Phyllida Barlow in "London" - Season 10 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

♪energetic synths♪

Phyllida Barlow: This used to be my daughter's flat. It's the 
first time I've had a studio with a window.

I love this semi-industrial skyline. 
It suits me really perfectly. [LAUGHS]

I have a fascination with 
abandoned industrial objects.

Out of the back of our house 
where we look onto a railway yard,

you see these objects that had this very 
specific use suddenly becoming moribund.

To me, the idea of re-making those objects 
is another form of fossilizing. [LAUGHS]

Especially with a material 
like plaster and cement.

Sculpture can take on the world we're living in.

It can absorb color and 
those industrial processes.

A lot of builders use these
colors to mark places which

needs repairs or mending.

They're colors 
of information in the urban environment.

For a lot of people born in the 40s, 
the shadow the war cast was very long.

I had extraordinary memories of London as 
quite a war-damaged city down in the East End.

The whole idea of damage and repair is an 
inherent process of making sculpture for me.

I've got some blunt
scissors here. [laughs]

[James Tailor] The aesthetic of something
looking like it's gonna fall apart

is something I
quite enjoy in my work.

It's nice to work with another
artist who has that kind of

aesthetic happening.

She's great.

She's absolutely lovely.

[Phyllida] I pay him to say--

[James] That's exactly what I
should say right now.

It's actually really
nice working for her.

[Phyllida] Good.

That's another 10 pounds. [Laughs]

[James] Can I go home early today?

[Phyllida] During the 60s, there were three very significant 
sculpture shows in London at the Whitechapel

Gallery, challenging sculpture in all sorts 
of ways.

All the sculptures were painted,

fiberglass and resin was used as the 
materials. The traditional skills of

sculpture were being challenged, questioning 
that hierarchy that bronze and stone had.

I found earthy materials like 
plaster and cement really compelling.

I started using fiberglass and 
resin and painting my sculptures.

Of course, I'd looked at Eva Hesse. I 
was completely mesmerized by her work.

That a hanging piece of cloth could 
actually take on consuming space.

I was determined to participate in 
these new approaches to sculpture.

[sawing]

There's a sort of method in the madness. [LAUGHS]

This particular group are 
all about compression. About

things being very closed and tightly contained. 
It's not so much about an idea as about an action.

Making the smaller works is the 
initiation of the larger works.

I know I want the color to be something that's 
inherent to it and not just applied at the end.

That's why I'm putting the fabric 
on the cardboard at this stage,

so the thing is almost like 
a rock strata or something.

[drilling]

Oopsie. [laughs]

I think I was more interested 
in processes of production,

rather than having an idea 
and then just making it.

I quite like the long, slow process of drawing, 
thinking about it, then moving to materials.

Those thoughts in your head start to diminish and the 
thing in front of you gains momentum of its own.

I'm always interested in the slippage 
memory has and painting is a fantastic

way of recording that slippage 
where things are inaccurate.

A lot of the quick work has a lot to do with

having so little time in the studio when the 
children were young, you know.

So, this is a deal I made with myself that if it was only an hour 
or two hours, I had to have done something.

I went when I was 16, as a painter, to art school.

Painting would have these quite strict procedures 
about them. There were so many rights and wrongs

about techniques, about forms. And it became 
very obvious to me that paintings use walls.

And to me, walls are very authoritarian. 
[LAUGHS] They decide what the space is.

A stand-alone sculpture is using the space that 
we could occupy or something more worthwhile.

Its possibility for being anarchic 
excites me a lot. I think I've

found that like a kind of escape from the 
whole business of getting something right.

In the way I work now, which is quite big, 
my relationship with the sculptures is:

Where does the space escape to?

What is 
the ambition of the space and the way

that it becomes enclosed? And what happens 
if that space is explored to the maximum?

♪curious synths♪

Yes, they're all
upside-down. [laughs]

Ugh,

that's annoying.

I think I must have
just shoved them in there.

Yes.

This is more looking at where sculpture ends up 
and what happens if it ends up in places where

it's not meant to be.

At a time when I wasn't 
having exhibitions, saying, "Well, this is good

enough for me putting my sculpture in this hallway 
for four hours before people want it back again"

shows me that there's a great kind of gaping hole 
about what and where sculpture is meant to be,

and I think I have sort of always been interested 
in the object that seems badly behaved.

This was an object for an ironing board. It's 
a bit of that kind of nostalgic thing. Oh,

the work has got worse [LAUGHS] over 
the years. It hasn't got better.

Shall we begin the
second coat then? Yeah.

How should we do it?

Randomly pick a color
that isn't a red, yeah.

Working with a bunch of younger 
artists is very important for me.

I've just got stuck on
the de Kooning colors.

I feel hugely responsible and a sort of 
anxiety that the deal is beneficial to them.

They're part-time and they're self-employed. I 
work closely with my studio manager, Adam, and

we're always thinking, "What can we offer 
them? Like, a three-month block guaranteeable."

I think being a mother makes one quite 
sensitive to what people are going through.

Yeah, that's fine.

It's pretty scruffy.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

At the moment, there are quite a lot of assistants 
because we're very behind on finishing the work

for an exhibition.

The way I inform them 
of certain aesthetic qualities that I want

is keeping their actions to something 
that is more functional than artistic.

Like a cleaning gesture with a brush 
that happens to be loaded with paint.

It's about information and expedience.

Some of the best times I've had was 
just taking the work to places so I

could have a different relationship with 
it from it being produced in the studio.

I noticed that I was looking up a lot at 
the trees, and I thought of something that

had a sense of industry about it, where the 
looking up would be looking through a frame

at the trees and the skies, and that's where 
the steel frame structure at the top of the

columns came into existence.

And then 
to have something that was possibly

left behind in a state of entropy, 
which was these worn out steps.

It's you and the work and the place. 
It's a very particular relationship,

where there's nothing else coming 
between you and that intention.

Going it alone is a very powerful experience.

I'd love to do a piece that could perhaps go 
very near the sea or in some incredibly remote

landscape where the audience isn't a factor 
of the work.

It's more about the "tree that

falls in the forest, but if you haven't seen 
it, did it actually happen" kind of question.

[LAUGHS]