Dicey

Tony Cragg is a diverse artist who uses many interesting material within his work. Some images I find to be personally really amazing are his dice sculptures. The time, effort, and intricacy involved in making these works are astounding. I enjoyed researching and finding out more about him and learning about his technique. He is very skilled and still has more to offer.

Aside from that, these are some extremely cool sculptures!

1949

1949 is the year Anthony Cragg was born. I began to wonder what else was happening that year in the United Kingdom.

Monarch - King George VI
Prime Minister - Clement Attlee, Labour

Events:

January - A national sex survey is carried out into the sexual behaviour of 4,000 Britons. The results are considered outrageous and suppressed for over 50 years.

January 1st - Peacetime conscription in the United Kingdom is regularised under the National Service Act 1947. Men aged 18–26 in England, Scotland and Wales are obliged to serve full-time in the armed forces for 18 months.

January 4th - RMS Caronia of the Cunard Line departs Southampton for New York on her maiden voyage.

February 1st - Women's Auxiliary Air Force renamed as the Women's Royal Air Force.

March 15th - Post-War rationing of clothes ends.

March 25th - Laurence Olivier's film Hamlet becomes the first British film to win a 'Best Picture' Oscar.

March 28th - Astronomer Fred Hoyle coins the term Big Bang during a BBC Third Programme radio broadcast.

April 1st - The Marquess of Bath opens Longleat House to paying visitors, the first privately-owned stately home to be so opened.

April 4th - Britain signs the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO.

April 20th - Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst goes up the Yangtze River to evacuate British Commonwealth refugees escaping the advance of the Mao's communist forces. Under heavy fire it runs aground off Rose Island. After an aborted rescue attempt at April 26 it anchors 10 miles upstream. Negotiations with the communist forces to let the ship leave drag on for weeks.
The first Badminton Horse Trials are held at Badminton House in Gloucestershire.

April 24th - Wartime rationing of sweets and chocolate ends, but is re-instituted shortly thereafter as shortages return.

April 30th - Wolverhampton Wanderers win the FA Cup for the first time in 41 years with a 3-1 win over Leicester City at Wembley Stadium.

April- First women appointed King’s Counsel: Rose Heilbron and Helena Normanton.
Manchester Mark 1 computer operable at the University of Manchester.

May - Council for Wales and Monmouthshire, set up as a government advisory body, first meets.

May 1st - The gas industry is nationalised.

May 6th - EDSAC, the first practicable stored-program computer, runs its first program at Cambridge University.

May 10th - First self-service launderette opens, in Queensway (London).

June 8th - George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.

June 7-25th - Dock strike forces the government to use troops to unload goods.

June 16th - Ealing Comedy film Whisky Galore! released.

June 21st - Ealing Comedy film Kind Hearts and Coronets released.

July 27th - Maiden flight of the British-built de Havilland Comet, the world's first passenger jet, at Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

July 31st - Captain Kerans of the HMS Amethyst decides to make a break after nightfall under heavy fire from the Chinese People's Liberation Army both sides of the Yangtze River and successfully rejoins the fleet at Woosung the next day.

August 24th - Old Trafford football stadium, home of Manchester United, is re-opened following a comprehensive rebuild due to bomb damage by the Luftwaffe eight years ago.

September 2nd - Film The Third Man, with screenplay by Graham Greene, released. The film wins 1949 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

September 19th - The pound devalued by 30% against the United States dollar.

September 21st - The first comprehensive school in Wales is opened in Holyhead, Anglesey.

September 30th - The Berlin Airlift comes to an end, during which 17 American and 7 British planes had crashed delivering supplies to Soviet blockaded Berlin.

October 12th - John Boyd Orr, 1st Baron Boyd-Orr wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

October 26th - Ealing Comedy film Passport to Pimlico released.

November 4th - Cwmbran designated as the first New Town in Wales under powers of the New Towns Act 1946.

December 16th - Parliament Act given royal assent; cuts the House of Lords veto to one year.

December 17th - Sutton Coldfield transmitting station begins transmitting BBC Television to the English Midlands, the first broadcasts to be seen outside the London area.

Information found from:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/timelines/tp/1940timeline.htm

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is an architect who's work I was introduced to by a friend. Her work similarly compliments the work of Anthony Cragg, and although she isn't directly liked to Cragg through his works, her work has a similar feel to it. She uses curving lines and flowing shapes within her sculpture that allow for the idea of wonderment. This is all of my opinion but I believe a preview of her work is necessary since I don't know of many artists with the style of both Cragg and Hadid. I did some research and found her official website. It let me know about the following:

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture inLondon.

After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met the engineer Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.She has been on the Board of Trustees ofThe Architecture Foundation. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid's winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and theCardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). In 2002 Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded aCBE for services to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honored with a retrospective spanning her entire work at theGuggenheim Museum in New York. In that year she also received an Honorary Degree from theAmerican University of Beirut.

Zaha Hadid's architectural design firm - Zaha Hadid Architects - is over 350 people strong, headquartered in a Victorian former school building in Clerkenwell, London.

In 2008, she ranked 69th on the Forbes list of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women". On January 2 2009, she was the guest editor of the BBC's flagship morning radio news programme, Today.

In 2010 she was named by Time magazine as influential thinker in the 2010 TIME 100 issue. In September 2010, The British magazine New Statesman listed Zaha Hadid at number 42 in their annual survey of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".

