BOOKS & ARTSprecariously looming works. Many seem
to take one curvilinear form and twist it,
repeat it and stack it until the object reach-
es the limit of that form. These are sculp-
tures made of aluminium, wood and bronze
but they hark back to Cragg’s early prac-
tice of assemblage in which he used seem-
ingly random everyday materials. With the
odd exception, the pieces in Cragg’s current
exhibition avoid the repetitive, corporate
nature of the works that saw him disappear
off the art-world radar for 20 years. In place
of that is a genuine idiosyncrasy that culmi-
nates in a bronze work called ‘We’, which
looks like a very large pineapple composed
of repeated parts of Cragg’s head erupt-
ing in different states of definition over its
surface. Noses and eyes poke through the
front, ears out of the sides like a sculptural
vision of the poster for Spike Jonze’s Being
John Malkovich.
The very fact that the Lisson Gallery has
chosen to exhibit Cragg during Frieze is tell-
ing. This is the slot that galleries reserve for
their major exhibition of the year in order
to take advantage of collectors and curators
from around the world who visit London
during Frieze Week. Over at White Cube in
Bermondsey, there is an exhibition of work
by Antony Gormley who, along with Cragg,
Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Alison
Wilding and Shirazeh Houshiary, was part of
a movement labelled New British Sculpture
in the early 1980s. This was a group of artistswho returned to the use of traditional mate-
rials and fabrication (rather than simply
putting things next to each other as concep-
tual and minimalist artists favoured). They
also returned to narrative with metaphor-
ic and figurative imagery, the ambition of
which could at times lead to bombast. Anish
Kapoor recently revealed, on the Radio 4
programme The Reunion, the thinking
behind ‘Marsyas’, his 2003 Tate Modern
Turbine Hall installation: ‘Modesty aside,I wanted to make a wonder of the world.’
Similarly, Gormley’s habit of repeatedly
making sculptures based on the dimen-
sions of his own body have led to a certain
amount of art-world sniggering. His new
White Cube exhibition is filled with over-
sized stylised figurative monuments that
are based on Gormley’s dimensions. There
are also little shapes of buildings which per-
haps suggest that Gormley is the art world’s
equivalent of Godzilla. The show culmi-
nates with ‘Run’, a cast-iron tunnel whose
external shape is the stylised contours of
Gormley’s torso, meaning that viewers are
invited to stroll through the inner space of
the artist, which is dark, slightly dull and a
dead end.
Leaving aside the occasional egocentricmoment, there’s a compel-
ling case that sculpture, or
more specifically the object,
once more occupies a central
place in the British contem-
porary art scene. The Turner
Prize shortlist features four
artists, all of whom turn to
the three-dimensional at
some point in their practice.
Helen Marten and Michael
Dean are perhaps the most
sculptural of the four, with
Marten representing the ten-
dency in contemporary prac-
tice to collide images with
incongruous objects and
Dean the most recognisably
a sculptor. Earlier this month
the shortlist was announced
for the Hepworth Prize for
Sculpture, the first art prize
in the country to focus sole-
ly on sculpture (Marten
features on this shortlist
as well).
Informing this revival is a
set of critical theories called
Speculative Realism, as well
as the related field, Object-
Orientated Theory. This is
a way of thinking that few
outside art school will have
heard of, but that has been
very influential in art schools throughout
Britain and Europe in recent years. While
the specifics of the theories are largely baf-
fling, the central message is a focus on the
primacy of objects (rather than humans)
and the mysterious and unknowable depth
of their meanings. Cue lots of artists mak-
ing objects that are wilfully obscure, while
strongly signalling that they have layers of
meaning within them. And cue lots of cura-
tors lining up to write texts about the essen-
tial unknowability of these objects, and a
decent number of collectors buying these
works, happy because while the works look
visually pleasing one does not have to strug-
gle to think about what they mean (as this is
unknowable).
This is the context in which Cragg’s work
has returned from obscurity and become
unexpectedly relevant. Modern British
art has always been stronger on the three-
dimensional front — Moore, Hepworth,
the Geometry of Fear group, Caro, King
and New British Sculpture provide an intel-
lectually more robust line-up than, say, the
Camden School Group, Bacon, Freud, the
Glasgow Boys and Gary Hume. Perhaps it is
in the history of modern and contemporary
British art that one can really find a march
of the makers. The return of artists such as
Cragg, and the return to the object on the
part of young artists fired up by poetically
inclined if largely incoherent critical theory,
should be welcomed.Collectors buy these works because
while they look pleasing one does not
have to grapple with their meaningDetail from ‘Spring’, 2015, by Tony Cragg© TONY CRAGG COURTESY LISSON GALLERY