Published in Sculpture
(September 1997)
It
is very tempting to interpret Tony Cragg's 1992 sculpture, 'Spyrogyra', as a
riposte to Duchamp. Consisting of
several dozen sandblasted bottles which cling, at mouth end, to the serpentine
form of a metal tube, 'Spyrogyra' is a bottle-rack gone mad. Of course, Cragg is an heir of Duchamp when
his material - the glass bottle - is readymade, but as is increasingly the case
with this sculptor who emerged from the conceptualism and arte povera of the
1970s, the transmutation of materials is as crucial as their election or
preservation. These are still
indefatigably real, actual bottles but in the particularity of their treatment
they have been aestheticized, shedding something of the banality of the social
environment from which they have been gathered to be rendered more ethereal and
archetypal in their sandblasted state.
As they become more opaque attention shifts from individual bottles in
space to a mass surface impression.
Cragg
may have come out of arte povera, but his sculptural forms now have an aristocratic
finesse. (Arte Povera's original
spokesman, Germano Celant, has recently authored the first monograph on Cragg,
a handsomely produced volume from Thames and Hudson.) No longer a scavenger among skips Cragg is now more a captain of
industry exploiting a wide variety of techniques and materials often in highly
innovatory ways. He recently showed 14
newish pieces at London's Whitechapel Gallery, a venue where he staged an
important early exhibition fifteen years ago.
His defining works at that earlier stage used found junk in witty,
inventive collages, often pictorially mapping out images on wall or floor.
He
has become far more three-dimensional, but what carries over from his early
approach is the supremacy of the visual over the tactile. Works fabricated to the artist's order
reflect his vision but do not bear his touch, and consequently appeal directly
to the imagination, bypassing the more visceral response that should be generic
to the appreciation of sculpture. The
sheer sexiness and panache of Cragg and the fantastic range of his visual
imagination can ultimately detract from the sculptural experience, from an
engagement with form. The groups of
assembled wooden objects, both man-made and natural, such as chairs and logs,
whose surfaces are liberally punctuated with hooks, is visually exhiberating,
electifying the edges of the forms and sending a shiver down the spine. (In another group of works, not included in
this show, knobs are similarly used to evoke unwholesome leeches or growths.) But ultimately such cleverness is the trick
of an art director as much as - possibly more than - the achievement of a
sculptor.
There is in fact throughout his recent work a tension between surface and depth which almost allegorizes a struggle within the artist's soul between a sculptor and an imagemonger. 'Forminifera' (1996) has laboratory vessel-shapes (a former lab technician, Cragg has an enduring penchant for test tubes, beakers and scientific apparatus) cast in plaster which is perforated with holes, a familiar Cragg motif. These holes could have been supremely sculptural, taking the eye into the depths of the material, but actually they achieve the opposite effect, appearing like polka-dots to embolden the surfaces and reinforce a sense of graphic closure.
Whatever
job title we end up giving him, sculptor or art-director, 'Secretions' (1996)
must be acknowledged as an extraordinary tour de force. A two part sculpture which has many
thousands of dice embedded within its surfaces, the sculpture's underlying form
is vaguely biomorphic, as with much of his recent work. The glistening mosaic of little dice with
their random exposure of numbers inevitably evoking DNA follows the sinuous
folds of the underlying structure. This
gives off a sensuous sheen, and even when the regimentation of little squares
is thrown, resulting in awkward breaks and joins, this only serves to intensify
the voluptuousness, recalling the mosaic work of Gaudi. The formal and conceptual richness of this
device is extremely sumptuous and satisfying.