Late last year, British-born artist Adrian Hall returned to New Zealand to reconstruct his work Low Tide for the New Gallery instalment of Action Replay: Post-Object Art, an exhibition revisiting New Zealand post-object art of the 1970s. Hall played a decisive role in this neglected chapter of New Zealand’s art history. As a visiting lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts from 1971 to 1972, he brought internationally current ideas into the local scene. Hall’s 1971 Barry Lett Galleries show The Plasma Cast Iron Foam Company Presents Adrian Reginald Hall, which included Low Tide, was one of the most audacious, unexpected, and influential sculpture shows of the decade here. Wystan Curnow and Robert Leonard talked to Adrian Hall before he returned to Sydney, where he now lives.
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Wystan Curnow and Robert Leonard: Let’s set the scene. You studied at the Royal College, London, right?
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Adrian Hall: Before that, I’d been at a very traditional art school in the West Country. Then, I had a year out working and making art in Somerset before I got into the Royal College. It was the work I did that year in Somerset that got me in. I spent three years at the Royal College, 1964 to 1967, very intense. Bill Culbert and Billy Apple had already gone through. Victor Burgin was a year ahead of me. John Panting, Nigel Hall, Terry Powell, and Steve Furlonger were among my contemporaries. Hockney had done his gold-lame-suit graduation, and he was down the corridor doing an edition of The Rake’s Progress about his trip to New York. Very smart. The Royal College had just decided to make art a respectable intellectual pursuit. They’d employed Iris Murdoch to run a philosophy course. That absolutely mortified me, because I’d never met anyone as formidable as that. Being locked in a small room for two or three hours at a time, while she chain-smoked Capstans and monologued, was something else, but it was a very strong experience. She’d been a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and introduced me to the Tractatus and The Blue Book.
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You were involved with Scratch Orchestra at this time.
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No, I was involved in its first manifestation as AMM Music with Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost, later Cornelius Cardew. We performed in my kitchen in Putney. At a previous place, Keith Rowe had been my flatmate (as was John Surman who went on to be a saxophone virtuoso), and Mike Westbrook had lived around the corner. It was a jazz milieu. The AMM performances involved a period of quasi-meditation, people picking around their instruments in various ways, then attempting to establish a sense of community through the activity of making sound. Some of the instruments were jazz derived. Keith Rowe had saved up for years to buy a Barney Kessel guitar, but—and, despite winning the Downbeat magazine poll for best jazz guitarist—within months he had sawn it in half and was playing it with hacksaws. My own forte as guest artist was the broken milk bottle (although later, in New Zealand with Phil Dadson, I would play gas cylinder and valve). Some AMM music could have been described as trance music. Sometimes the performances were violent, sometimes there would be deliberate humour, sometimes there would be laughter anyway, but the performances were always very probing—like watching a string of meteorites. Inevitable. I pulled away because I wanted to go a different way. They were very serious musicians and I was a very serious artist, but I was still a big fan. And the jazz thing has always been there in my work—innovation from within and without forms the city walls.

In the second year at the College, Peter Blake heard I was looking for a fabricating job and introduced me to this strange woman called Yoko Ono. This was long before she became a household name. I did things for her for a couple of years, a lot of fabrication and organisation. Yoko’s single-mindedness was a big influence on me, her unfazedly setting up an antagonistic, potentially dangerous relationship with her audience. She kept saying these things were beautiful. She recognised that provocation was a necessary part of the process of engaging with real life. I remember one performance, Tunafish Sandwich, maybe ten of us sitting on the edge of a stage in a theatre in London imagining we were eating a tunafish sandwich, looking impassively at an increasingly angry audience.
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What were your sculptures like?
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I guess you would now class them as primary structures. They were paintings that were not paintings, objects which were not objects—they were experiential. You could walk through them, or not. What really kicked me off was Le Corbusier’s book The Modulor, his concern to design architectural spaces around the proportions and movements of the body, and the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright and John Cage, who Yoko had introduced me to at an interactive dance performance. Later on, the writings of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty were important. What I was making wasn’t considered legitimate as painting at the College at the time, and I spent three years resisting them wanting to transfer me to Furniture. It didn’t occur to them, or me, that I might be making sculpture.

