The Elusive State of Happiness, Ian Breakwell, 1979, image courtesy of Felicity Sparrow

Ian Breakwell’s video works were described by Will Self as being “subtle enactments of an individual praxis that compel our attention, again and again, to the uneasy comity of lived life.” Working prolifically, and across a remarkable range of media, including performance, film, and television, his work is characterised by its wit, humour, and poignancy. Felicity Sparrow was married to Breakwell for many years, and worked with Quad in Derby on an extensive retrospective in spring 2010.

Breakwell is one of the artists in Polytechnic,  a group show of video, installation and tape/slide works from the late seventies and early eighties, at Raven Row, London, until 7 November 2010.

His film installation, The Other Side, is showing at the Bankhill Ice House as part of the Berwick Upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival,  16-19 September 2010.

Felicity, we’re talking about Ian Breakwell, who was your partner, and his show at QUAD in Derby – which includes work from the whole of his career. And it’s called The Elusive State of Happiness – where does that title come from?

It’s the title of an artwork by Ian, a collage of 1979 which is in the show. Around about the same time that he made his video, The News (1980), a parody of the values of broadcast television news. And it celebrates the kind of absurdities of small town life.

The Elusive State of Happiness is one of the headlines taken from a local newspaper – I think it’s the Long Eaton Advertiser of that time. A lot of the headlines end in question marks and they’re quite surreal and ridiculous.

All sorts of imponderable things. But what sets it up is a discarded passport photo which Ian found in one of those Photo-Me booths on Long Eaton Station, which is of a man who is so obviously pissed off – he’s too low in his seat, so only the upper half of his face is in the photograph. And he’s gazing balefully at the camera, at us the spectators.

So The Elusive State of Happiness is one of the headlines that Ian has cut up and it gives the title to that particular piece.

And it sort of describes his whole approach…

Yes, and particularly humour permeates Ian’s work, but it’s always comfortable humour. It’s usually humour of the noir-est type; a very black, deadpan humour. A celebration of that pissed-off man, not quite having his face in full frame in the photo booth.

But Ian wasn’t a pissed-off man?!

Oh no!

But he’s interested in ordinariness…

Yes, the minutiae of everyday life and what he would call small epiphanies. And he was an inveterate eavesdropper on other people’s conversations, which might not be funny in themselves, but often, only heard as a snippet, they become hilarious, particularly when juxtaposed with something else.

He described his Diaries as a look at the side events of everyday life. The things that don’t have a value in, say, daily newspapers or television news.

And that’s where the pain and poignancy of our lives becomes kind of raw and exposed, I think.

Ian was always the champion of the underdog. The unseen, the unloved. And the unlovely.

The rest of us.

Yes. There’s that lovely fat woman standing outside his flat when he was living near Smithfield Market, who’s standing quite neatly and decorously and then suddenly starts shouting and hissing, “You little know all. You Little Johnny know all.” And you cheer for this woman, who then subsides back into… what’s the word? Not obscurity. Invisibility. And there are lots of things like that.

Another of my favourites was a pub in Newport, I think it was, with three doors – one marked Ladies, one marked Gents, and the third marked Trout. That’s all it said. So it’s left for you to conjure up these fish walking to the loo. I think that was part of it: he was very good at editing and not explaining.

You mentioned the Diaries… is it lots of works or is it a single work?

His first major exhibition was in 1977, and the exhibition was called Ian Breakwell’s Continuous Diary.  The Continuous Diary is singular. And that’s when Arena, Alan Yentob, made a programme, called The Continuous Diary, which in particular looks into The Walking Man Diary, a piece that he worked on from 1975 to 1978, which the Tate bought. Ian was based in his third floor flat in Smithfield and he noticed the same man walking past his window everyday. But he wasn’t a tramp – he didn’t have any bags and he seemed very purposeful. And Ian made a point of photographing him and thinking about him, what he might see, what he might pass, what he might be thinking. But he never felt compelled to talk to him. So he was another of the anonymous people that Ian’s celebrating, but without feeling he has to intrude on his solitude, his purposefulness. It’s a very powerful piece.

