Ian Barr in conversation with Margaret McGhie
This conversation with Ian took place over several weeks, firstly in a face -to-face interview, then further developed in subsequent e-mail conversations. In some ways, though, the conversation began many years ago when we worked together as colleagues and friends.
What inspired you to be an artist?
I'm not sure. I suppose in the beginning the same thing that motivates any child or young person to develop in a particular direction - emerging innate talent and encouragement. Inspirational teachers, and not just art teachers, played an important part. And I can say with confidence that Glasgow School of Art, where I gained my art education and met some very charismatic individuals, provided a set of experiences that came together very powerfully and laid down the foundations for what I still do.
What motivates you now as an artist?
I make images because I have a need to make them. Being an artist is more than just an activity, it's an emotional state, or even, as Chagall said, 'a state of the soul'. I get enormous satisfaction ultimately from getting the right things in the right place and conveying whatever it is that I wanted to convey. I make things that are in one very real sense unnecessary, but in another sense very important because, as I said, I have a need to make them.
How would you describe your work?
In a New York Times article in 2005, critic Michael Kimmerman, wrote of the American artist Richard Tuttle's work as 'transcending traditional categories, a blurring of the definitions of the strict categories of art.' He describes Tuttle's work as 'an oddball assemblage of random ephemera', and ‘not quite sculpture or drawing or painting, but some combination of the three' and 'a no-man's land between painting and sculpture.’
He calls Tuttle's work ' wall assemblages' that concentrate on the materials for their own sake, the compelling features of the objects used being shape, colour, volume, and texture that illustrate art's fundamental role as a language. Much of this chimes with my work.
How easy is it to talk about your work?
Talking about my work is something I find difficult. I don't find it difficult to think about my work, but I find it difficult to articulate sometimes what it's all about. I suppose that's because it's not about words, it's about images - visual things rather than verbal things. But I'm sure there's a need to try and articulate what I am trying to do, so that people who view my work for the first time are given some sort of clue, some sort of pointer as to what they are confronted with.
Art, as is poetry, as is music, is there to be consumed. You can walk on by, or you can stop and give it a modicum of interest, or you can be fascinated by it. The onus is on the viewer to decide how much effort to expend, but surely there is a little bit of onus on the artist to help the viewer understand something of it. So although there are artists who eschew any explanation of their work, there's a need, I think, maybe even an obligation, for artists to try and say, 'Well, here are some clues as to what you're looking at.'
At the same time, the viewer, as well as the artist, is an active maker of meaning. It's a joint enterprise that allows new meanings and understandings to grow out of the dialogic encounter. Artworks live in the now, in the moment of seeing them. As you stand in front of a piece of art something is happening inside you. As Koons says, 'Art is finished inside the viewer' in 'the beholder's share'.
OK, so what do you mean by 'clues'? What are you trying to convey?
What I'm trying to convey to viewers is the distinctiveness of my personal experience that will be responded to in the distinctiveness of their responses. I'm saying:
'Here is something that has come out of my imagination, my consciousness. It’s an offering which has been generated by my experience and my enthusiasms and my obsessions, inner feelings and emotions that I am 'making large.'
Artworks have got to be 'read' in a way that's akin to poetry, I think. With poetry you make a kind of sense of it inside your head after you've read it, or as you read it. Similarly with visual art, I think you make sense of it as you look at it and as you absorb it. And for music it's the same. In a sense I suppose I'm trying to make visual music. That's not to say it's simply 'tuneful', but sometimes dark, sometimes discordant, sometimes repetitious. I like dissonance.
Many of your artworks feature broken, washed up, discarded 'fragments', what art critic Michael Kimmerman, to whom you've already referred, calls 'random ephemera'. How important is it that the things you pick up are broken and discarded?
I use all sorts of stuff to create pictures or images or pieces that are multi-layered and full of possibilities. I generally resist whole things because I want them to be understood and appreciated for their abstract qualities. But they don't need to be broken; they just need to be divorced from their original function. I like fragments, because they're anonymous in function.
It's important that they’ve been used, that's to say it's important that they've got some kind of history, it's important that they have some indications of use or usage. It doesn't mean they've got to have been used in a physical sense, but they've got to have been maybe weathered or damaged. I'm interested in texture, surface, edges, as well as patina and age. I am attracted to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which is essentially the appreciation of things which are not perfect, which are damaged or imperfect.
They remind us too that things which once seemed fixed and solid are actually in a constant state of change and becoming. A piece of wood may once have been part of a fence or an old barn, now it's a piece of wood with marvellous patina on it, an object that has a unique, unknowable provenance. They are objects in their own right, things that already exist in the world that, illuminated by my imagination, become art works that hopefully appeal to the imagination of others.
Some might ask, 'But is it art?'
I think that one of the key criteria for answering the question 'Is it art?' is that it should push and challenge the viewer. If a piece of work demands or invites the viewer to go back more than once, to look again, to wonder again, to be suspicious of it, to puzzle over it, to look more intently, to peer more deeply into it literally and metaphorically, then it gets the imprimatur of being art. I think it's art if it engages the viewer and repays repeated inspection.
So, how do you respond to the question 'What's it supposed to be?
