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The John Tusa Interviews |
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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with Sir Anthony Caro Sir Anthony Caro is widely regarded as Britain's greatest living sculptor. After a brief period working with Henry Moore from 1951 to 1953, he turned to making sculptures out of steel after a visit to the United States in 1959. In 1960, Caro made his first steel sculpture. A parallelogram, square and a circle welded together and called simply, Twenty-four Hours. Since then, Caro has explored the world of steel, steel detritus, industrial off-cut in a prolific career, his work being in public and private collections all over the world. In recent years he's had exhibitions at the National Gallery, the Tate and represented Britain with a group of other artists at the Venice Biennale. His latest involvement has been in the Millennium footbridge over the Thames at Bankside and he became a member of the select Order of Merit earlier this year. He is the grand old man of British sculpture with all the vigour of a very much younger one. ____________________________________________________ When did you know that you wanted to be a sculptor? I wasn't sure what I wanted to be early on because I think sculpture was such a....., it was something that you were not allowed to be in my family. You were not allowed to be a dilettante and any sort of artist was a dilettante in my parent's book. So I wasn't sure what I wanted to be and in fact, I tried architecture, engineering and they didn't grab me and it took a long time and I went into the Navy and it was the end of the war and finally, I said to my father, look, I am going to make a living at this, I am going to do it properly. I can teach. 'Well, you're going to be very uncomfortable, you know, you're not going to be able to have a family and you're going to live in squalor, but if that's what you want to do...' So I went ahead and did it. And yet my father was very supportive, actually, in the end, very supportive. Did you have the faintest idea then what kind of sculptor you were going to end up being? No, I didn't John. I thought really, that being a sculptor meant doing a portrait of a general on a horse or a figure portrait like an Epstein portrait or something, I didn't know what it meant at all. I just knew that I liked the reality of clay, the stuff, it was... that I used to make it with. I worked during my holidays with Charles Wheeler, in Charles Wheeler's studio and he was very kind to me and I think I just got the idea that this was the right material for me. I mean, I loved drawing, I didn't like painting because I wasn't into colour at all and so sculpture was what I wanted to do. What made you go to Henry Moore in 1951, that was after you'd finished at the Royal Academy , wasn't it? Well, I hadn't really finished at the Royal Academy . I was still a student there because it was a five year course, a very long course but I felt I'd come pretty well to the end of it and I was being taught then by old academicians who did these sort of generals and I felt there must be more to it than this, there must be more. So I found out where Henry Moore lived and went and asked him, can I come and do some assisting... Just like that without any forewarning... I'm afraid so, yes. But, he clearly took you in, so... He was very kind. He took me in, I went to him six months later and worked for him for two years and went, in fact, and lived out in Much Hadam and we had a little cottage there and we rented it and I used to bicycle up the hill to Henry's every day and work away there. We were working a lot on waxes and on a certain amount of bronze casting because he'd made a foundry, a little foundry down the end of the garden, which he'd made quite wrong. We had made it wrongly; we'd made it too wide for the size of the crucible, so we could never get the bronze to actually melt. We got more and more hot, the coke went bright red and then we had to put more coke in, it burned down and so we would be pumping this actual physical bellows, big pair of bellows. We pumped them until two o clock in the morning. That was when we finally poured. It was great fun, it was like a sort of party but it was not a very good way to do bronze casting. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. I mean, what did you learn from him apart from learning certain practical mistakes like that? Oh, I learned a lot from him because he was very generous with his books, with talking about art to me. He knew I liked to talk about art; I liked to think about it. He let me borrow a book. Probably I borrowed two or three books and then changed them so I'd take home a book at night on Negro Art or on Surrealism. We hadn't seen any Negro Art. I was at the Royal Academy schools, you didn't know about Negro art. It wasn't something that was on our .......... ...entirely classical and classical plaster casts..... ... Absolutely. They looked horrible. They all looked brown because they were covered with shellac, so they didn't look a bit like the real Greek things or the real Renaissance things at all. They're still there by the way, they're still there. Was there anything that you did not learn from Henry Moore that you began to think, if the man is a great sculptor, he's a great artist and a great man but there are things that he's doing that I know are not for me? I think I discovered that at the end, at the end. I remember coming into the Tate Gallery and seeing a Francis Bacon and seeing some Picassos and I felt