I have been working with Martin Richman for the past 15 years as his agent and project manager. Over that time he has realised projects in a variety of locations from the underside of bridges in Hackney to the town centre in Bristol to a Power Station in Birmingham. He has also made interventions in private homes and discrete sculptures that occupy a variety of spaces from whole rooms to the space between two books on a shelf.
Richman has maintained a strong gallery practice exhibiting in London, Brussels, New York and Venice.What unifies his work is his empathetic understanding of how to enhance our experience of the space that we occupy. Even when his pieces are very complex to realise he has a subtle adeptness which gives a sense of exquisite simplicity and rightness to the finished work.
Every project has involved a pioneering, complex, difficult and at sometimes seemingly impossible development and construction period. This has for me been the test of our relationship whereby we always arrive, often via a tortuous route, at these extraordinary magical interventions and sculptures. The politics and physics involved are forgotten and the sheer beauty and power of Martin's work drives us forward to his next project. This web site gives the opportunity to gain an overview of an impressive and varied career and to identify the artist's continued preoccupations and themes.
We grew up a few minutes from the beach in Southsea, which is the seaside resort part of Portsmouth. Amongst other businesses my father had a seasonal sea-front shop that sold film and pharmaceutical requirements for holidaymakers. In the fifties it was still a fairly popular holiday town for people from the Midlands and the North of England. My mother would take us children to the beach regardless of the weather, so swimming in storms was a favourite exhilaration. As we sat on the beach we played with sand and pebbles or gazed out to sea where the Isle of Wight was usually visible across the Solent. How clearly visible the island was became a means of assessing the weather, so veiled in deep mist or cloud wasn't so promising, but neither was crystal clarity. The best omen for good weather was a fine haze softening the focus as though gauze veils had draped themselves across the horizon.
Most English seaside towns partially define themselves with the presence of swags of coloured lamps hanging along the promenade. My memory is of having an early awareness of how lighting helped generate a quality of atmosphere so the promenade with its simple swags of lamps encouraged gentle walks for lovers or families taking in the romance of sea air, whilst at the far end of the sea front was an exuberant and brash fun fair with noise, flashing lights, excessively sweet and savoury smells and edges of danger both from the rattling rides and the older adolescents and drunken sailors who hung around there. I was fascinated; the brothel-creeper clad boys spinning cars on the waltzers, girls squealing with candyfloss flying across gaping mouths, whilst I tried to look cool in ice-blue jeans leaning against the balustrade with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates shaking all over.
Travelling Hopefully
by Jes Fernie
Sometime in the late 1950s: Martin Richman's mother is standing at the kitchen sink washing her whites. The whites turn blue. Is this the new Daz powder she is using? Could the blue in white be that blue? No – the tap water is blue. She calls the plumber, but the plumber is deaf; his wife translates. The plumber finds the inner tube of a blue biro lodged inside the tap. Martin is in the dog house – his curiosity concerning the workings of a rudder are not appreciated by all. Forty years later, in 1997, Martin Richman is invited by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to make an installation with the architect Niall McLaughlin for the gallery overlooking Portland Place in London. Artist and architect cover the floor in a layer of phosphorescent Daz washing powder and place three hundred polycarbonate cloches (little house-type structures) on top of the powder. Each cloche contains an ultra-violet light. The blinds are open for the first time and there isn't an architectural model in sight. The room is transformed from a stuffy, closed, institutional space to one which is open and sensual: the light streams in, nothing exists in the room except the low lying cloches and their snowy bed. Throughout the room there is this hugely odd, liberating smell of washing powder.
This work, called Bloom, is a synthesis of many dimensions informing Richman's work: the articulation of volume through the use of light and colour; a sense of play and experimentation; the construction of dreamy intangible spaces; the blending of the personal into the public; the interruption of the public with the private. But it also foregrounds the collaborative dimension.
Richman evidently enjoys the work he does in collaboration with architects, engineers, fabricators and lighting advisors. His lighting and fabrication work for Tyseley Energy From Waste Facility set him on a track to national acclaim with many resulting commissions, but the most successful collaborative project he has carried out to date is Bloom. Unlike most projects of this kind where an immediate power structure is set up with the selection of an artist by the architect, McLaughlin and Richman were selected concurrently by the curators. The project thus provided them with a rare opportunity to work together on an equal footing. In fact, the two of them formed an alliance ‘against' the perceived archaic machinations of the RIBA. Richman was also liberated by the fact that the process didn't involve a building which needed ‘some art' or art which needed a home – the empty room could be filled in any way he and McLaughlin saw fit.
Since he graduated from St Martin's College of Art in London in 1991, Richman has made a body of work which exists in the public life of the city and the private lives of people's bookshelves and doorways. On many occasions, the work spans the two worlds, allowing the viewer privileged, although often fleeting, glimpses of the private and personal in open public spaces.
Richman lives in London's East End and gets about on a scooter. This direct personal experience of the city infuses his work. He is interested in streetscapes, quiet alleyways, the bits in between buildings, the way people use those bits and how the interior life of buildings seep out on to the streets. Many of his projects are small scale, almost invisible, interventions into street life which go almost unnoticed. Painting and lighting a railway bridge in Bethnal Green is not the act of a great artistic ego - for Richman the important thing is to make a slice of life for a humdrum street which provides passers-by with an opportunity to engage with their city and their thoughts.
