Maybe,” says the photographer, as we begin to set up for the interview at Sir Anthony Caro’s Camden studio, “we could just have you next to some steel.” The artist poses, slightly uncomfortably but politely, beside vast piles of rusty steel plate, beneath the A-frame of a hoist and next to a mound of beams. In his concrete-coloured cords and steely-grey beard, he seems to melt into the industrial architecture. The studio, which used to be a piano factory, is buried behind a genteel Victorian terrace. Yet inside, the yard echoes with the buzz of angle-grinders, sparks glint in the semi-dark and a bright yellow fork-lift purposefully carries a huge block of metal.
One of the found objects in “Diamond”, a work from Caro’s new show at Annely Juda Fine Art, is stamped “London N.W.1.”, the trace of the manufacturer of a piece of heavy industrial kit, perhaps a 1920s drill press. It is as if it had been excavated from beneath Caro’s own studio, as if he was disinterring the carcases of the city’s industrial past and using the bones of manufacture to create the city’s new lifeblood, its newest big industry, art.
As we leave the studio we stop at a monumental construction of heavy steel plates cocooning a hefty chuck of rock. It will be the altar for a church in Bourbourg, northern France. I ask what the stone used to be. Caro’s chief assistant, Pat Cunningham, tells me he thinks it must have been some kind of trough, as it had a hole to drain it. I suggest it might have been a sarcophagus, as these too featured holes to drain bodily fluids; Caro grins as if he greatly enjoys the possibility.
This instance may have been a happy accident, but Caro, arguably the most influential living sculptor, always seems to import something primal, something profound, into even his most stripped-down works. His career defined the 20th century’s radical break with the remnants of figurative sculpture. Since 1959 his work has explored steel, from cut sheet to industrial detritus and found objects. He is represented in every major public collection.
I suggest, as we sit down to a cup of tea, that I can’t help but see his work as a kind of building. His new show is populated by a series of “Passages”, by works entitled “Door”, “Step” and so on.
“I suppose if you had said that a few years ago I might have been quite offended,” he replies. “But now I’d say it is located somewhere between sculpture and architecture. About 20 years ago I was showing a critic around and I said “come and see my new sculpitecture”, and that word rather stuck. I like the idea that these are works you might try to get into, even if you physically can’t. I look at a lot of architecture. I look at a lot of buildings and a lot of paintings. But I find I don’t want to look at a lot of sculpture. Sculpture without the figure is, in a way, a bit homeless. It needs to latch on to buildings, or the space around it, or painting.”
Is that, I ask, why he started off painting the surfaces of those radical, seminal sculptures, or why he now galvanises his new pieces? To clothe them, to associate them with the world beyond sculpture? “Well, first I was obviously protecting the material – you need to paint steel to stop it rusting – but also the colour was a way to allow something else in. Donatello [the Italian Renaissance sculptor] used colour, he mixed up funny materials, I don’t think one should be inhibited. But I also realised it had a decorative element. Then, in about 1969, I almost took a backward step. I had such a successful show in America that I needed a new challenge. I needed to get into more real, heavier stuff. I loved David Smith’s work [Smith also made monumental steel sculpture using industrial detritus] and, although it can be great to be as abstract as that, I never went any more abstract than that. I did a piece called ‘Prairie’ and after that point I had to get a little less pure. I felt at that point sculpture was free of its past, of having to be figurative, or of stone, or bronze or whatever, and having been there I felt we mustn’t be inhibited again by abstraction.”
Caro rarely gives interviews and somehow, against this powerful background of sparks and welding, I half-expected a gruff loner in the Jackson Pollock mode, a tortured genius. He turns out instead to be open, charming and gracious. Only at one point does he bristle slightly. Caro famously worked as Henry Moore’s assistant for two years. I broach the subject of his influence as gently as I can. “Everybody asks me about Moore,” Caro says resignedly, if good-naturedly. “I got so much out of Moore. I became so close to his work that I couldn’t really see it. He was the end of an era.”
What is it then that still inspires him? “I enjoy when you see the beginning of things, that’s when I get excited. I find myself looking at just-pre-Cubist Picasso, just at the moment when he’s struggling to get it right, or at ancient architecture when something is beginning to change.”
I mention that many architects seem inspired by art rather than architecture, and particularly by minimal art, by the cool perfection of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. “I quite like some of the minimal stuff,” Caro replies “but then I can’t say I see any soul in it. I never wanted the hand to disappear completely.” What then, is it that gives a sculpture “soul”? “I don’t know,” Caro sighs. “We know it when we see it. You can’t say what it is about a person either. Where is their essence? It’s ineffable.”
We take a stroll around the studios. The place is buzzing, young assistants bashing away at huge steel plates. I ask if whether what I have read, that Caro is himself notoriously impractical, can really be true in this most industrial of workshops. “Oh yes,” he says. “I’m so stupid about that kind of thing. I’m very lucky because I have all these people to help me. But there is also something useful in it. I can come up with an outrageous idea and Pat will find a way of achieving it. A knowledge of engineering may be another thing that would inhibit you, you may never try because you know it would be too difficult. Peter Smithson [one of England’s few great modernist architects, who also redesigned Caro’s home] once shouted at me ‘That’s not how you use a beam!’”
Caro remains a hugely popular artist. He has achieved the bohemian ideal of becoming influential and respected while remaining something of an outsider. His work isn’t part of the movements and trends that sweep through the art world. “I suppose people here are a little swayed by fashion, it always was a bit like that. I enjoyed talking to American painters. There was an intensity there, a way people worked hard. I never had to be polite and I felt very comfortable. I thought seriously about living there but never made the move. However, this way turned out well, it allowed me to thrash things out in my studio then get some distance from it in New York. People here have become much more open since then though, much less constrained.”
He is, I remind him, still revered in the US, perhaps even more than in his home country. “I suppose I started something,” he replies. “People don’t turn their noses up at sculpture any more. You need to be open, that’s the way I taught, too. You need to be able to make mistakes. You have good days and bad days and as you have less energy you don’t want to waste it on things that aren’t fun. And you don’t want to keep doing the same things, you want new challenges, changes. As a result, no one knows what my work’s going to be like.”
I watch Pat bonding a tentacle to a terracotta squid (part of the “Creation” for the Bourbourg church) and fork-lifting a big hunk of steel from one spot to another. Over another cup of tea in the workshop backroom (“We drink a lot of tea here,” says Caro) all the assistants have gathered for a break. The youngsters, all artists themselves, seem to have a real affection for the 83-year-old artist and he is relaxed around them. He joshes one of them who has been waking up in the middle of the night muttering about one more cut that he should have made in a sheet of steel. Time to move on, Caro jokes. But even I find it a hard place to leave.
When I do, I linger slightly among the piles of rusty steel and the old machine parts piled up in the former factory yard. It looks like an attempt to make an impossibly ambitious industrial machine. Yet maybe that is what Caro’s art is, a series of machines, physically static but intellectually alive, machines for reflection, for modulating space, for allowing us to see the things that otherwise disappear beneath the concrete of our buildings or into the ground itself. Caro says he chose steel precisely because he knew nothing about it. He knows more than he lets on.
New work by Anthony Caro will be on display at Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1, from September 13 to October 27 (tel: +44 (0)20-629 7578; www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk) and at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, from October 18 to November 21 (tel: +1 212-744 7400; www.miandn.com)