There are written Diaries, but film and video diaries too… of Ian talking to camera before the days of, you know, when everyone and their dog talked to their camera… the Diaries are… multifaceted?

To start with it was much more of a visual diary – The Walking Man is photo, collage, text and print. The Diary began, I guess, about the late ‘60s – a visual diary with components of handwriting, drawings and text. The earliest existing one is the 1969 Diary, which is entirely visual. And throughout the 1970s. In 1974, for example, the entire year is based on his wristwatch. You don’t see his face. You just have his wrist, the watch-face, and inside, cut out, there’s a drawing or photograph in each one and text written over it. It looks quite extraordinary when it’s all mounted up and shown together. 1975 was different again – text and image.

The bulk of his Diaries from the ‘80s onwards – is almost exclusively text-based, just writing. A lot of these were published in book form, the first mass-market one was Ian Breakwell’s Diary 1964-85 published by Pluto Press in 1986, then there was Derby Days published in 2001.

When did he start working with video?

Well, film started before video. Particularly in collaboration with Mike Leggett, and that came mainly through Ian’s performances. I didn’t know Ian in the ‘60s or the early ‘70s, but he was doing a lot of performance work in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

He was a member of the Filmmakers’ Co-op, though he wasn’t making films then. He really started using film when he was making Unword (1970), initially using found footage as part of this performance. Mike Leggett started documenting it on a 16mm camera, and then Mike became part of the performance, The Filmmaker, and was a character in the performance. Footage of one performance was shown in the next performance, alongside the found footage.

It was through Unword that he became involved in film, shall we say. We were both inveterate filmgoers, particularly in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Not to see anything in particular, we just went to see what was on at the local cinema.

Ian could remember going to see The Seventh Seal, and it said “a film by Ingmar Bergman,” and it dawned on him (because up till then he’d only ever seen studio-based Hollywood fare), that films could be by someone, like a book or a painting. And although I don’t think The Seventh Seal was necessarily an influence, the fact of Ingmar Bergman being an author, “a film by…” was revelatory.

And the fact that the lighting, everything about it, was different to what he had seen. The other thing, of course, was Saturday Night, Sunday Morning – working class northerners on film.

The first video was actually for the 1975 Video Show at the Serpentine – just a video camera, pointed first at the screen then at him reading, and basically recording until the tape ran out. That was called Excerpts from the Diary and included re-filming of part of a 16mm-film-and-35mm-slide-tape ‘expanded cinema’ piece called Growth, which exists in many different forms and formats, followed by a section from Estate, which was also a four-screen expanded cinema piece, reduced in this case to one-screen with music and voice-over. That was followed by Ian’s first reading to camera of his Diary. He’s clearly reading from the book. It’s very murky black and white, shot on Philips 1/2 inch video. And it’s clearly not edited, even in-camera. Halfway through the phone rings, Ian takes a few sips of water, and then it ends very abruptly. Ian claims that the camera blew up; I suspect it just ran out of tape.

So it was very, very crude, but it was quite interesting in the way that a lot of early work can have a very direct emotional appeal, partly because it’s so crude. It’s completely unmediated, which is moving.

Ian continued making video diaries for the rest of his life.

Yes. He continued writing his Diary, but from the ‘80s onwards these tended to be much more written. Occasionally, particular Diary entries would be illustrated or whatever, and works would come up alongside the Diaries.

When I did the website for The Diary Reinvented after Ian had died, and talking it through with Anthony Reynolds, we realised there isn’t much of a visual diary after 1980. In 1980 he made a huge series of paintings during a residency at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. He was there for a year but worked on the paintings over a120 day period – and the paintings are named 120 Days, after de Sade. It was the first time he had really made use of a studio so that he wasn’t sitting over his desk, and he couldn’t look out of the window because the windows were up high and only showed the tops of trees.