A couple of my works were included in the 1967 Young Contemporaries show at the Tate. I showed a slide last night of Yoko at the Tate standing next to the piece named after her, Just for Yoko: She Knows. It was a boxlike archway you could bend down and go under, and when you came up on the other side there was this box form hung on the wall like a painting. The back side of the archway was luminescent industrial orange, so it was quite an experience to bend over, pass through, and rise up in a space bathed in colour. Yoko had given me a copy of her book Grapefruit, in which she wrote about how entering a Japanese teahouse required humility, because you had to bow down to pass through the low doorway. She said it would be good if all the politicians in the world had to pass through the door of a teahouse and be humble before talking. A bit of serendipity, her giving me that book while I was working on that piece.

Yoko’s husband at that time, Tony Cox, saw what I was doing and told me I should go to the US and see the work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, and that Yale would be a good place to do it—they visited the school regularly. So, I followed his advice and got accepted. I wrote dozens of letters of application to try to get the funds to get to the US, and finally I got a scholarship.

The Sculpture Department at Yale was small but vital. Within a month, I was getting drunk with Judd in his loft in New York, and that went on for about two years. Judd was incredibly generous and very interested in young artists. Robert Morris was another one. We tried to get him as the new Head of Sculpture. Each week, another now famous artist would visit, the likes of Christo and Lucas Samaras. Through these visitors, we were drawn into the New York art milieu—New York was only two hours from New Haven. Most weekends were spent in Manhattan, gallery hopping, schmoozing, or catching the latest Warhol movie as it rolled out of the Factory.

While I was at Yale, I found another fabricating job, one which actually paid good money, working for Naum Gabo. Gabo liked the fact I was Cornish. He used to talk about travelling across Europe with his cardboard-kitset version of Head in a suitcase. At his place in Connecticut, I helped fabricate a huge version, which he presented to the people of Denmark in appreciation of their helping him during his flight as a refugee during the War. The notion of Head in a cardboard suitcase, flatly constructed, easily put together and taken apart, has stuck in my mind ever since as a masterpiece of practicality and invention.
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You first met Jim Allen in New Haven, when he was on his sabbatical.
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The New Zealand graphic designer Graham Percy, who I was with at the Royal College and on the boat to New York, put Jim on to me. Jim was staying at the YMCA and I casually, politely suggested, ‘Stay with us, but we’ve only got a sofa’, and he said, ‘I’ll take it’. So we had Jim over for four or five days taking notes, and he got to meet various luminaries of that time, like Sheldon Nodelman, who was an influential young art writer who brought a phenomenological perspective to bear on abstract painting.
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And then, Jim invited you over to be a visiting lecturer at Elam.
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By the time I got the call I was lecturing at UCLA. I had come in as a lecturer in the design school. The teaching situation was impossible—I had hundreds of students. I attempted to make sense of it for myself and the students by instituting group projects which were synergistic, involving the available resources of the university—anechoic chambers in Physics, the film library—and the physical resources of LA itself, including the telephone system. I remember a laundrette event involving chocolate ice cream and blueberry pie, testing various washing powders. We did a magazine on the Gestetner. We did a James Dean performance event at Griffith Park Observatory.
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There was a lot of unrest at UCLA.
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Yeah, the Black Panthers had become increasingly militarised, and shoot-outs, assassinations, and legitimised murder had become normal. The atmosphere was pregnant with fear, anger, and, indeed, loathing. The LA Tac Squad had rioted across the UCLA campus after academics and students struck over the events at Kent State University, where four students had been killed by the National Guard. The board had tried to suppress the unrest by sacking 160 lecturers under thirty, but, after they fired me, they hired me back. In 1969, Ronald Reagan was Chair of the Board of Regents at the University of California. He was a figure of seemingly universal derision. No one could foresee his presidential future. We left LA on New Year’s Eve.
