Alfred Young was born in Lambeth, London in 1936. His father was a sidewalk news vendor. When World War Two started most of the children in London were evacuated to more remote spots to protect them from the expected bombing. He and his sister Kathleen, who was six years older, were sent to Devon. His earliest memory was of looking out of a window at night at Plymouth, which was ablaze. He would return to London only to be sent off each time to a new location. He saw his mother rarely but has no memory of his father until after the war ended. Living at that time in the Elephant and Castle, a district in South London, was a bit grim. Dark and forbidding with roaming gangs, pea soup smogs so thick that people tripped over kerbs, bombed-out houses , food rationing, no bathrooms and outdoor toilets, no television, no phones and nothing to do but stand on street corners and sing to each other for entertainment. When he was thirteen he met a boy who told him if he joined the Air Cadets he would get to fly. The snag was the minimum age was fourteen so he pretended he was a year older.
Used as a recruiting tool the Cadets were giving short trips in old two engined planes. After a couple of years passed, the officers in charge of his squadron, seeing that he was intelligent , entered his name in competition for a flying scholarship, which he won. Because he been an apprentice since his fifteenth birthday in a printshop he couldn’t spend the required time two weeks to train but instead went each weekend that winter to a little airstrip in Surrey and learned to fly in an open cockpit trainer. He gained his flying license and the government minister for civil aviation, impressed with this, personally presented it to him. But when the newspapers reported this and gave his true age as sixteen questions were asked in the Houses of Parliament why someone below legal age was roaming the skies of southern England - much to the minister’s embarrassment.
Because during tests for aircrew he discovered he had hearing problems ( a V2 rocket had exploded close to the house in 1945, rearranging the furniture and taking out all the windows), he had to give up on ambitions to continue flying. He went into the Air Force as a regular National Serviceman. Most of the two years being spent in Germany (1954-56)
Towards the end of his time in Cologne he attended a huge retrospective exhibition of Picasso’s work. He was so moved by it that he decided there and then that was what he would do in life. He made his first oil painting in a basement room in a barracks: a tree growing through the remains of a bombed building.
When he returned to England he immediately took Saturday morning painting classes at the London School of Printing - his only connection to the art world. (He had spent two years there from age thirteen to fifteen in preparation for his apprenticeship.)
When he reached the age of twenty-one his term as an apprentice came to an end and he immediately quit the job and started to study painting full-time.
The art teacher there, Gerard de Rose, allowed him to sit in on every art class, without paying fees, and gave him extra attention. By working intensively for a year (and supporting himself with dishwashing and other like jobs) he applied for a place at the Royal College of Art and was successful. Regarded as having exceptional abilities he was able to skip undergraduate requirements and go directly into the postgraduate course.
Although considered by teachers to have some drawing ability he hadn’t considered art before as a possible future. In that part of London becoming a criminal was much more acceptable than becoming an artist.
Initially, those classmates associated with British Pop Art, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, were just finding themselves. Ron Kitaj who was older already had an identifiable style. David Hockney for instance was painting in an expressionistic style rather like Alan Davie yet making etchings illustrating fairy stories. Young, having come to art later than his classmates, was just beginning to broaden out. He had begun to examine Cubism, using those sombre earthtones of early Braque and Picasso. Somehow, one day, he came into possession of a postcard that had a picture on it in bright prismatic colors, by an artist called Jacques Villon.
He had never seen any artist anywhere that used color like that and determined to find out more. But nobody he approached knew anything about Villon. There was nothing in the College library and, given the aesthetic climate there, no interest in acquiring anything. Frustrated, he talked one day with Basil Taylor, whose field of expertise as an adviser to Andrew Mellon was 18th cent. English artist George Stubbs! But Taylor said: Why don’t you go and meet him? So Young hitch-hiked to Paris and after a few wrong turns, found Galerie Louis Carre, Villon’s dealer. They were wonderfully hospitable. Bringing him into an oak paneled room with nothing in it but two chairs the representative signaled for the staff to bring in one-by-one about twenty examples of Villon’s paintings, giving details about each as Young sat there. And after, turned to him and said: Tell us about your researches! The effect on him was incalculable. Later, he attended an exhibition of Villon’s work and met and shook his hand. Villon, some years older than Picasso, was very frail, in a wheelchair. He died soon after.
The faculty of the College hated the effect Villon had on Young but to their credit they tolerated it! And gradually, through persistence and a little knowledge of French, he pieced together enough information to begin to understand what Villon had tried to do. He used color as if it were light. Instead of green mixed with red resulting in a turgid brown it made yellow. And instead of yellow and blue making green they made white. As a close examination of your color television will confirm. But he did this in the Twenties! Following in the footsteps of Seurat, who used color theory and whose work prefigured digitized color printing, Villon’s use of color prefigured the digital devices of today. There were contradictions: structurally his paintings created a Newtonian space in which he would situate a cubist construction, but the attempt was brave.