that here was a more, a looser way of working. And I thought that I could learn from that. But that wasn't really until the end because when I think of the two years I was there, the change was pretty big from sheer academic work to thinking like Henry. And then there was the period of about six years and I don't want to go into that in detail but this great moment that everybody knows about in your history, 1959, you went to America and suddenly you were told, I think, by Clement Greenberg, the critic, that if you really wanted to do things differently you had to think differently. You just had to approach the whole business of art and sculpture differently. I mean, can you remember how shocking was that or were you actually ready for change? The fact that you had gone to the United States meant that you were ready for something radically new. Oh, I did. That was exactly what happened. I mean, I remember meeting on the boat, because we went across by boat, and meeting another chap who'd got the same scholarship as I had but in film and he said to me because I'm going to the States but I'd rather have gone to Italy, and I was amazed. I couldn't believe that anybody would rather have gone to Italy because I wanted to go to the future; I didn't want to go to the past. And I think that I, that at that time, abstract expressionism was beginning to get accepted and I was beginning to notice it. It had been going some time but it was percolating to me by then and I felt this was where I was going to learn. And I knew that my art had come to a moment where something had to happen and that was when I said to Clem, you know, I told this to Clem and he said, well, if you want to change your art, change your habits, which was a good open sort of remark and I took it to mean, try different material. By that stage, of course, you already knew David Smith, the great American sculptor who worked in metal or did Greenberg introduce you to him? No, I met him in 1959. He was one of the people that I met. Lawrence Alloway, who was here and knew a lot of Americans gave me a list of people that I should call and David was among them. David Smith was among them. I didn't go up to David Smith's place. I met him. There was a big party, I remember, that the Motherwells very kindly gave for me. Bob Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and there I was, sitting at a table next to Heddy Lammar and on the other side of it was David Smith. [laughter] What do you remember of Heddy Lammar? Was she very sexy? I think she was more, I think she was more taken with David Smith that she was with me, much to my....... [laughter]... So, the decision to work in steel was made there but your first sculpture, [unclear] wasn't made until 1960 when you were back in Britain . Oh yes. I didn't make a decision to work in steel at all. I said, I've got to work in something that was new to me and I thought to myself, well what can I use, shall I use aluminium, shall I use steel, shall I use wood, what shall I do, and I chose to use steel. I went down to the docks and found these bits of stuff and I didn't know how to stick them together. I remember saying to Frank Martin, who was a teacher at St Martins, the head of the department with me, how do I stick two pieces of steel together. I mean, I knew as little as that. I thought it was something you either bolted or you welded and I didn't know how to weld. I didn't know even how you make a hole in steel. I learned bit by bit, those things. Did you make your first piece, the one that we mentioned called 'Twenty-four hours', parallelogram, square, circle, painted it brown and black, which we shall come to. Did you make that by yourself or did you already need a lab assistant? No, I think I had a friend to help me lift it, you know, to actually put it into place and sort of, you give me a hand. Was that the breakthrough for you as a sculptor in steel? It was the breakthrough with the public, yes. It was not the breakthrough because, in a way, I had been making it for three years but, yeah, that was the moment that I got noticed and thought to be outrageous at that time. Now, it was also painted, wasn't it? Yes. And for a long time you painted your sculptures. Why was this? Because I didn't want them to get any credit by looking like sculpture ought to look, that is, by looking like bronze. I didn't want them to look like sculpture, I wanted them to look like something fresh and you said, 'that moves me.' Not, put it in that box. It's got to move me because it is in the box. I want it to say, 'here's a new box, try that.' And to insist on looking at shapes. And to insist on looking at shapes and so on. And then I started actually by painting them brown. You've got to protect steel anyway and so I painted them brown, a couple of them. Like the first one you mentioned and then I thought, why not try some other colours so we tried, I tried various other colours... Bright yellow, bright red, blue... ...sometimes got it wrong and my wife, who is a painter gave me a lot of guidance on that and would say, you know, that's, I think that red's the right colour for that or that red is the right colour for it, and so on. Yes. Got into the feel of it, the sculpture. But I mean, we're, as viewers, as members of the audience were almost trained, I think, to look at texture. You know, texture, surface, this is the surface, this is where it's been worked on, this is where it has aged so it is extraordinary that you were denying yourself and us that but you were denying it for a greater purpose. That is wanting us to look at what you were