Tony Cragg in the General Staff Building

At around the same time, two completely different exhibitions entitled “Created by a Hand with but a Chisel Armed…” Sculptural Decoration of St. Petersburg’s Palaces in the 19th Century and Tony Cragg. Sculpture and Drawings opened in the State Hermitage. While the former showcases the works which once decorated the private apartments and, accordingly, created the feeling of coziness and privacy, the latter features monumental and experimental works, revolting against utilitarian art, by the contemporary British sculptor. Tony Cragg says with reference to sculpture, “We cannot sit on it, nor can we put it on”. Another difference is the fact that Tony Cragg’s works are often exhibited under the open sky. Thus, in 2008, a Sculpture Park of the master’s works was opened outside Wuppertal in Germany. In 2012, Tony Cragg’s work Luke was displayed in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. However, this time Mr Cragg’s works have made their way into the museum, namely into the rooms of the General Staff Building, where modern art is represented. In spite of this, it is striking that the exhibition space is filled with so much light and air. Previously covered by panels, all the windows are unblocked by now.

Photo by Kirill Ikonnikov

Visitors may walk freely among the exhibits and fully appreciate their size. Nadezhda Sinyutina, one of the exhibition curators, compared the exhibition space with a park. Actually, Tony Cragg’s exhibition in the Hermitage is the site-specific project designed for the rooms of the General Staff Building. The sculptor came to St.Petersburg with his own team to oversee the exhibition installation. He took his own decisions over the arrangement of the artworks and the explications. Thus, the descriptions of the objects are placed not just near the works, but a short distance away, on the walls, not to interfere with visitors’ perception of the displayed art objects.

Mr Cragg chose to install one sculpture from the Early Form series on the Main Staircase of the General Staff Building, apart from the other works. Similarly, in the summer of 2015, one of the works by the architect Zaha Hadid was displayed in the Armorial Hall and not in the Nicholas Hall, where her retrospective exhibition was held.

Early Forms
Bronze
Germany, 2001
140 × 140 × 400 cm

An events programme connected with Tony Cragg’s exhibition includes lectures, meetings and roundtable discussions .On 28 February 2016, Tony Cragg gave a lecture in the Hermitage Lecture Centre, accommodated in the General Staff Building. The artist talked about the formative period of his career, from his early experience of being a minimalist to producing monumental sculpture. Mr Cragg says, “I consider myself a radical materialist”. According to the master, materials give us a language and a way of thinking. In addition, they possess intelligence of their own. Tony Cragg was keenly interested in seeing the world’s underlying structures reveal themselves. He wished his work to reflect process dynamics through the use of form and material, ranging from the most fragile material such as glass to bullet-proof Kevlar.

Photos by Rustam Zagidullin

He believes that any material deserves to be used in making art objects and that real life and art should be interrelated. This accounts for the simplicity, ordinariness and democratic character of the materials he employs. Mr Cragg experiments with a great variety of materials including rubber and plastic. When the artist uses bronze, it mimicks plastic. As a result, a large number of Tony Cragg’s works turn out to be sort of flip-floppers. For example, the previously mentioned Early Forms bronze sculpture appears to be massive, heavy and rock-solid. As a matter of fact, due to its thin ribs it does seem delicate and vulnerable. Judging by the sculpture’s external appearance, it may easily be mistaken for the one made of rubber.

Mr Cragg creates both hollow and monolithic sculptures, formed of a single block and composed of different parts. Thus, the Over the Earth sculpture is assembled from two pieces. Initially it was this sculpture that was intended to be installed in the centre of the exhibition. However, it became clear that due to its enormous size it might be too overbearing.

Photo by Kirill Ikonnikov

Mr Cragg’s works made of glass are displayed on the first floor. Cleverly installed against the window opening, Clear Glass Stack can partly be identified as a readymade, which means that at one time these bottles were used as intended.

An assembly instruction was attached to the object; however, no one can exclude a possibility of randomness. Every time, when installed on a new site, the composition looks slightly different. The other glass objects were created in the famous Berengo Studio, some of them were displayed as part of the Glasstress 2015 Gotika project at the Venice Biennale.

Photo by Kirill Ikonnikov

Also on view here is Mr Cragg’s earlier Minster (1988) composition. Standing some distance apart, the steel cones composed of intricate coloured gears rising upwards, actually produce the impression of the “the sacred wood”.

Mr Cragg admits, “I am a big fan of manmade materials”. One may wonder if it means that today such materials as, for example, marble have become out-of-date and bourgeois. The sculptor argues that “being a sculptor equals a radical political position”. In his youth he tried many blue-collar jobs. He even made steel and the beauty of this material’s transformation kept him spell-bound.

There was a time when Cragg was inspired by Roland Barthes’ essay which celebrated plastic considered as an alchemical substance: “taken as a whole, plastic represents a spectacle which needs decoding, the spectacle of its final states. Every time we deal with this or that final form, such as a suitcase, brush, automobile body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or wrapper, our consciousness regards feed stock as a certain conundrum. The inherent transformation capacity of plastic is unlimited. It is capable of becoming either a bucket or a piece of fashion jewellery. When one unexpectedly discovers connections between the uniqueness of causes and the multiplicity of effects, the endless diversity of materials provides a source of our continuous amazement. Moreover, this delight gives joy, since man measures his own might by the number of transformations. As it were, by closely watching plastic transformations, he seems to be sliding rapturously across the surface of Nature”. Being colossal and fanciful, every work created by Mr Cragg presents precisely this very conundrum and spectacle, which both puzzles and fascinates the viewer. The ethereal cosmic forms of his sculptures and their gigantic size are astounding. Streamline forms and flowing lines make his works contemplative: one develops an irresistible desire to gaze at them. Some of them have a glossy surface, which inverts/distorts a viewer’s reflections (for example, the Elliptical Column made of stainless steel). As a result, a “false mirror” effect is produced.

One can discern facial profiles and heads hidden in many of Tony Cragg’s works. Sometimes, fragmented and deformed, they recur countless times in the same work. In the Caught Dreaming sculpture the heads (both apparent and hidden) stand out from the cluttering dream mass. To put it differently, the form making process takes place right in front of the audience. Dreams materialize and a sleeper gets caught in his dream as if in a mire. The title itself lends almost surrealistic overtones to the work and unintentionally makes reference to the painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee a Second Before Awakening.

Another favourite technique employed by the artist is placing one object (or a form) inside the other. To this end Mr Cragg initially uses a computer programme, which he does for scaling as well. Other than this, he does everything else by hand. According to the sculptor, he is chiefly preoccupied with drawing, which is an equivalent to writing. The theme of language, the interaction between language and material is of particular importance to Cragg. For this very reason he considers himself in some way to be the follower of Duchamp. According to the sculptor, it was the latter who in his pivotal work Fountain for the first time showed the connection between language and material.

Cragg’s cyclopean sculptures which arrived at the Hermitage, emanate power, energy and will. Taken together, crumpled and straightening out material, nascent forms and creatures, totemic objects, priapian images (False Idols) and (quasi?) sacred compositions (Minster), fantastic jaws of an unheard-of (extinct? non-existent?) beast (Complete Omnivore) create unreal space populated by ideas embodied in specific shapes, or by the ones who escaped in a wooden boat (an ark?) equipped with metal hooks (Concentration).