雕塑家菲利达•巴洛 | 经济学人讣告

1

英文部分选自经济学人20230408期讣告

Sculpting from stuff

雕塑家菲利达•巴洛，于3月12日逝世，享年78岁

Her art emerged, she once said, from a childhood memory of climbing up an empty staircase, hoping for the sky. There, in that gaping space, she would feel the reach and stretch of plaster, cement, colour, surprise; the excitement of perilous moments; the sentient fear of vertigo; the big anthropomorphic shapes that stared and waited: dumb, curvaceous, still, biding their time. That was where the adventure began.

巴洛曾说自己的艺术灵感源于一段儿时的记忆：沿着没人的楼梯攀爬，希望能爬上天空。置身于那样一个向上开口的空间，她能感受到石膏、水泥、色彩那令人惊奇的触感和伸展。还有那岌岌可危的刺激感、那俯瞰而眩晕的恐惧感、那些巨大的形状都活了过来，看着她，等着她：有的不说话，有的曲线婀娜、有的一动不动，都在等待他们自己的那一刻。在那里她开启了艺术探索之旅。

For the viewer the adventure began in the discovery of her work in all its size and strangeness. It was not so much a case of looking at her art as running up against it. Visitors to the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017 felt like Lilliputians staring up at the vertiginous painted struts that soared up to the roof or inching around the giant pompoms on stilts that were squeezed against the walls. Her work was so tightly crammed into the space that one friend said it reminded her of Alice consuming the “eat me” cake.

对观众而言，接触到了巴洛大小各异、造型怪诞的作品之后，便开启了（和巴洛一起）的艺术探险之旅。她的作品不是单单要看，更要体验。2017年，在威尼斯艺术双年展的英国馆中，参观者们要么在那一根根高耸到屋顶的彩绘立柱下看得晕目眩，仿佛小人国的居民；要么在那一个个用高跷架起、紧挨四壁的巨大绒球间缓缓穿梭。她的作品把这个空间挤得满满当当，有个朋友甚至说这让她想起了奇境里的爱丽丝，吃了一块标有“吃我吧”的蛋糕而越变越大（直到塞满整个房间）。

注：《爱丽丝漫游奇境记》中，爱丽丝吃了一块标有“吃我吧”标签的蛋糕，身体变大。

A descendant, on her father’s side, from Charles Darwin, she retained a great rationality about what the world might throw up. She was not, in any way, an intellectual artist, claiming always to be bad at ideas. Instead she saw her art as a metaphor for her experiences. Her own adventure started in , in Britain’s industrial north-east, where she was born in 1944, when the country had already been at war for five years. Her father was a psychiatrist researching brain trauma (his hospital orderly was Ludwig Wittgenstein). Newcastle, and London, where the family later moved, were cities recovering from trauma of their own. She remembered streets covered in rubble, buildings stripped of their outer walls with long ribbons of wallpaper swinging in the breeze, the cubbyhole under the stairs where her grandmother stuffed anything in case it could, one day, be put to use. 

巴洛的父亲是查尔斯·达尔文的后人，因此作为达尔文的后代，巴洛对于世界可能发生的大小事都保持着高度理性。但她并算不上是一个特别聪慧的艺术家，还常说自己会有很多很糟糕的想法。相反，她认为自己的艺术是对个人经历的隐喻表达。巴洛1944年出生于英国东北部的工业城市纽卡斯尔，并在那里开启了她的艺术探索。她出生的时候英国已经打了五年仗。她的父亲是一名研究大脑创伤的精神科医生（路德维希·维特根斯坦曾在医院做过他的助理员）。之后她随家人移居伦敦，但纽卡斯尔和伦敦都是在硝烟的创伤中慢慢复苏的城市。她记得街上满是碎石，建筑的外墙脱落，一条条长长的墙纸在微风中飘扬。她祖母在楼梯下的小房间塞满了乱七八糟的东西，觉得这些东西有一天能派上用场。

注：路德维希·维特根斯坦（奥地利哲学家）

The ever-shifting industrial environment of Finsbury Park, in north London, where she and her husband, Fabian Peake, also an artist, moved after she finished art school in 1966, recalled the incongruous largesse that war spreads upon the landscape. From skips in the street she would collect odd bits of timber, cardboard, wire mesh and offcuts of polystyrene, scrim and chicken wire—anything that might one day be useful. One of her favourite words was “expedient”. During lockdown she even worked in dough she made in her kitchen.