He was thrown much more in on himself. So he created these imaginary portraits of people, and this kind of leitmotif “Keep Things As They Are” runs under each of them, which many have interpreted as being Ian’s comment on Thatcherite Britain. The leitmotif is followed by different phrases, like “in mysterious ways,” or “until the dawn,” or, say, “Keep Things As They Are: safe and secure.” It was very much in the eye of the beholder as to how they wanted to read that.

On the website, The Diary of Reinvented, if you go to the 1980s section, which opens with 120 Days as the key work for that decade, you can see that in those 120 days, Ian quite often used those day-to-day desk diary things that you used to get for offices where you’d tear a leaf off each day. And so in the background of all these portraits, behind the heads, as it were, you have got these diary days, on the surface, on the picture plane, which may or may not have the diary painted over by the portrait or whatever.

They’re visible, so there was the obvious link with the Diary.

The influence of de Sade was about the power of the imagination.  How he wrote when he was in prison, and whatever you may think of what he wrote, it all came out of his head. It’s not chronicled in things he’s done. It’s things he’s imagining. And that’s what appealed to Ian, and at Cambridge, there’s a reference to being imprisoned in his studio!

And like Diaries, it’s a framework for ordering how you make your art.

Another thing he was interested in was peformance, and the theatre space, both sides of the curtain, auditorium…

And the 16mm film Repertory before that. If one was unkind you would say it’s boring, minimalist. It’s basically a single tracking shot round the outside of a derelict theatre, and a voiceover, which is not Ian’s, reads out Ian’s description of what is happening inside. It’s almost like a diary, describing a different, often fantastical, scenario for each day of the week, but always setting you up with the idea of a proscenium arch: “In the locked and empty theatre: the curtains are up, the houselights dimmed…”  followed by what’s unfolding on stage.

And there’s a screen-print version of Repertory, with this written down below photographic images of exterior of this derelict theatre – the text is exactly the same but it seems entirely different because the image has Ian’s cursive script, so you have the words and image together.

In Repertory you have the site of entertainment and you don’t see the entertainment, in Auditorium you’re kind of the site of entertainment, inside the cinema, as a viewer, looking at the audience.

Yes. And you never see what they’re reacting to. You have to imagine it.

Some of which you’re given audio clues to, but you have to conjecture that in your head, from the audience reaction rather than see it.

Though I think it’s as much about watching people, watching, as it is about worrying about what they’re watching.

And then Variety, which is his archive musical, filmed musical performances.

When Ian made that, he already had in his head that he wanted to do this show, which he eventually did with the De La Warr, called Variety, that celebrated the old variety acts, which could have included cinema, because when cinema was first shown it was often as part of a variety bill, of different vaudeville turns, often in old music halls. And to celebrate the humour, particularly as he was from Derby and he liked northern humour a lot, including George Formby Sr. and a whole host of other people that I can’t name, being a southerner!

It’s a lament, as well, though, isn’t it?

It is a lament in a way. It’s a love, but I don’t think it’s nostalgia. It’s part and parcel of the dark, often dead-pan humour that Ian celebrated. What he called  “end-of-the-pier” humour.

He continued making Diaries right up to his death.

Yes, because the last piece that he made, well, planned on making, and which I finished on his behalf, is called BC/AD, which stands for Before Cancer/After Diagnosis.

He uses photographs of himself from babyhood – basic box brownie photographs, never intended to be blown up the size they are – to photos taken literally the month before he died.

And these are used in a continually morphing image. So it’s all still images, but they morph one into each other. Alex Fry did the video transfer and edit. It was a labour of love, but he was very careful to keep the eye line match consistent throughout so the eyes fade in and out at the same place on the screen.

The soundtrack is Ian’s final Diary, called BC/AD, which starts from when he’d first found he’d lost his voice (he was in the pub when without warning his voice suddenly went, mid-conversation, and he didn’t know what it was, his doctor originally thought he had laryngeal palsy) to the first diagnosis. The diagnosis was inoperable lung cancer. The first biopsy stated a type of cancer that is associated with smoking, which Ian wrote about and his reactions to it in a Diary entry called – well, which I called How to not give up, which describes all the cigarettes he’s ever smoked and their packets. A video camera was set up while he was recording the audio for BC/AD and this video extract was shown at his funeral wake.

The video is not really for public consumption. It’s documentation, but very nice documentation. And it was particularly poignant at the funeral because, just as he finished reading it, he turns to camera with a huge grin. Which kind of just made it quite sublime really.

How hard was it for you to complete that work?

To begin with, it was just so dreadful because of the actual work involved. I’d typed up the entire script of BC/AD for Ian, so I had it in front of me. And Ian’s reading, even edited down to take out the ‘ums’ and ‘errs,’ was, I think an hour and 38 minutes, which is a feature length film…

And there weren’t, in my opinion, sufficient images to sustain that length, but also it was too long. We knew stuff had to go. It now runs at just under an hour, looped, with just the title, BC/AD separating the ending and the beginning.  But working on it, you know, I spent 30 years with Ian and knew him as a very eloquent and articulate speaker, with a very beautiful reading voice, and his voice is quite shaky, sometimes croaky, which I found distressing. I got used to it, but I don’t happily sit through the whole of BC/AD even now. When I was in Derby, I was sitting there with John, checking the projection before the opening, and I suddenly realised, it’s so full of humour. Until that moment I hadn’t even thought of any of it as funny.

And suddenly the pair of us, we looked at each other and we laughed. And John said, “God, Ian’s so funny, isn’t he?” I said, “Yes, right up to the end.”

So, yes, it was, for me, difficult and there are moments of incredible beauty as well as sadness in it. It’s quite intense. It has humour and a lot more first person singular than in previous Diary entries. Bits of it had crept in. I mean, for example, Ian rarely referred to me, ever. Occasionally, “she,” but “she” might equally have been another “she” before me.

How northern is that!?

At least it wasn’t “her indoors”!

But it was kept impersonal because it was for an audience. Though he did use his former wife’s image – and images of a previous girlfriend, in his works, and I know I was upset at the way he used those different images of women –superimposed, one on top of the other. So I always said to him “You’re not using my image.” And he never did, which, in my opinion, is when his work became a lot stronger!

I am mentioned a couple of times in BC/AD. And there was a very funny diary entry – an unpublished diary entry from 1990 when we were in Australia. We were in Sydney and there was a huge explosion. We were in the suburbs with a couple who had a beautiful garden and things. And there was a huge oil depot went up in flames. And Ian writes it up… someone’s doing the ironing, someone else is doing something. I’m in the sitting room watching television. Ian’s the only one standing outside having a cigarette and he’s witnessed this explosion. And he keeps interjecting, saying, “There’s a huge explosion” and I’m muttering something banal about what’s on the TV, and everyone’s sort of saying, “Yes, never mind, Ian.” And Ian’s saying, “But there’s a mushroom cloud.”

I don’t know if there was a mushroom cloud, Ian did ‘tweak’ reality by editing out surrounding contexts. But it did happen, I’ve got the newspaper cutting from the next day describing the explosion and subsequent fire.  But what makes it funny, gives it its edge, is that Ian implies that this is how – so utterly banal –  the end of the world will be when the bomb is dropped, it’s going to be as mundane and as banal as this. He kept saying “But, but..  the sky’s full of sparks.”

But in BC/AD, he’s stopped tweaking reality. No?

No, I’m just saying that the first person singular comes in more because he talks unflinchingly about the deterioration of his body and about his approaching death, knowing he is going to die in a matter of weeks or months. So it becomes more personal and personalised at the end.

But in BC/AD it’s as though it’s not a story anymore.

Ian always claimed that none of his Diary was fiction. The ‘fiction’ is just in the way he edits out what may be there. He doesn’t invent. And although the Diary moves backwards and forwards in time, like memory does, and might imagine what is behind closed doors, what might have been, it doesn’t imagine a future, it’s never science fiction.

For the Quad exhibition you put together a film season, with David Sin.