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New Zealand must have been very different after that.
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After LA, it was a profound relief to be in New Zealand. I could touch reality. I could get to a beach with ease—Takapuna beach was minutes away—not like in LA where such excursions had to be planned, navigated across miles of freeway. Returning home from the studio at night, I could stroll and wonder. Tidal phenomena, the jetsam, and the marks of ages became simple evidence to dwell upon.
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Is that where Low Tide came from?
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Yeah. That reality imported into the gallery. Low Tide was a seven-by-seven field of concrete-foundation piles, painted with green resin up to their notches. Six rows filled the alcove, while one row ‘seeped’ through the dividing wall. The resin was very painterly—it was a joke about painting. It was like dank, gravity-stricken seaweed. Foundations of existence and art-history and my memories of crab-scrabbling as a sodden child … I wanted the work to draw on the memory banks of the viewer-participant, to create a sense of rightness. The installation was specific to the space. ‘Site-specific’ was an unknown term then, as was ‘installation’—but they weren’t unknown ideas. It had to be done differently at the New Gallery. It was a bigger space, and there was nothing like an alcove to contain the grid, so I did something different, running the grid at an angle through two rooms, again seeping through a wall. This time a nine-by-nine grid. It was almost identical to the first notional scribbles I drew on the plan when Wystan introduced the idea to me in Sydney.
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So, how did the show at Barry Lett come about?
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As soon as I had arrived, Jim said I needed to meet Rodney Kirk Smith at Barry Lett Gallery, and that I was having this show there—in four months time!
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The show really comes out of the blue. There was nothing like it in New Zealand before. It was so complete a statement that it must have been the result of a substantial build-up.
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Absolutely, the Lett show was a crystallisation of probably ten years of work. I’d been doing loose stuff with AMM in London, and that was in that box, and then there was another box with stuff that was rigorous and geometric, the sculpture. But with the Lett show, I dispensed with all those divisions. It was the first time I really kicked out the walls of the boxes of the way. Before that I’d always had that New York sense of propriety in my work, the well-maintained oeuvre. You couldn’t play too much. It had to be clear, tidy, sequential. Getting better at less and less. You only have to compare the career of my friend Fred Sandback, who maintained that kind of Morandi consistency over thirty-odd years, to my career, with its leaps, jumps, and backtracks.
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You mentioned Sandback, a fellow student at Yale. A couple of works in the Lett show used string to demark the space—string and plumb bobs.
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There were two pieces. One, with a string line across the space from side to side. It had plumb bobs at either end, one at eye height, the other at hand height. The other string went from the back to the front of the space, from inside to outside. Inside, it finished with plumb bob hovering over a concrete disk. And, if you followed the string back, all the way along down the stairs and out of the gallery, it was tied to a big bolt set in lead on the pavement. The energies were earthed, but it was a bogus earthing. And the string bounced around the gallery and delineated the space. The plumb bobs were like absolutes, absolute truths that other recognitions could be read against. I suppose the difference between my strings and Sandback’s was that his were elegant and art, and mine were straight off the building site.
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Several works looked like minimalism and yet they had associational aspects, which are not supposed to be there in minimalism. Low Tide is like a landscape piece. And there’s Life Size. How did that one work?
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There were two stacks of bricks under pressure, contained by steel bars at either side to stop them bowing out, with a cable that ran around the outside and underneath. The whole thing was held in place by the tension generated by its own weight—compressed energy. My height, my width. Pillar was a companion piece, a giant paperweight, two stacks of bricks suspended in resin, with spaces between the bricks where the cement might have been. Bricks in aspic. They said it was impossible. I made a kind of giant fish tank to cast it in. There was a nice contrast: in Life Size, the bricks were hanging and potentially explosive; in Pillar, they were floating and encased.
