TOUR AND COMMENTARY BY MAX COUPER OF TWO OF THE COUPER ART COLLECTION BARGES 1998

THE CHART BARGE

I tend to work in two different sorts of ways:-

1. I travel with the barges, or the tugboat, or combined, and work a lot overseas. The barges themselves are also vehicles for going and making artworks. I tend to make specific pieces in different cities.

2. The charts that you can see here are very much a different process altogether. They are things that over the years I have made in the winter. They are imaginary travels – fictional charts.

For example these three pieces were made in the River Crouch, which is the first river north of the River Thames. They were made at anchor, during a month, quite a few years ago. They tend to start from a very bleak, almost spontaneous viewpoint. This one was very much a reaction to the habitat up there. When you’re travelling by boat you’re surrounded by shoals and banks and eddies. So you are reliant very much on the charts. These were all generally made in a day. I tend to start in the morning, for example this one, the first process here was to use a broom to put the wash across, in the morning. Then after lunch the pigment went on and then I sprayed the various colours over the top.

This piece is much more related to South America, where I was travelling back in 1976.

Q. Process of making the charts.

This is the kit that I have used for the making of all the charts. The wash behind these is a watercolour wash base. Then I use dry pigments a lot. These are put on with various tools; sieves, blown on and then hoovered up, etc. I also use car spray paints because they are very quick to use.

Q. Process is very interesting for teachers, encouraging children to be more experimental.

Q. I love your story Max about this marvellous cog and how it fitted into the making of the charts.

This piece started when I was at anchor and was thinking about the Naska Desert that I had been in. Then somebody came onboard with a radio, I hadn’t listened to the radio for about a month. I had literally decided to cut myself off and move in circles round the anchor down the east coast. Something I like to do every 10 years! So on the radio I heard a story about the tanks in Kuwait rolling across the desert at that time, so the piece slightly changed its whole direction. They are very loose pieces, they are thing s I tend to have a lot of fun with really. Although they do tend to pull together a lot of the elements of my life; geography, travel.

The curious thing on the Continent, in the museum shows, was the way the public responded to them. A lot of people were very drawn into them and this was a very curious thing for me. It said a lot about the sort of suspicions that a lot of people have about art. That if you give them a single handle, the idea of a fictional chart is a very simple one, in other words, make up your own plot. That invitation to ‘make up your own plot’ is very much that way that I would teach on an art course. Often when you are taught you have got to learn somebody else’s plot, whereas, really what you should be learning is how to make your own plot through artwork, in general.

Q. Tell us about this wonderful table?

The table came later, it was actually made to go with the chart. This piece came out of one evening when I was sitting on the deck of the ship with about a dozen friends having a party at midnight. Someone pointed out that opposite us on the Crouch, there is a straight sea wall, which is about ten miles long, and that if you just put your head up gently and bring your eyes down, you could see the curvature of the earth. You are very rarely at that sort of vantage point because the earth is dropping off at about four or five feet per mile. The reason that you need to look down and try to imagine it is because automatically your eyes try to correct it, and thinks it straight, but there was a clear curve there. What I found interesting was the idea of actually being able to sense you were standing on something that was spherical. That everything else is dropping away from you. We know that, it is one of the first things that we are told as a child, but to actually sense that is a totally different thing. It made me start to think a lot about the way that we are actually on our own point, as the ship was, literally. The two co-ordinates of that point, for each of us, is a point in space and a point in time. It is the same for every animal. Those are our twin co-ordinates. I have become very interested in the idea of tracking, and that we are perpetually tracking things in our own lives and around us, and that we are the accident of where paths cross usually, even in our thinking. I then made the table to go with the Stella Chart. This bizarre thing happened, once I had made it, because this edge here was ground off and when I came in, in the morning all the metal filings had somehow attracted themselves to that point. It was as if there was some kind of alchemy at work that I didn’t understand.

The piece really in a way was about some sort of fictional concentration of energies, you know everything sort of comes down to that point, and that it had actually happened was a very bizarre twist on the whole piece.

This here is a collection of drawings and models and montages that I have either completed or am in the process of working on. For example, this project for Hanover started with this sketch here. I tend to start with a doodle, just some absurd idea, most of which get junked. A few of them tend to stay. Then there is the process, which begins by convincing myself that I am serious about it. Then I go a stage further to finding a site and looking at montages. Then the next stage is convincing someone else that I am serious about it. This model was made for the Mayor of Hanover, for the project, which he kept on his desk. Which resulted for that artwork for the museum in Hanover. You can see the whole process here from the throwaway sketch to completion, which took about six years.

The Paris project is a much longer time-span project. I have been working already for about seven years on this and it will probably be another seven years before I make it.

This project here is a commission from a museum in Copenhagen, The Museum of Modern Art. Which again, is at least ten years away from completion. Sometimes I like to keep things back. I like things that either happen quite spontaneously – you just do them. This year we have so many projects happening on the Thames, it’s nice to have things on the back burner.

THE STUDIO BARGE

There are more charts in here.

This piece I normally let people work out for themselves what it does or could do. I made it.

I prefer to keep it as a puzzle, because it is functional. There is no title – intentionally. It is dedicated to Buckminster Fuller.

It’s a multi-variable piece, it is multi-functional. It is not a static piece. It can move, it can open, it can be used for lots of different things.

There are lots of possibilities. It’s good to keep one or two things that you refuse to tell.

These are various charts:-

‘Scale One to Infinity.’ A more recent ‘Stellar’ chart.

This is part of a virtual land chart entitled ‘Search for Petroleum.’ I have had a long fascination with the mechanisms of petroleum companies. I have had many a little row with them along the river because of their tankers smashing the barges up.

This is part of a series (can’t be opened up fully), of works that open and close. This one is called ‘Split Track’ which is basically a steel track set into plaster. The biggest challenge of the building of this was the engineering of it because it is very heavy.

Engineering it in such a way that you could open and close it because it is so very heavy. The way it works is that the weights enable it to be lifted but then if you let it down it could smash down without the weights. So the weights work both ways.

I make the pieces in here.

This is another piece that is much more archaeological. This piece has been making itself for about ten years. Inside this there are a number of heavy objects that are buried in plaster. Most of them are close to the surface and they slowly rust through. There is a big chain in this one and other objects. Possibly in about another ten years more will come through. The ambient atmosphere seems to keep the process going. There are objects such as a pulley wheel assembly inside.

One of the things that being in the water is good for, which I think art is good for generally, is this coming back to the sense of material. Unlike the computer generated stuff of these days. It is good to see and understand what metal, water and magnetism can do.

This piece is the central piece, or has become the central piece of my life, by accident. This was made finally in Düsseldorf, Germany, where I balanced a barge. The piece is called ‘The Fulcrum’. It is about the point of fulcrum. The barge sat on top of the fulcrum, which was a very large spring from Fulham Power Station. One of which the main turbine used to sit on. The action of the public inside, walking either way, tilted the whole piece. What happened, by accident, was that this piece was so much trouble to make and it caused a huge political row in Germany. It caused tension between the British Ambassador, who helped bring the project over, and the German authorities who didn’t know what to do with it. Firstly they commissioned the project but when it arrived they decided that it wouldn’t pass their health and safety regulations. They thought that everybody who went inside was going to get killed. That’s what happened in Duisburg. We ended up in this row where the City and the Museum were being basically booted around by the Corporation in the harbour who were supposed to put it together but were finding every reason not to. It became a conflict between the Corporation, the Museum and the People who were trying to make it. The complete accident that happened, it just occurred to me, that came out of the making of the piece rather than what was put into it, was that the piece itself was a perfect metaphor for the process that was happening. The piece itself is about finding a balance between conflicting forces. The way that you can shift the balance by everybody going in the same direction, or not. This became a very political piece, which I ended up using in an exhibition at the European Parliament. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of lectures. This has become a whole political process, which I am now turning into a United Nations project.

I guess that one of the good things about being an artist is that no one can tell you what you should be doing, you can change direction when you like and take clues from anything and everything.

What has become apparent to me over the past fifteen odd years is that art is what the hell happens to you. If you sit in the valley and there’s a beautiful view, then that’s what you paint. If you suddenly get politics and business and all of these things attempting to play with your work, then it inevitably becomes part of your work. I think Christo found the same thing. The political process of making the pieces is as much part of the work as the pieces themselves.

This piece is called ‘Shutter’. This is part of a large series of works. I kept this one because it has a personal ring to it because the Container is the object which has made my entire life possible. It was the invention of the container, this system of putting everything in boxes, that created the entire redundancy of everything on this river.

When containerisation came along in the 1970’s no one needed barges or tugs or wharf’s. Basically the container ships are too big to come up the Thames and stick to the coast. So, thank you very much containers.