The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 66. Antony Gormley: Art, religion, and the battle for culture

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Can Britain remain a cultural superpower post-Brexit? How does religion and philosophy inform creativity? How can we prevent arts from being cut from curriculums? Rory and Alastair are joined by Britain's leading sculptor, Antony Gormley, to answer all these questions and more. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/leadingvpn It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics is leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today, we have with us Anthony Gormley. And Anthony Gormley is a sculptor. It's a very, very central to British public art, to British sculpture. I suspect frustrated that he's often introduced as being associated with Angel of the North, which of course is in every child's textbook now as one of those images along with the London

eye, which is going to define our country. But he's in many different conversations. I mean, Alastra and I had breakfast with somebody this morning, British Muslim, who was talking about just having seen another place, which is a collection of 100 cast iron sculptures of humans on a beach at Crosby, Merseyside. He has a career which we can get into a little bit and explore, but which really, I guess, took off in mid-1980s. He won the Turner Prize. He's a knight.

He's one of the kind of celebrated figures of British art. But he's particularly interested in the body. He's got a lot to say about religion. He's got a lot to say about politics. And I think quite a lot to say about public art. So we're very, very lucky to have him. And of course, I was from my beginning, with a slight apology that normally I think you're interviewed by art critics

who would be much more knowledgeable about your corpus of work than either of us. But thank you for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. Can we go right back to the beginning? Born in 1950, Hampstead Garden suburb, German mother, very Catholic, Irish father. And I'm fascinated by your relationship with faith and religion, with that sort of bringing. I mean, your full name is Anthony Mark David Gormley, so-called. called, I read, because that has the same initials as Ad Majorim Day Gloriam to the greater

glory of God. So we're talking quite a dad. Yeah, that was a bit of a, yeah, whatever, ring around my neck. Yeah, absolutely extraordinary, I suppose, household routine of prayer. Get up in the morning, you say your prayers by your bed, and you go down and you have breakfast and there may be grace before breakfast, but they'll certainly be grace before and after lunch, and certainly before and after dinner. Age six or seven, cycling down to Fentl Temple Fortune to serve. I can't remember whether it was Father Colin Wood or Father Delaney, but anyway, whoever it was, he'd got quite gaga by the time I was doing it, and I was age 10, and I would have to nudge him on a bit to keep going, because otherwise we'd be there forever.

But anyway, yeah, Catholicism was really, I think the rule of the carrot of heaven, the stick of hell was very high in, I guess, the moral kind of outline of my life's purpose. Also, in your description to your childhood, you also say that after church on a Sunday, your father would often take you to the British Museum or the National Gallery. And literally it's a sort of six, seven-year-old. you'd be mumbling around a rush to go.

Very young. And if you can imagine what that's like for a little toddler, you know, weedy little chap, like looking up at those great bulls from the Palace of Sardons or the head of Ramsey's II, this thing made out of granite

that is like 12 times the volume of a actual head. And I think that those experiences of looking at things from the deep past that in terms of these sacred bulls or lions, these winged mythological figures, they're a kind of example of the imagination that actually you don't have to stay with what you've got, you can transform it. And in terms of the heads of Aminhotep or Ramses, this is what we had to make in order to understand ourselves.

You weren't thinking that age six. No, no, I wasn't. No, no, I was just dumbstruck. I was thinking these are things from a long, long time ago, and they're still here. And they make me feel small. And they make me slightly scared. I'm the father of a six-year-old. And in fact, sitting in front of you on your desk is three objects that my six-year-old just gave me.

When I take him around the Victoria in Albert Museum, he can get a bit bored. He can be quite liable to say he'd rather be back home watching Pokemon. Were you an unusual? You must have been quite an unusual child. I mean, you didn't ever feel, or why is my dad dragging me around this museum, and I'd rather be back watching her. I don't know. I just think that that room, particularly the Egyptian room, is so generous in the kind of offer. You know, you can look down on a Middle Kingdom tomb that has Nut Queen of the Night kind of carved in very, very shallow relief in its bottom.

And she's quite a sexy woman. She's got, you know, her breasts are kind of feeding. the night. And then there were, in those days, before they made the Great Court, this wonderful ill passageway that had all of the grave goods of fantastic, phoronic, afterlife accoutrements, tiny scarabs and all kinds of things made of gold and lapis. And it was just, it was a treasure house. So you were the youngest of seven? Were your six older siblings very similar to you or very different? No, we were all absolutely different. And I have to to explain that the, you know, my mother went to Canada.

She was, she might have ended up in an internment camp like my grandmother, Omi. And she had only been married with my father for five or six years. And then she went for a further six years. So all of the pre-war, the four of my siblings that were born pre-war, spent six years without a father in the lake of bays in the summer, north of Ontario, and the minute they got old enough, the minute they were 18 or so, they just went back to Canada. This was the promised land. This was where you somehow could be free. You could kind of do whatever you wanted. And so it was a strange thing, a big house that was built by

my father that faced T-9 on that Hampstead golf course, looked like Bowhouse to the south and kind of Lutchins to the north and very strange because it was well it was painted in eggshell green and then textured sort of brown at dado level

it was made to last but it was actually more like an institution than my school so actually being sent to Yorkshire was just an unbelievable liberation into To go to a Catholic boarding school.

