Brian Eno first came to fame in the Seventies. Flamboyantly kitted out in
space suit and feather boa, he was the man behind the synthesizer in the
Bryan Ferry-fronted band Roxy Music. But for a protean polymath who had
ended up in the rock industry almost by accident, this was only the
kick-start of a kaleidoscopic career.
Eno is the composer who pioneered modern ambient music. He is the producer
whose talents transfigured the work of David Bowie and Bono, Paul Simon and
David Byrne, and are even now coveted by everyone from Dido to Coldplay,
with whom he is currently working.
Now 58, he is a diarist, a professor (of time-based media at the Royal College
of Art) and a passionate opponent of the war in Iraq. He has dated Julie
Christie, popped up as a character in a Philip K. Dick novel, relieved
himself in Duchamp’s urinal as an artistic statement, taken a cameo role in
the Father Ted sitcom and — according to rock legend, at least — got through
six groupies in a day before eventually collapsing.
His enthusiasms have an almost surreal eclecticism. And an interview only
emphasises the fact. An evening which begins as an a cappella singing group
in his Notting Hill studio moves, by way of the perfumes he mixes, on to
taramasalata in a local restaurant. But his latest offering is on the
subject of the visual arts. He is exploring nothing less than a fresh way of
looking.
Over the past 30 years or so Eno has staged more than 100 shows of his art
work the world over. But next week he makes his debut in a British gallery.
A multiscreen sound and light installation, Constellations (77 Million
Paintings), will go on show at the Baltic in Gateshead, while,
simultaneously, a similar configuration, Luminous, will be
displayed in Selfridges department store in London.
Constellations consists of 360 hand-painted slides. A computer
program randomly shuffles about the layers of these pictures to produce a
continuum of constantly changing images. There are 77 million permutations.
“The maths is sound,” Eno assures me, and you can be sure he is right. This
is the man for whom a square-root calculation is just a run-of-the-mill
piece of mental arithmetic.
Appearing on a pattern of screens, the images transmute to the accompaniment
of an entrancing electronic tune. The sounds cluster and recluster in
strange unearthly songs. “What absolutely intrigues me,” Eno says as he
stares into the patterns that coalesce and change and dissolve, “is that
I’ve never seen this before and I’m never going to see it again. Each image
is unique . . . and each moment in the music is unique.” Apparently, it
would take more than 9,000 years to watch the entire show at the fastest
speed available with the software.
Eno comes from a musical family. His grandfather, a postman in whose house (a
converted chapel deconsecrated after the priest committed suicide) the young
Eno first lived, mended organs as a hobby. Over the course of his life he
gradually transformed his entire home into a musical instrument. He
installed all the old organ pipes and fixed them up with ducts so that by
the end, Eno says, “he could pretty much play the whole place”.
Eno’s father, also a postman, was the drummer in a little jazz trio. “But it’s
only because of the type of technologies that now exist that I can make
music,” Eno says. “I can’t play an instrument. I never learnt because I was
planning to be a painter and not a musician.”
Brought up on a council estate in rural Suffolk, he fell under the influence
of a “strange and wily” uncle who, having been honourably dismissed from the
hussars in India, had stayed on in the subcontinent, only to return to
England many years later as a sort of guru. “He used to show me paintings,”
Eno says, “and once I went over to his place and he showed me a book of
paintings by Mondrian and I was absolutely entranced. These were the most
amazingly beautiful things I had ever seen, and I decided that painting was
the closest thing to magic that there was.”
Eno won a place at Ipswich Art College with a copy of a Renoir nude (“I loved
his big luscious sexual women,” says the man who, at the age of 16, was
already living with the girl by whom he had his first daughter). But it was
the Russian Constructivists who persistently fascinated him. “I thought it
was fantastic that you could make a non-figurative world that could still
communicate, that could evoke the strongest feelings. People have always
been able to accept music as an entirely abstract form, but they have a lot
of difficulty with art. Even now they are always trying to find out what it
means.”
By the time he was at Winchester Art College Eno had begun to move away from
painting to focus on working with light. He was “playing about with
happenings and performances which involved music and tape recordings”.
By the time he left art school, Eno was sure that he never wanted to have a
job. “My dad worked so hard, it was terrible. I remember him coming home one
day and my mother putting his dinner in front of him and he just fell
asleep. It was so sad and I thought: ‘I am never going to do that’. I also
had this early feeling about luck. People say that some people are just
lucky and some aren’t, but luck isn’t like that. Luck is being ready. It
comes to those who are ready to act. So I thought I am just going to wait
around and be ready.”
He didn’t have to hang about long. At a Tube station he bumped into Andy
Mackay, who told him “about these guys who had written some songs and had a
synthesizer but didn’t know how to work it. I said I could probably figure
it out, so I went along and I just started joining in. And the kind of
things I was doing made their music sound modern.” Roxy Music was born, and
for a few years it took over.
It was only in about 1978 that Eno returned to working with visuals and light.
“I was struck by the difference between paintings and music. The painting
sits still and you move in front of it. The opposite is the case in music.
You sit still and the music unfolds in front of you.
“I wanted to be able to listen to music the way I looked at paintings. I
wanted music that didn’t change very much — about the rate of change of a
nice day out. I wanted music that was a bit like going for a walk in the
forest, where you make decisions about which way to go, where you can stop,
sit down and not feel like you missed anything. And when I went back to
making art installations that was very much what I was aiming at also. I
just wanted to make the sort of places that I would like to spend time in.”
His multicoloured images, transforming and merging, mutating and melting, are
mesmerising. They encourage a new — or maybe an old — way of looking at art.
They have an entrancing, atmospheric, almost spiritual power.
“One of the most interesting things about these images is the new behaviour
that they produce,” Eno says. “People in galleries don’t usually look at
pictures for more than a few seconds. But in my shows they behave as if they
are in a cinema, even though nothing much is going on. I think this is very
interesting. It contradicts everything that people say about attention
spans. It makes me think that there is a niche in contemporary culture for
people who want to do something slow.”
Brian Eno’s Constellations is at Baltic, Gateshead
(0191-478 1810; www.balticmill.com), from Jan 31. Luminous
is at Selfridges, W1 (0870 8377377; www.selfridges.com),
from Saturday
