Let’s suppose that you are a Turner prize-winning sculptor, with more than 50 years in the game. One restless night, an idea comes to you. You work it up in your studio and send it off to the foundry, to be cast in bronze. Finally, you’re ready to show it to the world, but the first person through the gallery doors barely glances at it before taking a selfie with it. What do you do? Bear in mind that you are Tony Cragg, Royal Academician, and you are on record bemoaning the preference of many art-lovers for listening to audio guides as they tour exhibitions.
The perhaps unlikely answer is that you welcome the selfie-taker with outstretched arms, or at least give a convincing impression of doing so. “No, I don’t have problem with that,” says Cragg, albeit faintly, as if he’s thinking about the people who might be crossing the threshold of his latest show, which just opened in London. “People are bound to respond in different ways.”
Liverpool-born Cragg, in a zip-up sweater and dark trousers, is a lean 76-year-old but could pass for 20 years younger. He has lived for many years in Wuppertal, Germany, exhibiting and teaching across the continent and collecting many honours to add to his 1988 Turner gong. He has had his own decided views and gone his own way since he told his father he wanted to be an artist as a teenager. “He said, ‘What a waste of time and education!’ My father was bitterly disappointed. He was an electrical engineer and worked on aircraft and thought sculpture was a very dull and unnecessary activity.”
Cragg’s problem with audio guides is that they get in the way of a spectator’s relationship with an artwork. “If you have a picture on a wall,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what the artist’s intention was. A hundred people stand in front of it and they will tell you a hundred different things about it. The person comes with their education, background and abilities – and responds to what’s in front of them. People interjecting all the time disturbs that direct dialogue with the artwork.”
Technological distractions aside, Cragg is pleased to be back in London. “I’ve lived abroad for the main part of my life, but I still feel very British. When I come back to Britain, immediately I’m more relaxed. I love British humour. I love the weather. I love the food. I feel like I’m back home, anyway.” He still supports Liverpool FC and rues their recent form. “Someone once told me, as an artist you’re only as good as your last show, and in football you’re only as good as your last game.”
Cragg’s recent works include tall, free-standing forms that might gesture towards buckled or twisted skeletons. We are speaking just before his show opens and, as I watch them being wrestled into place, I think about artists on the road – musicians, say – and how much easier it is for the percussionist playing the triangle than the cellist. Of course, Cragg now has his own roadies. “I have a fantastic team,” he says. “They do everything. I arrived yesterday, moved things around for an hour, then left.” You don’t take your art on the plane with you then? “I used to,” he laughs.
Cragg’s early work included pieces that explicitly addressed issues in the land of his birth, including Riot, a frieze produced in the aftermath of the miners’ strike in 1984 and clashes between police and youths in Brixton, London. “I left Britain in 1977 at the beginning of the Thatcher period, and the destruction of the arts schools here, and a lot of other developments. It was a very extreme form of capitalism that paid no regard to the needs of the wider population.”
He has also used the motifs of the crown jewels and the union flag. What did he make of seeing the flag on lamp-posts during protests in the UK this summer? “Well, it’s very difficult to live abroad and then be critical about how people live in another situation. But the most bitter disappointment I had initially was Brexit. This idea of isolationism, stepping back – I think it’s bad for the general population. It’s sad. And then you feel tendencies which are very nationalistic.
“When I was growing up, the French were ‘Frogs’ and the Germans were ‘Krauts’. My parents were very unhappy that I went to Germany because of the war. But thanks to the Royal College, I went to France to work for a year and I realised, ‘Hey, the food’s not bad here!’ I noticed the furniture and the way the French treated their families: wow! But everybody has a history. My children, who are German, have this terrible burden of their history on their shoulders, from their grandparents’ generation.”
Although he didn’t see eye to eye with his father about sculpture, Cragg considers it a waste of time to make busts of the famous, or the likeness of a horse. “For me, representing exactly what’s in front of you is a senseless activity, a vain attempt by humans to parody or copy nature.”
That’s not to say the sculptor fails to acknowledge masters like the 17th-century Italian Gian Lorenzo Bernini. But, he feels, the time for figurative sculptors to lay down their chisels is long overdue. Artists such as Auguste Rodin incorporated the ideas of Sigmund Freud into their work, says Cragg, and Marcel Duchamp, who took a urinal and called it art, introduced the readymade. “When I was student, we realised that readymades were kind of running out of steam, but then people like Damien Hirst took it to another dimension with a shark in a tank.”
Cragg’s first job was in a laboratory and he’s all for children studying Stem subjects, but says that without art lessons they’ll struggle to visualise what they’re learning. “Art is one of the best ways for people to have a better existence. It makes life more livable. To ignore that, in a way that has happened in Britain, is almost criminal.”
He still loves what he does, saying: “I hate holidays. Twenty-five years ago, everybody needed a holiday. I spend a lot of time in Scandinavia so we found somewhere we can spend the summer in a very beautiful place where there’s the ocean and nature – and a studio! That’s perfect for me, it’s my dream.”
He shows me a list of new ideas on his phone and reads some out. “First and Second, Recall, For a While, Long-stop, On and off, Way to Go, Path, Backtrack … I’m not telling you these are future sculptures or anything. They are just things that tick through in the time I wake up.”
Was that a month’s worth of ideas? “I hate to say it, but that was last night.”
Cragg is astonished by the popularity of contemporary art, unimaginable when he was starting out. “Now, everywhere you go has its own gallery. I live within an hour of 40 galleries showing contemporary art. But in Britain, there used to be just London. In France, only Paris. When I was in France, the arts bodies were trying to take modern art out into the countryside – but the people threw food at it!”