Yeah, go to a mastic school was, you know, it was just absolute fantastic. I mean, somehow just the space, the fact that, you know, up there were the moors, down there was the valley, little beck flowing through it, there were forests, and then all these significant others that helped me do stuff. Can I just bring you back for a moment to your father? Because obviously the impression maybe that listeners get is this extraordinary man with his kind of brown dado walls, taking his children either to church or to the National Gallery's seven children. But give us more of a sense of what he was like as the father and some of the more, I suppose,

active, loving aspects of him. He was incredible because on the one hand, he was a tyrant. On the other, he was just incredibly good fun. He used to have annoying habits. He would put all his shaving foam on and then go around singing glory, glory, hallelujah, while trying to give us a king. to get us out of bed. With the shaving foam. With the shaving foam.

And seeing Glory, Glory, Alli, you year, because of the religious significance. Well, no, because it's a bloody, you know, like, get out of bed here. Yeah, like belting him. No, he was,

he was an incredible sailor. We had this, we had this boat called the sea trout, which was an old clinker-built boat, and he just set out from, we had, we had us a kind of country place, this old stables,

that main house had, you know, burnt down. He would launch this boat, quite a big boat with big old red sails, and he'd say, come on, we're going to the nab. The five of us or the six of us would get aboard. Anyway, no, he was the first or one of the first people to get the permission to produce penicillin. You know, I didn't see him that much because he was always off to India or Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong. It's hard not to be very admiracious of a man that fought in the First World War, married a German that made his own life. I mean, and at the same time, you know, he was brought up by Morris brothers and he wanted absolute discipline.

So we had to do, you know, first steps in Latin primer twice a week. And if you didn't get your declensions right, you got smacked. So there were times when, you know, I would be in tears in the study not having failed my Latin. How did your relationship with faith develop through your life? When did you lose it? I lost it in my first term at university, but I think the truth is that I think all young boys who go into that kind of atmosphere. You know, I was thinking, do I have a vacation? Am I going to become a Benedictine?

Because they were inspirational. I know that Ampleforth has fallen under a very dark cloud and for rightful reasons, but I had no experience of any sexual improprietian. whatsoever. And all I can tell you is the support that I had, I want to tell you about the art room. The art room was in the oldest part of the school, 18th century building, right in the middle of it, and it was always open. So you could get down there before General Assembly, as it were, in the morning, and start something off. You could rush up there at 11 o'clock and kind of see how it was going. Anyway, it was just fantastic. And the support that I was given by

Father Martin Haig, my lay teacher, John Bunting, an incredible sculptor who actually embodied what, in a way, the vocational life of a sculptor was. Did you already know by then that you were an artist? Well, they were incredibly encouraging. Did you know? Did you know? Father Peter, yes, yeah. Well, I knew that I wanted to make things.

That was so important to me that I realized very early on that making was a form of thinking, that making was a form of communicating, that maybe I implicitly trusted more than words. I know that we're exchanging words now, and I guess our listeners are listening through the agency of words. But in the end, I don't trust words as much as acts. And acts that are embodied into material mean the most to me. There's a paradox, isn't there? It's the whole thing. I mean, this is an incredibly disembodied form podcasts.

People will be listening to this. as they run or they're doing their ironing. And yet you are somebody who's all about touching stuff and being in a particular place. This will be floating in people's ears in the United States at some weird time. This is sort of trouble of our time, isn't it? We're all distracted. We are not in the present moment. We are usually in two places at once.

We are here, but we're also thinking about there or someone over there or something that somebody has told us to do. And I think that rooting in first-hand palpable experience is so important in a cyber age. We'll come back to your life in a second, but maybe this is a chance to introduce a little bit, listeners, to your sculpture. Because one of the things that's striking about it is that you're insisting on place. So, for example, the angel of the north is made with people from that area. and there's a real sense of its industrial heritage. In a field, for example, you're getting hundreds of people to make little clay images.

In the work that you did inside Australia, you get, again, a sense of participating in other people's bodies. There's a sort of sense of teamwork. Tell us about these sculptures or try to bring them alive for the audience and explain the way in which they relate to touch and place. To start with the angel, since you're right, that's the thing that I'm most kind of associated with. Does it irritate you? We've always said it irritated you. No, no, no. I think I just always have to restate the fact that this was made through collective will and collective action.

And that is what I feel so humbled by but also so inspired by. Art comes out of life. It should go back into life. For me, I can just remember going around, you know, Hartley Pool and Middlesbrough with the maquette in the back of a luten band, opening up the kind of shutter at the back, while there was a bunch of... of people in their brown coats or their overalls. And I'd say, how can we make this, mate? And it was just fantastic.

This is a time when swan hunters had closed down and one by one all those amazing shipyards on the time that I grew up watching on the news. Again, a very similar kind of memory to seeing those Assyrian bulls. These massive things going down the slipway, bigger than the houses that were either side. and you see them in black and white,

kind of suddenly this thing that the size of a cathedral suddenly moved. Anyway, I had to find the people that had made that, made that shape out of six millimeter shipplate and learned how to bend it. Find them and say, let's make something together that tells the world what you're capable of in a different form. This thing sticks its wings out and has to deal with 100 mile per hour winds.

It's a massive kind of problem for it not to blow over. There was a lot. I needed a lot of help. You know, I was moulded with my arms out. I did have to have sticks because it takes about an hour and hour and a half. You know, but that was my very kind of small beginning. I then took that design. We had to digitise it, which we did with the help of Newcastle University.

