June 2024
Tony Cragg
Saul Appelbaum speaks with Tony Cragg about sculptural form, language, and the Internet on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles
Installation view, Tony Cragg, April 27—June 29, 2024, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles.
Saul Appelbaum: I love the language you use in many of your interviews to make inferences about the nexus of matter, experience, feeling, and sculpture. Will you set the stage with some observations about this nexus?
Tony Cragg: We have an amazing ability to read the world with our eyes. We do it with our ears, and we do it with our sense of touch. What we see and how that affects us is instant. It’s quicker than any other media. If you wink or move your face, I immediately have neurons that change my emotions. It can make me laugh or be aggressive just by what you do with your face. We see thousands of people in a short space of time, and we recognize everybody. We know they’re different individuals. We read this surface so accurately, which means so much. It’s not just the face. It’s also the body. How is a person standing? Arms folded, legs apart, upright, and bent? You know if this person is healthy, young, old, dynamic, or depressed. Everything comes out of these signals. The body is a signaling device.
We’re incredibly acute about these things. This is sculpture for me. You’re sitting in a chair. How did the chair get there? This is an extension of your body. Aren’t you happy sitting on the floor? We make chairs, put them in a room, rooms in a building, roads connecting the buildings, etc. Communally, we’ve created an enormous amount of things, this secretion of material, if you like. That’s what we call our culture. You get up in the morning, put on your clothes, decide what to have for breakfast, sit at the table and chair in your apartment, etc. These are sculptural decisions for me. All of that material is to keep your naked ass off the naked soil. It’s the material that we produce communally together. Its only function is to protect us from nature and to modify our experience so that we have a better, from our point of view, survival strategy.
Installation view, Tony Cragg, April 27—June 29, 2024, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles.
That’s an amazing mechanism. Sculpture looks at those mechanisms. Why do we make those decisions? We’re responsible for the impoverishment of form on this planet, not just because we destroy the environment but because it’s how we make things. Our industries make things with the simplest geometries, the cheapest and easiest way to make things. These simple geometries reduce the form or the value of the world.
In a square meter of forest, there’s more form than the whole of Los Angeles. We took down the forest because we needed a field. After a while, we needed a parking lot, so we changed the field into a parking lot. It’s a dumbing down of materials.
SA: It’s striking the use of extension lines in architectural and representational drawings, for instance in Giacometti’s drawings. What do you think about these lines and what they infer about the interconnectivity of seeing and matter?
Tony Cragg, Incident (Solo), 2023, Stainless steel, 96 1/2 x 27 1/8 x 41 in. (245 x 69 x 104 cm), Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Tony Cragg, Stand, 2023, Corten steel, 43 1/4 x 18 7/8 x 28 3/8 in. (110 x 48 x 72 cm), Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Tony Cragg, Masks, 2021, Guatemalan green stone, 63 x 41 3/8 x 17 3/4 in. (160 x 105 x 45 cm), Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
TC: For thousands of years, people made representational sculptures. At the end of the 19th century, things went beyond the surface because of science. Suddenly, an artist like Maillol starts making sculptures that are more like geometric constructions in space. When Rodin makes sculptures, he no longer worries about anatomy. Rodin is obsessed with Freud’s new ideas. He wants psychological affect. He goes through all these strategies. He sometimes beats up the figure, throws it on the ground, breaks its arm, etc., to express a maximum emotional quality in the work. Now, we’re moving into abstract ideas.
As things go on, Brancusi comes along and introduces Byzantine geometries. When we get to Duchamp, he does something unique and shows us that everything affects us. Not just the face or body in the room but everything around us has an emotional and intellectual meaning. Therefore, we can use everything to make art. He makes it very clear how things that exist in a three-dimensional space, or three-dimensional extension, also exist in terms of language in our brains.
We have a cloud of associations, a volume of words, of terms. Artists discovered after Duchamp that you didn’t have to change an object too much to make it art. You could even change the terms around it. The whole world becomes the subject of sculpture. I think the 20th century gave us many opportunities to work with.