presenting which was plain shapes, relationships . I still do. I still do, in a way. I mean, I don't want you only to look plain shapes and relationships but I want you to look, as opposed to feel. I don't care for sculpture that is, that you run your hands over, sculpture for the blind and so on. It seems to me that, by and large, that's not the area I'm into and by and large, I don't actually think it's the right way to look at sculpture. Now I say that, I did actually once see a head of the guide dog by somebody who was blind and it was a marvellous sculpture. But on the whole, I don't see it that way. I see it as something... sculpture is something to be looked at. To be seen in a visual way not a tactile way. Clement Greenberg, as you well know, but he wrote many years ago, 'there are no volumes in Caro, only planes, linear forms and shapes.' Well, he was describing what you did then but were you perfectly happy with that as a description of what you intended to do and what you have continued to do? It's not true now. Because there are shapes and there are even recognisable things in sometimes. But yes, I was happy. I mean, Clem was very good at expressing those things but where his real strength was, I think, was in the studio because he would come into your studio and American critics do do this, they come into the studio; not all of them but some of them, and you can talk to them while you're in the process of making art, which is wonderful. What do you think of this? Well, I think you're in trouble on the right hand side, you know, that sort of thing. Very visual. Things you can do with other artists too, this is lovely. Now our English critics don't do that. English critics look at the finished job and write a criticism about it. They scarcely meet the artist in that sort of way. Do you think that is their background and their training that they feel there's a sort of need to keep a professional distance, an ethical distance rather than ending writing reviews about people, artists with whom they have almost collaborated in the studio? I don't know. I think probably, yes. And I think quite a few of them come from a more literary start. I mean, Greenberg as an example, was originally a painter, who was a failed painter and he decided to be a writer. But it helped even to be a failed painter in this context.... Well, he did... he knew what it was like in the studio. There are some critics that still do that in America and there are some here that I can talk to quite intimately about art and some who teach in art schools and so on, so it is... perhaps it's breaking through that. Let's talk about work in the studio because, after all, you're dealing with a heavy, heavy material and first of all, is it hard work, physically? I don't only deal in steel now, I deal in all sorts of things. But is it hard work physically? It is if you're trying to lift something which is right on the edge of what you can do when you really ought to be using a machine and you say, no but I can lift it, I know I can and then, that's when you put your back out. But by and large, you use a machine if you can, or a simple... we have a simple gantry in the studio, which we made ourselves. It works perfectly well, we can lift heavy things, I think, up to two tons, but I mean, not terribly heavy things, but heavy enough things, yeah. But the actual cutting and the welding, is that always being done by a studio assistant? Wherever possible. Whenever possible. I can do it. I don't enjoy it. It's like sticking stamps on really, except it can be done well or badly and I'm very lucky because I have, ....Pat Cunningham has worked for me for thirty years and he's wonderful and I have some younger people who help me, who have come out of art school and so on and they're terrific actually, and I really enjoy working with them but I'd rather spend my time usefully, which is to say, let's make that differently. Let's change that. Let's... in other words I'm using my eye aesthetically rather than using it on... from a practical point of view. I've never been very practical actually, I know there's sculptors are meant to be very good at putting up shelves but I'm very past it. Mine can be guaranteed to fall down. But therefore, you don't need, clearly, to be involved in a touch way, in a tactile way with the material. Well, I think you do, in so far as you lift things and so on but I... and you also know what the weight of something is and you know what it feels like. I remember, years ago, saying to a painter, give me a hand to move this and he was amazed how heavy it was. You do get to know the stuff. The whole question of how you start, where does the idea for a piece come from? How does it develop? That's the question one's often asked and it's so hard to answer because there are so many ways in which it comes. It comes from thinking about art. It comes from looking at art. It comes from a conversation you had. It comes from the last work you did. It comes from what the architects are doing. It comes from paintings you saw. It comes from seeing two bits of steel on the ground together or it comes from coming across something and saying, that's a start, now wait a minute, what else does it need? There's so many possibilities or ways it can come. I think when you start, you've got one way of working but as you get older you've got so many ways of working. And, presumably, you don't start on a piece and then work through to completion? I mean, you're working on a number of different pieces at one time, are you? Well, you'd... personally, I start a piece and take it up to a certain stage, quite a long way on and then I get the people in my studio to make it and I don't want to see it while it's being made and then I take another look and that can happen four or five times because each time it's fresh for me. Each time it's like covering it up, I'm not seeing it for a bit. So in that respect, I work on several things. In the old days, when I had a one-car garage when I was making those first things, I could only work on one, and that was very tedious. I used to sit and look at it for days and perhaps move something six inches and that would be a day's work and that was a very tiresome way to work. Now I can work on more things because I've got a bigger studio and I've got people helping me. Do you work a long day at making sculpture? I work a reasonable day at making sculpture. I start late, I start about ten thirty or something... That's not very late. It is late, actually, and then, unfortunately my, sort of, time clock is an afternoon clock, not a morning clock, so I don't actually really get going until the afternoon and then by five o clock or five thirty, things are going really well and I would love to be able to go on till eleven at night and cut the mornings out and start... but you can't with sculpture. For one thing, you've got people working for you, for another thing, you've got to get different sorts of materials and you make a noise and there's... there are practical reasons why you can't work into the night. But that would suit me very well, working into the night would be very nice. Do you splurge on work, do you have times when you say, look the next fortnight I feel dry, I feel barren, I don't have an idea. I'm not going to do anything and then suddenly you find that the ideas come back and you work as intensively as you can, given the limitations you've just mentioned? No, I don't work like that. I say, I'm going to have a holiday now. I'm going away for two weeks or three weeks. Before I do that I always try and finish everything off as if I was going to die tomorrow and then I go on holiday, which is madness. But I do try and keep fairly systematic and fairly regular. I don't want to have these moments and I don't know really... I don't think I know any painters and sculptors that are like that. Yes, I mean there are so many writers who write 800 words a day, whether it is a good day, a bad day, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling bad but I will sit down and write. So you're very much part of that... that discipline, the equivalent discipline? No. I don't like to think like that. I would hate to think that I was writing 800 words a day but I go into the studio every day, pretty well, and when you get into the studio you can't help it. You start by messing about and in a little while you're enjoying it so much that you're working away. I mean, I do think that in a way you get to know yourself, you get to know the way that you can operate and Pat knows it, my... Pat Cunningham. So if we're looking at small sculptures, let's say, I say, Pat give me, give me an easy one. So he'll give me one which is nearly right and I'll say, that's okay and then you look at the next one that is nearly right or not quite right and then you only get to the difficult ones later. But that's rather like you asking me questions. You don't ask me... the difficult questions are not the first questions you ask me. Not the hardest ones, you know, and I think that that's... if you can work like that in some sort of way, it's quite a good thing or... when I'm my garage at home I put on some music and get the thing sort of moving in the right frame of mind so I get into the frame of mind of the sculptures I'm going to work on. Now is this one an easy one or a difficult one, does the word inspiration mean anything useful to you ? I mean those of us who aren't artists look at artists and say ah yes, this is an inspired work and so on, now does this actually mean anything useful to you? No I think it's.... it's too broad a word. I mean I think of course I would hate to make a work which didn't speak to me, which didn't say anything to me. But do you reject works? Oh yes . Yes I do think I say that, 'that one worked or that one didn't work'. I wouldn't use the word inspiration, I'm very cautious about using any of these overheated words The interesting thing is when you talk about your work you're very matter-of- fact and in particular this word that you always use about your raw material, or many times I've seen it, that is you refer to it as stuff. So there you are surrounded with these piles of steel off-cuts and I think the fact that you call it stuff shows how close you are to it how close you have to be to it. But also it's because I'm bad at expressing words and I ...... But it's a wonderful word. ...but I would never say... I would never say I want or I very seldom say, I want a piece of wood that's four foot six long or one and a half metres or whatever it is. I don't say that, I say, I want a bit that long holding my hands... because it is very much to do with the bodily experience, this job. Once you've made a piece are you possessive about it or are you happy to let it go to whoever's bought it or whatever its destination is? No I'm happy it has to live its own life like one's children have to live their own lives .To my amazement I was in New York and my dealer said there's a work of yours in Sothebys but I think it's wrong would you go and look at it. And somebody had had it in their gate, they'd welded it into their gate and they'd left a bit of gate on. So that was a mistake