Tony Cragg comes to CAFA, China

Tony Cragg's exhibition opened today at the China Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing with a talk about his life and practice. The Liverpudlian sculptor quit his studies in Chemistry and his work at a "smelly" laboratory (he worked at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association) to begin his studies at the Gloucester College of Art in 1970.  When the drawings he was making in his spare time became more important to him than his work in the lab, he decided it was time to go decamp from his chosen career.

Speaking on the subjects of the sciences, human developments and other man-made products, Cragg dwelt on our need as a species to create cheap, low standard houses, objects,  materials and so on for mass-consumption. "Every city is the same,"  he said, as he described the grey streets, grey lamp posts and grey buildings of our cityscapes. Art, on the other hand, is for Cragg "free from utilitarian motives...something useless and exciting."  He might have added that Beijing is a particular case. On this day, the smog in Beijing has been so terrible that I would rather be inhaling second-hand smoke, but he was obviously too polite to do so.

 Going on to speak about the relationship between science and art (and he says that he cannot understand why people do not find out more about the way man made things around them function - in comparison to something like a tree, these things are "simple"), the artist said, "we should never forget that it is artists who went to the moon first... who went to the bottom of the ocean first." Making art, as an imperative for the development of science is a great "responsibility" to Cragg.

Cragg also spoke of the use of a broader range of materials in sculpture following the innovations of Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now in his sixties, he came into the art scene at a time when conceptual art was coming into vogue with force. Yet, materials are everything to Cragg, and as such he would never describe himself as a conceptualist; someone he would say just sits on the sofa and thinks of one or two related ideas for a work that can be put together just so.  Creating pieces of sculpture is for Cragg akin to writing: "[it] means you discover new words or new thoughts" as you are working.  Material is in this sculptor's mind, ultimately complicated and sublime, with even our emotions being a kind of material in his mind. "This turns me into a radical materialist, if you like." Clare Pennington