Ian Breakwell
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ian Breakwell (May 26 1943 - October 14 2005) was a world renowned British fine artist. He was a prolific artist who took a multi-media approach to his observation of society. Breakwell was born in Derby and studied at Derby College of Art, graduating in 1964.
During the 1970s Breakwell worked with the Artist Placement Group (APG), which dropped artists into government departments in the perhaps forlorn hope that their intuition would improve the decision-making process. Breakwell's placements included the Department for Health and Social Security; under its auspices he worked in Broadmoor and Rampton hospitals. The results included a report, co-written with a group of architects, recommending top-to-bottom changes at Rampton, and a film, The Institution (1978), made with the singer-songwriter and artist Kevin Coyne. A diary entry recalls Breakwell's first APG visit to Rampton, which immediately stirred memories of performing there as a child-conjuror: the incongruous juxtaposition is entirely characteristic.
In 1986 Pluto Press published Ian Breakwell's Diary 1964-1985, his idiosyncratic journal, observing fine details of modern society typically overlooked by most people. In the 1980s, he made a number of adaptations of his diary for Channel 4. Later he co-edited (with Paul Hammond) two important anthologies, akin to the work of Mass Observation: Seeing in the Dark (1990), an assemblage of hundreds of accounts of cinema-going; and Brought to Book (1994), which documented the myriad forms of bibliophiliac obsession. Although he had a longstanding relationship with the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, his keenness to develop new ways of working led to residencies with, among others, Tyne Tees Television (1985) and Durham Cathedral (1994-95).
Works of this period included Auditorium (1994), a film made with composer Ron Geesin, in which we are taken to a variety show, but are only allowed to see the audience's reactions; the results are hilarious and touching. Auditorium is currently on show at The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, part of an exhibition, co-curated by Breakwell, called Variety, the title taken from another Breakwell/Geesin film. The pavilion itself was the setting for The Other Side (2002), in which ballroom dancers float serenely through its dreamlike architecture, to the accompaniment of a Schubert nocturne for piano trio.
It was in 2004 that Breakwell was diagnosed with cancer. Typically, he responded with renewed creative energy, creating a series of works that looked unblinkingly at his condition. The resulting images are both painful and beautiful - just as the last pages of his diary will no doubt reveal not only the artist who created them, but unexpected facets of our own experience.
Breakwell is survived by his wife Felicity Sparrow, and by his mother Nancy.
