Bruce Lacey (1975)

[Music] yes some people want to know whether I'm an artist an actor a performer a showman a sculptor A Painter and I just say to them well I mean I never used to use the word artist for years because it was sort of a dirty word but now I say I am an artist I'm a sort of old rounder you might [Applause] [Music] [Applause] say I find it very uh disturbing when I uh visit parts of London that I haven't been to for uh several months because I don't recognize them they've all gone and new uh buildings have been put up I found this very psychologically disturbing I used to work in an old shed at the bottom of my first wife's garden and then when I married Jill we lived in an old shop and gradually all the property developers are sort of chasing us and now the shop has being pulled down and now we found this old factory and eventually when the factory goes we'll probably uh be forc to work under Railway archers weather it's very cold here I'm going to go back to the old factory in a minute go to the old factory and get in my airplane and fly all through the sky back to my child the to nine ignition sequence starts 6 5 4 3 2 1 zero all engine running lift off we have a lift off 32 minutes CL the hour lift off on Apollo 11 Tower cleared we got a roll NE Armstrong reporting the roll and Pitch program which put a follow 11 on proper [Music] heading down range 1 mile altitude 3 4 miles 2,95 oh a wonderful experience finally come down to earth uh during the second World War I wanted to be a a batt of Britain fighter pilot and um I was only 15 years old so I had to make an airplane cockpit rather like this I call this my fantasy fighter and in my bedroom during the War I used to fly and um bomb Berlin every night um until I make a a space um cap this has to double up as a as a space simulator um the thing is what I find in my life is that if there's something I can't do for real I try and live it in a sort of fantasy way there once was a man who lived in a house in the town he had a crazy room that was upside down with the flashing light that did Flicker and spin what a crazy world this man lived in he shut all the doors and head for a hole in the sky a drifting dreams as time rolled by he saw strange things and he heard strange sounds transcendental Journey that would know no bounds crazy were the things he saw and crazy was his mind all open [Music] wide this is my secret room people only come in here by very spirital invitation so you're very privileged this is my memory box full of all my past all the things I've collected since I was a child uh I've even got model airplanes I collected gas masks Buddhas all radio sets I very rarely come in here myself because uh most of my life is spent with the future or the present but sometimes I come in here for reassurance when my childhood dreams are [Music] here over here is where I keep all my hats I got hats from all over the world wherever I go I get a hat and I'm told by my friends and that I believe it I have the ability to look like the nationality of the uh the country the I'm wearing this is Italy uh and um this is an American hat that Len Dayton bought back from America businessman's American businessman's convention in hotel and um this is my um uh Viking hat you see how I look like a viking and uh the only differ I have is when I put on a j a Japanese helmet which I collected um bought this for 30 bucks with all the um all the uniform but look like a Japanese I've got to do that with my eyes I know arho like cheese and um fed Li um this is my um American policeman's hat I bought back from America and if I can reach up here if you excuse me one second when I went to New York I went everywhere to all the fire stations to dry tight and get hold of a fireman's helmet and this was one from the fireman that was killed in the fire in New York and it's all battered leather you know this is um a martian helmet I made for a cigarette uh commercial showing that even martians smoke their cigarettes and this is a lovely helmet this is what the peruvians wear in um in the mountains the mountains on uh [Music] Peru so I look just like a Peruvian I told you so didn't I uh it all really started years ago with my father taking me around markets collecting things I first started collecting swords and pistols and I went on to Japanese armor Buddhas and Idols musical instruments and costumes and all the things that I've collected are things that people used uh costumes cooking utensils I never clean them at all because for me they're wreaking in humanity some things I've got still have the original dirt or the sweat uh like a driving wheel from an old motorc car still got all the grease from the person's hand and to me this gives me um an immediate touch with um you know it brings back in immediate memory I remember where I bought it and then it gives me um almost like immediate doorway back into uh into history into the past this is a a box I've just my memory box my secret room and uh I probably haven't opened this box for at least 15 or 10 years um this is an airplane that I made during the war that my sister sat on within about 50 minutes of making it and in this box here um during the war we had to make airplanes out of bwood this is an [Music] fw190 and uh there's the good old spit fire I made out of bwood and this plane here is a mosquito plane that was hanging up in the window of my bedroom around about 1944 45 when I was um downstairs getting um dressed to go to the bank and I just about got my pajama trousers off and I was completely naked when the German V2 rocket fell opposite and the upper half of my body was covered in uh plaster and the lower half of my body was covered in so um literally caught my trousers down but when I went up to my bedroom I found that the German uh V2 had destroyed this model airplane I like to think of today that it's the only model airplane in existence in the whole world world still here that was destroyed by enemy action during the second world war at uh mosquito and I'll I'll keep the pieces forever and in art school they taught me to be an artist they taught me how to paint academically and um I was a very brilliant art student I won a scholarship in the pred roome the queen had one of my etchings H hen had a painting I had a silver medal first first class diploma and a traveling scholarship but um and I went on a sort of a big world tour but when I got back uh to my sort of Studio romantically uh in the Attic of my um house uh I became bored with the painting and I kept reverting to all those things I used to do as a child in an old secondhand shop in London I found uh some cardboard boxes that were filled with old Victorian or rather Edwardian negative um plates I I excitedly took them home got a book from the library on how to develop photographs converted my downstairs labatory into a dark room and then magically saw these pictures in the wash hand Basin come to life they seem to have some sort of strange immortality the way the light uh had melted away bits of the pictures by getting into the camera I suppose or the way uh faces were in or out of focus in studying painting we always been told it was immoral to um work from photographs in 1954 in my final year at the Royal College of Art I went in for the Rome scholarships and the subject they set for this competition was the flood and all my friends did paintings of uh Noah's