1966年艺术学院毕业后，巴洛和同为艺术家的丈夫法比安•皮克搬到了伦敦北部的芬斯伯里公园区。那里的工业化环境一直在变化，与散落在其各处的战争时期的残留物格格不入。她会从街上的废料桶里收集诸如零零碎碎的木头、纸板、铁丝网、塑料泡沫的边角料、粗布、养鸡网等东西，总有一天能用得上，所以她很喜欢“就地取材”这个词。在封控期间，她甚至还在厨房玩起了生面团。

注释：

work in：to add one substance to another and mix them together

She became an artist at a time when that meant having a studio and making work, not becoming part of the “art world”. She raised five children and had a day job for nearly 40 years, teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art. Making art was something she did in short bursts between taking care of the family and going to Tesco. Redecorating, housework even, it all went overboard (they never moved from the house they bought in the early 1970s), as did shopping for clothes. For years she lived in trousers, lace-ups and a paint-spattered anorak.

那个时候当艺术家就意味着拥有工作室且能创造出作品，巴洛成为了艺术家，却没有进入“艺术圈”。她是五个孩子的母亲，同时在斯莱德美术学院任教近四十年。她只能在除了照顾家庭和去乐购超市购物之外见缝插针地进行艺术创作。她没精力翻新房屋、做家务（一家子一直住在七十年代初买的房子里），甚至没精力逛街买衣服。她多年来一直穿着长裤、系带鞋和一件颜料斑驳的套头防水上衣。

Exhibitions meant showing her work in an abandoned attic, a school playground, a disused office, an old stocking factory—even chucking it one time into the Thames. It was not art for sale, at least not early on. So she’d make work and then take photographs of it. Often that’s all that survived, for she’d pillage from one work to make the next. Once, at the end of an exhibition (when she had become better known), a gallery-owner apologised for selling only three of the four big pieces on show. What to do with the last, she was asked? Oh, just put it on the bonfire, was her reply.

巴洛的艺术作品展也只能在废弃的阁楼、弃置的办公室、学校操场、旧长袜厂里举办，有一回甚至把它们扔进了泰晤士河。当然，那些作品不叫卖，起码早期的作品不是。她会创作并为其拍照。通常最后留下来的就只有照片，因为她会毁掉一件作品并利用其材料去创作另一件。在一次展览结束时（当时她已名声鹊起），画廊老板只售出了展览的四件大作中的三件，他为此向巴洛道歉。他问巴洛，最后一件该怎么处理？她回答说：哦，那就烧了呗。

English to the core in her humour and practicality, she could not have been less English in her artistic heritage. In contrast to the early Victorians who toiled from morning till sundown remaking classicism in their own design, she was a night thief, picking the pockets of the Arte Povera movement of post-war Italy and the unschooled makers of America’s deep South. She said she was suspicious about the dishonesty of certain sculpture; bronze, for example, which was hollow if you sawed through it. She explained it once to a curator by pointing to a fuzzy red jumper that was draped over a chair. What she wanted to convey was the red fuzziness, not the fact that it was a jumper. The vital thing for her was less the artwork itself and more the working—the making—of the art.