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Pillar is like Low Tide, except the tide has risen again.
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That was absolutely it, because that was the process: pour an inch of resin a day and hope it would stop smelling in time for the show. There was a lot of smell in the show when it opened.
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Some of the works referred to your life quite directly, Cheque Piece—hundreds of your cheques pinned to the wall in a grid—pointedly so. It’s autobiographical.
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It was cheques tracing two years of my life in New Haven, every cheque written, all in sequence. At the time, US banks would return your cheques with your statement at the end of the month. I’d opened the account in New Haven with a change of visa and a payment to the immigration board. Then, there are cheques for the rent, for the occasional substance, donations to the Black Panther party, lots of liquor stores. The last cheque was for a trucking company to take my stuff to LA, and then the account was closed. Everything, all life is there.
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Is there a story behind Moominmamma Dead and Gone?
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This is a difficult one. One day, I was in the studio. It was just before the Lett show. There was a knock on the door and in came a friend. It was the day after his wife had committed suicide and he sat down with me and we shared a beer. He was devastated. It was a very awkward occasion, as you might imagine. And I found myself looking at the mess on the floor. That chaos was indicative of what my friend had brought in, and I found it true and moving, and to make the work I simply moved all that stuff onto a metal plinth. In the show, there was so much stuff that was ordered and structured and at times authoritative, and it became essential that I put this work in also to demonstrate the randomness of experience. It was dangerous, because there were bare live electric wires on a metal platform. Moominmamma was a matriarchal comic-strip character of immense stupidity.
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The materials you used brought a wider range of content than you’d typically get with ‘the specific object’, the minimalist object. The concrete piles, the line and plumb bobs, the bricks … they come from your experience working on building sites.
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Yeah, one of the best examples of that in the show was Silent Wall. It was a hollow, stud wall, clad with four standard eight-by-four foot sheets of gib, with one stroke of a caulking gun on each side, cleaned up by one stroke of a palette knife. They looked like Barnett Newman stripes. It was called Silent Wall because the hollow was filled with foam. Sculptures like this were absolutely related to the everyday world. My work may have been involved in ideas about transcendence and personal development, but I made the decision back at Yale that it was not about virtuoso performance in any way. It was not about the sublime. It referred to working and to working-class life. I’ve always been able to make a living with my hands, at that time very much with my hands. I’ve always carried the sense of poetry that my father had when he was wiring a house, his nagging sense of precision in arranging screws at that angle, running electrical wiring this way, holding the hammer properly, and letting the tools work for you. The poetry of the artisan provided a resonance and a matrix more valuable than virtuoso performance. I’ve always been very particular about the qualities of the material. Things are put together quite obsessively. My neuroses won’t permit ragged edges that aren’t considered.
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The show was funny. Pyramid particularly.
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I used eight-by-four boards again. I liked the way they were standard. They originally made them that size because that was the size of the early railroad boxcars they moved them in. As a builder I was used to moving them. They seemed related to the body. And I had a minor epiphany when I realised I could cut the sheets diagonally and reassemble the pieces to create a pyramid exactly my height. Pyramid had light bulbs running down its edges on a dimmer hooked to a timer. Over 24 hours the bulbs slowly brightened up, then dimmed away. Full brightness was synced up with high noon over Cheops. It was a little joke about the pyramid cosmologies of the day. I had in the back of my mind a cartoon from the Yale School of Art and Architecture journal Perspecta which showed the Great Pyramid and someone talking to the Pharaoh: ‘This is all very well Ramases, but let’s plug it in and see if it works’. It had its serious side too. You couldn’t see the lights change. It was so slow. But as you walked around the show and looked at the other things, you could feel something happening. It provided significant if barely perceptible experiential change in the space, but you couldn’t put you finger on it. Of course, Pyramid was only fully lit when the gallery was shut. I think humour is another signature you can use: the tragic, the foreboding, and the humorous. We all cry, we all laugh—I told you I was a soppy humanist. But the Barry Lett show was the first time I had consciously employed humour.
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The Lett show broke a lot of new ground. Reviews were good. Tony Green and Hamish Keith were positive. Even T.J. McNamara took the show seriously. How did people generally respond?
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With some uneasy bewilderment, I felt. Someone said, ‘This is all very well Adrian, and very interesting, but how is anyone supposed to buy it?’ Within the art community, some artists were very interested, for instance Gretchen Albrecht and Jamie Ross. Gretchen swapped one of her works for one of mine. I suppose the thing which exemplified much of the response and that irritated me was that the humour—particularly the way the opening was presented as an event—seemed to prevent serious attention being given to the individual works. Some people were also offended by the art swipes.
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Art swipes?
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There were art jokes. Slab was a painting joke. I made a glass mould on the floor. I poured in a whole bunch of resin, plopped a foam mattress in, let it all set, and then pulled it all out of the mould. It produced this fractured, painterly, crisp surface with a very raw edge. Slab hung from chains set into the resin. I was playing with how painters were letting the dribbles show on the edges of their canvases as a convention.
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The Lett show involved works that operated in a range of registers, with relays of associations running between them. And not just the works, but everything that went with them: the catalogue, the title of the show, the ritual of the opening, the hanging devices. That was new here: the exhibition as a medium.
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During the opening, toast was served and homemade fruit wine. Maree Horner and her friend Jane were dressed in serving-maid outfits with T-shirts with PCIFCo across the front. And they greeted people as they came in and gave them PCIFCo badges, so every individual was made part of the conspiracy.
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It was a riposte to authority.
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Irritation with bureaucracy, the controlling things in all our lives—bogus authority. The little catalogue pamphlet was printed on forgery-proof, chemically imprinted, cheque paper. It included an entry ticket and a copy of a silly, pompous reference that had been given to me by that provincial West Country art school. My California driver’s license was reproduced on the cover, as if the catalogue were a certificate of authenticity, and the show title included my middle name, as if it were a legal document. Everything was underlined six times to say this is absolutely official. It was the spoofery of a certificate of authenticity upon a certificate of authenticity upon a rubber stamp of a signature. And probably, this was a response to the high art of New York, which I had already decided was very tight and provincial and hermetic, and at odds with my desire to make the art process an engagement with real life and real human beings.
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The Lett show had a hand in introducing Marcel Duchamp into New Zealand art. Certainly, a number of the Sculpture students picked up on him subsequently.
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Of course. I’d been to the big Duchamp show at the Tate, the one organised by Richard Hamilton and with his reconstruction of The Large Glass. I’d also run into Hamilton during a tour of that show. The depth of cryptography in Duchamp, the layering, really interested me. And in LA, I’d purchased a copy of the big facsimile edition of the notes to The Large Glass and I brought it with me to New Zealand and lent it around. I lent people books on Wittgenstein too.
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What were your impressions of the school?
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I have to admit I was fairly arrogant when I arrived. New Zealand was the bottom of the world. But when I arrived, it was a revelation. I was given carte blanche by Jim. I was given a studio and I went to look for students. The first people I got into conversation with were Maree Horner, Angela Day, and Malcolm Ross. Malcolm was actually holed up in his studio in a separate building, and I was taken to meet him, and we had this fragmented exchange over a couple of years. It soon became clear that I had nothing to feel complacent about, being nibbled at and challenged as I was. People were interested, they were also smart. It was a community of committed individuals. Trust came into it. Jim took upon himself the role of facilitator, allowing us to be as preposterous and silly as we wanted. He was in the office phoning the air force to get Phil Dadson flown to Fiji to meet Indian drummers, and he was harassing Fletchers for support for the Bledisloe Place project. I was some kind of catalyst, and I recognised at the time that this was my role. There was this flat bureaucratic system and we just got on with the business. Being there set in my mind an idea of the art school as a place where artists at different levels of experience enjoy a free exchange of ideas and information. It was a very special couple of years.