Marek Kapolka - Reading 3

Cutting Things Up, Tony Cragg

The tone of this reading is incredibly different from the previous two. Tony Cragg discusses some of the fundamental questions about art and material, meanwhile sending some strong critiques on the state of contemporary art.

“Material” and the act of making art are the primary focus at the beginning of the reading. Cragg describes the act of making art as a kind of journey- watching the changes unfold bit by bit and letting the process embed itself into the artist's psyche. In this process, according to Cragg, all the oversimplified classifications of art (form and content, abstract and figurative, etc) fall away into an unrestrained communication. It's here that we start to see the two main targets of Cragg's ire: modernism and utilitarianism. He calls modern art a “cold-hearted combination of elements taken out of a well functioning industrial reality” and considers utilitarian uses of material as an unpoetic waste of their potential.

According to Cragg, proper art is a representation of “humanity's understanding of itself at that time”. The old forms and images no longer properly convey the contemporary mindset, which is not to say that the old forms are obsolete, but that they've been transformed and re-contextualized. For instance, he notes, “The still life is no longer a demonstration of clever Dutch handwork or even, just the Duchampian acknowledgment of the industrial artefact as a carrier of metaphor and meaning. It has become any use of material that helps any figure exist in any given framework, essentially used as part of an existential strategy.”

To Cragg, utilitarian creation has created a “flood of meaninglessness” and destroys culture, reducing it to the level of the lowest common denominator. Art, on the other hand, “puts itself outside of some of the norms and standards which are binding for most people and becomes a testing ground for new forms and new meanings.” Art is the trend setter and the avant-garde, imagining the world so that the scientists and politicians can implement it.

I found this reading a bit unsatisfying. Not only is it disjointed and a bit shallow (which I imagine come from the fact that it is, I assume, the intro to the book- hopefully the ideas presented get fleshed out more later on), but the concept of the topic- what art is and what it can or should be- is quite tedious. I agree with most of what he says- especially the points about creating images, rather than appropriating and recombining existing images, and the drollness of utilitarianism (although there are exceptions)- but with so little elucidating of his points it really feels like he's just making his general philosophies known- if I didn't agree with him I certainly wouldn't be swayed by the chapter, and I don't feel any smarter after having read it.

Also, his casting artists as the vanguard of thinkers strikes me as, in a way, offensive and lazy. Cragg seems to portray progressive creative thought as being unique to artists, as if he is trying to force artists into specialists with a codified role in the industrial world. I've seen this idea welling in the minds of a few people now, and it always seems to operate on a crass stereotype, portraying scientists and engineers and such as automatons with no imagination. It also denies (or at least relieves) the artist the ability to carry out the ideas that they conceive of- turning them into a sort of unnecessary middle man. I see no reason why an artist should not be able to make their work something practical.