Recently, Richman's interest in these ‘transitional' spaces has been realised in a more direct, personal way through his touring exhibition Come to Light. The death of his father in 1999 unearthed childhood memories and a desire to examine the lost world of 1950s Portsmouth. Sitting on the beach, looking out to sea, being drawn in by the sight and sound of the waves, Richman enters the dimension that is so present in the work he makes forty years on. At the end of the promenade there is a fairground which exudes a sense of illicit excitement. The whirligig which forms the centre-piece of the exhibition is a physical manifestation of the intense experience Richman has looking up at blazing lights, feeling the darkness and the people around him, almost losing himself in the frenetic movement and life of the fairground. But after the initial exhilaration, this floor-to-ceiling spinning spiral, studded with bright lights, becomes a monster, potentially uncontrollable and menacing.
Much of this work appears far removed from any political statement, but the escapist current at its core belies a sense that Richman hankers after a better life, where situations are improved and things are fairer. In 1999 Richman was invited to work with Thames Valley Police to make a light installation for Abingdon Police Station. No more direct alliance with the state and authority could be forged. The apparent disjuncture between Richman's almost anarchic beliefs and those of the police force could be considered odd, to say nothing of disingenuous. But this is perhaps where the strength of the project lies: Richman addresses this issue with a tension which is both poignant and blunt. Each window in the façade of the building has been covered with a translucent film in the middle of which a concentric rectangle has been cut. These rectangles provide peepholes for passers-by; the inside workings of a space of considerable public import yet curiously out of bounds, becomes visible to all. A timed internal lighting system consisting of blue and violet fluorescent tubes imbues the building with a sense of movement and warmth. The rigid geometry of a fairly dull modern building becomes a space for contemplation and reflection. But there is only so much you can see through the windows; ultimately the work seems to be saying "reality is more tedious or traumatic than you think – let's go to another place where we are free to dream". Richman has made a series of nine metre translucent beacons for Bristol harbourside, transformed a waste disposal unit into a light sculpture of vast proportions, effected small slits in doorways leading to heavenly corridors, morphed childhood memories into an insane spinning spiral, and turned Abingdon Police Station into a peep show. Among many other things. In all of these works it is light which seduces us and takes us to another place. The poignant thing about light is that while it is physically ‘there' it is not something you can gather and store. Its visual impact and presence can be overwhelming, but you can't put it in a box and take it home. In works such as Lucent this sense of denial is explicit. You sit in front of a wall sculpture which emits finely tuned pink fluorescent light; your focus becomes hazy, you lose yourself in the middle distance, your mind dives into areas unknown, picking up unconscious thoughts, unravelling them, hoarding them, chucking them away. Rather like the oceanic, blissful state that babies enter when drinking milk from a bottle or the look that people get when they are taking a drag from a cigarette, Richman's work provides us with a positive opportunity to enter another realm of thought brought on by a heightened state of awareness.
But there is only so much milk in the bottle and the cigarette has a finite length. An important corollary to the hugely affirmative aspect of Richman's work – making public buildings, spaces and bridges shine – is the sadness which comes with the experience of looking deeper into the spectacle. It is impossible to sustain the level of intensity required to remain in his ‘zones' for long. There is always something which drags you back to reality, making demands on you, moving you on. And of course, this constant denial is what keeps us going; to achieve our goal would result in nothing but disappointment.
Jes Fernie is Director of the RSA Art for Architecture scheme and is a freelance art consultant and writer.
What Remains Behind
by Sue Hubbard
Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind.
Wordsworth, The Prelude
Some years ago, approaching a friend's cottage across darkening fields, Martin Richman was struck by the seductive glow emanating from a lit window. Yet this apparent warmth also generated an uncanny feeling of being separate, cut off from a desired space that could not be entered. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that to have an idea of perfection we must once, for a moment at least, have experienced it. The warm light from the cottage window might be understood as synonymous with those half-remembered, idealised states - the womb, the innocence of childhood - from which we are all expelled into the uncertainties of the adult world. All Romantic art is based on a sense of loss and the need for reparation. And Richman, though a Modernist in the use of his eclectic ‘non-art' materials, his visual sensibilities and the unconventional locations in which he places his art, is philosophically a Romantic.
In Day in Day Out, 1999, made for the exhibition Chora, he placed a small glass house on a cardboard plinth. At once doll's house, greenhouse and skyscraper, the viewer was simultaneously seduced and frustrated by this tiny, sealed, jewel-like building. Both void and vacuum, the light was triggered by the viewer's physical proximity, the glass walls dissolving into a series of infinite regressions. Walking through East London, Richman had been struck by the rhythm of lights in the tall tower blocks that suggested patterns of habitation, of presence and absence in the darkness of the city. A blue light might denote the flicker of a TV, a fluorescent brightness the cooking of dinner. These distant windows, he understood, acted as screens on to which the viewer could project imagined lives, metaphors for the dialectical division between outside and inside, between inclusion and exclusion. What Gaston Bachelard has called, in The Poetics of Space, "the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no". Flooded in ambient light Richman's little house was both aloof in its sealed perfection yet seductive; a Kristevian metaphor for the nostalgia of the warm protective, prelinguistic space of the maternal body to which, it is, of course, impossible to return. To quote the poet O.V. de Milosz:
I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh House. House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood.
