If you go down to the woods today, be sure of a big surprise. Morgan Falconer went and found Tony Cragg’s sculpture slipping disconcertingly between realities
“I don’t actually like everything here, you know,” says Wilfred Cass, smiling. “Some of this stuff I just hate!”
Together with his wife Jeanette, Cass set up the Goodwood Sculpture Foundation after he retired from a career in engineering and management. Tired of “just collecting”, he wanted to establish a sculpture park that would have new work always coming and going. If one is to judge by his garage, which has, besides a car and a lawn mower, a dozen Antony Gormley figures lined up for transit like soldiers, one must suppose that the foundation met his wishes.
Goodwood is highly unusual among Britain’s sculpture parks — “a totally new mousetrap”, says Cass, who recently turned 80 — operating like a commercial gallery with Cass commissioning artists and funding production costs and the work then being sold. Until the sculpture arrives he never knows exactly what he’s going to get.
To mark Goodwood’s tenth anniversary, Cass is mounting the largest outdoor exhibition to date of the work of Tony Cragg. Cass has worked with Cragg since spying one of his sculptures in a New York gallery 20 years ago. Then the artist was in his early thirties and assembling relief sculptures from fragments of boldly coloured, discarded plastic. But since then Cragg has turned to traditional casting and his work has evolved through a rich variety of forms and materials: wooden forms encrusted in hooks, cock-eyed columns built up like fat stalagmites, mollusc-like shapes describing the passage of an object in space, and compacted organic shapes constructed from thousands of dice.
Cass is featuring more than a dozen recent works of Cragg’s. When I visited, the two were discussing their placement in and around a new chalk pit that Cass himself carved out of the woody grounds earlier this year. Entirely typically, Cass didn't bother with landscape gardeners, he just got a pen and paper, a couple of guys with a digger and started moving earth.
The result is a serene and judicious collection of different spaces and contexts for the sculptures, a fine foil to the hectic energy of Cragg's objects. Scale lends Cragg's objects a stable monumentality, yet the surfaces of works like Bent of Mind writhe with a mass of subtly hidden human profiles and Tongue in Cheek is a bulbous, gleaming bronze cage of round holes apparently turning itself inside and out.
Although the Goodwood show has to be limited to sturdier works that can be viewed outdoors, it gives a good survey of Cragg's work in the past five years. But one might be puzzled by the variety: a work such as Ferryman borrows the pierced casing of Tongue in Cheek and yet it stands upright like a cartoon figure. Formulations is entirely different. From afar it looks like a large chair with fat legs while up close its surface is covered in letters and numbers. But if there is continuity here, it lies in Cragg's preoccupation with the vitality of form and design, the possibility of diversifying from the shape of everyday objects. Occasionally Cragg's forms don't suggest the human world at all: the silvery surface of the arced form I'm Alive evokes a muscular fish, wet with water. Bulb is a pumped-up pale green form sagging forward as if the air was rushing out of it. One of Cragg's Rational Beings series, its structure is composed of perfect piled up circles such that it is symmetrical from one angle, asymmetrical from another.
Cragg makes his work in Wuppertal, a town just outside Dusseldorf. His first wife, whom he met when she was studying in London in the 1970s, was a native; he followed her back and soon settled very comfortably. He now runs a studio with a sizeable German workforce. One room seems like a storage depot of white forms — vast heads, casings like giant nut shells, vessels with strange openings — and in another room assistants are are busy sanding a new model, the dust flying like a tiny snow shower.
All this is a far cry from the years when Cragg might turn up 24 hours before an exhibition with nothing to show, and then wander the streets to find the fragments of plastic he needed to construct his early, vividly coloured collage-sculptures. “When I made the first Early Form in the mid 1980s people suggested I cast it in bronze and I thought they were crazy. To me that seemed reminiscent of Henry Moore, and he was an example of the past. But actually, bronze is like an archaic plastic. It's an excellent material for getting complicated forms.”
Arguably, however, there is more continuity than first appears between Cragg's early plastic fragments and later cast objects, and it comes down to his long-held beliefs about art and science, tools and artefacts. Cragg's father was an engineer with a great respect for technology. As a boy, when Cragg asked his father for a radio the man didn't go out and buy one but instead constructed his own cumbersome one. He tells a story of the wonder he felt when he and his brother found an echinoid fossil in the garden — that fossil sits by his bedside to this day. If Cragg's art is alert to the modernity of designed, fashioned forms, it also takes the longer view which sees those forms as tools and artefacts in an unchanging human world.
“Utilitarianism pervades our world,” Cragg says, “and it's an enormous censor on possible forms. There are hybrids that could be used as a part of visual language. I'm no longer interested in the table, or the bottle or the chair, but what lies in between, because that's a new reality.”
He laughs, “We know what a pig is, and we know what an elephant is, but what if you were sitting in a park and you met a piggy-phant! That would frighten the shit out of you! What would that look like? A big, pink, hairy, tusked, curly tailed . . ? And that's what a sculptor is looking for. He's looking for the piggy-phant.”
Article by Morgan Falconer, first published in 7th May 2005 edition of The Times Weekend Review.