They then transferred it into a big. buildable thing where we use the ribs of a ship on the outside to be the form of this thing. But for me, this is, you know, this connects with the cathedrals. It connects that, you know, we live in a time when art has been institutionalized and commodified. And yet for most of it's, if we think from Paleolithic times onwards, for most of the 25,000 years that art has been part of our evolution, it has been made usually in. in community for community. And this is a continuation. Where does your creative impulse come from?

Do you ever know? When you have a particular idea of something you want to do, what's the feeling like? How does it feel when something new comes into your head? Well, it's usually, you know, I usually, I mean, I haven't, but it usually starts like, sorry, I'm opening a little book. It's a moji book that is the size of a passport, and I've just got it out of my pocket.

It's a nice colour passport, not like the new ones. That's true. This is a red passport, not a blue one. But anyway, it'll start like this. But this comes from what I'm doing in the studio. So what's happening in the studio then gets translated into this, and then I'm thinking, how can I push it further? So this is, believe it or not, a body,

but it's a body as a zone of energy. We're making this, but at the same time I'm trying to push it. I'm trying to say, how can we lose the body entirely or lose the body enough so that you don't know whether the energy field is created by the body or the body created by the energy field.

And that's what really interesting. I mean, you know, this, yes, we talked about my work as if it was always like 200 tons of the angel or the, yeah, I guess another place is about 60 tons of iron. And sometimes enormous, right? So the angel, I think, sets on 100 square meters of concrete plinths to stop it coming out. I'm sorry about that. I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed by how much concrete. What about the bigger picture idea, as it were, your kind of obsession with the body and actually with your own body?

Where does that idea come from that then informs so much of what you've done? The OUR story is being sent up for an enforced rest after lunch. And being a good Catholic boy, being told not to move, being told but not being able to sleep. and just having this experience of lying completely still and becoming aware of the space within the body. And it would start with this claustrophobic red kind of hot space, but behind closed eyes. And as I got more familiar with it, because this was a repeated discipline, it became cooler and bigger, until it became this space in which there was no objects, there was no edge. There was no bounding condition.

It had infinite extension. And that experience as a very young child was then reinforced when I went to India and started studying meditation. That's a sort of strange connection between you and me and also Yuval No Harari, who we just interviewed, which is that we all meditate in the Vipassan tradition. And I'm about to go on another silent retreat next month. Good 10, 10 there. Yeah, and Yuval has just come off a 40-day. Yeah, no, he's impressive.

But it seems to lead in very, very different directions, doesn't it? I mean, obviously at the moment at which you were talking, I can recognise what you're talking about. But for Yuval, the experience of meditation leads to him being interested in the disembodied or the sort of virtual, the way in which humans might escape their bodies entirely and become robots or artificial intelligence. With you, the same tradition has led to a desire to be. really kind of ruse it and material and there on a beach or there on a hellside.

Yeah, good, good point. I think that the truth is that that experience of the darkness of the body for me was a reversal. You could say that all platonic but also Christian kind of cosmologies are towards the light. Towards the light. Darkness is somehow evil and is full of repression and kind of motivations that we can't understand but leads to violence and and despair. And I discovered in Vipashna completely the opposite, that within that darkness of the body is actually potential. In coming to terms, you could say, with the void within, suddenly I was released from all of this guilt, all of this, well, the original sin that Catholicism had landed me with. But it's interesting for me, I think of what I do, or certainly if we think of another place,

These are industrially made fossils that simply indicate a place of human time. Just to remind people, another place of the statues on Crosby Beach, which over time are beginning to get barnacles and rust and adjust endlessly to the horizon. Yeah, and they spread. They're about 200 metres apart, so they're extremely isolated, even though they're together. And it's a big space, right? So there are three miles, three miles of coastline and about a kilometre. want to out to sea. And when the sea comes in, they disappear, apart from the ones that are above the tideline, and the ones that are furthest out at high tide, because it's a tipped plane

of eight meters below the surface. And this, I mean, for me, what is this? This is, yes, making art in the time of mechanical reproduction. So the works become a field. You can't say this is a singular unique object. It's a field effect. And the viewer, that the, the the participator is invited to be part of that field. You're part of the picture. Can I ask, I'm going to hand back to us one second, but the thing that interests me is how often you work in iron, steel. No, it is iron.

It's important. It might start as steel. So it starts as, you know, break discs, and then it's melted down, reverts to the same condition of the core of this planet. But I'm interested in why the fact that you work less often, in sort of silica-based things. Less often working with sandstone or sometimes with clay,

not really with glass, which I would think as more sort of organic. Ethereal, perhaps. Well, I suppose steel is more, lacks that kind of transparency or porosity of these silica-based things. I mean, iron seems to be, you know, it conducts, it's metallic.

I mean, it's got an edge, which these sort of silica-based clays and glass sandstone lack. You're thinking about your turquoise mountain glasses. Well, at least I am. Immediately you start thinking, I think of these incredibly lucid blue glasses with tiny bubbles in. I'm going to say something that may sound totally counterintuitive. I think of my work as being about space, not being about objects. But how can you activate space? I want to use the density of mass. as a catalyst for making these fields in which your movement, your space-time experience is amplified. I can't think of a better way of doing it.

