I’ll tell you how Tony Caro and I met. When I came back to London, Roger Hilton told me, “There’s this guy making sculpture like yours, and he’s getting rather well known. We’d better go and see him.” So we went to see him, and there were some of his early welded pieces there, like the yellow piece [Midday (1960)] that’s at MoMA. Roger said to Tony, “This guy is Brian Wall, and not only is he a better sculptor than you are, but he did this stuff before you did, and you’re just a big shit!” It wasn’t a very happy day.

But why did Caro get the credit for introducing this particular kind of sculpture?

Tony Caro pulled the stunt of the century on us all. There are a number of reasons. He already had a reputation as a figurative sculptor. And he was part of the London School. And he was welding at a scale that I couldn’t afford, because I was penniless. My first thought when I saw his work wasn’t, “What great work this is!” It was, “How does he get enough money to do this?”

He was also championed by Clement Greenberg. How important was that?

I think it absolutely had to do with Clem. There’s no other reason. Tony learned his lessons real quick, and very earnestly, and he did some quite good stuff along the way, but as Clem’s influence on Tony declined, Tony’s work got worse and worse, and now it’s absolutely awful!

Of course, you came to know Greenberg rather well yourself. And you were a regular visitor to New York in the ’60s. How much contact was there between artists in London and New York in those days?

There was a real link between London and New York in the ’60s. Clem said that the art that was really important was going on in London. In those days you could fly from London to New York very cheaply, so I came at least twice a year, and I knew what was going on. It was natural to go back and forth and know people in both cities. I met people through Clem—he would always do a little drinks thing at his apartment and invite people whenever I came through. I met [Kenneth] Noland, Larry Rivers, Jules Olitski. Barney [Newman] and I were very close friends, though Barney and Clem never talked to one another. And Barney and [Robert] Motherwell and everybody would come to London and we’d sit and play cards with David Hockney and [John] Kasmin. It was really incredible.

Why, do you think, haven’t you gained the celebrity that some of your friends have?

I was at an opening recently and somebody asked me, “What happened to you? You were on the cutting edge of everything.” That really shook me up. I don’t regard myself as ever having been on the cutting edge. I think of myself as trying to be on it, but never really being there. Intellectually, my work was good and clear, and avant-garde-ish, if you like, but it was always half a step behind. But then, sculptors are always half a step behind.

Your current show demonstrates how consistent your career has been. Your artistic vision has been constant since you first started welding.

I don’t think of myself as being consistent, but when I get into dark times, as we all do in the creative process, a shining light comes through to me when I pick up, for example, a book on Mondrian and see that the consistency is astounding from his very early paintings to Broadway Boogie-Woogie. I’ve always felt that that’s what being an artist is really about. I’m a Buddhist, and for me it’s like a prayer wheel: You keep hitting the prayer wheel and each time the wheel stops a different prayer comes around. You don’t do anything to make things happen, but by doing nothing, something happens. And it keeps happening as long as you just put one foot in front of the other.

I’ve been very fortunate. I just keep going back to the work. If you work at sculpture all the time, you’re not going to make great work every time. You’re not even going to make good work every time. But you are going to get to the good ones. You have to have faith that you have a good one in you.