TONY CRAGG SCULPTURE 

Tony Cragg (b. 1949) is the most renowned British sculptor of his generation.  For the past 30 years he 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

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.

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.