I think of them as being 21st century industrial time equivalent of standing stones. They're an attempt to put human biological time in relation to sidereal planetary time. And I can't think of any way of doing it better. At the same time, you know, I am making works that have no body reference because it's the, it's the viewer's body that then becomes the subject of the work. And these are works like breathing room or clearing. I don't know if you, either of you went to the Royal Academy show, but clearing is 11 kilometers of endless, a singular line without beginning or end that is like a big scribble, but it's in the room. It's up against the ceiling. It's down on the floor. it's bouncing off the walls. And it feels like the most crazy kind of, well, I call it a quantum drawing because it won't persist within,

as it were, the Euclidean geometry of our chosen habitat. What it is is an energy field and you have to duck and dive in order to be, so it's sort of like a twombly painting, but you're in it. What role does the art that you do have in the community where that art exists?

And given this is a politics podcast primarily, how do you define the role of art within the political debate? I think art is a fundamental human or the making of things, the making of images, the making of marks is a fundamental human need. It has been part of our survival, as I said earlier, from Paleolithic times. It is also a basic human right. The first thing to say is art should be on the curriculum. It is absolutely necessary. Irrespective, I'm aware that I had a very privileged background. But I think you give any child from the age of two onwards a sheet of paper and a way of making a mark and they'll go.

At a certain point, because of our culture, they become self-conscious about that in a way need to lead. Even if it's just a trace, there's a sense in which I have affected some people. part of the world by that trace, that that making of a mark. And I think that that is a absolute key in self-determination in the building of a psyche, of a character, of a person, of a self. And without it, we are, we are victims of a late capitalist world and we're all kind of racing one against the other as to what little kind of hole in this cliff face we can can occupy. If Demis Hasebis or Sam Altman are right, that AI is going to solve intelligence, is going to make energy free, we are all going to now become redundant. Well, we better all

become artists. We better find a meaningful way of making sense. Recently you had in the country, this country, the Arts Council of England, making rather strange noises I thought about the funding of the organisations which get their funding being told not to get too political. Now what did you make of that and what does that say about where we are culturally? It's an absolute disaster. I have no idea. The Arts Council was founded by Maynard Keynes with the idea of arms length policy. There should be no, I mean, you know, we will end up with a with a guring of, I mean, it's just, The state-sponsored propaganda.

Yeah, we cannot allow art to become propaganda. Art schools are the reason that British art has become of international significance is because of the quality of our art schools. That is something that we inherited from the 60s. I ask myself, where does alternative thinking come from to businesses as usual? It will always come from, you know, usually people who are dyslexic who have had to find other ways of communicating. And where have the nests for those souls to grow been? Well, it has been art schools. We wouldn't have got the Beatles without art schools.

And somehow there was a change in the 80s, when, late 70s and 80s, when art schools started behaving like universities. Things that used to be about learning from the guy next door or being taught by an artist that was making his name or her name out in the international art world was replaced by a lot of administering art tutors. Anyway, I mean, I feel that art schools have now become extremely dependent on particularly Southeast Asian students that often don't have English as their first language. that's no problem per se. Actually, you have to be quite rich. As you say, the UK does have a pretty amazing reputation in arts and culture. What I'm hearing is that you worry that might be at risk if there's this kind of cultural malice. We've had this terrible government, which has kind of consistently undermined the very thing that people, you know, when you think about what a culture's values are, where do you go?

You go to its music, it's dance, its theatre and its art. and yet this is the thing that has been consistently undermined both in education and in the support of our institutions. Having said that, I don't want to be totally negative. We have maintained the absolute importance of keeping our museums free and open to everyone. And I think that the art schools continue. But I am very, very aware they're underfunded and it seems like they depend for 30% of their funding on foreign students. I've got this thing that I keep banging on about that I want, if we do get a Labour government, that they have a sort of deliberate strategy of trying to brand the UK as a kind of cultural superpower.

If you were tasked with trying to build the arguments and the policies and the programs that might allow that to happen, what sort of advice would you feed in? Well, I just think that the, you know, 7.5 billion that the creative industry is bringing into the Treasury is not the argument that I would you. I would always use the intrinsic value of art and the fact that this is, you know, politicians come and go, but the art is, in a way, the trace that we leave of our hopes and our fears. And I would say, you know, I'm just very depressed by the fact that in terms of our government kind of hierarchy, it's always the cultural minister that is the, at the bottom rung. You'd elevate that. I would elevate that. I mean, you know, when you have Andre Amelro, you get something when you get Jack Lang, you have something absolutely extraordinary that happens. And Nadine Doris isn't quite Andre Malro, is your suggestion. I think that's the way of putting it. Lucy Fraser is not Jack Lang. Is this what we're hearing?

Well, I mean, we had Greg Gowry. We have had some some great and inspirational arts ministers and we need them again. I mean, I think to full. fulfill your ambition of Britain as a creative soft plower force in the world. I think we need a minister who really believes that. And hopefully as a, I mean, now, the culture minister in waiting is a cellist. And that gives me hope. And I learned the other day that the prime minister waiting is a flautist. Yes, yes, I heard about his time in the conservatoire. And that gave me I have to say, I did feel maybe we're up for a change. Okay, Anthony, Roy, let's have a quick break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science.

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops.

So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and, enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History,

which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade union.

unions and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about

the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Tell us a little bit about international politics and art.

