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Horseytalk.net Special Interview
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Horses have dominated the life of the award-winning
artist, first as a boy tipster, then as an owner and now
as creator of the monumental white horse sculpture poised
to grace the Kentish skyline. But, he tells Tim Adams, his
new show is inspired by another love - football
Last Tuesday was one of those days for Mark Wallinger. Not
only was his proposal to build a 50-metre-tall white horse
beside the A2 in Kent chosen to become the largest public
sculpture Britain has ever seen, but the real racehorse in
which he has a stake, Riviera Red, romped home in the 2.40
at Lingfield. When I saw him on Wednesday afternoon, at London's
Hayward Gallery, where he was putting the finishing touches
to the show he is curating, he was clutching a copy of the
Racing Post. The paper carried a headline about the previous
day's events that was the stuff of his childhood dreams: "Wallinger's
amazing double".
As a boy in Chigwell, Essex, Wallinger was obsessed with
racehorses.
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He remembers tearing home from school in 1966, aged seven,
to see Arkle win his third Gold Cup. Wallinger's other passion
was for drawing and he would look at the George Stubbs thoroughbreds
in the National Gallery on visits up to town with his parents
and go home and try to emulate them, "with no other
aspiration, you know, than to try to get the legs right".
Two books changed his life. The first was James Joyce's
Ulysses - "just the idea of telling a life from a single
day, the fantastic comedy of it" - on which he based
his MA thesis in fine art at Goldsmiths College. The second
was a copy of the flat racing form book for 1976, given to
him by his Uncle Dick, which he studied when he was supposed
to be revising for exams.
To start with, when he was too young to bet, Wallinger would
give his dad tips. Later, he got to the races whenever he
could. What drew him there, partly, he told me as talked
in his studio in Kennington, south London, a couple of weeks
ago, was that it gave him a way of thinking about Britain,
about bloodlines and ownership and politics
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. "Racing has always been a picture of this country,
although distorted because there is no middle class." It
also satisfied an adolescent desire to predict the future. "There
is that great rush you get when you pick a winner. It's the
momentary illusion you have some control over life." Wallinger
laughs loudly at the idea.
At art college in the 80s, first at Chelsea, then at Goldsmiths,
Wallinger made efforts to keep his hobby separate from his
work. Racing was his secret life and he feared if he exploited
it, it would lose its magic. However, he couldn't help himself
in the end. "The fact is any artist eventually ends
up using everything they care about."
One of Wallinger's earliest successes came in his painted
series of Stubbs homages Race, Class, Sex which were bought
in 1992 by Charles Saatchi. Inevitably, he had fantasies
about purchasing a racehorse of his own, "the ultimate
working class dream", which he realised, in syndicate,
in 1993. He paid for the horse partly with a limited-edition
sculpture and named it A Real Work of Art.
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He meant that, too. Wallinger
is quite uncomfortable talking about his work - protective
of its mysteries, wary of pretension, self-deprecating. The
closest he gets to describing the kind of thing he is searching
for in his art is when he recalls approaching Sir Mark Prescott,
head of the most historic yard at Newmarket, to train his
horse. "Prescott gave me this talk about racing for
an hour or more," he says. "He had broken his back
in an accident as a younger man and had lain flat out for
a year thinking about horses. His insight was extraordinary.
We walked round the yard at dusk, you know. Prescott would
go to each stable and turn on one light and you would be
confronted each time by this amazing living presence, just
coming at you out of the gloom." |
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Wallinger recognised the sensation, that sense of sudden awe. "I
spent three months in Rome at the British school there," he
says. "You go into a church, put your 500 lire in and you
come face to face with a Caravaggio; it is absolutely immediate.
Everything else in the church looks fusty and irrelevant, but
that impact is timeless."
In the end, A Real Work of Art ran once in earnest and went
lame. "We'd kind of hoped she would win the Oaks," Wallinger
says of what might have been. In the end, the horse only won
him a Turner Prize nomination. And after that, for a while, racehorses
disappeared from his art, if not from his attention. When, however,
he was invited last year to submit an idea for a monumental sculpture
to give some sense of symbolic coherence to the mostly chaotic "London
Gateway" new town at Ebbsfleet, a horse was his first
instinct. The more he thought, the more appropriate it felt.