and I don't like that to happen. I don't want actually someone to weld it into their gate. By and large that's one of the advantages of people paying for their work and paying quite a lot for it. They say they'll take care of it and they take care of it like they'd take care of their car and they keep it clean and they love it I hope, that's what I want to happen. And as for physical location, cityscape, townscape or anything. Do you have particular views about that? No, I've worked on a fairly intimate scale of one to one scale, even though they're big, some of them. I don't think many of them are public sculptures. I've made one or two public sculptures and I would like them to be in a suitable place. I don't think I'm a rural sculptor, or if I've, I've made a sculpture which could to in the landscape, it's really counterpoint to the landscape. It isn't part of the landscape, it's like a house would be in a landscape. It's an inappropriate thing, in a way. But you, you recognise the landscape through it. But by and large my stuff, up to date, has been mostly fairly one to one, fairly intimate. And you still have a... you have a store, do you, of pieces, which you haven't sold or are waiting to be sold or you've forgotten about, do you? I'd prefer to forget about what I've made. Yes, I have a store and you put the ones there that you've gone on beyond and in a way I don't want to feel terribly affectionate towards one sculpture more than another. I feel affectionate for them when I'm making them and when I've just finished them. And then, they've gone. Show them and they've gone. And they live their lives, I live my life. While we're together we're talking to each other, that's real. Afterwards, it's sentimental, I think, to be caring about old pieces, particularly. How do you see your relationship as an artist, as a sculptor, to society? I think it's very important that we have a response. I think that it's very tough on an artist who paints his pictures or makes his sculpture and has no means of showing it and has to... he has no gallery, he doesn't put his work into shows. What's he done? He's just turned it to the wall and I think that is like talking in the dark or talking to yourself, and it's a very unhappy way of going about this thing because in a way we need a response, we need it. Whatever the responses is? Whatever the response is. Even if it's of incomprehension? Not really, incomprehension isn't much good but I think that a negative response can be quite useful. Somebody saying, I don't like it because of this and this and this and you think to yourself, well, is it really like this and this and this, you know? Hostility, if people say, why should sculpture be made out of steel, why isn't it, you know, all the usual things. Why doesn't it look like an object? Why doesn't it look like people, you know? I cannot take a thing made out of that sort of material. I suppose that is incomprehension but it's also hostility. Does that matter to you? I think it's got to be intelligent criticism for it to have any effect, really. It's got to be somebody using their eyes and using their heads and then saying something about it, that's useful. I have had, though, people saying criticisms which have been, not hostile, but have been very critical and that's made me think sometimes, now wait a minute, are you taking this for granted, are you doing this, you know, are you... is what you're doing right. I'm a very anxious person, I think, you know I do listen to other people a lot. All the debate or so much of the debate about the arts and the role of the arts in society nowadays is surrounded by the idea of accessibility. Is something accessible to the audience, accessible to the public, where does that fit into your own thoughts and concerns about how you make sculpture and how you hope that it is received? I'm delighted that lots of people are looking at art now, many, many more people than used to, twenty or thirty years ago. That's good but if it lowers the level just in order to make it more accessible, I'm very against that and I think that what we have to do is to educate people to such an extent that they can appreciate the best so that there are many, many elitists. In other words, I do believe in excellence and I do not believe in coming down a peg just in order to get more people into the museums or into the art galleries. Now, you used to go around American galleries and things and there'd be some lady doing a spiel about what the artist intended and so on and I know that English people used to say, 'oh god, it is so awful.' Actually, it's not awful. It's a good thing. Anyway that we can bring people to try and appreciate what the artist is doing is good and I think there should be an awful lot of visual experience taught in schools, not being to experience, being to, whatever the word I want is. Yes, education. Visual education. Visual education, yes. Yes. And it is getting much, much better than it was, much better. So it's the educational outreach rather than some sort of false accessibility, saying to you, Caro, you're too difficult. Exactly. Well, if I am too bad, then, you know... [laughing] Do you think the state should fund the arts though, I mean you, personally and a lot of other sculptors have always earned your living but in general should there be major state subsidies for the art? I think anything that helps the art is good. I was very lucky because my work really took off in America . I had good galleries. There was a tremendous sort of audience, really, for art and people were buying it and people were