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My name is Barbara Marshall and I’m a volunteer here at the Victoria Gallery and Museum and I’m going to be talking to you about Gogglehead.
Now, when i take people on tours and stop at this sculpture and say how fantastic i think it is they often look at me as if I’m daft... although they often do that as well!
It certainly isn’t beautiful is it?
It's not something you would particularly want in your house and this is a piece of artwork that you need to know something about.
The main reason I knew something about it was serendipity, when I was teaching at the Community College I had a video of Elisabeth Frink’s life which is absolutely fantastic.
It followed her until the week before she died.
She died the week before the 'Risen Christ' which is above the doorway of the Anglican cathedral was put up
and on this video it shows you putting it up on a horrendously windy day and it was fantastic and moving.
So I learnt quite a lot about Elisabeth Frink and about this sculpture.
As I say it’s not beautiful, its brutish, its violent, its evil looking and perhaps that’s what a lot of her work is about.
There are beautiful pieces of work particularly in animals but mostly when she is using the human figure it is the worst side of humankind - mans inhumanity to man.
But then we also get some wonderful nature and although we cant see any here I encourage you to look on the internet some of her images of horses and dogs
I’m sure they gave her a lot of peace compared to what mankind does.
I need to tell you something about the background of this as well, whilst you can look at this brutish huge head
which actually looks a little bit like Frink
she had a very long jaw and often in her work she seems to put herself, she was a handsome woman not a pretty woman.
But the first thing you notice is the mouth open, the snarl, the fairly impassive features- of course impassive, because he has dark glasses on.
And he is part of a series, there were 6 of these made called Goggleheads because we cannot see through the goggles.
I need to tell you about two men and the Algerian war of independence as well.
First of all I don’t want to tell you about this man
I want to tell you about the man that this man had killed
and that man was somebody called Ben Barka who was an Algerian fighter for independence.
Algeria had a colonial past with French invaders where they took the land
and many people were disenfranchised and treated extremely badly.
This came to the foreground in the 1950s and 60s when there was a huge movement from ex-colonial countries
for the people who lived in the colonies to take over the running of their own country.
And this is what happened in Algeria, the Algerian war of independence which lasted for three years.
Not this chap, but the chap that this one murdered Oufkir
was a freedom fighter in Algeria who was a friend of Che Guevara and Malcom X and before he was killed
or rather disappeared he was about to chair an international conference called
‘The First International Meeting of Third World Liberation Groups’.
He was disappeared on the orders of this man, he wasn't directly killed by this man.
This man was a Moroccan general known for his thuggishness called General Oufkir,
known for the brutality of his actions and his hallmark dark glasses so you could never see what he was thinking.
I’d like to read you something about these dark glasses written by a playwright called Brian Phelan
who wrote a play in the 1980s called ‘Article 5’ based on the UN declaration of human rights
and article 5 was the part that deals with torture.
Feelan says ‘when I studied the Gogglheads I realised they were a 3D expression of the kind of practitioner I was studying in the files of Amnesty International.
To torture, the practitioner must reduce his victim to the status of animal while protecting his own sense of humanity.
The goggle men protect themselves in the most basic way when you look at them you can only see yourself in their glasses.
You cannot possibly guess what effect your pain is having on them and you can’t appeal to them for any mercy.”
Oufkir ordered the death of Ben Barka and apparently he also wanted Ben Barka's head brought to him
which is particularly poignant as this sculpture is just a head rather than a whole body.
Frink has always been interested in human rights and she was an early member of Amnesty International
She lived in the south of France for several years when there were a lot of Algerian immigrants coming to live in France and became concerned with human rights there.
She grew up in East Anglia she came from a fairly privileged family and she did well very early on, she was noticed very early
So if you too can find this film you can see film of her as a young woman when she went to Chelsea art college.
Her Father was in the army and she grew up in East Anglia, her dates were 1930-1993, so she was 15 when Belsen was librated
and she writes about the effect of seeing that film of the liberation of the concentration camps on her practise.
But also living in East Anglia she was aware of the bombers coming back from raids
and I remember seeing a television program some years ago saying that half the young men died in Britain on the airfield, they crashed before they could deliver their bombs
so she saw some horrendous things which had a great effect on her.
Her oeuvre is human beings and animals, mostly men , hardly any women at all.
She was married three times, she was very interested in men, apparently she was very open about her sexuality
and lived her life to the full but mostly it is the brutal aspect of men that come across.
