Many artists apply multiples in their work. In our lecture today, some typical artists were introduced who were using the mutiples in their work. The one I’v choosed for this blog is Tony Cragg. His work has a very strong sense of the rhythm. The repetition, layers, multiples. He always use found materials. Discarded construction materials and disposed household materials were always been used in his early works. Cragg used more traditional materials in his later works and made simple forms from them.
Stack, 1975
In this work, he used the construction materials. The repetition of the line and the layers to make a cube.
Fields of Heaven, 1998
The multiple of the object made us feel very light even its shape and the light just like heaven. The shape also looked like the balloon which is a very light object.
Pacific, 1998
This is the one I like the most of his work from today’s presentation. This work is made of glass even the bottles are made of glass. Glass is a transparent material. The multiples of the bottles will give us a very nice sense of the rhythm from the outline and the change of the color from the overlaping of the bottles just like the waves in the ocean. It also tells his feeling when he moves into the new country, from England to Germany. Just like dive into the ocean, you wouldn’t know what happen next.
Cragg emphasizes that his sculptures are not made in factories but by himself. He likens work made by fabricators to relatives that you have never met.
“There is this idea that sculpture is static, or maybe even dead, but I feel absolutely contrary to that. I’m not a religious person—I’m an absolute materialist—and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime. When I’m involved in making sculpture, I’m looking for a system of belief or ethics in the material. I want that material to have a dynamic, to push and move and grow.”
“I also want that to happen over the course of making things, so that as soon as one generation of sculptures has gone up, another generation is coming on and things are growing up around me. That’s how it seems to work for me.”
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25052/tony-cragg/
“The aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. A painting as an aura while a photograph does not;the photograph is an image of an image while the painting remains utterly original.”(Thw Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin)
The reference of what Benjamin discussed in his essy he talks about the aura represents the originality and authenticity. In Cragg’s work, where is no original. For instance, my favourite work in today’s lecture, Pacific ,was made of many of glass bottles. He didn’t use the bottles in some particular shape he just choose the bottles randomly which surround us. So there is no original piece because there are thousands and millions of them.
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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with Tony Cragg:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/cragg_transcript.shtml
