TONY CRAGG SCULPTURE

For the past 30 years Tony Cragg has consistently produced original ideas and a remarkable diversity of forms employing a vast array of materials and techniques.  It is impossible to characterise his work by reference to any style or art movement.  In the early seventies a new generation of British sculptors celebrated a certain freedom from the snares of style which had bedevilled their immediate predecessors.  By the end of the sixties the influence of Conceptual Art had replaced the formalism of the New British Sculpture that had previously thrived at St Martins.  This influence encouraged a pluralist environment in which almost anything could happen.

While late modernist adherents continued to argue over the necessary and sufficient conditions for art itself, the younger generation responded to the more open climate generated by Conceptual Art which came in the wake of American Minimalism, Land Art and Performance.  Conceptual artists proclaimed the subservience of form to content thereby allowing any material or method to be employed in their service.  Some artists such as Art and Language took this dictum and privileged media associated with popular culture including text, photography and video over more traditional materials.  Cragg, by contrast, was among those who translated this freedom into an infinite possibility for systems and material processes with which to conjure new and provocative objects

In common with the conceptualists of the late ‘sixties and ‘seventies, however, Cragg maintained a critical and political edge to his work.  His inventions not only suggested exuberant aesthetic play, they also contained ironic commentaries upon the role of art in the market place and on the junk culture that thrived in Thatcher’s England.  Cragg could transform waste materials into valuable commodities through a Duchampian process of nomination but his project did not stop with the readymade - he performed transformations with materials and objects that provoke amusement and wonder.

The early works were structured according to rigorously applied processes often informed by archaeological systems for re-ordering and reconstructing scattered fragments.  In these early assembled works he usually made use of “poor” materials such as building debris and plastic fragments of littoral flotsam from the Thames.  It was these works which Australian and New Zealand audiences first saw in exhibitions such as The British Show 1984-85.  A key example in that exhibition was New Stones Newton’s Tones.  This work consists of a rectangle constructed on the floor out of plastic fragments that had been graded according to the colours of the spectrum.

Such works employ the same nature/culture equation that Richard Long relies upon for the formal tension in his stone cairns and floor lines.  The geometry of the shape on the floor must be crisp and precise yet the fragments must not line up with the edge otherwise, the work becomes overdetermined.  In the case of Long’s slate cairn, for example such an alignment would make the piece identical to a dry stone wall.  The disposition of the fragments must be as ‘natural’ as possible.  Cragg’s relation to Long is often taken to be ironic yet the nature/culture issue is fundamental to the work of both artists.  New Stones has also been compared with Carl Andre’s bricks ( Equivalent VIII).  The crux of Minimalism in Andre’s work is a very simple Duchampian nomination but Cragg gives us multiple readings and visual delectation which fills the aesthetic void left by Andre’s conceptual framework.

New Stones may be thought of as recycling waste, as a marketing strategy for generating value out of nothing, as a critical take on the romanticism of landscape artists like Richard Long, a spoof of Carl Andre’s bricks at the Tate Gallery, and yet it is an original object which rewards endless visual contemplation.  The tension between geometry and random aggregation is most apparent in the grading of the bands of the spectrum.  These bands are not linear but blend smoothly into each other, they have something of the quality of oil slicks on water.  This quality suggests the random movement of particles organised by the forces of nature.  A reference perhaps to the laying down of flotsam in bands along the shoreline. 

The process of sculpture is much like any other kind of human building or making and in traditional societies that is immediately apparent.  An African village moulded in mud and decorated with relief and painted motifs seems to have grown naturally around the people whose lives are articulated by the paths and enclosures that they have created.  Their architecture is inhabited rather than being designed.  This process can also be found in the organic structures which have evolved in some older European cities where laneways naturally lead to public piazzas and squares where people gather and do business or simply sit and watch.  They are accumulated traces of behaviour which echo the structures of chance in nature such as the pattern of debris on the sand.

Today, in the most overdetermined architectural situations individuals and communities find ways to adapt some detail that allows them to grasp and respond to reality within the slippery perfection of the designer’s world.  These human adaptations of their environments can be compared to the structures that insects build.  These intricate buildings fabricated out of materials processed by the body such as paper, wax, and mud are often more beautiful and more complex than most contemporary human edifices.  Inhabiting form in this sense of bodily extension seems to be akin to the creative processes that Cragg employs.

Joseph Beuys claimed that every-body produced sculpture as a natural product of the way they live their lives from day to day.  In many very prosaic ways that is manifestly true.  Our gardens, our domestic environment, personal grooming and even those carefully folded or screwed up bus tickets are all examples of the creative production of the human animal.  Beuys suggested that our bodily secretions connect us to the material world and he expressed this through the use of organic materials such as fat and wax and honey.  Cragg, on the other hand, creates forms out of any material that suits his immediate purpose, often using the traditional skills of casting, modeling, carving and welding.  However, the objects that he summons into being have the power to move us to wonder at their origin while convincing us of their authentic existence almost as if they are the products of natural processes.  That is his particular skill. 

The works selected for this exhibition are more recent than the assembled fragments.  They are more akin to traditional sculptures in that they are built using all the conventional materials such as clay, plaster, wax, bronze, glass and sculptural plastics rather than found objects.  Some of the first such sculptures were modelled on commonplace found objects — one of the most popular being large bronze replicas of tiny plastic fruit drink containers.  These products of disposable culture crudely imitate the shape of the fruit.  Cragg has modelled them on a massive scale and patinated them like antiquities.  The resulting sculptures have acquired a monumentality and aesthetic authority which belies our understanding of their origins.  Just as with New Stones there has to be an element of irony at play but it is equally a celebration of social alchemy transforming dross into gold.

The fruit bottles have a similar presence to the magnified forms of Jurassic crustaceans which Cragg has also sculpted.  His interest in biological forms and in archaeological method are only two examples of the parallel between his sculptural processes and scientific classification.  Cragg worked as a lab technician at the National Rubber Producers Research Association before going to art school and he has retained his scientific curiosity and an enduring fascination with scientific method and with the appearance of scientific process.  He has produced glass sculptures that must directly reflect his laboratory days.  An array of retorts, jars and other vessels clutter the table such as you might find in a busy industrial chemistry lab.  The glass has been blasted giving it an ethereal luminosity while removing its transparency.  In this way the objects cease to be literal representations and suggest something more general about glass vessels and light.  They take on the quality of remembered images.

The Early Forms are a series of sculptures where one common form smoothly morphs into another equally common form yet the spiralling complex that this produces seems to have a life of its own, subject only to the logic of DNA replication.  Cragg’s beginnings in science parallel the experience of Beuys who shared a fascination with biology and collected natural forms from childhood.  A passionate desire to understand the workings of the world is fundamental to both art and science.  However, modern science normally aspires to be detached and objective while the artist more often seeks to know the world by inhabiting it.  In this way the artist attempts to manifest a trace of the world empathically through material processes that are by extension part of the natural order.

Cragg visited Australia in 1990 to take up an artist-in-residency at The Art Gallery of New South Wales.  On that occasion he created three monumental forms.  In a remarkably short time Cragg carved three vast bloodwood trunks into the shape of rubber stamps of the kind used in bureaucratic institutions.  These symbols of bureaucratic approval and disapproval subsequently proliferated taking the form of mushroom-like clusters in every conceivable material in a series of new sculptures.   This exhibition presents eight very different works from the period since he was last shown here.  The theme is diversity of form and material rather than conformity but a unifying quality can be found in each of the works conveying something of the artist’s particular vision described in this introduction.