In the idyllic surroundings of Goodwood Sculpture Park, 11 new sculptures by Tony Cragg show that the artist has achieved the rare feat of making monumental structures appear weightless, finds Richard Dorment
Like Long and Kapoor, Cragg is one of the few British artists to pull off a triple whammy, by winning the Turner Prize, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, and having a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. But all that happened in the late 1980s, and since then he's had only one major show in this country, at Tate Liverpool, in 2000.
If you still think of Cragg in terms of the early wall reliefs collaged out of fragments of brightly-coloured plastic, or as the artist who transforms industrial debris into free-standing sculptures of mind-boggling complexity, you may not have realised how much his art has changed over the years.
In earlier pieces, Cragg typically worked with found and readymade objects. More recent sculptures have been made in the traditional materials of bronze, stone and steel. If in some ways he is no longer as radical an artist as he once was, he is now a master of his materials, an artist who can make monumental forms weighing many tons look as though they have been freed from the laws of gravity.
A show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the sculpture park at Goodwood gives us a chance to see 11 new sculptures by Cragg, beautifully sited in a newly created open-air "gallery" where, for once, outdoor sculpture is contained and enclosed in an intimate space so that the eye has no difficulty focusing on the works of art.
You approach the show through a path that opens out on to a sloping lawn. There we see Tongue and Cheek, a relatively small, ovoid bronze with a golden patina and a perforated, honeycombed surface. Step up close and you find that inside the outer carapace is another perforated bronze oval organically joined to the exterior at one end, like a pair of socks that have been turned inside each other. At the opposite end, a triangular shape pokes out like a tongue.
If this description confuses you, that's not my fault: Tongue and Cheek looks different every time you turn away and look back at it: like a womb and embryo, a mouth and throat, a fossil, or a small animal with a sharp tongue. Cragg's work is rarely wholly abstract. In terms of his subjects — or, rather, the themes that inspire each piece — instability and allusiveness are at the very heart of his art.
From the lower lawn, you look up to a natural ridge where there's a two-ton bronze piece called Declination, (meaning "the angular deviation of the compass needle east or west from true north"). Like one of Henry Moore's reclining figures, there is a front and a back to this work, but the undulations and curves of the sculpture offer innumerable satisfying views as you move around it. Dense and impacted, the mass of solid bronze might easily have looked lumpen and inert. But simply by painting it bright yellow, Cragg lends a gaiety and lightness to a piece that changes form as we circle it, as shapes that suggest first plastic bottles, then a tuba, a loudspeaker, a saddle, or a car engine emerge and then recede.
Cragg has a miraculous ability to give sculpture, which is inherently heavy and static, a sense of movement. I'm Alive is a swirl of elongated silver, leaping across the lawn like a sea serpent cresting a wave. Had it been made in any material other than reflective stainless steel, it would not have felt as joyful as it does. No other sculptor I can think of has the ability to make the experience of looking at a work so dynamic, the ability to engage the viewer's active participation in "completing" the work that the sculptor began.
Cragg made several pieces in this show by stacking dozens of elliptically-shaped plates one on top of another to form a vertiginous tower, then having the whole thing either cast in bronze or carved in stone. An ellipse is a circular shape in which the radius is shorter than the length. As the stack rises up to the sky, the outlines of the sculpture turn into human profiles, looking one way from one angle, in another direction from another.
If the viewer moves even an inch, the faces change - lips become bigger, noses smaller, or the face disappears altogether. At one moment the teetering stack of ellipses looks as if it is floating upwards, but look again and it appears to be collapsing in a heap. It is an extraordinary thing to say about something this big and this heavy, but the sensation of looking at one of these pieces is like watching smoke rise from a chimney or clouds scud across the sky. You could look at it all day.
The show will be on for a full year, which gives you the perfect reason to visit Goodwood in West Sussex, one of the very few successful sculpture parks I've seen. Here, Wilfred and Jeannette Cass have established a sculpture foundation, commissioning artists to make large-scale pieces that they then display in the romantic woodlands of their 26-acre estate. Everything is for sale and, on the whole, the quality of the work is high. The experience of coming across a work by Gavin Turk or Stephen Cox in a forest clearing or silhouetted against an open field makes a tour of the grounds consistently interesting. It takes an awfully big carrot to coax me into the countryside, but I can't recommend a visit to Goodwood strongly enough.
Article by Richard Dorment, first published in 18th May 2005 edition of The Daily Telegraph. Photography Courtest: Daily Telegraph
