The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Saturday September 20 2003
In the article below, we said that Jonathan Miller's production of Der Rosenkavalier was revived at Covent Garden this spring, when it was, in fact, staged by ENO at the Coliseum between February 28 and April 6.
"I love getting stripped to my waist," says Jonathan Miller. "I love putting on a visor and letting the sparks fly with a great big welding torch. Then going off for a big rough breakfast with a handyman. It's undeniably a macho thing." Is it hard to weld? "No. The guy who taught me said: 'If you can light a cigarette without setting yourself on fire, you can weld.' I," says Miller, with a touch of pride, "can weld."
Of all Miller's incarnations - satirical young Turk in Beyond the Fringe, critically panned theatre director, critically panned opera director, endlessly revived opera director, critically re-evaluated theatre director, unwilling though knighted national treasure, winning defender of anglophone analytical philosophy, writer, doctor, photographer, painter, TV presenter and director, bloke who rolls his eyes when called a polymath and shakes his head when called a renaissance man - this latest, the rugged 69-year-old welder getting sunburned for his art, is the most unlikely.
And yet, when he's got the afternoon off from directing operas in Santa Fe or putting Christopher Plummer through his paces as King Lear in Ontario, this is precisely where Jonathan Miller's creative juices have been flowing for the past four years. He'll nip off to a scrapyard, return with a rusting haul of intriguing bits of metal, and then spend hours welding RSJs to other bits until the results please him. And soon, with a bit of luck, they will be pleasing other people: because they are to go on show in London. "That's a possibility," says Miller. "Though the greater possibility is that I'll get a mauling from the press. As usual."
Miller learned to weld while staying at the adobe Californian desert home of art dealers Claire and Eugene Thaw, a place fringed with sage brush and mesquite. It was these friends' handyman, Jim Johnson, who taught Miller to weld. It has become an unlikely passion.
He's not yet read Don DeLillo's novel, Underworld, with its storyline about an artist in the desert respraying rusting old B-52 aircraft as a post-cold war conceptual-art project, though when I tell him about it he looks eager enough to head off to the American desert with a spray can. That said, such an artistic project would would be too freighted with clunking symbolism for Miller's taste. His art, and that is what he calls it, is formalist, eschewing any overt symbolism. "I get a satisfaction from the formal play of shapes in all the visual art I've done, be it photographs, collages or sculpture or arranging objets trouvés at home," he explains.
He has had these rusting assemblages shipped back to his north London home, prior to having them exhibited in St John's Wood. As Miller stands in the impromptu sculpture park that is his front garden, he is surrounded by the fruits of his welding. There's a lovely cataclysm of panel beating gone wrong in the long grass, a seeming carburettor with twiddly bits on the other side of the path, and a plaque of artfully arranged metal pieces hanging in the porch. They are all rather beautiful. Do they have names? "This one's called Next One. And so's this." No, they don't have names.
Only a philistine would take these rusting lumps of metal for discarded car parts abandoned by some sociopath and phone the council. But there aren't many philistines round here. His old Beyond the Fringe chum Alan Bennett, who lives opposite, probably casts an appreciative eye over them during his strolls. Critically mauled Martin Amis may dream of hefting them at the man from the TLS. It's not hard to imagine neighbours Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin leaning over the wall and debating which piece bears the greater resemblance to Russian constructivist Kasimir Malevich's collages and which to English sculptor Anthony Caro's butch girder sculptures.
"I know your face," says a passing lady to whom Miller has given directions to Primrose Hill. "That's nice," he says, looking away and returning to the sculptures. Is his artistic quest for some kind of significant form? "I don't really hold with that Roger Fry bollocks," he says, not unpleasantly. But does he have some sort of goal when he puts these things together? How does he know when he's finished? "Quite simply when the results please me, and it would be hard to say when that happens." But he's a formalist artist. "Oh yes, I have a modernist sensibility in this."
As he talks, we walk into the house, the same graceful Victorian pile near Regent's Park that he bought in the early 60s for £8,000, with a mortgage offered on the basis of reviews he had received for Beyond the Fringe. There are more rusting assemblages in the hall. Someone's going to bruise themselves a treat in that hall before long. Bubble-wrapped, framed collages, also destined for exhibition, are propped up all over the place.
Lining the stairs are framed architectural drawings, including one done for Napoleon, that Miller claims are influential on his current work. "They're all unconscious influences, of course - as are Morandi, Schwitters, Italian futurists, the Russian constructivists, and lots of others artists I admire." Isn't that Freudian? "Oh no, it's the opposite of Freud," says Miller imperiously as he rounds the landing on the way to his studio. "These influences aren't repressed; rather, there isn't enough space on my hard drive to keep all the influences there, so I forget them. I've just been reading a biography of Coleridge, how the poet forgot what he had read but how these influences cropped up in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. But the writer found Coleridge's library records so that he could reconstruct these influences even though Coleridge had forgotten."