I think that the unfortunate difficulty about much visual art is that people invariably ask what it's supposed to be. People don't ask of composers 'What's it supposed to be?' do they? And as Picasso pointed out, do we understand the song of a bird? No, we just listen. So with art, why not just look?
A collector of Howard Hodgkin's paintings quite deliberately hung one where he could see it every day. He said:
‘If you analyse, try to pin it down in words, it can often make it more difficult to realise the experience in another form.' Hodgkin himself has said he is happy to give clues but not explanations. And it's important to say that I don't make these things, be they paintings or constructions or sculpture, for an audience that I can identify out there. I don't really make them for anybody other than myself.
How much of a risk taker are you in your work?
If what you mean by risk-taker is someone who can work with abandon, and make dramatic spontaneous decisions that are completely at odds with the direction in which the work is going, then I don't think I fall into that category. There are others who are always analytical in the way they construct their work and address the ‘problems'.
I think I'm somewhere between the two. My process is considered. But I do take risks. Sometimes I find it's good to do something drastic in terms of colour, or by making some violently irrational marks or whatever on the piece, particularly if it has stalled and needs a radical departure. The entire endeavour is always about solving problems and rectifying mistakes, so there is no option but to take risks. Without taking risks I know I would never create anything of real worth.
How do you know when a work is finished?
I know a work's finished when there's a resolution to it, when its 'right' but I can't tell that in advance. It's a truism - and nobody would be surprised to hear this - but very often you start off with a clear idea of what it is you want to make but you never make that object, never. As Picasso says:
'It is remarkable how little the 'willing' of the artist intervenes.'
No piece of work is ever as originally conceived. What is first imagined never comes to pass but is mediated, amended, altered by technical, aesthetic and chance elements. Sometimes it's because I'm not technically adept enough to do what I think I want to do, sometimes it's because the materials take me somewhere else. Sometimes it's because seemingly unimportant memories, recollections and experiences become important in the process of personal meaning making. Sometimes it's because in the making things go awry. As Peter Doig has said: ‘It’s just mistake after mistake after mistake in the quest for an outcome that in unknowable until it becomes real.'
That's an excellent quote for the kind of process that's involved in making art. It's not that something, some aspect of a work is wrong, but it's just 'not right'. It's an immediate, intuitive feeling. You might put that blue against that green and as soon as you do it you think 'No, it's not right', so you either scrape it off, or you paint over it or you leave it and come back to it later.
When I'm making a piece of work what goes before influences what comes later, so I'm building. Perhaps there are some accretions of stuff on the surface that I might get rid of, or there might be vestiges of it left, or I leave it and paint over it and because I'm painting over the texture changes. It's a bit like an archaeological process in that the artist lays things down, builds up textures, scrapes and scores you see things beneath, sometimes just glimmers, and the viewer in looking at it examines it more closely and discovers: 'Hey this big area of black is not as black as I first thought, because on looking at it I see that's there's actually blue underneath’
It's a bit like digging the garden. You dig it up, you turn it over, you find things, you get something of the infinite richness of the processed surface or form.
The point has been made by other artists about how frustrating and baffling an experience making art can be and suggesting that artists very often don't like to reveal how hard they try.
Well, I don't mind revealing that for me it's hard, but don't push me on describing what the hardness is. It might be as hard as writing something you're satisfied with or composing a beautiful piece of music. It's damn difficult. I would never want to give the impression that it's easy.
And I think that's one of the great frustrations for a lot of artists. What you' re trying to do is produce something that is not just another of something that you've done before. And that's where I suppose risk taking comes into it, but also I suppose it's a set of personal aesthetic considerations. Speaking personally, I don't want things to be too elegant, to be too just-so. I want there to be a kind of 'Oooh!' edginess that’s not quite balanced. It's hard, and that's why I have to work privately, on my own. It requires complete concentration and that can't be achieved with people around.
One of the important things about doing it well is you've got to do it regularly. You can't knock off for six months then come back and say: ‘Well, I think I'll make a construction today.’ You will make a construction but it will be bloody awful. You need to 'stay in the zone', not necessarily every day, and probably not 8 hours a day - I'm not that kind of person, Some artists are, you know, into the studio for nine o'clock, stop for lunch, start the afternoon, stop at five that's it. But that's not my way. For me it’s much more sporadic, but it's intense when it's happening.
And then, of course, if someone were to watch me in the studio they would think, 'I thought he said he worked hard on this.' Much of the time, and as work progresses, a greater and greater percentage of time is spent doing nothing but looking at the work. But sitting looking at it is working, wondering, agonising, judging, knowing - to go back to our previous reference - you’ve made a mistake. Well a mistake's quite easy, knowing you've got to sort it, but that point where you know it's not quite right, but it's not a million miles off, and you know that if you plunge in too boldly you'll mess the whole thing up, but something is needed, now that's an interesting tension.
What do you like about your work?
That is a difficult question. I like the satisfaction I get from getting it right and finally solving the problems, of making it coherent and whole, making it approximate to what I was striving for but never quite getting there. It's satisfying when you get to that point when you think ' Yes, nice one!' and that does give you a rush and a satisfaction and a thrill and oh, all sorts of emotional lift, which makes the struggle worthwhile.
Ian Barr was in conversation with Margaret McGhie, teacher, writer and friend
Copyright © 2015 by Margaret McGhie
The moral right of the author has been asserted