Inscrutable Cragg and his park materials
Tony Cragg: A Rare Category of Objects
It isn’t often these days that you encounter art that is not just indescribable, but almost literally unimaginable. However, looking at Tony Cragg’s recent works in his largest British show to date, the question is not so much about what they mean, as how he dreamt up the ideas and processes that brought these mind-boggling structures into being in the first place.
A bronze “figure” set on the highest point of Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s stunning landscaped grounds is a mass of disc-like, strangely muscular forms that appear to be permanently slipping out of alignment. Elsewhere phantom forms, like layers of tremulous jelly, are rendered in super-solid marble, while a gigantic outcrop of cliff-like masses radiates an almost animal, organic energy, the whole thing constructed in mind-bendingly intricate layers of polished plywood.
If Cragg’s forms appear neither quite animal, vegetable nor mineral, but a bit of all three, that feels appropriate, as a preoccupation with categorisation – or “taxonomy” as it is slightly pretentiously put – provides the theme of this exhibition.
Cragg, 67, sprang to fame in the early Eighties as part of the New British Sculpture movement, with Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, and has become one of Britain’s best-known sculptors, by literally sorting things out.
Rather than evolving new forms from scratch, Cragg organised rubbish from his studio into monolithic stacks, or gathered plastic detritus into colour-coded assemblages that gave him some of his early hits. The irreverent wit of his Britain Seen from
the North, for example, composed of junk objects, has made it enduringly popular, with its life-size viewer looking at the Scottish end of a vast map of Britain lying on its side.
While the exhibition doesn’t pretend to be a retrospective in the sense of fully representing Cragg’s career to date, there are works from all periods which have been arranged, principally for visual impact, in the beautifully designed underground galleries as well as being dotted through the grounds.
The earliest pieces have a childlike faux naivety: New Figuration, from 1985, shows a figure spiralling into space in shards of dustbin lids and brightly coloured plastic spades, while Minster (1990), a collection of spires formed from stacked industrial components, has an unlikely fairy-tale quality.
Yet it’s far from self-evident how this early enthusiasm for the ordering of found materials has fed into the more carefully constructed, but inscrutable forms of Cragg’s more recent work.
Drawings of simplified human profiles from the Nineties, however, give a clue to his future direction. These rather anonymous brows, noses and chins are put into a kind of whirling sculptural rotation in his Rational Beings series. In Cast Glances from 2002, a blurred head in black bronze is clearly discernible with a tornado-like cloud emanating from the top. And if the idea of blurring – an optical effect – feels odd in relation to sculpture, which is all about tangible physical objects, then defying and confounding such categories is what Cragg’s sculpture is all about.
These attenuated and endlessly morphing heads and body-parts become a sort of all-purpose texture, a quasi-geological strata that has lost any clear link to its original human form, but is explored in almost endlessly diverse permutations and materials.
In Points of View (2013), three teetering gold-tinged bronze columns of strata perform a kind of wavering dance up on the green sward above the gallery; the layered plywood of Runner (2015), a brilliant red structure completely filling the tall Underground Gallery corridor, harks back to his early enthusiasm for stacking, while Instant (2011), with its mass of serrated profiles in deep red polished marble is – completely counter to what you’d expect – actually a portrait.
While Cragg’s work always strongly reminds me of early 20th century Italian Futurism, which sought to capture motion through minutely assembled multiple viewpoints, he is interested less in portraying movement per se than in embodying the sub-atomic energy and dynamism that is present in all things.
In Cragg’s hands, materials take on an exuberant life of their own. Lengths of what looks like industrial piping, split at the side to reveal interior and exterior, get themselves into writhing, almost copulatory permutations. One, spreading into a rippling yellow fan-shape at the end of one of the garden walkways, feels like an industrial equivalent to the scallop-shell in Botticelli’s erotic masterpiece, The Birth of Venus.
Secretions, an arrangement of enormous bulbous forms, like internal human organs, is covered in an oddly glittering surface that proves, on closer inspection, to be thousands of plastic dice – a play on the muchvaunted role of chance in modern art.
This is a beautifully organised exhibition that sets Cragg’s work off to strong effect. It might appear to make too much of Cragg’s interest in the quasi-scientific analysis and categorisation of materials and processes – from his early days as a lab technician in Welwyn Garden City to his professorship at Dusseldorf ’s prestigious Kunstakadmie, where he taught for 36 years.
Yet I suppose Cragg’s desire to push materials far beyond the limits of what they would naturally do is about understanding how things work. Far more though, you’re left with a sense of the universal human urge to create extraordinary stuff, to bring into being forms and structures that have never been conceived before.
In that sense, this show couldn’t be more appropriate as the centrepiece of a programme celebrating 40 years of Yorkshire Sculpture Park: the vision of Peter Murray, then a lecturer at Leeds University, it has gone from modest beginnings to be globally influential in the way sculpture is exhibited and understood, as well as becoming a hugely successful attraction (600,000 visitors last year). You couldn’t hope to find a more appropriate embodiment of YSP’s innovative exploratory spirit than the visionary work of Tony Cragg.
‘Rather than evolving new forms, Cragg organised rubbish from his studio into monolithic stacks’