Some years ago I interviewed the famous jazz musician and composer Dave Brubeck about his life and work.Brubeck was an instinctive, a natural musician, from as far back as he could remember.As a young man he thought it might improve his compositional skills if he went to music school, so he applied.He was turned down because he could not read music!I want to meditate on that paradox for a few seconds.
How did what we loosely call ‘art’ first start?We don’t know, of course, but of one thing we can be sure: art came before art theory; the making art came before art criticism.If we apply that to music, we realise that the hearing of music in the head, and the making of that music on the chosen instrument, preceded music notation, the language that was invented to help others read or interpret the original music that came to the composer.Inevitably, the interpreters and critics begin to assume a more important role than the actual artists who provided them with the subject of their study in the first place.The great sociologist Weber called this process the routinisation of charisma, and it happens everywhere.Dave Brubeck was a natural musician, as all great musicians are, long before he mastered the theory of music, which was why he got into trouble with the professors at the music college.
I like to think of Frank Bruce as the Dave Brubeck of sculpture.Completely untrained, it is quite obvious that he is also a great artist, an instinctive artist, a natural.It is true, of course, that if you get him going he can talk the talk of sculpture, but the really significant thing about him is that he has been walking the walk of sculpture, making astonishing art, for 30 years.And the other thing about his art that is compelling is that it appears to grow out of the very nature from which its materials are taken.Artists look at the world and remake it through their art, helping those of us who don’t see with the depth and intensity that they see with to look harder and see more.Look at Frank’s work and you see the beat and brutality of the natural world, as well as its heart-breaking beauty.That is why it is absolutely right that the setting for Frank’s work is a forest.Here it is brought back to its own home and it brings us back to look at it all with new eyes.
It is a pleasure and an honour to be part of this opening today.