I’d been up to Derby and met the guy who runs the cinema, and I said, “Oh, I could put together a programme of films that Ian really liked or that influenced him.”  And I remembered that David Sin, who had worked at the BFI and was responsible for putting together the BFI’s Ian Breakwell DVD, was – is working at the Independent Cinema Office, where they put together film programmes, including artists’ films, for touring round regional cinemas. So I suggested doing this mini-programme with him – thinking, of course, they’d far sooner deal with him than with me.

So what started out as an anonymous bit of fun (for me anyway), putting together some of Ian’s favourite films… And suddenly it’s on the Quad website, saying a programme “curated by” – and that’s my least favourite word, because I use “programmed by”.

Isn’t there a difference between programming and curating?

But the term curator didn’t apply unless you actually were a curator, ie. someone at Tate or someone at the National Film Archive. In fact I probably AM the curator of the Estate of Ian Breakwell, in that I look after it and maintain it and his legacy. I guess I was also the “curator” of Circles… Over the years I’ve done lots and lots of programming – putting together of film/video programmes, sometimes with performance or expanded cinema as part of the event, but I don’t tend to think of it as “curating”. That’s a very recent thing, where everything is “curated” by someone or other. I admit I have occasionally used it referring to myself but I find it pretentious. I do programming, I don’t do curating.

Anyway, David Sin and I put this programme together for showing in the Quad Cinema to accompany Ian’s exhibition there. One of the key films, The Rebel with Tony Hancock, we couldn’t get. But the others: The Hustler, An Actor’s Revenge, L’Atalante and Night of the Hunter we did manage to get.

Those last two films we both of us saw over and over again.  And in 1990, or whenever the restored version of L’Atalante came out, Ian stopped going to the cinema.  He said “They’re never going to make anything as good as that again” and I think he was particularly disillusioned by the violent films, particularly of Tarantino. And The Hustler – Ian had written this hilarious piece for Sight and Sound [in June 1994] about seeing that film in 1962, when he was at Derby College of Art, when he and his mate spent their lunch hours in the Regent Snooker Hall, Derby, re-enacting the film, with each of them vying to play the Minnesota Fats character, their hero, rather than the flashy Fast Eddie (played by Paul Newman). The piece was reprinted in Derby Days – which is still in print and also appropriate to the show at Quad.

There were shorts chosen to go with each of these features. But there was a separate ‘shorts’ programme  which started out being about Word and Image, based on one of the programmes I’d put together for Live In Your Head at the Whitechapel. It included Anthony Balch and William Burroughs’ films The Cut Ups and Towers Open Fire, and John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum, and This Surface by David Hall and Tony Sinden. Then I wanted to include Ian Bourn’s Sick As a Dog, and Margaret Tait’s Colour Poems… Anyway, it got re-named as “Ian Breakwell and the Avant Garde,” with my little addendum, in brackets – (Friends and Influences). What they all have in common of course is a sense of humour – though I don’t know if this made it to the actual programme note!

Estate, Ian Breakwell © the estate of Ian Breakwell & Anthony Reynolds Gallery

Dates: 13 February – 18 April | Location: QUAD Gallery, Derby

The Elusive State of Happiness is the first major retrospective exhibition of the late Ian Breakwell (1943-2005) that explores the unique voice of this very special artist, a man with an eye for seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Ian Breakwell was a world renowned and prolific artist who took a multi-media approach to his observation of the minutiae of life through a wide range of media, including visual diaries, film works, TV, audio and drawings. The humour, mischief and oblique wonder at the world that permeates his verbal and visual legacy is already legendary.

Louise Clements, Senior Curator at QUAD, said, “He was an incredible, diverse artist and this is the first major retrospective of his work, so it’s appropriate we have it here in Derby. We are excited with the show and to be able to offer audiences a full exploration of his life’s work, from diaries, audioworks, moving image expanded cinema to text, drawings and photo-collage ”. The exhibition is curated by QUAD in partnership with Anthony Reynolds Gallery and Felicity Sparrow.