writing about it, people were liking about... liking it. And people were expecting to spend money on having a work in their houses. Now that doesn't happen so much in America now, I don't think, maybe it does but it never happened here to such an extent because people had a lot of old things. You don't need a new work of art if you've got a Van Dyck on the walls anyway and... Well, you might want to change. Well, yes, but not many people would change like that [laughing] and of course also there were poor people or new rich people in America who would come, the first thing they would do is to start to get a collection of art in their houses. Were they more open-minded in what they were prepared to look at, what they were prepared to judge, what they were prepared to buy because they didn't have the great European tradition hanging over them and...? I would say so, I would think so. In the old... in those days, in the 60s, 70s, yes, I would think so. But is there not now a much greater openness to contemporary art, whatever, however one describes that in Britain, than there was certainly when you began in ...30 or 40 years ago?... Oh, much more, much more open and it's wonderful that this has happened and I mean, I can remember saying, oh, the English are never going to like art because we're a literary nation and all that stuff, well, in fact it's not true. We are starting to like it very much and a lot of people are, you know, really turning towards art and they... I think it's wonderful that's happening and sculpture in particular which was, even then, was the... was always the poor relation of architecture and painting. And I think there is a real, real hunger for it now which is marvellous but don't forget that I'm not quite a contemporary artist now because I'm getting old, you know, and young people, who are a lot younger than me are getting the real experiences of nowadays, whereas I'm on my own track, rather than being on the track of the 90s. But in fact you have been critical of some of the more sensationally angled or sensationally directed young contemporaries who you do regard as being more interested in sensation rather than in working for more serious ends. I mean, do you actually feel a real gap or any sort of gap between you, who you are, what you're doing and what the young Turks of Hoxton are doing? Of course there's a gap but I'm very interested in what the young Turks are doing. I think also that I'm not so critical of them as critical of the way they've been used by people who went for, with a small s, sensation rather than going for art but I don't think... there are good artists and bad among them just as there are among any others. But, look the fact is, here you are talking to a man of 76 about people of 35 or 30 and you know, I always use this sort of simile that you wouldn't really have talked to Degas about Cubism in 1917 when he was 76. And you wouldn't have talked to Monet about Surrealism when he was in his 80s. That would have been silly. Well, would it? It would be jolly interesting, wouldn't it? No, I think it would have been silly because it's nothing to do with Monet. But they have views on it and have views based on... Yeah, but... a lifetime of work and experience as you do. I don't think it is interesting. I think that those people have got to start to move... it's interesting about Monet but it's not really interesting about the art. Yes, but it's interesting about you. I think really, you know Picasso never understood Jackson Pollock and thought it was nonsense and Matisse did too and in a way it doesn't say anything about Jackson Pollock. They were onto a new world. But I think in some funny way, actually, they influenced me more than I influenced them. I think what's happening is interesting. I think that in fact something, which I think that those younger artists have brought about which is the idea of bringing our everyday lives in more, the idea of bringing more meat into art. Not letting it be quite so pure and so abstract. I think that's very important and I think actually it's certainly affected what I make. Some years ago you said, and I wonder how much it still applies now, the art that I prefer is the art in which intelligence and sensibility are both given reign. Do they both play out in your work today or what is the balance between them? I hope so. I hope so. I've never rated my brain that high but I do enjoy people who say things that stimulate me. I enjoy them. I enjoy being pressed in a way so I think that aspect of intelligence is something that, you know, I don't know that I have it but I do get a bang from it. Sensibility, I think you... you've got to have that if you're an artist. Has your work, say terms like 'The Trojan Wars', the 'The Decent from the Cross', 'Last Judgement', now how's the balance between intelligence and sensibility work there because one might say, particularly with things like 'The Last Judgement' which I think was a direct response to events in the Balkans, is there a greater element of sensibility of passion than there was before? I don't quite know, John, I don't know actually what's happening to me. I just felt that I had to do those and it wasn't what I expected of myself. I started 'The Trojan War' by going down to work in the south of France with Hans Spinner and it so happened that what came out looked like warriors and was really, 'The Trojan War'. I just felt it was 'The Trojan War' and I started getting very involved in it and reading the Iliad and so on and trying to actually recognise who these brutal warriors were and who were their gods