Thank you to all those who sent a question for Vanessa Engle. She has answered a selection of your emails about the series...
Robert, Cambridge
Some of the interviewees are obviously reluctant to talk. Did you have any difficulty tracking them down and then persuading them to be interviewed?
Vanessa Engle
Yes. The particularly elusive ones were Barry Flanagan, who hadn't done an interview for 30 years; Richard Long, who had never given a television interview; Jim Dine was also very elusive but a fantastic interviewee; Yoko Ono was pretty difficult.
Those four were all very reluctant, but the key thing with all of them, particularly with Barry Flanagan and Richard Long, is they feel that nobody really remembers how important they were in the 60s - that they were making incredibly avant-garde, revolutionary work then but are now more associated with work that they made later on in their careers. With Flanagan and Long, it wasn't really me that persuaded them - they relished the opportunity to go on the record and talk about their work from the 60s that they feel isn't really taken into account or remembered as much as they'd like it to be.
Sara, Highbury, London
Did you deliberately ask questions designed to irritate some of the artists?
Vanessa Engle
No, I didn't ask any questions that were designed to irritate. I ask the questions that I think need answering and I ask them quite directly. I think those who are most hostile to the questioning, like Barry Flanagan and Richard Long, are just like that. The reason Richard Long doesn't give interviews is because he doesn't like it. It's not that I was asking irritating questions, it's that the questions that the media would ask can illicit quite a scary response.
Mike N, Essex
Where exactly is Alistair McAlpine's B&B monastery?
Vanessa Engle
It's called Santa Maria. It's in a little place called Marittima, in the area of Italy called Puglia. You get your breakfast and evening meal and amazing wine. It's a really classy hotel. When we stayed there we were the only people there, it was out of season, so all that food you see in the table was just for the crew - three of us. If you stay there you get to spend a lot of time in the McAlpines' company.
Kadir Guirey, London
Thank you for making such a great programme, it brought back a lot of fab memories of Robert Fraser and his gallery where my mother would drag us along for his openings. I was wondering why you didn't include more of his interview and why did you end the programme with those out takes of Colin Self. Was it meant to be sad, ironic, or just a bit of a laugh at his expense?
Vanessa Engle
The reason we didn't use more of Robert Fraser is that there isn't much more. The bit of Robert speaking is from a BBC programme called Art on the Movies. If there was to be one surviving interview with Robert Fraser, that wasn't the one you wanted it to be. He wasn't really talking about art, or being a dealer, or the 60s or anything about his own story. He was talking about the extent artists were involved in making feature films, or influenced by feature films.
The inclusion of Colin Self - obviously, it was meant to be humorous, but it wasn't meant to be having a laugh at his expense. What I was trying to show, was that a lot of the people we interviewed were incredibly rich, complicated, and indeed difficult personalities. Obviously I had to interview these people for hours and hours, even days, and it's trying to reveal that the sleight-of-hand of trying to squeeze them into neat journalistic story is not the whole story.
Trudi Gurling (St Martins, 1966 - 1969), Kerris, Penzance
Had you thought about challenging the St Martin's myth makers, particularly William Tucker, by interviewing those who had to survive the course (literally) by negotiating a way between those overbearing male egos? You interviewed Barry Flanagan and Bruce Mclean but there were also a few - very few - women sculpture students there during the 60s who received little support and encouragement.
Vanessa Engle
I was aware that it was tough for the women on the course and I did in fact interview a student from the time, but the interview she gave was not strong enough to include in the programme. There is another story to be told, which is what it was like to be a woman artist in the 60s. It was incredibly difficult, and although there were women artists at art school, there were very few who went on to have successful commercial careers. But it ended up not being the story that I told. I was aware that the St Martin's scene was very macho but I ultimately made the editorial decision to tell that story of the development of sculpture and not the other story.
Alex Dempster, Glasgow
Do you think 60s art was in any way competitive with other aspects of 60s culture or did it feed off of popular culture? If it did, is that in your opinion a good thing?
Vanessa Engle
I think that obviously Pop Art related to popular culture and fed off images of celebrities and a lot of Americana. I think that a lot of the rest of 60s art - the sculpture, the abstract painting and a lot of the political and performance-based stuff that's in programme three was quite separate from popular culture and other aspects of the culture. And I think art is often quite separate. Surprisingly the art world and the literary world do not overlap as much as people might imagine. The art world is quite inward looking. My personal view is that of all 60s art, Pop Art holds up the least well. As time passes that's the stuff that looks the least interesting.
Mark Lambert, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
I've heard a lot about changes in life pre and post-1968 and for people in the art world who lived through it (I myself was too young). Do you think it was really so dramatic a change, and why, particularly to those you interviewed?
Vanessa Engle
Yes I do, I think it absolutely was. Britain in the 1950s was an incredibly austere place and the art world was very parochial. That all really did explode in the 60s. The influence of America was huge in the 60s and that changed things enormously. Even the fact that there was more air travel to America made a huge difference, because suddenly there was all this exchange if ideas that hadn't taken place before. I think that the general social and political moment in the mid to late 60s, where people were really questioning everything about society, created a sense of freedom and possibility that this incredible range of new things were possible in the art world. I don't think that had been the case before.