She won the Stirling Prize two years running: in 2010, for one of her most celebrated works, the Maxxiin Rome, and in 2011 for the Evelyn Grace Academy, a Z-shapes school in Brixton

Hadid is the designer of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park in Seoul, South Korea, which is expected to be the centerpiece of the festivities for the city's designation as World Design Capital 2010. The complex is scheduled to be completed in 2011.

Alain Prochiantz

Another of Cragg's influences is Alain Prochiantz. He was born December 17 1948 , and is currently a researcher in neurobiology and a professor at the College de France. Alain Prochiantz is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure (1969). After a thesis of science obtained in 1976 in the field of genetic translation , he turned to neurobiology , working with Jacques Glowinski and became director of research at CNRS . He obtained the direction of the Biology Department of the Ecole Normale he held until 2006 to become Chair "morphogenetic process" of the College de France in 2007. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences since November 18, 2003 and Chairman of the Research Committee of the Foundation for Medical Research (FRM). In 2011 , he received for all of its work on the Inserm Grand Prix .
It is also the author of numerous scientific articles and books on the brain is involved in staging drama of scientific with his friend Jean-François Peyret . Together, they collaborate in the writing of the play Ex vivo / in vitro created at the Hill Theater in November 2011.
Alain Prochiantz works since the early 1980s in the field of neurobiology molecular processes including morphogenesis and cell differentiation nervous. He made ​​his first important work at the College de France with Jacques Glowinski on the development and maturation in vitro of dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain , , . Who moved his laboratory to the ENS , it then focuses on the molecular signals responsible for some neuronal morphogenesis process and stresses in particular since 1991 the role of the homeobox of certain transcription factors , (but also of different proteins of the extracellular matrix such as tenascin , and glycosaminoglycans ...) in these phenomena. As was then fully accepted in the scientific community, he suggested that cascades regulating homeotic genes (the Hox family ) are potentially involved in many stages of neuronal differentiation, the growth of neurites , neuronal polarity. .. However, going against a certain amount of knowledge, even of dogma in the field of molecular biology , he reports that areas of transcription factors, or even whole proteins such as protein Hox5 can be internalized in a cell , and therefore makes the idea of the possible secretion of a transcription factor given by a nerve cell A can be internalized by a neighboring cell B and have a biological effect on it. To clearly demonstrate this, he focuses his team to the homeoprotein Engrailed of the Hox gene family involved in the morphogenesis of brain structures and demonstrates that it also has an intracellular localization in secretory vesicles . The first key publication supporting this theory is made ​​in 1998 with the demonstration in vitro that a large proportion of nuclear transcription factor Engrailed is actually secreted into the extracellular medium by Cos and recaptured by neurons in co-culture acting as potential intracellular messenger peptide . It is interesting to note that these articles have been published in good journals in biology but not prominent because the data were relatively challenged by the scientific community . These discoveries will take some time to be recognized .
Alain Prochiantz continue its work in evolutionary genetics of development and directs its research towards the physiological aspects of his discoveries including basic molecular understanding of the processes of neuronal plasticity and axon guidance .

I found this information from: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Prochiantz

Issac Newton

Issac Newton inspired my artist, Tony Cragg, who's artwork blossoms off the page.
Sir Isaac Newton, born December 25 1642, died March 20 1727, was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."
His monograph Philosophy Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution. The Principia is generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever written.
Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colors that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.
In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed Newton's method for approximating the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
Newton was also highly religious. He was an unorthodox Christian, and wrote more on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics, the subjects he is mainly associated with. Newton secretly rejected Trinitarianism, fearing to be accused of refusing holy orders.

I researched this information from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Influences

As I stated in my midterm paper, Cragg admits to be influenced by are scientists and philosophers like Isaac Newton and Alain Prochiantz. I decided some good lateral research should involve them. The posts of these will follow this one.

Tony Cragg's Interview with Jon Wood

Tony Cragg interviewed by Jon Wood:

Jon Wood met up with Tony Cragg in Sweden this summer to talk with him about the
exhibition and about some of the thinking behind his recent sculpture.

Tony Cragg: We've been planning this exhibition for about two or three years and, at
the beginning, I thought I'd do a whole show about Rational Beings. But more
recently, since the work has developed in the last eighteen months, I decided it would
be much more interesting to show the ways in which Rational Beings have been
approached via Early Forms. So that's the main function of the exhibition really for
me: to show the synthetic relationship between these bodies of work. I realised that
that would be quite a lot for one room but, it should function especially in such a
large, well-proportioned room, which gives the work a great deal of monumentality.
And so my idea was to populate this space with these sculptures.

...

John Wood: And for viewers walking around the works, looking across early work and later
work, what would you like them to take away with them?

Tony Cragg: I just want to give them an alternative: an alternative to looking at nature, and an
alternative to looking at a dull-headed industrial utilitarian reality. Every sculptor
wants to give you an alternative to looking at nature. You know nature is wonderful
and interesting, and will be the source of everything, but ultimately, as sculptors, we
have to express ourselves on our own terms

More form this extended sculpture Interview:
http://www.tony-cragg.com/texte/Tony%20Cragg%20interviewed%20by%20Jon%20Wood.pdf