Their violence their brutality, their cold unfeeling nature.
She also did a lot of birds, not lovely birds in the garden but violent birds of prey
and if you do go to see any of her work it is often the brutish side of animal nature that you see.
She new she wanted to be a sculptor early on and she couldn't wait to work in bronze
and so what she did was she made an armature of steel rods and coated it with plaster and in this film you see her slapping it on
literally working very quickly and she did some carving with the wet Plaster of Paris and then carved it again when it dried.
Then she had them cast in bronze, it was a very immediate way of working that she was interested in.
I’ve talked about the violence she refers to all the time but many of her men have their eyes closed not just goggles but eyes closed in suffering but towards the end of the 80s
she did a series of tribute heads which were men who had died for their beliefs who have their eyes open.
They are really poignant and very beautiful.
Her last piece of work was the 'Risen Christ' above the door of the Anglican Cathedral and it literally kept her alive.
She had throat cancer and she had many operations.
In this film it was incredibly poignant, you saw her as a young woman with a cigarette having a great time
and then you saw her as a skeleton but still working up to 2 weeks before the sculpture was put up.
She went to the foundry in London where she had the cast made
and she was up on ladders swathed in goggles and scarves and working and chiseling away at his face.
There are several pieces of her work in Liverpool and I thought I’d check on them in case you are inspired to go and see them.
When I looked at the Risen Christ his face is absolutely grim, his eyes are open he might have risen
but what he is looking at he doesn't like at all...humanity and mans inhumanity man.
But what they also have at the cathedral but you can’t see it as it’s put away at the moment is the maquette that she worked from.
You can also go into the catholic cathedral and an early piece of work of hers is a rather sinuous brass piece of sculpture above the altar piece hanging in the air.
You can go around the back from here (VG&M) and see one of her running men and when this first appeared
I thought it was a symbol of joy and exuberance of the kind of running that we might like to do when we can
but reading about it they are hunted figures who are running away from something or running towards something.
I went to have look at him today thinking about violence and torture and i went to see what I thought about him
and somebody has defaced him with red paint which is very poignant.
Also if you have a car Yorkshire sculpture park is magnificent and has lots of her work.
It has her Judas, a figure of utter brutality, his eyes are shut and he is absolutely beastly.
Frink also worked from nature as well...yes humanity is beastly and we don’t have to look very far today to see it, violence is all around us
but that doesn’t make you want to look at more art and so Frink did do a lot of artwork based on nature.
She had a wonderful studio in Dorset with huge glass walls instead of windows and is full of dogs and water buffalo and horses.
When i decided to do this talk i thought I had better see what a) i remember
and b) what other information there is
There is of course the internet...but I went to the library, our wonderful new Central Library and thought I'll test them out
because the building is wonderful but I'm not sure there is as many books as there were but I'll test them on Elisabeth Frink.
Sure enough they found a book for me and this chap lead me to it and it's a huge book full of pictures of her, pictures of her sculpture
Published in 1984 it was her catalogue of work up until that point and I thought I'd like a copy of this book so i googled it
and it came up as £881 and then I thought oh my goodness...and I've been into the library and told them the value
I don't know if my copy that i am taking back tomorrow is worth as much because it is battered and somebody has drawn a picture of a dog in it.
But presumably there aren't very many so although I feel very passionate about free libraries, I wonder whether it should be a reference copy instead.
But it will be back in the library very shortly.
Now what have I missed out? let me finish with a quotation from Frink herself.
This is what she wrote about the Gogglehead:
“My concern is not that mankind is any worse than it was, it is just that it is as bad as it was.
The media get news of atrocities more quickly to us than the dark ages and we are living in a dark age of humanity.
We are becoming brutalised and no longer respond properly to atrocity’
she wrote this in 1983 and I suspect that is very common today.
Does anybody have any questions....?
Well do go and have another look at him and he was made in 1967
Well while I've got an audience I'll tell you a little story.
there were a few programmes before Christmas showing areas of London that had been mapped in Victorian times by Colonel Booth.
And the programme went back to these 6 areas now and one of the areas was Notting Hill which has had many fortunes
I remember it as an area that was desperately poor and dangerous, I said this to my son and he said Notting Hill? It's incredibly expensive
and sure enough we went into a beautiful Georgian house and there were two young Barristers living there
and they had one of those in their house because there are still things to buy
Ok...thank you!
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