她幽默、务实，是个十足的英国人，而她的艺术遗产也是充满英国特色。维多利亚早期的英国人昼夜无休地按自己的设计重塑古典主义作品，与之相反，她是个夜贼，奉行“拿来主义”从战后意大利的贫穷艺术运动和美国南部腹地未受过（学院派）教育的艺术家那里汲取灵感。她说她怀疑某些雕塑作品不诚实。例如锯开青铜制品，你会发现它是空心的。有一次她指着一件搭在椅子上的红色绒毛套衫，向策展人解释：她想传递的是红色绒毛特性，而非这是一件毛衣的事实。对她来说，关键不在艺术品本身，而在于过程——即艺术的创作。

As a child she was always making things with clay or other soft stuff. That never stopped. As an adult she would begin with whatever materials she had at hand; felt, perhaps, or polythene or sellotape. She’d dip the work in paint, wrap it in binbags or bind it with fabric or sticky tape. And then she would stand back and look to see how it lived on its own.

孩提时，她总是拿粘土或其他柔软的东西创作，这个爱好从未停止。成年后，她就用手头的任何材料开始创作；毛毡也好，聚乙烯塑料制品或透明胶带也好。她把作品蘸上颜料，再用垃圾袋包起来，或用布料或胶带捆起来。然后，她就静静旁观，看看它如何焕发活力。

Sculpture had to do more than just be conventional arrangement. It had to enlighten, show the way. Spillages taught you how to be casual; hanging instructed you about the stillness of uninterrupted looking; spreading about where edges can be found.

雕塑不仅仅是把（材料）按照传统的方式布置，还必须给人以启迪，指明方向。边角余料叫人率性发挥；悬空雕塑让人静静凝视；平铺则让人找到边界感。

There was nothing slick or smooth about her sculpture, one critic said; it was full of knockabout. Things tottered, or dangled, or seemed to be about to topple over. From very early on, she made use of every spare moment, making sure she finished at least something by the time she had to turn her attention back to her family or her students. The work would emerge with speed. But never was it slapstick.

有评论家称菲莉达·巴洛的雕塑不见任何光滑平整之处，却满是坑洼。她的雕塑踉跄不稳、摇摇欲坠，眼看都要倒地了。早在很久之前，她就开始利用每段空闲时间，确保自己在这段时间内能完成一部分创作，再回去照顾家庭、教导学生。她产出作品的速度很快，但从不糊弄了事。

Late to the party

大器晚成

The art world only really caught up with her after she retired from teaching, aged 65, and threw herself full-time into making art. A super-gallerist, Iwan Wirth, came calling in his chauffeur-driven Audi, uncertain when he got to Finsbury Park that he had come to the right place. But he had. Exhibitions, one bigger than the next, soon followed: at the High Line in New York, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Venice Biennale.

菲莉达·巴洛65岁那年才从教师岗位上退休，开始全身心投入到艺术创作，至此，艺术界才真正认识到她的价值。此前，顶级豪瑟沃斯画廊创始人伊万·沃斯（Iwan Wirth）曾让司机开奥迪车带他来芬斯伯里公园，那时他还不确定自己是否来对了地方。但他确实来对了。自此，在纽约高线公园、慕尼黑艺术之家和威尼斯双年展等地的策展接踵而至，规模一场比一场大。

Why do humans make sculpture? George Mallory is supposed to have said he wanted to climb Mount Everest simply because it was there. Sculpture’s special power, by contrast—the reason why Phyllida Barlow made sculpture at all—is that it isn’t there. That was where her adventure began.

人们为什么要创作雕塑呢？大家认为乔治·马洛里（George Mallory）曾经说过他想攀登珠峰，只因为珠峰就在那里。相反，雕塑的独特魅力在于它本身并不存在（而是需要被创造出来）——这也是巴洛从事雕塑创作的原因。从零开始创造便开启了一场艺术之旅。

Lee，爱骑行的妇女之友+Timberland粉

Shulin，女，热咖啡+保温杯，慢慢来er

Benjiamin，MTIto be, 初学翻译的翻译小学生

Mosy，绘本、演讲、戏剧英文教育践行者

Kin，译术学徒一枚，积微言细，自就鸿文

Rachel，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译（年年备战一口）