Above: Coloured Gel Boxes (2008) by Adam Barker-Mill.
Adam Barker-Mill is the only professional cinematographer to have switched careers and become a successful artist instead, and his first major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Ahlen makes clear the connection. “Obviously it is all about light,” admits the artist, “light is the very essence of cinematography and light is also the main material of my current work.”
In fact, Barker-Mill’s career as a cameraman is intriguing in itself, having shot both an Oscar winner and politically radical footage, with some of the most innovative independent British directors of the era, from cinema verité to structuralist experimentation. But in 1985 he gave this all up to concentrate on creating abstract and largely sculptural art works, an ambitious oeuvre now given full rein throughout this German museum. The sheer range of Baker-Mill’s materials and techniques is impressive, whether a permanently installed light-sculpture of concrete and glass near the entrance to the museum, cardboard banana boxes turned into fragile hanging lanterns, or precisely milled aluminum lamps and MDF cubes; the end result is a perfectly paced parade of different visual effects, including two specially built dark-space rooms which enable a fully immersive experience for the viewer. The exhibition also makes clear that Barker-Mill is as much a technician and craftsman as artist, having personally hand-built most of the earlier sculptures and overseen the construction of later works with an obsessive attention to detail, the hand as much in evidence as the eye.
For Barker-Mill’s connection to cinema is not only intellectual and visceral but physical, with a love for the machinery of creation; aged nine he became projectionist at his prep school, “taking the film out of its box, lacing it all up, adjusting the focus and the azimuth, then I sat next to the projector making sure not to let the film burn if the projector broke down. I remember a thriller with a charred hand clasping an electric rail and I turned up the volume very high to give all the other boys nightmares, the only creative thing I could do was turn up and down the sound.”
In 1962 Barker-Mill moved down to Cornwall and tried his best to be a painter but soon found himself more interested in experimenting with a sophisticated form of color animation using 8mm film. These were Chromat compositions, with one bright rectangle set against another and changing independent of each other. “To avoid producing any image the camera was pointed directly at a skylight with the lens defocused, so only light was recorded,” the Barker-Miller recalls. “I could manually rewind the film in camera whilst masking the gate with rectangular stencils and progressively opening up or stopping down the lens while the film was running. It was quite complex, I had to adjust the f-stops to create the dissolve between one color or another.” These experimental films, direct precursors of his later work, were projected once onto a very high ceiling at his mother’s house and then seemingly lost.
Above: Skylight (2008) by Adam Barker-Mill.
Enrolling at the London School of Film Technique on Electric Avenue in Brixton he was hired by the performer-politician Screaming Lord Sutch to make a promotional music clip; shot on 35mm black and white, a single shot on a tripod, this was cut up with black leader to make a dazzling strobe on screen, curiously enough predating Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966). Sutch’s film was shown on a gigantic screen at the local Odeon in Brixton where it literally fell to pieces on the projectionist’s floor as the glued joins of the black leader broke.
Barker-Mill’s first job was in a cutting room on Wardour Street as Probationary Trainee Assistant Editor on the 1965 documentary CHINA! directed by the communist Felix Greene. This was followed by a stint teaching film at Bath Academy of Art where he made a 10-minute short about the projectionist at the local cinema, the Regal in Corsham. “This was the first film I directed, shot, and edited. I really liked it when he opens up the lamp house so we have a sudden burst of light, a carbon arc, a very bright abstract moment.”
He also worked on his first collaboration with longtime friend, the director Barney Platts-Mills, making a documentary on the Steiner school in Bristol. “It was an hour long and more or less bankrupted the film department,” Barker-Mill says, “classic cinema verité with sync sound for which we had hired an expensive 16mm French Éclair camera.”