I mean, I notice you've done big exhibitions in Petersburg and I believe in Moscow. What do you feel looking back at exhibiting in sort of Putin's Russia? Well, I wouldn't do it now. I believe in the central role of art as a bridge across gender, race, language and political system. So I have, I had a show last year in China. I will do a show this year in China, in spite of the fact that Xi Jinping's regime is horrendous. So why you would do China, but you wouldn't do Russia? Well, I think that everything that Putin has represents,

and has done. I feel that his whole regime, in doing one, I would be supporting his regime, and I can't. Whereas you feel that with Xi, you can, you can remain critical,

but you can still do your art. The interesting thing is that the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party are pretty disinterested in art and it is really interesting. that actually some of the most groundbreaking art being made today is being made by Chinese artists. That's because they've always been somehow below the political kind of horizon in terms of the power of that nation. Yeah, I won't work in Saudi Arabia, for example, for similar reasons.

A lot of money in that particular part. Yeah, to tell us a bit about money and art, because I guess that that is an interesting thing, which is that by the time you get to your stature, you can become very, very wealthy, and I suppose one could develop a taste for money. That must, I mean, I don't want to push it particularly on you personally, but do you feel that for the really sort of famous celebrity artists and sculptures that money can be a complicated factor and that it can draw their art and directions in which they don't want to go? Yeah, there's absolutely no question, but I'm also worried about that as a model.

I think that art is a vacation. You don't choose it, it chooses you. There has been, I think, one of the downsides of the YBA, the Damon Huss kind of generation, was that now if you haven't been approached by a gallery by the time you do your degree show at art school, you feel you failed. And in your case, it was a much slower burn, wasn't it?

I mean, you were born in 1950. And you made it big by the time you were in 30s. Yeah, well, I don't know about make it, made it big. I didn't have a gallery. I started working with White Cube in 91, 92. So your family, into your 30s almost until you were 40, wouldn't have seen you as a great rock star who was making huge income. My father would have thought that I was a complete failure.

Did they encourage you? Yeah, they did in the end, in the end. I mean, my dad died in 1974, so I didn't, you know, he didn't see me. I was still at art school So he didn't see But did he understand why you wanted to be ours Yeah he did in the end It was funny

He took me off to Corr Abbey On the Isle of White for a retreat A wonderful Abbott Monk Father Anthony there And that was really good It was good for me To have that reconciliation

But they let me go to India I mean I just disappeared After Cambridge I just disappeared for three years It took me a year To get to India the Indian-Pakistan war was going on, I went through the Wagga corridor, met these Tibetans. They said, oh, come with me, come with us.

We're going to Dalhousie. And I'd known Charles Hastings, who was really into Tibetan Buddhism, so Mahayana school. And I said, yeah, well, I'll come with you. And then I met Goenka. Tell us a little bit about just briefly, and it's made more of interest to me than all this sense. but tell us a little bit about going current and that whole tradition. Well, what was extraordinary was how practical he was. He was a Burmese businessman.

Burmese businessman in the tradition of Lady Saedah. So he was part of the International Buddhist Centre in Rangoon. But his whole thing was, and this is a continuation of where we were talking before firsthand experience. You know, you can know about Buddhism intellectually, but I want you to experience it. So you do. And we should do this now. I mean, that gateway for me was how do you achieve concentration? So let's try it.

Let's just close our eyes. The first three days of a 10-day course are Anapana. Sorry, we stay here for 10 days? No, no, we're just going to do about three minutes. So, concentration on breathing. Now, just breathe through your nose. As you breathe in, you can feel that cool air passing your upper lip. As you breathe out, you can feel that warm air touching your upper lip.

Anyway, the breath is an extraordinary thing because it is both alliotoric. In other words, it's controlled by the systems of the body, but it can also be. controlled, you know, you can force your breathing. So it's an amazing indicator of this bridge between, you could say, conscious and unconscious, or the limbic system and your conscious kind of controlling mind. Anapana then continues if you manage to maintain your concentration on that point on your upper lip, you can begin to make what they call a beege, just a point. A point of samadhi or concentration. And at a certain point, you move that point of concentration to the top of your head,

and you begin to move it in a spiral manner through the whole volume of your body. That was my introduction to, I think, the first-hand experience of a form of knowledge that had nothing to do with books, that had nothing to do with being able to reproduce the great thoughts, or the histories of our species, embedded my consciousness back into being, using existence as a form of examining existence. One sort of also gets echoes of, I suppose, you spent nearly two years meditating in India, right? Yeah, yeah.

And as you say, you were also interested in being a monk, your interest's vocation. I was very influenced by Joseph Boyce, and I, but I have not. never thought of myself as a shaman or as a guru. Absolutely not. But I absolutely believe in the idea of the art object or the experience of the field of art as a catalyst for mindfulness. I really do. I really believe that. The other thing that strikes me looking at your work is how often you mentioned standing stones,

but your little clay figures look like terracotta funerary objects, the Near East, your standing figures look like extraordinary kind of ancestral statues, stripped of all personality. I think you say, you know, they're not George the Fourth, they're not Apollo, they're figures like the figures that we take from the actual world. And you studied, I guess, anthropology, archaeology. So tell us a little bit about the kind of ancient in your work. Well, I guess I want my work to be timeless. I'm really pleased that I haven't been caught by fashion. I don't think my work kind of fits in. Oh, that's what they were making in Britain in 1980.