Young then went back to a rigid application of perspective in a series of still-lifes and compared the two methods of space representation realizing that linear perspective implied immobility and the hard shadows a timelessness.This occurred toward the end of the third year. His classmates, by now hailed as full-blown Pop artists, were enjoying much success but although he exhibited in the Young Contemporaries show alongside them that year (1962?) he was overlooked.
In 1963 Young began to teach in several art schools and colleges. One, Kingston School of Art, happened to be very close to the house that Edweard Muybridge had retired to after his days in California. A modest house, unnoticed and empty of visitors. Young would go there and examine the Zoopraxiscopes and other devices. An experience that would later prove to be influential.
When first published Muybridge’s work had quickly become a reference for artists. From Degas and Eakins up to Francis Bacon his work had supplied visual imagery. But Muybridge himself still wasn’t recognized for his artistic talents - certainly not at that time in England though perhaps his contribution to the movies was beginning to be acknowledged.
In 1966 Young came to the United States, taking a job at UNM in Albuquerque. Within a few months he learned that the sculptor John Chamberlain was living in Santa Fe. He had seen only one photograph of Chamberlain’s work before but recognized its strength. Introducing himself they talked at length and Chamberlain invited him to stay the weekend. So began a friendship which lasted until Chamberlain’s death.
Chamberlain had just made a series of beautiful sculptures from polyurethane foam but his gallery, Castelli, had refused to show them. Castelli was expecting more of the work Chamberlain had shown in the Venice Biennale 1964, sculptures made from crushed automobile parts. Chamberlain, on the other hand, already acknowledged by Warhol and other contemporaries, wanted to continue to experiment. And did. Even though married with three sons and heavily in debt. As well as shooting movies and taking photographs he experimented, for instance, with aromas and at Rand a couple of years later made a work that was made up of questions such as: What do you consider the prime effort to consist of? And answers like: The fourth advantage of having chosen Friday. Eventually though he was worn down and he reverted to the style which was commercially viable. He died a wealthy though angry man.
The whole episode had a profound affect on Young. He saw how beautiful artistic ideas could be ignored or discarded by dealers who know as much about art as realtors know about architecture. That commerce is the arbiter of what the public can see. A situation which persisted and even intensified until today the art world is awash in corruption and intrigue as billionaire hedge fund managers snap up art for its ability to generate profit without regard for the deleterious effect such behavior has on society and the costs that are eventually borne by the public.
Although Young’s paintings had received some notice: a work was included in the 1968 Whitney Biennial and was featured in Van Deren Coke’s book The Painter and the Photograph (a subject explored in greater detail later by David Hockney) he decided at this point to stop painting. When asked by a student why he said: I want to explore ideas that painting can’t accommodate.
Later that year, after spending the summer in London with Chamberlain who was making a movie there, Young went to San Francisco to teach at State College. Immediately after Nixon’s election the campus erupted in strikes and confrontation. Ostensibly about the need for Black Studies (what we would today call multiculturalism), it was also an expression of anger over Vietnam and the general harsh treatment of nonwhites, among other things. For months there were pitched battles between the police and students, scenes of pretty young girls being beaten with nightsticks were not uncommon. In the middle of this Young was invited to have a one-person show in the Berkeley Gallery. A few days later he was approached by a man identifying himself as Mel Henderson and told that they both had been promised the same time slot. Henderson suggested doing a joint show to which Young agreed. Henderson also suggested another artist, Joe Hawley, join them.
Due to constant bomb threats all three were already taking classes outside the building so it made sense when Henderson suggested the show should take place outside the gallery. To underline that Henderson welded the door of the gallery shut when the first ‘Event’ took place. It was apparent that Henderson had already considered making large-scale works - what would later be called Conceptual Art. Young’s initial suggestion was simply to work on water, which in San Francisco meant the Bay. This developed into a series of works made with non-toxic dye. They worked together for about six months, the last two works in November 1969: Yellowcabs (a hundred cabs converging on one intersection) and a huge spiral drawn alongside the Golden Gate Bridge called Coil. Soon after that, jobless and penniless, Young and his family left San Francisco to live in an unused summer cottage in Inverness at greatly reduced rent.
Just weeks after moving, the attorney Tony Serra, whom Young had just met, visited bringing with him his brother, the sculptor Richard Serra and a friend Joan Jonas. Young and Serra realized that though they had no previous knowledge of each other they were in fact both working in similar areas. Serra closely questioned Young about the works he had made, especially the spiral in the Bay. And given Serra’s propensity for stirring the pot it is likely he happily told Robert Smithson about it when he returned to New York. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was made in 1970.
Drawing the spiral in the rapid current of the Golden Gate and watching it turn into a sinuous line which moved through the Bay as it dissipated made Young realize how time had played a structural role in the piece. And after that each work that he produced used time in a similar structural way. For instance, in 1971 UC Berkeley Art Museum invited him to contribute a work about the future. Realizing that any concrete object would inevitably only gather dust and therefore suggest rather the past he sent the curator, Brenda Richardson, a letter containing instructions followed a few days later by another, this time on soluble paper written in the dye he had used in the Bay. On it was written:
Problem
Is
Soluble
So
Show us the present
Hyped as the future
Imagining the future
Togged out in the past
When, as per the instructions, she immersed it in water the letters detached themselves and fluoresced, eventually sinking to the bottom of the developing tray in a yellowish sludge. Brenda’s written account of the work was to be the exhibit which was called Acrostic. An image perhaps of how today is consumed by tomorrow.
