Barry Flanagan, the bronze hare guy, has enjoyed a revival since his death in 2009. His hares have even materialised at Frieze art fair in London, dancing among the trees in Regent’s Park. These rustic images of beastly freedom suit our mood of ecological guilt. Or so I thought, until I decided to take a closer look at them – only to discover what a bizarre, obsessive and private artist Flanagan was.
One of his hare sculptures can be funny and memorable. A gallery full of them is quite alarming. His greatest strength as an animal artist is that he doesn’t anthropomorphise. There’s nothing human about his agile creatures, even when they tower on hind legs. The longer you look into their bulging blobs of eyes – or sometimes a hole where one should be – the less you discern a recognisable mind. They’re comic yet sinister, animated by a force that may be malign. The colossal sculpture at the start of the show depicts one melancholy hare sitting pensively in a garden grotto while three more of the varmints cavort in a crazy jig above it. If the sad thinker is an image of sensitivity, it is mocked by the braying dancers.
Other hares gather in enigmatic conversation, like devil-worshipping villagers. There’s a whiff of The Wicker Man here. In this classic British film, policeman Edward Woodward has a missing girl’s coffin opened up, only to find the body of a hare. The pagan inhabitants of Summerisle say it’s “a beautiful transformation”. Flanagan’s hares too are idolatrous and bewitched.
But not, unfortunately, all that bewitching. The folk-rock fun wears thin – more Lindisfarne than the Incredible String Band. I would like to see a Flanagan in a pub garden on a summer’s day in Somerset. Just one. Instead, this show offers a showroom crowded with hares doing unlikely stuff. One struts atop a broken computer, another balances on cricket wickets, while others spring from anvils that symbolise how Flanagan made them at London’s AB Fine Art Foundry.
This show wants to turn our attention to Flanagan’s fascination with the process of casting, but anyone can enjoy the process of making art and still produce rubbish. It’s the results that determine how interested we are in the making. And as much as I want to be charmed by Flanagan’s results, they curdle. The repetition becomes ... repetitive. Why on earth did this artist dedicate himself to hares for three decades – from 1979 until his death?
Before that, as an exhibition at Tate Britain revealed a few years ago, Flanagan was a daring conceptual artist. His 1969 work A Hole in the Sea remains a haunting masterpiece of ocean art – a mind-boggling idea that stretches belief. From making a hole in the sea, he seems to have ended up staring into a creative abyss. To produce conceptual art was to believe art has a radical purpose. His hares are utter cynics by comparison. They’re Thatcherite animals that leapt into prominence in the 1980s and Flanagan retreated into his forge to produce variations on the cold, even evil cartoon character he’d come up with.
Art does not have to be well made. It does not have to be the product of some wondrous process. It just needs to feel like it matters. Flanagan’s hares don’t matter at all and we should let them skip off into the sunset.
•Barry Flanagan: Alchemy of the Theatre is at Waddington Custot, London, until 18 April.