I'm kind of, I'm not, they can't box me into that kind of thing. I think, I think that our species has always found it necessary to make models of itself in order to understand itself. And I go back to the stencils on the cave of Peshemel or, well, anywhere, on the Maros caves in Sul. You're holding up your hands. Hold up your hand and you chew charcoal or you blow ochre. And you leave this sense of touch between the skin of the earth and the skin of a living body as a kind of marker in time. That is one very, very strong, I think, reference for me. I think of my works as shadows in a sense.

They are, they indicate indexically. they are forensic proof of where a body once was, but by implication where anybody could be. Alison, can I bring you in for a second? So you're somebody who loves sport, loves physicality, loves keeping fit, loves going for these kind of amazing freezing emotions in water. How does this sort of talk about body sit with you

and talk about art sit with you? I love listening to Anthony talk about art. And I loved, I watched a programme by you where you were immersing yourself in crude oil and then sort of splattering your body onto a big sheet of paper. Which then becomes a beautifully hung work of art and a wonderful exhibition. I think I've got a better understanding

from your earlier explanation of what you were like, what you were thinking, what you're feeling as a child. I can now see the link between that experience and when I look at some of your figures dotted around the coastline. love the fact that we have some of the best because I'm determined to bring this back to politics at some point I love the fact that we have these these voices who are very definitively British and who express what they do about art and relate that to who and what we are as people I think that's very very powerful that's what I mean in part by creating a cultural super

I think we do it's partly I know you prefer to make rather than to speak but it's partly about our language. So I'm fascinated by what people like you do and what they give. And I think it does relate to our soft power. And I don't think we exploit it nearly enough, which is why I want to bring you back to the red and the blue passport. And I want to ask you, what's your assessment of what Brexit has done to our standing in the world and our status as a cultural superpower? It's an absolute disaster. It's a fun. fundamental failure of imagination. It's a fundamental betrayal of what was a creative necessity after the Second World War.

All of the sacrifices that my grandparents and my parents made in order to make a free, open Europe, that we were so much part of the creation of, and we threw it away for nothing, for nothing. it makes me angry and sad. Strikes me, it must also make you sad, thinking about the fact that none of the political parties at the moment pushing to reopen it or to even imagine, even single markets or customs union ratio. I mean, and that makes me think that there's a problem in politics

to bring it back to politics, and Alist is prompting, partly of imagination, but also of hope. I mean, I'm thinking about this because we're thinking about Israel Garter a lot at the moment on the podcast. very striking that nobody seems Salasra and I were talking about it's a breakfast nobody seems to actually have the confidence to envisage a Middle East peace process

a long-term solution a settlement anymore it seems to it's sort of terrible lack of hope well I think we're you know I always go back to E.O. Wilson and you know we have medieval institutions paleolithic emotions and God given technology

but the way that those things interact is all fractious. And the fact is that I think about politics has always defined in a way by past actions. This is like almost a karma thing from Buddhism. It seems to me that the Tory Labour kind of dialectic is something that might have made sense in the 40s, but just doesn't make sense now. So the allegiances that politics leads us to have to fit ourselves into don't fit the world in which we have the entire knowledge of humankind in our smartphones. You know, I think, yes, we need proportional representation. Yes, we need, in a way, we need a politics that is to do with issues and the necessary things that will make our speech.

species flourish, not this endless kind of dialectic between worker and businessman or something that seems to come from another age, a kind of master slave mentality that just isn't true for now. What do you hope for out of the next, the coming election? I hoping that Kirste Stama will get in. He's a thoroughly decent bloke. I mean, in some ways after the charisma of Boris to actually have somebody who is grounded, who talks about his father as, you know, this toolmaker who was somehow, you know, denied by Thatcher

and her obsession with Milton Friedman economics, his desire to reassert apprenticeship. And I hope, I heard him the other night just say, yes, we've got to get art back into the curriculum. He's got my vote. He has definitely... Where did you say that? In a meeting in Covent Garden where he met a few people from the art. Oh, you're at one of those. Oh, I know about those.

I mean, I do, you know, I hope that there will be real transformation. But do you... That's the hope. But do you... I was at an event last night with Rory's hero, David Gork, And although there was a 500 people there, none of whom, one of whom thought the Tories could win the election, the rest no chance. But there was a sentiment. Maybe they were wanting change and they want to see the back of this government, but not that much hope about the scale of transformation.

But you actually seem a little bit more hopeful. Yeah, I know all of all of the Tories' talk of leveling up hasn't happened. I just, I feel more faith, Keir in his sort of ground up attitude for what is necessary, will think seriously about the infrastructure of this country. I mean, you know, the whole drama of HS2 and the lack, again, of imagination here, you know, we should be, we should have in Manchester a place where a internationally, you know, important university doing important work on things like graphene should be associated with, as it were, the business acumen to put those revelations into products. I mean, that's been

the disaster for Britain that we've always had remarkable ideas, but then realized somewhere else. And we need to do it here, but we need to create our confidence in our own future by giving the infrastructure for that future to grow. And I think in the hands of Kirstama, that's more likely to happen than if we carry on with the prison. Let me maybe sort of push it, push it again one stage. So I think everything you say about Kirstama seems right. I still sense a lack. And if I think about problems that we face, how on earth do we actually get the NHS and public services working?

And we're spending a phenomenal amount of money. And our doctors and nurses are run off their feet and patients are getting a rubbish deal. AI is coming and it might wipe out 30, 40% of the jobs in this country. It might also be an extraordinary opportunity for productivity, but do we have a government that's kind of bold enough in recognising those dangers and challenges? What are we really doing about climate when we've just taken away the 26 billion that Labor committed? Where is Britain's leadership on the Middle East peace process and statements and ceasefire? So I'm going to sort of push you on this question of imagination and hope.