and so on. When I made 'The Last Judgement' I knew I wanted to make a last judgement. I didn't know how but I knew I wanted to. And then, I think the difference between that and what I was doing before, I think is the same person doing it but I think it was looking out at the world more than looking in at myself. Well, it's entirely consistent with what you were saying earlier about your terms of reference for creating sculpture and you cited all sorts of external things; sculptures, ideas, conversations and it sounds, in those cases, 'The Decent'...'The Last Judgement' in particular that just being aware of what was going on in the Balkans, the outside world was so pressing that it did something to... to you internally. You just had to express your feelings as sculpture. Well, I think so. I mean just simply watching the television and seeing how much of that is on it and reading the newspapers and it was in your face all the time, this... and is. It might also be something to do with my age and the fact that maybe you do start to get more conscious of these things. But 'The Decent from the Cross'...? 'The Decent from the Cross' was more like looking at old art, looking at the Rembrandt, looking at the Rubens... But it wasn't, from your point of view, just an academic... It wasn't but it's not quite as closely related to outside events. Apart from 'The Bridge' and that, 'The Millennium Bridge', that must have been a wonderful new direction to be part of, is there anything particular that you know is bubbling up inside you that you're going to do? God, a lot of things are bubbling up inside me but odd things are happening too. I mean, I do have some plans to make some art and I don't want to kind of spoil my luck by talking about them too much now. I don't think you should. I do have some ideas for making my own things, quite a lot. But also, what is happening, which is odd, is that people are asking me, well, would you be interested to do something and that's kind of exciting. For example, there's a church in the north of France that has been the end of it, the choir and the aisles have been left for... ever since the war and they're blocked off from the rest of the church. They say, oh, would you like to activate this area and I would like to very much and, I mean, that sort of thing which would be completely different. It would be like, really, it's almost architectural and I think that would be very exciting. Which takes you back to the very beginning to your architecture however skimpy it was... Yes, yes, it does. But it's not architecture like making houses, it's not architecture like making a space work in a new way, in a more, in a more emotional way perhaps. Yes. So there again, perhaps the balance between intelligence and sensibility is tilting in the way that you feel, you feel right and maybe it's different. It should be different. Well, I think you see, that's another example of how you can start, by somebody coming up to you and saying, what about doing this, what about doing that? You know, another thought is working with this engineer that, who designed the bridge. His name's Chris Wise and he's a wonderful young man who's full of go and he said, 'lets do something together'. We went down, we're going to make a tower, a sort of impossible tower I hope. And that's a challenge too. In the end, you know, I think that there was a period in the 70s where I knew much more where I was, what I was going to do. Now I don't know where I am and I love it, I love it. Just a final thought. Is there anyone today, any sculptor today who will say, as you have always said of David Smith, that Tony Caro was an important influence on me. Is there anybody at all who you see as continuing your work, that would be silly, but as somebody on whom you have had a considerable influence? I think I had an influence on Richard Serra and I think that he is a very important sculptor and I think he's changed the face of sculpture quite a lot. His things are much bigger and much more to do with people, they're much more to do with large amounts of people in public places and so on and I know he said that he came out of me originally or somewhere out of me, somewhere, a long way away. And if any young sculptor, would- be sculptor came to you as you came to Henry Moore 1951 and said, could I sit in the studio, work with you for a couple of years, perhaps they have done but what would you say? [laughing] I'd say... I'd have to say, don't I, on this programme, I have to say, go away, I hate you. Oh, I don't know what I'd say. Probably have a cup of tea and that's it. But no, I've got some people working for me. They have been sculpture students. They're a delight. I happen to be lucky, I've got really nice people and we talk about all sorts of things in our tea breaks and we look at art together. We look at my art and I say, what do you think about this, what do you think about... perhaps we should change this end, what... do you like the colour of it, do you like the... I mean, I talk to them like that and it's very open, it's very nice. I don't think I'd accept somebody out of the blue, no. Don't forget, when I went to Henry, he was 50 something and I'm older than that now and I have to be very careful that I have just the right number of people in my studio and just the right ones. And I'm very lucky at the moment, it's okay, it's good. It seems very reasonable. Anthony Caro, thank you very much. |
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Listen to the interview with Sir Anthony Caro
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