Installation view, Tony Cragg, April 27—June 29, 2024, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles.
For me, the extension lines you’re talking about are not physical. They’re the idea that when you have a thing in space, you cluster it up with associations, words, and meanings. And those words and meanings don’t exist anywhere other than your mind, yet you transport these things into the material so it communicates. The material world is so complicated. I am in a sense of astonishment every day that I’m here, that I exist.
SA: Do you believe language is a part of a material process? Is it sculptural?
TC: Yes. I’d have to say it is. It’s materially formed. You can see it forming in your own hands. I write sometimes. You can have an idea or something you want to say, and then you put it on paper. You move around different clauses, then suddenly, it becomes a sentence. So what have you done? You’ve used material to form your ideas. You’re using material outside of your body to reflect and think. That is the creative process.
When I have a block of clay in front of me, billions of things are in that block. Some of it is the dust on my fingers. When I start to move and mold the block, suddenly, a form starts to vibrate. Associations, ideas, and emotions accumulate around the form.
Installation view, Tony Cragg, April 27—June 29, 2024, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles.
SA: I keep returning to a simple scene about the nexus of matter, experience, and feeling. I’m walking down the street and someone sends me a message. I see it on my phone. It gives me an intense feeling. Then that changes how I act and move things around. What do you think about the material or sculptural basis of the Internet?
TC: The Internet is a communicative medium, so it’s been beneficial. It’s become essential to us as a part of our social strategies. The immediacy and the speed of communication have changed. On another level, it’s not just communication. It’s a super source of information. There’s a little sadness in this human condition because it reflects a lot of sordidness, a lot of unhappiness, and a lot of unnecessary things. We’re pitted against each other in a competitive mode, like competing for survival. It becomes a battleground for a lot of issues. So often, it resorts to the lowest common denominator. If you want to educate people, the Internet is also a good tool. Then, it’s about the quality of ideas or quality control. Sometimes, it becomes a cesspit of information instead of a glowing source.
SA: This lowest common denominator sounds analogous to your idea about the parking lot. It’s the lowest common denominator of building in the environment. There’s undoubtedly an internet parking lot.
TC: That’s what worries me. We’re teaching people the wrong things. We’re making them into economic units. It doesn’t value life. It doesn’t value the existence of humanity. It makes people into useful things. To do that, we pit one against another. When we’re talking about material, I’m not just talking about the shape of the material. I’m talking about the shape of the environment, the education system, the production system, etc. I’m a sculptor, and the fact is that making sculpture is political. Being an artist is political. We know what the rest of the world is making. There’s an optimistic, positivistic approach to human existence that can improve life on the planet.
Tony Cragg
April 27- June 29
Marian Goodman Gallery
Los Angeles
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool, England, and has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia, 2018; Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, The International Sculpture Center, 2017; the Barnett Newman Foundation Award in 2016; the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, (CBE) in 2016, the Rheinischer Kulturpreis, Sparkassen Kulturstiftung, Rhineland in 2013; the Cologne Fine Art Award in 2012; the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award, Tokyo in 2007, he represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988, and the same year was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London. He served as Director of the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, after having been a Professor there since 1988.
Cover Photography: Saul Appelbaum
Saul Appelbaum is the Founding Director of The Pioneers. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Art from the University of Chicago. He has worked with Harper’s Bazaar, Serpentine Gallery, Asics, Petzel Gallery, Elle, FGP Atelier, Heidi Klum, the Scottsdale Museum Of Contemporary Art, InStyle, the Ann Hamilton Studio, Snoop Dogg, the Jewish Federation, Zión Moreno, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Mick Jenkins, Transfer Gallery, the Columbus Museum of Art, de Sarthe Gallery, TCAmgmt, Diego Boneta, SCNR and Rocco Castoro, L’Officiel, Hirmer Verlag, Kids of Immigrants, Natalia Reyes, Vogue, the Singapore Art Museum, The Visionaries Agency, Pope.L, Grazia, Critical Inquiry, Perry Ellis, and Numéro