It was very galling to read, BEEA systems. are recording a profit of $127 billion. Which is the defence manufacturer making weapons. Yeah. You know, this is still an important prop in our GDP. I am aware that this isn't just our problem, the aging population. And what you could say, the diminishing ability, it seems, of the Western world to replace itself with the same problem as Japan. So what is the answer?

Well, in my view, I think Kate Rehuis, you know, do not economics is the answer. We've got to give up on the idea of endless growth. It's so obvious, you know, we've got a planet with limited resources, with defined resources, and the goal of endless growth is impossible. So we've got to learn from what, in a way, COVID told us that actually we can live very differently. And yet the problem, which Alastairnoy keep coming back to, is, and we did when we interviewed Kate and touched on when we interviewed Caroline Lucas, is the politics of that is so difficult to imagine. Well, that's why we've got to have different politics, isn't it? That whole thing, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, is at the root of all of this.

Okay, well, let me finish my last question, and then I'll hand back to Alastair-Fenture. So sitting in front of you are three objects, which my six-year-old brought. One of them is a, which you have in your hand, which is a fossilized 150 million years. your old tree which has been polished. One of them is a piece of copper and one of them is a piece of amber. And I wonder whether you just tell us a little bit about these objects. And I suppose one thing I'm interested in is these are objects that have some of the quality of your work, maybe have less human intervention.

Nature itself has been involved in the creation of them more directly. I'm holding this ancient tree in my right hands or a part of it that has been polished to a very, very high level of sheen. It's cool. And if you look at it, it has all of these extraordinary colors, some sort of light yellows that are almost translucent and then darker, almost dried blood color of ruby red. And it fits in the hand in an extraordinary way.

It sort of settles like an egg into the palm of your hand. And there's a sense in which, yes, you're communicating with something that is, yeah, has been around before you and will be around after you. And I guess, you know, that reference to the standing stone, what is a standing stone? A standing stone is a marker in space that makes you aware of your time and, in a way, invites you to spend time with it. Well, I think that's what this stone does. We're here for such a short time.

You know, you said this was 130 million years old. the Cambrian period. We're an extraordinarily successful species. We have learned to live in every environment that this planet offers apart from Antarctica and the Arctic. But at the same time, that very adaptability that has come out of our extraordinary extended arm, our technology, is the very thing that is going to kill us and perhaps a very high proportion of the biosphere.

So as I sit here, I've got this ancient tree part in my right hand and a piece of copper in my left that feels like a copper nugget. It's almost like this has come, being dug out of the ground. It feels a bit like a meteorite as well. My new most meteorites are actually iron. But there's something lovely about this as well. This talks about the mutability of matter because it's sort of, yeah, it's globular, it's very, it's small, again, very, very dense. Copper, copper has a density not dissimilar to gold or lead. This just reminds me of the way that we talk about our evolution in terms of material, Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age. This material was what was found in in river systems and in nodes in the ground made our first tools.

So this sort of, this reminds me, in my right hand is something that reminds me of kind of the age of the planet, but then also the development of the biosphere. In my left hand, this tells me about our relationship with the materials of the world and how they've come to define us. Well, I've listened to you all day. Let me just ask you this. Is legacy important to you? When you do sort of finally... Yeah, kick the bucket. Kick the bucket and pop your clogs and disappear. Will it matter to you that you've left these so many objects in different parts of the world? Will that be important to you? And that they will survive and endure? Yeah, I mean, I think that's what sculpture is for. It's about saying that there is continuity and that I can talk through these.

things to people who aren't yet born. And I hope there is an inherent, you know, when we talked about hope earlier, to me the difference between a painting or a photograph is that this is not, a sculpture is not the picture of something. It is in the world and by implication it changes the world. So the making of an object that you put out on the beach, on a mountain in the street, is an expression of a desire to contribute to the evolving world, but also a prayer of hope that it will continue,

that it will flourish, that our species will learn to live with all other living beings, as the Buddha hoped we would. This is an impossible question, I suspect, if you'd answer it. If there's only one piece that you've done that you're allowed to take it with you, what would it be? Take with me where? to wherever we go and you can be pre or post-Catholic.

I think it's very difficult. This is like asking a parent to choose one of their children as their favorite. But I think probably the model of my work, which is field where I go and ask people to repeat this action of taking a lump of clay, allowing the space between their hands to become a generative womb out of which form arises, stand it apart from them and make it conscious by giving it two eyes, simply pushing the point of a pencil or a piece of wood into its head, that then multiplies and becomes this landscape that completely fills whatever space it's in, whether that's a supermarket, a cathedral or an art gallery,

looks back at us and makes us the focus of its gaze and says, we are the spirit of the ancestors and we are the spirit of the unborn. What are you doing, the living, to make the continuity of life happen? Now, Roy, before we close, do you see any physical similarity between me and Anthony? Yeah.

I think you're both big white guys. I'm going to tell you the story, I had to tell you, but you don't know this because you weren't there, but I was in your studio. Oh, when? You've also got, actually, your big white guys were similar noses and ears. And here. Yeah.