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He had in mind
the great bronze age hill carvings. "The site is where
the chalk of the North Downs goes into the Thames," he
says, retracing that idea. "And then you've got Epsom
at the other end of the Downs; then I was thinking thoroughfares,
Watling Street, pilgrims, all the immigrants and travellers
who had come and gone to London. It seemed to fit." He
wanted the horse to "look as real as possible",
like a Stubbs in a field, but to be as big as the Statue
of Liberty. It was only subsequently that he realised someone
had worked all this out before: the white horse is already
the symbol of Kent ("... the emblem of Horsa, the brother
of Hengest, who defeated the King Vortigern near Aylesford
...") |
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Things often seem to work out like this for Wallinger. He
has a quiet genius for capturing exactly the spirit required
for a place and for a moment. His Ecce Homo for the fourth
plinth in Trafalgar Square at the millennium, a human-sized
messiah in a crown of barbed wire, looked like the closest
we'll get to a second coming ("I wanted to somehow point
out our squeamishness about saying what we were celebrating
was 2,000 years since the birth of Christ," Wallinger
suggests).
Equally well judged, in a different way, was his recreation
of Brian Haw's Parliament Square peace protest in the Tate.
What was conceived as a copy became an immediate memorial
to a loss of the right to protest. On the day Wallinger got
the go-ahead to produce his work, the real thing was carted
away by police. It was only when he set about installing
the show that he realised half of it fell within New Labour's
draconian exclusion zone around the palace of Westminster
- it was technically illegal.
"The law prohibiting protest was pretty extraordinary,
it seemed to me," he says. "You can't mention Magna
Carta without sounding like Dave Spart, but these are big
issues. Brian Haw told me to piss off the first time I approached
him, but after that we got on well."
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In finding these serendipities for his art,
Wallinger talks about "following his nose and then confirming
it with lots of research". As a result, he is that rare
beast, a conceptual artist whose concepts get richer the longer
you look and think. He has no interest in repeating himself ("Part
of the tragedy of the art market bubble is that people started
churning out trademark products"), beyond the fact that "in
each case there has to be a bit of a magic leap at some point,
something real has to be at stake for both the artist and the
audience". |
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The most memorable instance of this dual challenge was Wallinger's
film Sleeper, in which he dressed up in a bear suit and prowled
the glass-walled Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for 10 nights.
When you meet Wallinger, a big, amiable character who softens
his intellect with laughter, you can't get the bear quite
out of your head, it has become part of him somehow. He looks
back on it now, with a grizzly guffaw, as "probably
the most fun I had ever had".
This being Wallinger, there was a complex backstory to the
idea. It came to him first when he was at the bear enclosure
in Berlin Zoo and came across a big sign explaining how the
brown bears were not allowed to breed any more because there
are too many bears in captivity. That struck him as poignant,
lonely and full of Cold War significances. "Not least
because the brown bear is the symbol of Berlin - and the
bears in Berlin Zoo were on an island and the zoo itself
had always been an island in this divided city ..." Anyway,
he had a feeling that Berliners might respond to the surprising
sight of a human bear trapped in a night-time gallery.
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He was right. He had feared it might be dull mooching about
in his bear costume in the early hours, wondered if he should
smuggle a Walkman in under it. But in the event he wasn't bored
for a second.
Did he discover his inner bear?
"Most of the time, there was some activity outside the
glass; people were bringing things for the bear, little gifts
which they would leave outside. Or they would try to communicate.
I quickly felt I had a responsibility to them."
He suffered for his art. "It was damn hot. I would take
the suit off after a night and put it on a radiator and it would
just about be dry of sweat by the next night."
On the seventh morning, as he was taking off his suit, a man
who had been taking photographs of him wondered if he had seen "the
other bear"? They walked around the back of the gallery
in the half-light and Wallinger was confronted with his ursine
double peering in at where he had been. "The suit was identical," he
recalls. "We went to try to approach him and he stayed in
character, completely." It was unnerving. The other bear
was with a young woman. Wallinger asked her if she knew who he
was. "No," she said. "We thought the bear had
broken out."
Were there any moments when Wallinger lost his own bearings?
"Well," he says. "I do remember being there at
3.30 in the morning and for once there really wasn't anyone around.
And I could see the Philharmonic Building and Potsdamer Platz
and here I was all alone in the world looking out of this bear's
mouth. Strange thoughts do come into your mind at that point." Not
least of them were these two: "It's a funny old life, isn't
it?" And: "Mark, how did you get from Chigwell to here?"
Wallinger was from a family of fishmongers. "My dad was
a frustrated writer," he says, "obsessed with American
detective stories. Him and my mum left school at 13, then the
war came along and he had to take over the family fish shop." Wallinger
used to go with his dad to the market in an old Lyons Maid van. "It
had a big hole in the floor under the passenger seat and you
could see the road going by - I thought it was terrific."
When frozen fish came in, his dad was forced to look for another
line of work. "Such was his naivety he went for a job at
the press shop at Ford's in Dagenham thinking it was to do with
journalism. He found it wasn't, but he took the job anyway." Sometime
later, he went into life insurance.
