Tony Cragg

Photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Tony Cragg, "Outspan" (2007)

Photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Tony Cragg, "Bolt" (2007)

Tony Cragg Gallery Scene: 1989–1998 Shopping for Sculpture The C**** Word Blue Chips and Bargain Hunters in Bologna Miami’s Silver Lining British Businessman Commissions Public Sculptures for London Olympics Russia Today

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In 1988 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Turner Prize. He received the CBE for services to art in 2001, and in 2002 he won the prestigious Piepenbrock Award for sculpture. Though born and educated in Britain, and hailed in the 1980s as one of the “New British Sculptors,” Cragg has based himself in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977, and he has shown extensively in all parts of the world.

His major exhibition "Tony Cragg: Das Potential der Dinge" was recently staged in Berlin and then Duisburg; he displayed drawings, watercolors, and sculpture last month at Haunch of Venison, Zurich; and on May 3 he opened his latest New York exhibition at Marian Goodman. Cragg spoke to ArtInfo while that show was being installed.

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Tony, when I think back to the beginnings of your public career, it seems that you were primarily interested in novel materials, whereas nowadays you seem more interested in novel uses for traditional materials. Does that contrast make sense to you?

I can understand it being put like that. There are two histories: one is the history of sculpture in the last 100 years, and then there’s my history. At the end of the 19th century, sculpture was almost all figurative, and it didn’t use many different materials. Then, under the pressure of the world filling up with all sorts of industrial objects and materials, Marcel Duchamp, among others, offered the possibility of bringing non-art materials into the art world. Today, after almost 100 years of Duchamp-esque strategy, we can use almost anything. It’s interesting because it’s not only materials—there are tools and meanings as well.

I went to art school in 1969. That was a period that was really Duchamp-esque. Artists were still looking for new materials, and as a young artist that’s inevitably what I took up. And I was also looking for new spatial contexts. I started to exhibit in the late ’70s, and did a lot of installative work in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I was very lucky that I had the opportunity to find some new materials as a tail-end gesture of that process.

In the ’80s, this Duchamp-esque strategy was running out of steam. What’s the point of finding the 150,000th new material to make art with? Who cares? My focus went away from looking for new materials and new objects, and it went toward more psychological and more expressive content. Now that we had this new vocabulary of things, what were we going to express with it?

I was already tired of making installative art by 1981. Far too often I found myself in a situation with a material or an object and I’d think to myself, “Christ! If I just had more time to work with it.” By ’82, ’83, that’s what I did, I just packed up and went back into the studio. I got a much bigger studio, and had two really good assistants at the time. We just learnt to make things.

And “making things” seems to have driven your work ever since. I can’t see you as the sort of artist who’d employ a fabricator.

I’ve got nothing against it at a conceptual or moral or ethical level, but I really don’t like the idea of letting the work be made by somebody else. If you make the drawing or the maquette and then give it to someone else to make the sculpture, you get back a product. It’s like meeting a relative that you’ve never met before. You think, “Mmm, I should know you, but I don’t really …” I tried it in the early ’80s and it was eminently unsuccessful, because I rely on the pathway of making the thing: all of the junctions where decisions are made. That is what is really exciting about making this stuff—having the thinking process that’s going on parallel to the making.

Until I was 19 I had no idea that sculpture could be exciting. I was at art school in Cheltenham, and they said, “This week you’re making a sculpture,” and I thought, “Oh my God! Not sculpture. That’s not what I came here for.” We were shown a broom cupboard full of old material that looked like it had been recycled into sculptures every year. I had no real desire to do it, but I went to the cupboard and I took this material out and by the end of the afternoon I was totally absorbed. It was strange, and it was rapid—like watching the changing expressions on a person’s face when you’re talking to them. Every move I made, it became a different thing. Ideas were flowing and it was really exciting.