The 16-minute silent film — partly black and white, partly colour — was shot in Flanagan’s studio in Vauxhall, South London. It opens with Collin close-up, putting on a t-shirt before taking 900 lbs (approx. 400 kgs) of sand in hessian sacks up a flight of stairs. There he pours all the sand from the sacks into a larger shaped canvas bag placed flat in the middle of a wooden floor: it becomes one of Flanagan’s 'casb' (canvas sandbag) sculptures - works he had been making since 1967 — bulging and vaguely biomorphic.
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Barry Flanagan. the works
Barry Flanagan. the works took place on Friday 11 October at House of Annetta.
British artist Barry Flanagan (1941 - 2009) made a film in 1969 that until last year had been lost for decades. Entitled the works, it features someone who Flanagan names as Collin making sculptures with 'some bags and some sand', as directed by Flanagan. Barry Flanagan. the works is a revisiting of what we see in the film, a durational performance by Assemble, the Turner Prize-winning multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art.
Barry Flanagan, the works, (1969), 16mm film, 15mins. 53 seconds. Courtesy of The Estate of Barry Flanagan
"lost for decades"
Collin goes back downstairs and with a hand brace drill makes a hole in the ceiling, into the sandbag sculpture directly above. Sand pours onto the floor below, and so the house is transformed into a kind of hourglass. Flanagan’s camerawork and editing clearly convey his fascination with the nature of the materials he is dealing with, especially the movement of sand through air and the way it accumulates as a mound on landing. 'the works', plural, is an appropriate title, given the numerous outcomes of this action: the sculptural pieces, the performance and the film. Now, with the involvement of Assemble, it has a new lease of life, not as a copy, but as a re-enactment made in response to different circumstances.
Barry Flanagan, the works, (1969), 16mm film, 15mins. 53 seconds. Courtesy of The Estate of Barry Flanagan
"the house is transformed into a kind of hourglass"
The location of Barry Flanagan. the works is House of Annetta on Princelet Street, Whitechapel, the former home of Annetta Pedretti. Pedretti lived there for almost 40 years until her death in 2018. Built in 1705, this Grade II listed Georgian house is the place where she developed experimental ways of learning and organised community resistance. Her special area of interest was cybernetics, self-regulating systems, and this informed her beekeeping, her publishing, art making, political activism and day-to-day conversation. It could not be a more appropriate venue for this project.
In conversation with Melvin Bragg (South Bank Show, January 1983), Flanagan explained that, as a young man, he 'had worked as a labourer and the manipulation of the physical world is a constituent part of the work of a sculptor. And certain broad basic skills, [such as] shovelling, carrying, lifting etc, constructing scaffolding, laying forms, pouring concrete, shaping a building', fed into his subsequent artistic career. What we see Collin doing exemplifies the artistic propositions of both Barry Flanagan and Assemble.
Barry Flanagan. the works is a collaboration between The Estate of Barry Flanagan, Assemble and Plinth.