Bronze hares are making a temporary home for themselves on O'Connell Street, and their creator Barry Flanagan is equally hard to pin down, writes Aidan Dunne
The name of sculptor Barry Flanagan is virtually synonymous with the bronze hares that have become his anthropomorphic alter egos. These anarchic, playful creatures have been exceptionally popular ever since he began making them in 1979. One of them, a drummer, guards the main entrance to the Irish Museum of Modern Art and has become, as director Enrique Juncosa notes, the unofficial emblem of the museum.
It's appropriate that Imma is the venue for a retrospective of Flanagan's work - well, a sort of retrospective, since the artist is, perhaps rightly, very wary of the term "retrospective". In the 1960s, he points out, "a retrospective was regarded as a gateway to heaven. Now it's expanded to include all sorts of things." Of course the exuberant hares could not be contained within the space of the museum and a dozen or so have found their way into Imma's extensive grounds, and 10 more, with the help of the Hugh Lane Gallery, can be encountered on O'Connell Street.
The other main strand of the show may come as a surprise to those familiar with Flanagan only through the hares, which are relatively conventional sculptural objects made in a traditional material, bronze, by traditional means.
Look at the work he made pre-hare, and you might be tempted to describe him as an iconoclastic conceptualist, exhibiting ephemeral arrangements of pre-existing objects and materials: sand, jute sacks of sand, folded blankets and clothes, rope. They were striking, provocative works for their time and they are still challenging. Mind you, he shies away from both the conceptualist and iconoclastic labels.
From his point of view, what he did was always about a physical intervention in a physical space, a material practice rather than a theoretical one. He was interested in substances, three dimensional forms and the spaces they occupy and often, in the process, redefine.
In using unorthodox materials and forms he was motivated by a sense of their potential rather than a desire to attack classical sculpture.
He is genuinely weary of being asked why there was such a dramatic transformation in his work, and has said several times that he doesn't see it as a transformation or a departure, pointing out that he trained in the 1950s, in Birmingham, as a sculptor, learning drawing, carving, modelling and casting. As regards the traditional division between the two latter categories, however, he is definitely a modeller, one who is uncomfortable around the whole business of carving. In fact he is a fluent, natural modeller. When he works with stone he interferes with it only minimally. It's already there, sculpturally, he reckons, so why try to make it do something else? His use of "impoverished" materials was partly related to the sheer cost of bronze casting.
HOWEVER, WHILE THERE was no big departure, he does allow that there was a specific path back to casting. In 1969 at the Central School of Art in London, he'd made a portrait bust of his father-in-law, Emlyn Lewis, a plastic surgeon. It was cast in the bronze department. When the head of that department, Henry Abercrombie, left to set up as a partner in a new foundry with Andy Elton, Flanagan was one of the artists invited to work on something there.
Not particularly wanting to take on the whole daunting history of sculptural figuration, he looked for a stand-in for the human presence. Animals were a good alternative and, from 1973 or so, he made animal bronzes. It was itself a difficult area to take on, fraught with risks of sentimentality and cliche. Then, around 1979, already acquainted and interested in the rich lore and mythology of the hare, he decided to use it as a model: a portrait of a hunter's prey.
Surely he was taken aback at how well it went? Well, yes, but he puts it down to his "high speed gallerist, Leslie Waddington. I think it's a question of good management. We form a triangle, me, the gallery and the foundry - with me at the apex of course."
Time and again in interviews he describes himself as a tradesman. "I am no great intellect. I took up a trade, in the bronze shop. And I've proceeded as any trader would." He loves "the bronze shop", finding it to be, as with nearly any working environment, really stimulating.
The hares took on a life of their own, so to speak. "You could say that I've been outrun by the hare." But it wasn't a grand plan. "The idea of the hare as an alter ego evolved. It wasn't inevitable when I started. But once you abstract from the human like that, it opens a window in the mind, it allows your imagination to roam. I would say though, that while I find it interesting, as regards that interest, I don't call it an obsession and I don't think it is obsessive."
THAT SEEMS QUITE accurate. One feels that if he didn't find it exciting, he would simply move on to something else. And incidentally, he notes: "People ask me all the time why I make sculptures of rabbits." As for the hares, though: they have a definite character, not unrelated to their natural state, and that state as represented in various cultures, and not unrelated to Flanagan's own character. His hare is anarchic. It (neither he nor she, by the way) leaps over symbols of religious affiliation, labour, even gravity. It plays mischievously. It takes on the role of Rodin's The Thinker. He likes the fact that hares are loners. He is something of a loner himself, a genuinely independent artist who would have been gratefully absorbed into any number of artistic groupings but always preferred to maintain his distance.
The French dramatist and poet Alfred Jarry, best known as the author of Ubu Roi, is generally cited as a central influence on Flanagan's earlier work. "Alfred Jarry occupied the position of schoolboy hero for me from about 1963 or 1964, at which stage I was rather beyond being a schoolboy. But he still has that position for me."
He tended to hang about, he says, with literary and theatrical types rather than visual artists. He liked Jarry's outlaw sensibility, his way of thinking, particularly his "pataphysics", a science of imaginary solutions, which is seen as anticipating Dada and surrealism.
Flanagan's favourite literary form by far is poetry, though he is convinced that "I have a play in me, as they say. But just one. I'm not a frustrated playwright. In relation to the theatre, if anything I'm a frustrated actor. To speak and command so much attention, I would love that, but I'm far too self-conscious, and I find certain aspects of the transformation into character rather frightening." (His two actual stage appearances, way back, saw him cast as a Welsh housewife and an elderly man).
Famously peripatetic, Flanagan maintains residences in several places, including, most recently, Ibiza and Ireland. He also works quite happily with many different foundries. "The itinerant character of what I do is always in evidence. Itinerancy is quite a theme in the contemporary fiscal world. In Europe, I cherish my freedom to fulfil my itinerant role. Though I am not necessarily a restless person." He actually enjoys being in one place, and being absorbed in his work, though he can and often does, as he says, "work at the kitchen table."
A few years ago word got around that he was retiring. In a way he seems busier than ever, so what is the status of his retirement now? Ah, he explains, perhaps semi-retirement is the way to describe it. Or not quite. "I wasn't exactly holding up a white flag, and the volume of work I produce is exactly the same, and I don't really have any more time to myself." Which, it transpires, was the object of the exercise. It was a ploy of sorts to give the impression that he wasn't generally available. Demands on his time had simply become too much. But, he concedes sadly, it didn't really work. The hounds are still there, catching up.
Barry Flanagan: Sculpture 1965-2005 is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until Sep 24. Tel: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie