MEMO
In September Richard Wentworth will be showing 'Memo' at Far Far. Over recent years Richard Wentworth has been working closely with the foundry at Lockbund to develop works for two public sites in Central London on the Thames riverside. Wentworth remarked that he had little expectation of the complexities and eventualities which the work would provoke. In a letter to Lockbund, Wentworth explained his previous involvement with casting ...
“ In the 1960's I was a student at the Royal College in Kensington. Were you walking up Queen's Gate past the goods entrance to the museums, you would be passing the extemporised premises of Royal College Sculpture and the Film and TV department. They are no longer there.
About once a month, if you were walking up in the late evening you might pass Francis Bacon crossing the Cromwell Road. You might then see clouds of smoke escaping from a corrugated shed and, were you inquisitive, you might check to see the source. You would find men in boiler suits and a rudely assembled kiln arrangement, similar to those multiple brick kilns of a hundred years earlier, manned by the Dickens characters.
This was the RCA foundry at work, melting out the waxes and burning off the gases of moulds ready for bronze casting.
As a student this seemed entirely unremarkable because this was still a period of night watchman and naked coke fires in glowing tar barrels all over the working city.
Students are a funny mixture of intensely curious and uninquisitive. It's only now that I am reminded how much I learned from witnessing these processes over that three year period. The materiality of sculpture and how it was exhibited and seen was changing fast, but the means of production still owed most of its language to processes that would have been commonplace a century before.
About this time, coincident with the release of Sgt. Pepper, I worked for Henry Moore. I already knew lots of manual processes and had a working sense of how moulds were made and how they performed across a variety of materials - not so very different from all sorts of kitchen processes, baking and pies most obviously.
At Henry's I was introduced to the novelty of him handing me a maquette. Invariably it was a small hand worked plaster, often not much bigger than an apple core, and Henry would say 'times eight'. The working circumstances were modest but well organised artisanal rather than industrial and my task, alongside other assistants, was to 'point up' the cardinal points on the maquette. This meant plotting key moments and then scaling them up using pointed sticks held together with scrim and plaster, often hilariously precarious.
I remember thinking how shockingly arbitrary it felt, being ambitious to do it well, but also it being the first time I had tested my skills in this way. There are two Henry Moore works, both editioned, out in the world which embody the anxieties and modest skills of that nineteen year old.
Amidst the elaborate language which we often associate with art criticism, it's rare to hear about these 'ordinary' practicalities, whereas in studios, artists are always playing the alchemical card to try and develop some 'new way'.
Of course it would never occur to this late teenager that they might return to the casting/moulding territory five decades later.
The organisational intelligence at Lockbund is a marvellous thing to witness, frank discussions about time and motion, materials and deadlines, ways and means, and the chance to witness all the processes in between.
I don't want to suggest that this was a damascene moment, but I would like to celebrate a pleasure which would have been well known to numerous heroes - Giacometti, Miró, Gonzalez when he was working closely with Picasso, add Rodin. As a student it would never have occurred to me that all this could join Elizabeth Frink to Louise Bourgeois, Brancusi with the mischief of Bruce Nauman.
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