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
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Sculpture Garden
A sculpture garden is an outdoor garden dedicated to the presentation of sculpture, usually several permanently sited works in durable materials in landscaped surroundings.
A sculpture garden may be private, owned by a museum and accessible freely or for a fee, or public and accessible to all. Some cities own large numbers of public sculptures, some of which they may present together in city parks.
Exhibits range from individual, traditional sculptures to large site-specific installations.
Found Material
Web definitions
- (found materials) objects found in the environment and used as tools or media in making art works.
Sculpture
Definition
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials - typically stone such as marble - or metal, glass, or wood. Softer ("plastic") materials can also be used, such as clay,textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals. The term has been extended to works including sound, text and light.
Found objects may be presented as sculptures. Materials may be worked by removal such as carving; or they may be assembled such as by welding, hardened such as by firing, or molded or cast. Surface decoration such as paint may be applied. Sculpture has been described as one of the plastic arts because it can involve the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated.
Sculpture is an important form of public art. A collection of sculpture in a garden setting may be referred to as a sculpture garden.
History: Ancient Sculpture
Sculpture has been a means of human expression since prehistoric times. The ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia produced an enormous number of sculptural masterworks, frequently monolithic, that had ritual significance beyond aesthetic considerations. The sculptors of the ancient Americas developed superb, sophisticated techniques and styles to enhance their works, which were also symbolic in nature.
The freestanding and relief sculpture of the ancient Greeks developed from the rigidity of archaic forms. It became, during the classical and Hellenistic eras, the representation of the intellectual idealization of its principal subject, the human form. The concept was so magnificently realized by means of naturalistic handling as to become the inspiration for centuries of European art. Roman sculpture borrowed and copied wholesale from the Greek in style and techniques, but it made an important original contribution in its extensive art of portraiture, forsaking the Greek ideal by particularizing the individual.
In Europe the great religious architectural sculptures of the Romanesque and Gothic periods form integral parts of the church buildings, and often a single cathedral incorporates thousands of figural and narrative carvings. Outstanding among the Romanesque sculptural programs of the cathedrals and churches of Europe are those at Vézelay, Moissac, and Autun (France); Hildesheim (Germany); and Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Remarkable sculptures of the Gothic era are to be found at Chartres and Reims (France); Bamberg and Cologne (Germany). Most of this art is anonymous, but as early as the 13th cent.
The late medieval sculptors preceded a long line of famous Italian Renaissance sculptors. The center of the art was Florence, where the great masters found abundant public, ecclesiastical, and private patronage. The city was enriched by the masterpieces. The northern Renaissance also produced important masters who were well known.
In France a courtly and secular art flourished under royal patronage during the 16th and 17th cent. In Italy the essence of the high baroque was expressed in the dynamism, technical perfection, originality, and unparalleled brilliance.
Modern Sculpture
The 18th cent. modified the dramatic and grandiose style of the baroque to produce the more intimate art, and it also saw the birth of neoclassicism. This derivative style flourished well into the 19th cent. but concurrent with the neoclassicists, and then superseding them, came a long and distinguished line of French realist sculptors.
Rodin's innovations in expressive techniques helped many 20th-century sculptors to free their work from the extreme realism of the preceding period and also from the long domination of the Greek ideal. The influence of other traditions, such as those of African sculpture and Aztec sculpture (in both of which a more direct expression of materials, textures, and techniques is found), has contributed to this liberation.
Among the gifted 20th-century sculptors who have explored different and highly original applications of the art are sculptors working internationally.
An element of much modern sculpture is movement. In kinetic works the sculptures are so balanced as to move when touched by the viewer; others are driven by machine. Large moving and stationary works in metal are frequently manufactured and assembled by machinists in factories according to the sculptor's design specifications.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0860991.html
Anthony Cragg Quotes
"I felt very free to use the plastic fragments I'd started using in '77 in new forms. That was almost a kind of punk gesture at the time, a little bit aimed against the pieties of Land art, Minimalism, or whatever."
"At some point we’ve got to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of everything, maybe it’s not so very important what it means. It’s probably more important what the sense of it is.. they are two very basic and different things."
"In the '70s you could buy substantial works by extraordinary artists for a few thousand dollars. There was hardly any contemporary work that cost more than that. There were very few galleries. There were no television programs about art, nor was it covered by every newspaper. Art was not perceived in a very big public framework."
"My attitude is, I make the sculpture in the studio on my own terms on my own time, and I want to see it go out of the studio and have its own existence whether it's noticed or not."
"I think the twentieth century is just that.. the process of artists rushing through the world and finding some part of the non-art world and bringing it into the art world, minus its context."
"I always have rules about what I'm doing, and the game becomes to break the rules, but on my own terms."
"My life has been spent with this big wave of people in front of me. So at the time I was very influenced by these artists' work, but I realized I didn't want to make their work."
Biographical Summary
“Tony Cragg seems to me one of the two best straight-up abstract sculptors now at work in the world,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in the Village Voice in 1998. “No one in contemporary art toils harder to do more sorts of things more spectacularly with a greater range of materials and processes.”
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool, England, in 1949. His father was an electrical engineer. He earned a BA from the Wimbledon School of Art in 1973. In 1977 he received a masters degree from London’s Royal College of Art and then moved to Wuppertal, Germany, where he continues to live. He works in a huge studio in a defunct industrial space in Wuppertal. In 1978 he began teaching at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he still teaches.
Cragg works in metal, glass, and plastic fabrication, as well as in traditional sculpture materials, and applies a casually exquisite draftsmanship to drawings and prints. In the late 1970s, he began making wall sculptures of assembled found objects, and has said, surprisingly, that in doing so he was thinking of van Gogh. Van Gogh, Cragg explained, wrote about going through the trash as “a fantasy journey through a land of strange forms and colors.”
In 1981 Cragg made Britain Seen from the North, a work that helped establish his reputation. In it, a collection of pieces of bright industrial debris forms the silhouette of a man looking up at the shape of Britain. Cragg participated in 1982 and 1987 in Documenta, the influential international exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. In 1988 he won the Turner Prize in Great Britain and gave the entire £10,000 prize to charity. Also in 1988 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. In 1989 he had his first solo show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, where he is still represented. Crown Point Press published editions of Cragg’s etchings in 1988 and 1990. In 1996 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London held a retrospective of his work. In 2007 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, a major prize for outstanding achievement in the arts given by the Japan Art Association.
Cragg’s work is in the collections of museums around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Tate Collection, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has produced many public art works, including a 2001 Public Art Fund commission for Central Park in New York. Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the Village Voice in 1998 that Cragg “is a ‘public artist’ in an unusually complete sense. It is all about getting art into a world that is presumed to want art. Each Cragg work confidently awaits a home in some particular room or outdoor space, to which it will impart civilized value with the spiritual equivalent of perpetual motion.”
-Kim Bennett
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