Tony Cragg

TC: Well, no. In 1983 I made a work that I called Minster, which was made of circular objects, disks, circles, and cylinders that I stacked up on top of each other without fixing them together, to make very tall, slender minster-like spires. Just everything I found. The idea was that gravity was the glue, if you like.

Then shortly after that I was obliged to fix them because people kept walking up to them, shaking them, and then they’d get a painful bang on the head. Then I realized, "Aha, okay. If I have to fix them, then there is no need to make the columns straight and vertical".

Obviously circles and cylindrical forms are generic forms in biology, and what we have to consider is that our own, very organic figure is made up of, or consists in all its aspects of, a myriad of very precise geometric figures. In our minds there's a very big aesthetic difference between an organic form and a geometric form, but the fact of the matter is our own bodies wouldn't function on any level, not on the molecular level, not on the cellular level, not on bone level, not on the organ level if it wasn’t for its geometries.

I found this duality of the organic and geometric aesthetics that represents so many classical dualities in human nature to be a really important and profound subject... and very relevant to the appearance of our material surroundings, in view of the fact that industry only makes simple geometric things. Because the production methods have to be cheap, because they have to be economic, they take the simplest way of making things. Look around you: straight edge, flat, bland, circular, nothing really very exciting. Our industry makes a lot of lowest common denominator decisions about what we get. We suffer from, from well, an impoverished world of form, in fact. We turn a forest into a car park and take a tree down and cut it into blocks. Well, it's simply depressing, isn't it?  Obviously, that's not quite fair. I suppose it is a wonder that we can make anything and Nature has had a long time to make the complicated and intricate things it does... so complicated and so unimaginably intricate that we can't even imagine how they have been made, but I think we should try.

DG: You mentioned that when you started working outdoors in sculpture you wanted things that could sustain – can you expand on that a bit?

TC: I once said that "I make things in my studio, and the minute they start to move towards the door, they're in a state of decay". It's probably not a good idea to say that. On the other hand, there is something to it. There's an ideal, and after that the aging process takes over. Sculpture is fortuitous in many ways because it has the possibility to have a long life; it certainly outlives our own lifespan.

Nowadays sculptors use a lot of materials that have shorter lives than the traditional sculptors' materials. I make things in plastic, and in glass, wood and lots of other materials, but even working with wood is not a permanent solution because it's an organic material that eventually decays. Especially once you get outside in the all-weather environment and with social interaction, there are many reasons that the sculptures have to be very strong and stable.

DG: Do you use any 3D software when designing your forms, or is everything developed and built by hand?

TC: The ideas, and everything I develop--the themes, and the content of my work--I worked entirely by hand through the '70s, through the '80s, and through the '90s. People ask about my early forms, what program did I use? In 1989 there were no computers for those things, so I already developed this language of form, of both the rational beings and the early forms before there were any computational developments.

On the other hand, if there is a technology, why wouldn't you use it? Any sculptor would have used the sharpest chisel. He doesn't use a blunt one. You use the best tool you can get. The one thing I don't want to do is to generate sculpture in a computer. I believe that this would destroy my pleasure and the excitement of making and so on. I can't do it and I don't even know how to do it.

One thing the new technology is very useful for and many sculptors are using it to enlarge things. The traditional way of enlarging things is very difficult and time consuming. It takes days and days. Now it's relatively easy to have someone come in, scan the work, and work up a model from there. Even then it is only a beginning and I don't accept the work as it is, and continue to work from there. As soon as I have made an enlargement I work with it, cutting it up, modifying it, and changing it around, just using the bits.

The other thing that I find very useful to use digital technology for is if I want to put volumes inside each other. That's something I've tried to do for many years in my studio, in handmade internal forms. I managed, but certainly putting volumes inside each other has been made much, much easier by newer technology. For the last nine months, in the new work I've been making, I'm back to cutting forms out of wood, modeling polyurethane and carving shapes out of other materials. I’m not against computational assistance; it's just that the main thing for me is I want to have an emotional response to the form I create, an emotional relationship to it. So as a tool for certain tasks, new techniques definitely have a role, but I don't want to just generate the things without a psychological dimension.

DG:  What are your thoughts on artists who have their work fabricated for them?

TC: I think it's very legitimate, actually. I see young people and most artists are doing it nowadays. Nobody asked if Don Judd made his own sculptures. He didn't. He never made anything.

There's been a long history of artists doing sketches and letting it be made. That's exactly what I don’t do. I have a studio with twenty people in it, about ten of whom actually make the work with me, and we are working here with the materials. Only in this manner can I approach the degree of complexity I want to attain. In the '80s, the early '80s, where artists were saying, "Let it be made," just send off a sketch or a model; that was not a solution for me. I just had to learn more about making things myself, so that's that.

DG: How does nature impact your sculptural approach?

TC: I'd love to make work that has the same degree of complexity and fascination that the natural world has. Nature has had a long time to make stuff, and that's why it's so mind-bogglingly complicated and so impressive for us. I think human beings make really boring things. It's boring, geometric, and repetitive, and I think we should use whatever means we have to make better things and reject the mediocrity of industrial manufactured goods. Sculpture is one of the rare uses of materials that enhances the wealth of form around us.