Something similar happens with Miller's work, and he loves reflecting on that role of forgetting in creation. He works on sculptures or collages with no thought as to which progenitors are influencing him, and then, when they're finished, he will see how they are influenced by his favourite artists or architectural draughtsmen. There's a box of bottles in his study, for instance, which Miller only realised owed a debt to Giorgio Morandi's etchings when it was done. "It's a 3D Morandi, I now see. I didn't know that while I was making it."
Most of the stuff Miller uses in his art is rubbish. He shows me a 40-year-old boxed assemblage featuring corks and a scrubbing brush without bristles. Four years ago, he produced a book of his photographs - ripped posters, stained walls, appealingly draped tarpaulins. He wanted to call it Absolute Rubbish. The publishers wouldn't let him, so he called it Nowhere in Particular instead.
"I'm interested in the overlooked and the negligible. That's where some of the most interesting breakthroughs in art and science come from. Until Freud, nobody thought about the significance of slips of the tongue. And now we think: how stupid not to have thought of that before. I make no grand claims for my work, but it seems to me to come from a similar noticing of the negligible.
"For 40 years I've been taking photographs with a cheap automatic camera, often of ripped-up posters. Sometimes, I whip out a Stanley knife and cut up posters from walls to make collages from later. I'll put them in plastic bags and hope I don't get too closely questioned at customs. I'm Jack the Stripper.
"One day, I was in Florence trimming a poster, and policeman came up to me: 'Che fai?' [What are you up to?] he asked. 'E arte!' [It's art] I replied, and he nodded and wandered off. I've always loved fragmented typography." The police round here probably wouldn't have deferred to such an artistic project so readily. "Probably not."
Sadly, Miller's appropriations of the negligible, his resuscitations of the abandoned and his recycling of decaying rubbish have so far been neglected. "The book Nowhere in Particular fell stillborn from the press. Nobody was interested," he says. His exhibitions of collages in 1991 was scarcely reviewed. What will be the critical fate of his looming exhibition? "I suspect Brian Sewell [the London Evening Standard's art critic] is hardly likely to go to such a remote place as St John's Wood. I don't have any great hopes of being reviewed for this. But then I do tend to get mauled in the press. I've said it many times that when I first directed operas I was regarded as a vandal, and now I'm seen as a fossil."
Miller now complains that he finds it hard to get work in British theatre or opera. "I got knighted last year, which was a mixed blessing. It was 'Take this and shut up'. I can't get work from the RSC, the National or ENO. Yet when my productions are revived - my Mikado is in its 18th year and is very popular - they get reviewed as classics." And there is some justice to his complaint: when, for instance, his production of Der Rosenkavalier was revived at Covent Garden in the spring, this originally derided production got a five-star review in the Guardian and was elsewhere hailed for being suggestively set at the time of its writing - just on the lip of the abyss of the first world war.
Is his metalwork a replacement for the theatre and operas he should have been directing here? "No, it's not that simple. And in any case I get work elsewhere. I'm off to Florence next week, after I've finished work on a TV series about atheism, to direct a revival of my production of Figaro. Later I'm directing Lear at the Lincoln Centre in New York. The metalwork is just something new for me, another interest. I am always filled with enthusiasms for new projects, like a little boy being asked to come out to play. It's hard to say no or not to yield to new projects."
In Miller's kitchen, there are some prints by his son Tom, a photographer, that seem to share the same formalist predilections as those of his father. What does Tom say about his work? Miller shrugs in imitation of Tom's response: "'S'all right, I suppose.' But," he adds fondly, "what is a son to say about his father's work?"
Good question. Miller is enthusiastic about his own father's art, some of which is displayed in another room. His dad was the founder of child psychiatry in Britain, and also produced likenesses of some of his patients. There's a red chalk drawing from 1921 of a patient undergoing hypnosis, and a bust of another patient who suffered wartime trauma.
"When I get called an intellectual or a renaissance man or a polymath I think about how my parents would have been embarrassed to be called such vulgar things. they were middle-class, cultivated people - my mother was a very good novelist - to whom knowing about books and art and speaking languages was normal, as well as taking an interest in science and philosophy. They were just educated people who had a lot of interests. It's normal. And so it is for me. I'm just normally sophisticated, like my dear old dad and my long-dead mother, but I'm increasingly ashamed of the vulgarity around me."
· Jonathan Miller's metal constructions and paper collages go on show at the Boundary Gallery, 98 Boundary Road, London NW8 on September 26. Tel: 020-7624 1126.