Arc all animals going in two by two but for me as I I called myself of a realist painter I had to paint from my own experience well there weren't any floods on at the time but I remembered the previous year seeing News Real photographs of animals stranded and I thought they're the real tragic figures because they can't swim or get into a boat or climb to the roof of a house so I went to the uh Co-op slaughter house completely covered in blood I was by the end of the day and saw 300 Bulls slaughtered and it wasn't until I went into hospital with tuberculosis towards the end of the war and started writing poems and drawing as like occup therapy and so for the first time in my life for 18 months I had nothing to do I felt perfectly well I just thought about my own dreams and things and I was very worried CU I thought I was going to die and so in hospital I started analyzing all the things that Society had taught me to do they said you mustn't eat pizza off a knife and I thought that's right cuz you cut your mouth so I said okay I won't eat pizza off a knife and then they said you must always uh eat apples and custard by bringing the spoon to W you that way but when you eat soup you move the spoon that way away from music so I analyzed all these brainwashing things and accepted or rejected other ones and it was a great uh Renaissance I emerged a bit new person from hospital and I started drawing in hospital and I went straight to art school and when I got to art school they didn't want to know about all the things that I wanted to do you know um I've been in the tap dancing troop since I was about 9 years old and I really wanted to do things um so what I was doing my activity that I wanted to do was was uh an expression of my psychological [Music] State and I went through a terrible period when I felt ashamed I felt like a leper but not doing this very high Noble thing called painting until I realized eventually the art was whatever the person doing it said it was and the critics can come along and argued but I look for myself as like a sort of pioneer out in front I'm the one that says what it is and um you know because I know from experience that 10 years later they will agree with me you know [Music] and I looked upon as in England a sort of Jack of all trades and master of nun or Willow the Wisp a sort of a pottera but what I do is that all these different skills I've picked up very gradually I merged them all all together and I dare say you've guessed it it's my fantastic robot with great big red fat juicy lips the um originally I built her as a um a replacement for a rather difficult actress and she's called she has a name like all actresses have she's called Rosa bosm which stands for radio operated simulated actress battery or standby operated Mains and um a few years ago we were doing a production of the Three Musketeers and a girl we had playing the part of the queen of France was such a terrible [ __ ] to work with and I gave her the sack and built rows of bom to take her place and she um is capable of uh of giving me a kiss there are my love back again and uh I take her to her places [Applause] when uh when Jill and I got married a few years ago we took her to the wedding and she became the best man [Applause] [Music] here this machine I call the uh Universal integrator it's made up of uh six different um Space men or rather alien creatures from other planets six creatures all standing back to back all the heads are in a revolving frame all the bodies in another and all the legs in another and they're all revolving in different directions and pausing at different times and making up different figures so if you can imagine um 6 * 6 * 6 you get 218 different combinations of figures all for the price of six uh this is a piece of assemblage I made in 1963 which deals with the predicament of old people it's really about my auntie Daisy who was living uh with my mother and father in a very small room so this person here like Marty Daisy is living in a large coffin which is also a bed sitting room she's got a frying pan she's frying herself an egg her in her body are all the postcards uh all the memories from the family album The the wedding the um the holidays the marriage the medicine cabinet uh like most people's medicine cabinets are all full of grty old stale Gan medicines also thinking about the future uh a government eventually might build an old people's home which old people are living in boxes like this on a conveyor belt moving slowly towards the Mory so when they die the lid is put on and they're sealed up forever with all their possessions [Music] I had an exhibition in an art gallery all these things and all the art critics came along and they all criticized them severely they said this isn't art this is propaganda this is sociology uh so I said well if it isn't art it's what art ought to be um synthesizers cost uh oh several hundreds of pounds and even thousands of pounds but um I can't afford to buy one so I was determined uh all my life I've had an ambition to be a sort of famous composer and make sounds and music and I've never been fortunate enough or had the patience to learn to play a musical instrument now apparently there are um uh the ordinary keyboard on the ordinary Western piano can only play 100 notes but scientists uh tell you that the human here can distinguish a thousand separate notes so I say what's happened to all the other 900 now um by building a synthesizer you can actually hear all those lost notes uh I couldn't even afford to buy a keyboard so this is old firewood sewn up um inside here there's an old um sort of uh bit of brass curtain Railway which all the notes press down on [Music] we've recently uh just done our own space musical called the electric element we work together with a group called The Alberts in which uh everybody wrote their own scenes expressing their own fantasies and feelings and philosophies and my oldest son John did a lot of electronic music for it Jill wrote her part too um having many different characters where she was uh really search SE ing for her identity but in making all the costumes and films and painting the sets she found her her true identity before the show had even started [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] for me the electric element my part was um sort of early expressing early fears I had in being married uh to a young woman Jill is 15 years younger than I am and so for years I had fears that um I would lose her and I had dreams and nightmares where I would be finding her and losing her again and so in the electric element in all the scenes with her um I would think it would be her there but she wouldn't know me it' be like a terrible Nightmare and um she'd go away and then gradually I'd find her again then I'd lose her again then I'd find her again um like in our own true life we came together and we're happily married in the electric element we came together uh right at the end and we're United forever [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] oh look what's that on that's uh that's mommy and daddy doing the British landing on the moon oh I don't want to look at it I don't like seeing myself on that's a art and Technology Program n [Music] come the flag won't move yeah know that little know that Mom there's no wind on the moon there's no wind on the moon you see Flags like that um [Music] a [Music]