In 1972 Young and his family, destitute, moved into a ranchhouse near Cloverdale, in a valley slated to be flooded to create Lake Sonoma. The rent accordingly was incredibly low - something like $150 per year! Sharing the valley only with a few sheepherders from Oklahoma his family lived on a diet of beans and fruit from abandoned orchards supplemented by mutton from the occasional downed sheep.
Inevitably, Young lost contact with those few who were interested in this new art though he continued to create works. One, based on his realization of the effect settlers had had on the landscape - the girdled trees, the carcasses of animals caught on the remaining wire fences dying in prolonged agony led him to make a work showing sheep getting entangled and lying helpless. It was called Sheepshank. It also included his first stereo drawing, an anaglyph in red and green. Young had been shown a Vectograph in 1970 by Bruce Lane, who had made special effects for the Monkees movie Head. From then on Young made stereo photographs, though using a regular camera with the resulting and inevitable time lag between shots. In fact, this incorporation of the time element in the stereos was perfectly in synch with his other work.
Another work, made in Joan Jonas’ studio in 1973 used two video camcorders side-by-side aimed at a chair. They were connected to two monitors that could be cross-viewed to show the sitter a stereo view of him/herself. On the floor in chalk was a diagram of the lines of sight and in front of the sitter a sheet of glass suspended from the ceiling with a viewing window indicated. There was a time delay in one camcorder so that when the images were merged a three- or more accurately four dimensional image was created. The work was called Fur Fechner after the 19th century German psychophysicist.
In 1975 the strains on the marriage proved too great and it fell apart. Young decided to move to New York. The night before he left San Francisco he conceived of a work that he called Uccello’s Wife. An aluminum structure rather like a gymnasts parallel bars stood on a 21ft long strip of astroturf. On it were stirrups for the feet and a sliding backrest that connected to a large cardboard bellows. When the backrest slid forward the bellows opened and when moved back closed. Behind the bellows, suspended, was a paper bird. However, the machine wasn’t functioning. It was abandoned. The bird was motionless. The title came from a story about Uccello’s wife who one night called Paolo, aren’t you coming to bed? and heard him mutter Ah! How beautiful a thing is perspective!
The piece was made in Joan Jonas’ studio but the one part that resisted resolution was the bird. He worked on it off and on for two years before finally being satisfied. Later, he realized it had the potential to really fly and continued to experiment with the design - essentially two mirror helixes. It had the attractive characteristic of not stalling. Occasionally he would get a favorable response to it. Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific American and creator of the Great International Paper Airplane Contest was initially very enthusiastic though later, when advised by aeronautical authorities, he cooled. Most thought the design too radical to be taken seriously.
In 1980 Young discovered Contact Drawing: by having someone stand against a wall and stretching a sheer fabric over them, pinned to the wall, one could draw directly on it and derive a likeness which seemed to have something photographic about it. Response was very favorable. He drew Richard Serra that summer and after he had made a number of drawings and stacked them Serra said: Chuck Close is going to sh*t when he sees this!
Young continued to make drawings this way: Mickey Ruskin, Taylor Mead (a number of times), Joni Mitchell, John Chamberlain, Ruth Kligman, Keith Sonnier, lots of people. In fact almost anyone who went to his loft. Later in the Eighties gentrification led him to leave his studio and he moved back to California.
In 1993, using the contact drawing method, he drew one hundred and eleven people in the town of Pacific Grove. Called Painting the Town the resulting frieze measuring 237’ was exhibited in an empty five-and-dime store in the town center. A similar project though smaller was done in Carmel the following year.
Married again with a new son he continued to experiment with the idea of ‘density of information’ - a concept that came out of conversations with Chamberlain many years before. And continued, as always, to make portraits as the opportunity presented itself.
In 2007 he produced his first stereo book. Using a lorgnette with prismatic lenses he made thirty stereo drawings.
And in 2010 he began a series of stereo collages that resulted in a second book called the Optimix Suite - again using the lorgnette to view. The book was quite successful and resulted in copies going to a number of collections. A year or so after its publication Google created Cardboard - a very inexpensive way to view stereo images making it possible for his work to be seen as a smartphone app. Called Optimix Pix it is free and available on both Android and iOS. And hopefully marks the beginning of a reconfiguration of the world of art where artists can connect with their audience free of the aesthetic control of galleries.
University of California Berkeley Art Museum
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia,Vancouver
Museum of Modern Art, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Tate, London
Art Institute, Chicago
Center for British Art, Yale
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia
Royal College of Art, London
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of Texas, Austin
University of Peking
University of Tokyo
University of New Mexico,Albuquerque
Museum of Fine Art Santa Fe
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth