IMAGINARY SYMBOLS OF END TIMES: THE SCULPTURE OF BARRY FLANAGAN 1965-82
IMAGINARY SYMBOLS OF END TIMES: THE SCULPTURE OF BARRY FLANAGAN 1965-82
Barry Flanagan at the Tate Britain
This is a retrospective of the work of the sculpture Barry Flanagan (1941-2009). Flanagan attended St Martin's School of Art from 1964-66 but his approach to sculpture isn't essentially very academic. He uses non-conventional materials such as sand, canvas, rope, sculpted cushions, installation-like assemblages resembling landscapes or even some organic entity or animal, a blue volcano topped with an aluminium object with blunted edge which may also be a face in profile (al casb 4 '67 & aaing j gni aa 1965)). A giant gourd may also resemble sagging testacles or heaped, coloured sand accompanied by two small sacks which may also be testacles stuck on an evaporating sand penis. There's also the influence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his Pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions' and the work that made Jarry famous, his 'Ubu Roi'.
There are imaginary organic objects such as distended plants, a clothesline completed by brightly coloured fabrics. The play of light and shadow, the open spaces, cream walls and sand-coloured wooden floorboards of the Tate Britain become part of the sculptures. Ropes that undulate like giant snakes among indigo sub volcanic stacks but really elongated cushions stuffed with sand as in Flanagan's work rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 '67. Piles of blankets, a yellowing canvas shot through with a pattern of bullet holes that is both concentric and eccentric. Flanagan experiments with expectations of what the public defines as sculpture, creating fluid yet transitory shapes and images.
The recurrent spiral symbol found in works like vii 78 moonthatch 1987 is reminscent of the gidouille, the spiral on the belly of Ubu Roi, Jarry's Pataphysical anti-hero. Flanagan's travails to the continent also led him to northern Italy, to an artisan community which symbolised some of the ideals of his art but he also managed to work with the marble found in that region to create works like The Road to Altissimo (1973), Ubu of Arabia (1976) and Hello cello (1976).
There are also a great many of Flanagan's paintings and they are intense, child-like, hard-edged in a sculptural sense but always imbued with Flanagan's trademark humour and playfulness. They toy with great ideas in physics and mathematics but Flanagan also hardly appears to take them seriously. I'd question whether the sequence Cup drawings i-vi (1874) really needs to be here since the effect is not one of seeming naivety but of naivety. Flanagan is a primitive artist constructing the imaginary wigwams that children hide in and the real hares that they chase on moonlit nights. In some ways he seems to mock the pretensions of high art but his works rarely become legitimate artworks except by relating the most basic sense of child-like wonderment at nature and the natural world.
This exhibition only deals with the early Flanagan (1965-82) so it ends with his depictions of hares which he gained an interest in after reading The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson which explored the mythical attributes of the hare through history. Flanagan clearly began to find a lucrative career for he now began to work in bronze, the typical, traditional medium of the sculptor, to make his Large Leaping Hare (1982). Since he then gained respectability the aura of an anti-establishment sculptor began to fade away slightly and these large scale sculptures are just a bit over-bearing but this is only part of a really enjoyable retrospective of Flanagan's work.
Paul Murphy, the Tate Brtain, November 2011
Barry Flanagan at the Tate Britain
This is a retrospective of the work of the sculpture Barry Flanagan (1941-2009). Flanagan attended St Martin's School of Art from 1964-66 but his approach to sculpture isn't essentially very academic. He uses non-conventional materials such as sand, canvas, rope, sculpted cushions, installation-like assemblages resembling landscapes or even some organic entity or animal, a blue volcano topped with an aluminium object with blunted edge which may also be a face in profile (al casb 4 '67 & aaing j gni aa 1965)). A giant gourd may also resemble sagging testacles or heaped, coloured sand accompanied by two small sacks which may also be testacles stuck on an evaporating sand penis. There's also the influence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his Pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions' and the work that made Jarry famous, his 'Ubu Roi'.
There are imaginary organic objects such as distended plants, a clothesline completed by brightly coloured fabrics. The play of light and shadow, the open spaces, cream walls and sand-coloured wooden floorboards of the Tate Britain become part of the sculptures. Ropes that undulate like giant snakes among indigo sub volcanic stacks but really elongated cushions stuffed with sand as in Flanagan's work rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 '67. Piles of blankets, a yellowing canvas shot through with a pattern of bullet holes that is both concentric and eccentric. Flanagan experiments with expectations of what the public defines as sculpture, creating fluid yet transitory shapes and images.
The recurrent spiral symbol found in works like vii 78 moonthatch 1987 is reminscent of the gidouille, the spiral on the belly of Ubu Roi, Jarry's Pataphysical anti-hero. Flanagan's travails to the continent also led him to northern Italy, to an artisan community which symbolised some of the ideals of his art but he also managed to work with the marble found in that region to create works like The Road to Altissimo (1973), Ubu of Arabia (1976) and Hello cello (1976).
There are also a great many of Flanagan's paintings and they are intense, child-like, hard-edged in a sculptural sense but always imbued with Flanagan's trademark humour and playfulness. They toy with great ideas in physics and mathematics but Flanagan also hardly appears to take them seriously. I'd question whether the sequence Cup drawings i-vi (1874) really needs to be here since the effect is not one of seeming naivety but of naivety. Flanagan is a primitive artist constructing the imaginary wigwams that children hide in and the real hares that they chase on moonlit nights. In some ways he seems to mock the pretensions of high art but his works rarely become legitimate artworks except by relating the most basic sense of child-like wonderment at nature and the natural world.
This exhibition only deals with the early Flanagan (1965-82) so it ends with his depictions of hares which he gained an interest in after reading The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson which explored the mythical attributes of the hare through history. Flanagan clearly began to find a lucrative career for he now began to work in bronze, the typical, traditional medium of the sculptor, to make his Large Leaping Hare (1982). Since he then gained respectability the aura of an anti-establishment sculptor began to fade away slightly and these large scale sculptures are just a bit over-bearing but this is only part of a really enjoyable retrospective of Flanagan's work.
Paul Murphy, the Tate Brtain, November 2011
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