In the1980s, Tony Cragg’s colourful arrangements of found objects had something of Pop art’s trashy aesthetic and instant visual appeal. Collaging bits of plastic bottles and battered frisbees into representational wall reliefs, he took the detritus of a throwaway society, detached it from its original function, and recycled it as art.
Then in the middle of that decade, Cragg began to work in bronze, an unfashionable material associated with the inertia of monumental public sculpture. Coming at the very moment when younger British artists were beginning to make work with dead sharks, human blood and cigarettes, his move away from assemblage towards a material freighted with art-historical baggage could well have made Cragg look antediluvian.
But as a show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art reveals, over the last 20 years Cragg not only faced the challenge but revelled in it, making bronzes that weigh many tons, and yet look as though they’d been freed from the laws of gravity and inertia, zigzagging giddily upwards, as vertiginous in their verticality as Brancusi’s Endless Column.
In these amazing sculptures Cragg appears at times to be engaging in a private conversation with the great masters of early 20th-century sculpture. As you move around a tower of elliptically shaped plates, the outlines turn into profiles of human faces just as happens in that icon of modernist sculpture, Renato Bertelli ’s 1933 Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini), while in Runner (2010) Cragg is clearly riffing on the moving figure in Umberto Boccioni’s famous Unique Forms of Continuity in Space from 1913. In each case he takes a work that is already dynamic and torques it, gives it an extra spin, speeds it up.
Cragg is also a dab hand at setting up expectations and then refusing to do what we expect him to do. This is as true of individual sculptures as it is of Cragg’s entire career. In Bend of Mind, for example, you assume that the distinct profile you see from one side will vanish as you circle round the sculpture. Instead, the opposite happens and the profile you started with gradually turns into a full face.
And what Cragg does in bronze he’ll sometimes vary in wood or metal, or else pursue entirely different trains of thought in ceramic or fibreglass. He even returns to assemblage: a two-part piece consisting of a wooden workman’s bench and what looks like an anthropoid shape crawling on the floor beside it he renders both repellent and sinister by encrusting the entire surface with scores of screw-hooks, as though it has erupted in a painful disease of the skin.
And some pieces are so eccentric they appear to be one-offs, or happy accidents. I still can’t figure out what in art history might have inspired the scale model of a gothic cathedral made of red ceramic entitled Small Church. The building lies on its head like a plane that’s crashed nose first on the ground. With both its steeple and “spine” (the nave) crushed, its flying buttresses lie exposed like the rib cage of some prehistoric animal.
Cragg’s sculptures refuse to be categorised. Once you engage with one, it’s hard to pull yourself away. He is inexhaustible. Against stiff competition from Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Richard Long, and Richard Wentworth, he is the most significant British sculptor of his generation.
Reference:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/8690554/Edinburgh-Festival-2011-Tony-Cragg-Scottish-National-GalleryHiroshi-Sugimoto-Dean-Gallery-Robert-Rauschenberg-Inverleith-House-review.html
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