While at Corsham, Barker-Mill also worked on a film about the artist Oskar Schlemmer, all shot at night with the radical director Marc Karlin, now considered the missing link of British structuralist cinema. Barker-Mill worked with Karlin again when they were approached by Chris Marker to try and film the Peugeot production line in Belfort, as Marker had been banned as a known political agitator. “We first set up a formal interview with the CEO of Peugeot in his Paris office, to reassure them that we were respectable, as we were pretending to make a film about the common market. There was film in the camera during this interview, I just pretended to be filming him to look legitimate. We were then allowed to film the factory floor, with Jon Sanders on sound, and this was used by Marker.”
Above: Disco Volante (2019) by Adam Barker-Mill.
Through Sanders Barker-Mill also got a job on The Great Rock ’n' Roll Swindle (1980) for Julian Temple; shooting Malcolm McLaren acting as himself, with Vivienne Westwood as art director, filming on location at the SEX clothing shop and Highgate Cemetery. He also shot various pop videos, including for Donovan, on stage with Poly Styrene even a gang warfare B-movie in Clacton-on-Sea.
But Barker-Mill is perhaps best known for his long collaboration with the director James Scott, starting in 1967 with a documentary on the painter R.B. Kitaj. This was closely followed by Love’s Presentation, about David Hockney creating a series of etchings, shot in black-and-white, the credits are scrawled in Hockney’s own handwriting. The Arts Council was wary of backing the project without an introductory section, “they were afraid nobody would know who he was!”
This was followed by a groundbreaking film on pop artist Richard Hamilton that used a variety of techniques such as reshooting a TV monitor. Original footage of a commercial break and a Hollywood trailer were used, “it was technically very demanding, using footage of a Douglas Sirk movie on which [Hamilton had] based a series of prints.” This was followed by The Great Ice-Cream Robbery (1971) on Claes Oldenburg, filmed at the Tate and shown on two separate screens side by side, with twin projectors like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966).
All of these art films by Scott have been reissued by the BFI, including Chance, History, Art… (1980) with interviews with the Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid and artist-criminal Jimmy Boyle.“ We filmed on Betamax which was better than VHS but didn't catch on,” Barker-Mill recalls, “one could film for 20 minutes continuously without the expense, then we re-filmed it off a TV monitor onto 35mm, so it now only exists as a roll of film.” He also shot A Shocking Accident which won Scott an Oscar for Best Short in 1983, “I shot on 35mm color and it was tricky to try and film an apartment in Naples when actually in London, getting the balance right between interior and exterior with the bright light of the south.” Scott moved to Hollywood to start work on Loser Takes All for Miramax which was soon mired in strife with Harvey Weinstein, who even attempted to change the title of the original novel by Graham Greene on which it was based.
Above: Banana Boxes by Adam Barker-Mill.
Meanwhile Barker-Mill was still collaborating with Platts-Mills, with whom he shot the seminal Bronco Bullfrog (1970) and the cult classic Private Road (1971), starring Bruce Robinson who seemingly adapted elements of the story for his own Withnail & I (1987). Barker-Mill was also cinematographer on the notorious shoot for the most ambitious, if not dangerous of Platts-Mills films, Hero (1982), shot on 16mm color in the Scottish Highlands. His now wife Carolyn Barker-Mill captures this well in the monograph on the artist published by Bartha Contemporary in 2015: “Hero brought together Old Bohemia Notting Hill and working class Glasgow gangland young offenders. Adam was Director of Photography and led a crew of camera assistants, focus puller, clapper loader, grips and electricians. Our courtship was sealed signed and delivered when Adam took me up in a helicopter over the Corryvreckan whirlpool as he filmed the bubbling mass. In those days Adam worked back to back on films. He was admired for his skill in naturalistic lighting, for framing a shot and for his ability with a steady hand-held camera. Adam decided after one of his films had won an Oscar not to follow the director to Hollywood but to give up movies altogether on a high and stay in Southampton and make art.”