And a while back was something called Camden Highline, we're doing a fundraiser. Oh. And you couldn't be there. And a woman came up, I was studying there with Fiera, a couple of people chatting away. And this woman came up to me,

She said, I'm so pleased to meet you because I've admired you for so long. And I love you. And I love you work. And I said, well, I'm very grateful and thank you. And she said, and it must be incredible as you travel around the country and around the world. And you see the consequence of what you've done. I said, well, that's very kind. Thank you very, very much indeed.

And then she said, and I particularly like it. It was the stuff in Liverpool. And then suddenly realized she thought I was you. Oh, well. So the penny only dropped at the very, very end. Absolutely. I mean, I love the first bit. Such an admirer of your work.

That's very funny. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I'm sorry. I'm aware that this isn't quite the fair that your listeners. I think our listeners will thoroughly enjoy it. I think they'll love it.

Some of them might wish there was a bit more Tory bashing, but you did a bit of that. They might wish that there was a bit more. No, I thought you were propagandising for Labour was excellent. Oh, good. Well, I'm hoping that Keir will listen to me. I'm so excited you came on. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that. Did you? And I also thought it was funny, this discovery that basically you are twins was kind of a good revelation at the end. Well, we're almost almost exactly the same height. Yeah. Quite similar build. Yeah. Quite big noses.

Yeah. Some big ears. Hair cut, very, very similar. No, this woman was absolutely convinced I was here. And I was convinced that she was talking to me. for at least the first three minutes. And it is true. Some of our listeners will probably think,

you know, what's this got to do with politics? But actually, whenever we did get onto politics, he became even more kind of innovated than he was when talking about art. It was interesting, we probably should have asked him about this,

but he's now become a German citizen. He now has a German passport, because his mother was German, and he was clearly things breaks it. It has been a total disaster. I was really cheered by his assessment. of Keir Stahmer because that was hope. One of the best cases made for Kirstama

that we've heard on the show coming from an artist, not from a politician. And he was basically saying, in the end, he trusts his instincts. He trusts the fact that Kier understands what it meant for his father to be a tool maker. He trusts that Kier will care about leveling up. He trusts that Kier will care about culture and art.

It was a sort of case for Kirstama's character as being what gives him hope rather than his statements. And it's interesting that he'd obviously met him quite recently and form that impression quite strongly. And I honestly, I really do think, and I know he mentioned Sangam Debenair, who's the Shadow Secretary of State, whose background is classical music. And I just, I think there's a huge gaping open door for Labour here to really, to make arts and culture something really, really important again.

And it's partly, isn't it, that politics feels such a long way away from this? I mean, I guess if, you know, maybe a kind of different general. of politicians, maybe kind of some of Atlee's government, some of Wilson's government, would have been very comfortable talking about art and sculpture and literature. But nowadays, professional politicians seem to be so far away from wanting to talk about painting or sculpture or novels. I mean, you know, Macmillan used to sort of, I think, show off about all these 19th century novels he'd be reading all. The only one I can think of in modern politics, who, Nicholas Sturgeon every year does a picture of all the novels that she's read.

And it's vast numbers on them. She has them. Her bookshelves at home are all color-coordinated according to the sort of genre she's looking at. But you get a sense that, you know, Michael Foot, for example, would have been much more comfortable having this conversation than most politicians today. Oh, God, yeah. When you mentioned Michael Foot in books, when Michael Foote died, he was a very good friend of ours. We were given with a small group of other people, first dibs on going around to his house and going through the tens of thousands of books that were. there, most of which he had not only read, but actually had markings inside and jottings and

so forth. But why I loved about, I mean, I was mesmered. When you gave him the three objects that you brought him from your son, mesmerized the way he was describing them and the effect that they were, the effect that they were clearly having on him. And that thing he has about when he's, when he's talking and there are many people who could persuade me to sit here and shut my eyes for three minutes. But that thing when he's concentrating and he shuts his eyes and it's almost like he's going off to a different place and I guess he is kind of

seeing things that become art. I also think that there's something rather wonderful about his earnestness that you know you and I might be a little inclined to giggle about closing our eyes or being serious that way but he's really serious without being pompous I don't think he's pompous but he

really believes in what he's saying he really believes it's important and he's not embarrassed to talk about some very, very important things. Maybe you find that more on your German reading. Well, and then, as he left, he gave us both very, very large books, and mine is in German. Yours in German. He knew that he's been Deutscheiker.

Compliment to you. No, so I thought, I think he's really, I think it's really lovely to have that, and to have such an unusual voice being prepared to be so serious. Not a bullshitter in any way. I think you really feel the... And also, you know, the... He speaks so clearly. When he says he likes making rather than speaking,

but he speaks in kind of perfectly formed sentences. There's no umming and eye. He thinks and then he says it. And I thought, you know, when I raised the thing about the Arts Council, he was visceral. You know, that was like, totally offended everything that he thinks

about what this country should be and what the arts are for and the relationship they should have with politics. And I think the one thing that would, absolutely get him to like Kirste Stahmer, even more, is if Kierstahm were to come out and say, look, part of the job of arts is to get up the nose of people like us. Yes, absolutely. Because that is part of the job of the arts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be awful, awful if artists were not annoying politicians. I mean, that would be a real sign that something terrible happened. Very bad side of something going very horribly wrong in our culture. Good. Well, I'd be fascinated to see what our listeners think about that, but that's our first. It's our first artist. First.

Well, we did Brian Cox, which is different. But it's a first, certainly our first artist, professional artist. And he's definitely a leader. So good stuff. Thank you very much. See you soon.