lived moment. And I want to make it from the inside rather than from the outside. ... Absolutely, and I think until recently all of the work was hollow. I mean it w they were I call them body cases, I don't call them figures, because in fact they're just a kind of very intimate architecture that represents not the body, but the space that the body occupies.
Presenter asks
8:48Are you meditating inside there [when you are being encased in plaster]?
Well, I think I think the the the process definitely comes out of my experience of meditation in India. And that certainly gave me my first experience of this idea of the space of the body. ... I found that space again in meditation, and that's where I go when I am being moulded. ... I do it with my wife, who's, you know, extremely adept and with whom I have a, you know, very profound trust. And uh, in a sense, she's responsible for, you know, ma giving me birth every time.
Presenter asks
12:27Why a sculptor more than any other kind of artist?
the most challenging of of work. ... the idea that I could contribute to that and sort of make things that would, as it were, exist in a di different time frame to human life. And I think that's the really exciting thing about sculpture. It's an incredibly resistant and stupid thing to be doing at the end of the 20th century ... And here is sculpture that in some senses goes at geological time and is, you know, in a way resisting all of that.
The keepsakes
The book
Ernst Bloch
I've had Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope ... sitting on my shelves waiting for me to have the time to read it, and it's three volumes, and it is ... a study of Utopia, its failure, but our continuing need of it.
Presenter asks
24:51What directions do you give them when you [make Field]?
There's only three rules. One is that they should be hand-sized, the other is that they should stand up, and the third is that they should have eyes that that look in in one direction. ... Everybody finds their own way to make it. And when it's made, we then completely occupy a gallery to the complete exclusion of the audience.
Presenter asks
27:19What do you want to do in [the courtyard of the Royal Academy]?
Well, I made a piece uh three years ago called Critical Mass. It's Twelve sculptures that have been cast five times each ... they will be l uh either hanging upside down from the façade of the building or lying as if after a massacre in the central reservation of the courtyard. ... And I thought this was a very apposite place to think about the victims of the twentieth century. And I think there are very strong references in this work to Rwanda, to Cambodia, um, to the more recent conflicts of Bosnia.
“I think it's terribly important to liberate art from the straitjacket of both the museum and the private gallery. I think both of them are very, very specialised spaces that in some way are almost like hospitals in the kind of support that they give for what they show. And I think it's very important to see whether art can survive as part of the fabric of the built world.”
“I think if you think of what the primal gesture of sculpture is, which is in a sense the standing stone, taking something that was that's lying on the surface of the earth and by this simple gesture of standing it vertical, it becomes a marker in time, in space. It says here we are, we exist and this is in a way a proof of our existence.”
“I think that the abiding concern of my work is to make forms that in some way warn or provide some kind of talisman against the potential of a humanly created disaster. So that idea of mortality is very linked to what I conceive of as their reason for being.”