Or as Rozemin Keshvani puts it in the same monograph, “After nearly twenty years of working with light and editing films, Barker-Mill decided to devote himself entirely to his art. His earliest creation Chromat 1 was installed in the Arnolfini in 1985… Adam has continued investigating light and creating work with light as his medium for more than forty years.”And there are clearly parallels between the two, whether diffused daylight or just new uses for the simple lightbulb. Indeed, when his 1992 Three Columns installation at Victoria Miro gallery was reviewed in Flash Art magazine it specifically linked it to the twilight Magic Hour and the work of Sven Nykvist. Likewise his Colloidal Dispersion works of 2012 make reference to Hitchcock’s Suspicion with Cary Grant carrying a glass of milk lit by a small lamp within to make it glow. Barker-Mill has created a series Candle Light and interestingly his longtime collaborator James Scott actually shot a series of candle lit tests for Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones though it was famously not until Barry Lyndon that true candlelight was used. Though Barker-Mill’s art work is rigorously abstract it is far from austere or cerebral, the sheer beauty of these shifting zones of color inviting contemplation if not mystical reverie, though he himself has never specified any spiritual connotation to his use of light, stressing rather the technical and scientific aspects like any hard-headed cinematographer.
Above: Colloidal Dispersion (2011) by Adam Barker-Mill.
“I had all the ideas 20 years ago but then the technology came along, my first piece had manual dimmers, and then Halogen light bulbs appeared soon after I first started making my art,” says Barker Mills. “Raoul Coutard was always my inspiration because he used available light on location, he ‘bounced’ light as we did on Bronco Bullfrog. I lit most of those interiors with just one lamp. For the Hockney film they’d first tried Chris Menges and I was actually his assistant for the one day but Menges wanted to put in a lot of elaborate lighting and we just wanted to keep it very simple, I was able to shoot using only daylight and a Photoflood bulb in place of a normal lightbulb. We owned the iconic Camiflex because of its link with the Nouvelle Vague and our hero Coutard, on this we could shoot on 16 and 35mm, it was a ‘mute’ camera which was very noisy. When filming in color I would balance for daylight and for tungsten, it would be too blue from the window and vice versa the artificial light would be too warm, so I would need gels to balance color temperatures.” And now Barker-Mill uses these same gels in his art, from a film lighting supplier in Fulham, exactly the same gels for both his sculpture and his films.
Barker-Mill is a collector as well as artist and there is an obvious parallel between the photographs he owns and his own work, especially those of L.A. cinema screens by Hiroshi Sugimoto, who opened the shutter of his camera to expose the black and white film inside for exactly the duration of the screening of an entire feature-length film, resulting in a seemingly empty blazing rectangle.
Barker-Mill has created a series of such screen works using both the cinema format and memorably that of a vintage 1972 BeoVision 3400 Bang & Oulfsen television set re-wired as a glowing work in itself. This takes pride of place at the museum retrospective right next to a monitor showing Magnum Opus, the first film Barker-Mill has directed himself in fifty years, an assembly of his videos shot on iPhone and Sony Camcorder. “Digital cameras have made a huge difference, you can now shoot with an iPhone in public and nobody bats an eyelid,” effused the artist. “Also you don’t have to wait for anything, back then you had to wait overnight to see rushes, one never knew if the rushes were going to be okay.”
Above: Beovision 3400 (2016) by Adam Barker-Mill.
Barker-Mill’s art is distinctive in its technical precision combined with a numinous sense of transcendence, one which must be actively worked for by the viewer. Certainly any visitor to his retrospective will be aware of the time required to fully enjoy the work, to let themselves be embraced by the light, a welcome antidote to our rapid cut click-culture of instant imagery. If Barker-Mill’s sculpture has any narrative dimension it would be in the sense of Godard’s famous quote, “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” Rather, Barker-Mill treats us to a sequence of chromatic interventions which reward the patient viewer with the most subtle of emotions and moods.
“Working as a cinematographer trained my eye for the quality of light, the nuances of ambient light in a space, for ‘ambient’ really just means what’s there, whatever is around, the actual light itself, even moonlight," says Barker-Mill. "My understanding of how to use light comes out of that formative cinematographic experience—however different the end result.”
Adam Barker-Mill Retrospektive is at Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany through February 16, 2020.