Tony Cragg talks to Barry Schwabsky - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, April, 2003

BARRY SCHWABSKY: When I first started seeing your work in the early to mid-'80s, it was related to the new figuration. In fact, that's the title you gave to one of your found-plastic wail pieces from 1985. Was that maybe a misreading of what your work was about?

TONY CRAGG: One has to see it in terms of bigger movements. I was born in 1949, went into art school twenty years later, in 1969. The first art that I saw and was interested in was the art of the Conceptualists, the Minimalists, the Land artists, arte povera, Joseph Beuys. I realized that there were already people who had a certain sensibility, these ideas and formal solutions for something that I'd already started to do on my own, like tying up bits of string, and knotting it, and other sorts of practical exercises with material. I was still a student, and these were people five, ten, fifteen years older than me. In Europe this was the postwar generation that moved into positions of responsibility in all walks of life, simply because of the vacuum that was in front of them due to the war. My life has been spent with this big wave of people in front of me. So at the time I was very influenced by these artists' work, but I realized I didn't want to make their work. I even had problems with a lot of that work. I was already kind of antagonistic toward the idea of making straight lines and flat surfaces. I didn't like the romanticism of certain things I admired. I didn't feel like I had my own position yet, and I didn't want to be the tail end of something. So it took most of the '70s, student times and after, to work out something that wasn't too heavily influenced. I wanted to use materials that weren't romantic, that were typically used in an urban situation, I wanted more complicated references rather than reducing everything down to a minimal gesture. I didn't want work that stayed always on a gestural, conceptual level. I wanted to challenge the geometry of a lot of the work of the time, as well as the very aestheticized purist sense of much of it. At the end of the '70s, in Europe anyway, you had the feeling that the preceding generation had dominated the decade in such a way that something had to change. That was even expressed in the fact that there were a lot of exhibitions whose explicit purpose was to lo ok for a new generation of artists. And you immediately saw that it wasn't going to be a linear continuity, but a real break.

BS: Can you define the nature of the break?

TC: The change when it happened was not a sculpture change, it was a painting change. The artists I got to know at that time were people like Cucchi, Chia, Clemente, and Paladino in Italy, Immendorff and Lupertz in Germany, and Martin Disler in Switzerland. So I took part in a lot of exhibitions where you literally had paintings everywhere and then this strange mix of materials in the middle of the floor. That was my lot, in a sense. In London I had relationships with artists like Richard Deacon, Bill Woodrow, Anish Kapoor, and a few others, and we all came to the Lisson Gallery. And out of that you had a kind of national group situation coming up; you had the Italian painters and the German painters and the English sculptors.

BS: Your references are primarily to European artists.

TC: That was absolutely an aspect of the end of the '70s and into the '80s, an awareness, a new consciousness of European art. It started with these apparently national groups, but there was a European identity. Europe had been downtrodden since World War II, but now there was a new self-confidence. The idea of political union came later, but it was very much felt in terms of art. Even the opening of Spain, for instance--that happened first on a cultural level. Culture was a real vehicle in the '80s for the unity of Europe, and not in the sense of homogenizing it.

BS: So you felt as connected to the Italian painters and the German painters as you did to the English sculptors?

TC: I had great sympathy, great relationships with them. We knew we made very different things, that our origins and our interests were very different. But alongside those national groupings, there was another structure that is much more difficult to describe and therefore less well known, which has to do with sympathies and spiritual affinities.

BS: Did these relationships with painters help you see your way toward using images in sculpture?

TC: Obviously. I felt very free to use the plastic fragments I'd started using in '77 in new forms. That was almost a kind of punk gesture at the time, a little bit aimed against the pieties of Land art, Minimalism, or whatever.

BS: The story that usually gets told these days about those times says that the return of recognizable, representational images was a kind of regressive move, a betrayal of the innovations of the '60s and '70s, so it's interesting that you recall the subversive thrust of it.

TC: I always have rules about what I'm doing, and the game becomes to break the rules, but on my own terms. The first things I did that you'd call representational--they actually represented a fragment of what I'd found as a material. For instance, a little plastic Indian that I'd found on the banks of the Rhine would become the motif for a work made of plastic fragments. So I was very conscious of the relationship between the image, the material, and the object. That's the eternal triangle. It was premised on a conceptual basis rather than a subjective gesture. But it still allowed for complicated thoughts and a richer emotional palette or atmosphere around the work. It wasn't just about going back to figuration.