{VISUAL ART} Reviews
TONY CRAGG Stunning showcase of sculptor’s poetic, monolithic output ●●●●●
From Scouse lab technician to director of Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Cragg’s prolific artistic journey has been one of inspiration and rejection, absorption and a will to move beyond. While the works of Max Ernst, Richard Long, Joseph Beuys and Henry Moore may have been staging points in Cragg’s trajectory, his separation from the ‘ego sculptors’ he is most often parcelled in with – Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor – could not be more acute.
With a few notable exceptions, this excellent exhibition presents the majority of Cragg’s poetic and monolithic output so far. Cragg’s giddy sketches guide the visitor in like a skipper to dolphins and then you are there. ‘Wild Relatives’ shimmers like an alabaster cloud, ‘In Camera’ is all pottery school Ernst, ‘Constructor’ is
L A V I T S E F
part circus mirror/part sea lion, while ‘Hollow Columns’ is the first of many anthills that look good enough to lick. The modus operandi is simple – nature recast in bronze, wood, stainless steel, kevlar or fibreglass – sometimes vulgarised, always surreal. Things begin to shudder with
primordial intent. The stunning ‘Distant Cousin’ is a Venus fly trap re-imagined by some Dadaist Dr Moreau; ‘Outspan’, ‘McCormack’ and ‘Declination’ are nuclear bloated clams as envisioned by the futurists. ‘Forminifera’ is the giant wasp’s nest Patrick Caulfield never designed. Only the wood and hook amateurism of ‘Under the Skin’ disappoints, but that’s small beer in a brewery of wonder. (Paul Dale) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, until 6 Nov, £7 (£5).
80 THE LIST 4–11 Aug 2011
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: BOTANICAL VAUDEVILLE Sparkling post-industrial dance on gleaming surfaces ●●●●●
Inverleith House has long carved a niche for itself as a champion of late 20th century American icons, and for the gallery’s British Art Show contribution has gathered up a grab-bag of 37 works made between 1982 and 1998 by Abstract Expressionism’s original skip-diving grease monkey. This late-period collection is a fast- moving mixture of shine-buffed collages and rust-laden sculptural detritus, as if junkyard and garage had been stripped bare after some Ballardian multiple pile-up on the freeway, then the component parts put back together again on some customised Frankenstein’s dragstrip as ornamental signposts forever in motion.
Twisted road-signs are heaped together, connecting neighbourhoods and no-go areas that one would normally be just passing through. A giant pig is draped in neckties. A windmill made of metal strips dominates one room as if oil was just a hidden drill away. On the walls, mirror images on bronze and brass dazzle like cut-up wall-hangings at a postmodern diner that should be soundtracked by some Link Wray twang on
the big-fendered car stereo as its boy-racer occupants go cruising up the strip, so steeped in suggestions of blue-collar teen romance are they.
With the wall-pieces rounded up from the ‘Shiner’ and ‘Borealis’ series of works, and the more sculptural constructions from ‘Kabal American Zephyr’ and ‘Gluts’, it all adds up to some sharp-edged re-imagining of the American Dream with bent out of shape street signs on a mashed-up grid system where playing in traffic is suddenly as safe as houses. In the sunlit quietude of Inverleith House, this transforms into a Zenned-out road movie that surfs silently through the ether rather than cause any kind of congestion.
Rauschenberg’s death in 2008 may have robbed us of
the world’s foremost architect of re-imagined urban arcana, but as Botanical Vaudeville proves, even a decade before, the road he travelled was as expansively of the moment as ever. The show’s couldn’t-be-better title piece sums it up. This is work as play, a post-industrial dance on gleaming surfaces that sparkles before zooming into the ether. (Neil Cooper) ■ Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, 248 2971, until 2 Oct, free.
ELIZABETH BLACKADDER Popular Scottish artist revisited ●●●●●
A major retrospective of Elizabeth Blackadder’s work at Scotland’s biggest gallery space was always likely to draw sighs of resignation from art snobs who value provocation and semantics over talent and craftsmanship. This eternal star of Falkirk is a major artist and this excellent exhibition reminds us that she is about more than just cats and flowers. Simply but boldly curated to allow visitors to follow
Blackadder’s journey from serious, mildly joyless student portraitist through her scholarships and many travels, this show is as much about the emotion of the journey as the archaeology of influence.
It becomes evident that she is in search of
something elemental, different and very much her own. Her botanical portraits are beautiful but seemingly rootless and alone, her interpretations of Japanese Zen art works in opposition to the subject matter – it is chaotic, vibrant and full of humanity. Her much-loved still lifes shudder with abstraction and skewed perspective. In her most profound paintings, which include ‘Flowers and a Red Table’, she prostrates herself on the altar of amateurism in search of the individual and the guttural. Blackadder’s brilliance is in the sacrifice. (Paul Dale) ■ Scottish National Gallery, 624 6200, until 2 Jan, £8 (£5).