Light and space are the leitmotivs that run through Richman's work, whether in galleries or public spaces, in sculptures, installations or paintings. What he creates are transitional spaces, places for dreaming and remembrance. As a boy in the 1950s growing up in Southsea, part of a small, tightly knit orthodox Jewish community where both his father and grandfather before him were tailors to the Navy, he was deeply affected by the quality of light. The crystal blueness over the Isle of Wight that promised a fine day, the twinkling lights of the promenade and fair ground that all beckoned offering sweet promise and pleasure. These tantalising memories have given rise to such evocative works as an installation made for Jesolo Beach, Venice where by upending 49 translucent white plastic buckets, placed between flagstones and lit with UV tubes and coloured with fluorescent powder, he created a dreamlike, Proustian work that recalled childhood sandcastles and the winking lights along the Southsea promenade. Whirligig, created for his recent show Come To Light in 2001/2, also elicited the half-remembered excitement and tacky eroticism of the funfair seen from afar and longed for as a child. Thwarted desire is a constant refrain that echoes through Richman's works. A film made for the same show, using photographic stills from his family album, of grandparents, aunts, uncles and his parents was overlaid by filmed images of cherry blossom. The collision of these two elements – the portraits of the dead and the blossom, an emblem of renewal – touch delicately, on the pain of Jewish history, on the lost and irretrievable dead of the Holocaust.
As a young man in the 1960s Richman was very aware of a new movement in art, an anarchic shift set in motion by artists such as Robert Smithson to move work from the elitist confines of the gallery into landscape and cityscape. An eclectic mix of poet, filmmaker, landscape gardener, draughtsman and philosopher Smithson's gigantic Spiral Jetty, built in 1970 on Great Salt Lake, Utah, took art from the privileged playground of the white cube out into the American wilderness. It was an attempt, in that more utopian age, to create a democratic, inclusive art. Spiral Jetty was built on reclaimed land emphasising Smithson's concern with the fate of the earth and the artist's political responsibility to it. Such thinking appealed to Richman's leanings to make work that was not constituted solely of ‘precious' marketable objects but rather formed a part of our everyday experience. This has led him to work on a number of public art and architectural projects including, the Student Union building in Portsmouth in collaboration with the architects Hawkins Brown, the Hampstead Theatre, a new school in Tulse Hill, proposals for projects such as a sculpture for the side of Derby Playhouse and the lighting of the South Shields Ferry Terminal. In these interventions art has a subliminal effect on the lives of those who encounter it. Duchamp understood, perhaps better than any other modern artist, that once shaped by the demands of the market, art's potentially radical and subversive value is diluted, distorted and misappropriated, that there is always a correlation between society's values and the art it produces. These works by Richman not only enhance public space but also decommodify art, shifting the emphasis from marketable object of exchange into that of open public experience. It is as important for him that his art should resonate equally with the shopper in the street as with the theoretically literate. Richman is not afraid to produce art which forces the viewer to examine his or her own emotional responses both to personal history and to the world which we inhabit. As aware of the symbolic power of colour as any painter, Richman flooded the façade of the Tysley Energy From Waste Facility, with blue and red light. The result was as emotive as the saturated colour in Rothko's celebrated Seagram paintings. The modernist cubes of the building, its heavy masculine rectilinear lines also placed the work firmly within the field of minimalism with its implicit references to the geometry of Judd, André and Robert Morris. His use of blue light in the intervention at Abingdon Police Station not only evoked the traditional blue lamp of the police station - a beacon of safety in the dark night - but also something more subliminally spiritual. For traditionally blue within the history of art has denoted the heavenly. The convergence of two such different image sources fills out the readings that can be attributed to such a work, from the pragmatic to the poetic. Barnett Newman talked of "an art that would suggest the mysterious sublime rather than the beautiful". Such a description might equally be applied to Richman's work.
Richman sees himself moving now into new arenas where the work is less resolved, more open to chance. Much of what he has made in the past, he feels, has been isolated in a state of perfection. Objects of desire. If life is to in anyway mirror art, it needs, he feels, to become more chaotic. In modern society we have become used to art that is emptied of any sacred or moral imperative. Secularism, individualism and pluralism define the culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Deconstruction has left us with the shards of shattered meanings littered at our feet. We are all too painfully aware of our separateness but have lost sight of any means for connectedness. The sensibility of our age is characterised by the dilemma between truth to the individual self and truth to a wider social set of values. Martin Richman's work, with its roots within the transformative but its branches reaching towards what is fresh, different and new, aims to face this quandary. For as the South American poet, the late Octavio Paz wrote: "The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation". Richman's work encourages this participation, this experiential life affirming pact between artist and viewer.
Sue Hubbard is a poet, freelance art critic and novelist.