Wallinger is 50 now, but the Essex boy he was never seems far
away; he is childless but in some ways childlike. "The whole
identity thing was a big thing for me. You have to be true to
where you come from." At art college, he was turned off
by "this Esperanto art that could have come from anywhere.
It was all American abstraction, it was more like a creed." Working
figuratively, as he did, was a minority sport. The life-drawers
were all rounded up and put in a little room.
At Chelsea, there was a course called "Is there life after
art school?" The short answer to that, at the time, was
no. The course taught you how to sign on, advised you not to
get a job that interested you too much. Wallinger followed the
advice.
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He got himself a pound a week studio with no electricity
in Brixton, a job at the Communist party bookshop Collet's
and signed up for the MA at Goldsmiths. At the time, no one
thought that being a Young British Artist would be a lucrative
career option.
When he started teaching at Goldsmiths, he watched that
fact change. Damien Hirst arrived. "I used to give him
the odd tutorial, but I was only six years older. It was
a bit 'who are you?', but it was clear he was going to be
a major player. At that point, people thought he would be
a kind of Malcolm McLaren figure. He was doing spot paintings
and medicine cabinets. I remember he had a show in Windsor
and asked me if I fancied going along. I didn't really, to
be honest."
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Wallinger got roped into the Sensation cabal by Saatchi,
but he never felt he belonged. "To a degree, there was
a sense they were Thatcher's children. They had all that
entrepreneurial can-do and stuff. I was old Labour really
and never had that." In the long run, that has been
liberating for Wallinger. "The big advantage of coming
from my generation was the lack of expectation of making
a fortune out of it."
As a result, he has felt free to follow his obsessions and
hunches. The show he is guest-curating at the Hayward, which
will go on tour, is a kind of autobiography of these obsessions.
Called The Russian Linesman, it allows Wallinger to pursue
his interest in what he calls thresholds, disputed boundaries,
the moments in time and space and form when one thing may
become another. The show, half hung when I saw it, has the
feel of one of those Victorian museums of curios, eclectic
but unified by a singular sensibility.
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It includes life masks of Blake and Coleridge,
dioramas of Nuremberg commissioned by Hitler, film of tightrope
walker Philippe Petit walking between the Twin Towers, unnerving
footage from borderlands - in the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan
- Robert Hooke's engraving of a flea, to name but a few. Wallinger
makes sense of it all in a wonderful precise catalogue essay,
which also acts as a primer to his interest in the way each of
us internalises big historical shifts. |
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Some of his walk-on parts
in history are genuinely uncanny and he leaves them at that.
He spent the afternoon before 9/11 cutting out postcards
of jet planes, removing an aircraft-shaped space in the sky
from each of them and pinning them to a white wall. When
the Berlin Wall came down, he was in Hamburg exhibiting his
Subbuteo re-enactment of the disputed goal in the 1966 World
Cup final (hence The Russian Linesman). He had made the piece
as a little cameo of ambiguity and patriotism, but even as
he was showing it, one side, West Germany, ceased to exist. "I
heard the news on the radio in a taxi and within the hour
there were more Trabants on the streets than BMWs." |
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Wallinger is a remarkable visual poet of these weird little
epiphanies and his show is clever at placing you in all sorts
of no-man's-lands. Some things, I guess, though, are beyond dispute.
Was Geoff Hurst's goal over the line or not?
"I was watching the final on holiday on the Isle of Wight," Wallinger
recalls. "I'm a West Ham fan. Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst
lived up the road in Chigwell. Was it over the line? Of course
it was ..."
Bare necessities: Life story
Early life
Born in Chigwell, Essex, in 1959. His father was a fishmonger
who later moved into life insurance and his mother an office
worker. He was educated at Loughton College, Chelsea Art College
and Goldsmiths, where he later taught.
Career
1990: Creates Capital, a series of large paintings of his friends
dressed up as homeless people, which are bought and later exhibited
by Charles Saatchi.
1992 Saatchi buys Race, Class, Sex, his Stubbs-homage horse
paintings.
1993 Buys a racehorse, calls it A Real Work of Art, and races
it.
2000 His sculpture Ecce Home, a life-size figure of Christ,
adorns the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
2001 Represents Britain at the Venice Biennale.
2007 Wins the Turner prize for State Britain, his recreation
of anti-war activist Brian Haw's Parliament Square protest. For
the Turner exhibition he showed Sleeper, in which he wandered
the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at night dressed in a bear
suit.
2009 Wins the commission to create a massive work of public
art in Ebbsfleet, Kent.
Personal life
Lives with his partner, the artist Anna Barriball, in south
London.
Ally Carnwath
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