A conversation with my friend Barry Flanagan could be a baffling affair. Stiffly whispering one minute, barking jokes the next, he delighted in wordplay and biographical confidences easily lost on the listener.
Sometimes in mid-flow, the sculptor paused. Then he leant forward and sniffed the air, with his chiselled features and unruly greying hair, the image of the animal he had made his trademark – the hare.
In 1979, inspired by one of these creatures glimpsed on the Sussex Downs, he bought a dead one from a local butcher and modelled it at his East End foundry. His leaping hare was instantly iconic. Bordeaux wine producers and Japanese hoteliers queued up to buy one. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. Showered with fame and money, he was a trailblazer for commercially canny artist-stars such as Hirst and Emin.
Yet the mercurial hare, also a motif in the work of such key influences as Miró and Joseph Beuys, had pedigree in the out-there territory that Flanagan first explored in the 1960s and 70s when he was an adventurer on the furthest shores of conceptual art. But far from being a departure, the hare was an integral feature on the journey Flanagan first set out on.
Born in Prestatyn, north Wales, in 1941, Flanagan resolved at the outset of his career to embrace every direction, and poetry not sculpture was his first track. In 1964-65, with others at St Martin's art college, he produced the magazine Silâns. His writings display a gift as formidable as that he applied to stone and marble: prose and concrete poetry full of subversive, offbeat humour. Such poetry spilled over into his sculpture, inspiring titles such as aaing j gni aa.
As a sculptor, Flanagan rejected the stark metal structures of "girder-welders" like his tutor Antony Caro and reverently stuck with non-traditional materials like rope and sand. He flirted with Land Art and Arte Povera. He made and filmed a hole in the sea off the Dutch coast. He worked with Yoko Ono. With some students at St Martin's and John Latham, their tutor, he took a chunk of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture and chewed it for a work called Still and Chew. Greenberg, an American critic, also advocated Caro's formalist school. Flanagan and his contemporaries recoiled, preferring a less shackled approach. When the college library wanted the book back, Latham returned the detritus distilled in a vial and was summarily sacked.
Family was paramount, and Flanagan brought up two daughters in Camden Town. He did casual labouring to supplement art's meagre returns, but he disliked the way "money punishes art" and resorted to making his own lino-printed currency. These Flanagan notes were issued in fives, tens and fifties and were redeemable against his estate. He used them to pay for labour and materials. Yet when real money came, he believed in unburdening himself of it as fast as possible. In 1971, he distributed the payment he received from the organisers of Art Spectrum London for his involvement in the new 50p decimal pieces at the show's opening at Alexandra Palace. A decade or so on, when the amounts he received were much larger, he continued to display mind-boggling generosity, passing on his prize money to a struggling young French sculptor, for example, or sponsoring a young woman after casually hearing her complain to her mother that she lacked the funds to do a teacher training course. For Flanagan, flow was the important thing, with money as much as anything else.
