“People once threw food at modern art!” Turner Prize-winning sculptor Tony Cragg’s amazing journey to success | Art and design

toLet’s say you’re a Turner Prize-winning sculptor, with over 50 years in the game. One restless night, you get an idea. You can make them in your studio and send them to the foundry to be cast in bronze. Finally, you’re ready to show it to the world, but the first person to walk through the gallery doors barely glances at it before taking a selfie with it. What do you do? Mind you, you’re Tony Cragg, the Royal Academician, and you’re officially bemoaning the preference of many art lovers to listen to audio guides as they tour exhibitions.

Perhaps the most unexpected answer is to greet the selfie taker with outstretched arms, or at least give the impression of doing so. “No, I don’t have a problem with that,” Cragg says, albeit in a low voice, as if thinking of the people who might have crossed the threshold at his latest show, which just opened in London. “People are bound to respond in different ways.”

Liverpool-born Cragg, wearing a zip-up jacket and dark trousers, is 76 years old, but could be 20 years younger. He lived for many years in Wuppertal, Germany, where he exhibited and taught across the continent and received numerous honors to add to his Turner bell in 1988. He had his own views and walked his own path ever since he told his father he wanted to be an artist when he was a teenager. He said: What a waste of time and education! My father was bitterly disappointed. He was an electrical engineer who worked on airplanes and thought that sculpting was a very boring and unnecessary activity.

Cragg’s problem with audio guides is that they hinder the viewer’s relationship with the artwork. “If you have a picture on the wall, it doesn’t matter what the artist’s intention is,” he says. “A hundred people stand in front of it and they’ll tell you a hundred different things about it. The person brings his education, his background, his abilities—and he responds to what’s in front of him. People who interfere all the time disrupt that direct dialogue with the artwork.”

Technological distractions aside, Cragg is happy 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, I immediately feel more at ease. 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 regrets their recent form. “Someone once told me, as an artist, you are only as good as your last show, and in football you are only as good as your last game.”

Cragg’s recent works include long, free-standing figures that may suggest twisted or contorted skeletons. We were talking just before his show opened, and as I watched them wrestle into place, I thought about artists on the road—musicians, for example—and how much easier it is for a percussionist to play the triangle than for a cellist. Of course, Cragg now has his own ways. “I have a great team,” he says. “They do everything. I arrived yesterday, moved things around for an hour, then left.” Don’t you take your artwork with you on the plane then? “I’m used to it,” he laughs.

Cragg’s early works included pieces that dealt explicitly with issues in the land of his birth, including The Riots, a frieze produced in the wake of the 1984 miners’ strike and clashes between police and youth in Brixton, London. “I left Britain in 1977 at the beginning of the Thatcher period, with the destruction of the art schools here, and a lot of other developments. It was a very extreme form of capitalism that didn’t care about the needs of the wider population.”

He also used decorations of the Crown Jewels and the Union Flag. What did he do when he saw the flag on lampposts during protests in the UK this summer? “Well, it’s very difficult to live abroad and then criticize how people live in another situation. But the most bitter disappointment I felt initially was Brexit. The idea of ​​isolationism and backwardness – I think it’s bad for the general population. It’s sad. And then you feel very nationalistic tendencies.”

“When I was growing up, the French were ‘frogs’ and the Germans were ‘kraut’. 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 realized: ‘Hey, the food’s not bad here!’ I noticed the furniture and the way the French treated their families: Wow! But everyone has a history. My children, who are German, carry this terrible burden of their history on their shoulders, from their grandparents’ generation.

Although he did not agree with his father regarding sculpture, Cragg considered it a waste of time to make celebrity or horse busts. “For me, representing exactly what is in front of you is a meaningless activity, a desperate attempt by humans to imitate or imitate nature.”

This does not mean that the sculptor failed to acknowledge masters such as the Italian Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the seventeenth century. But he feels that the time when figurative sculptors should put down their chisels is long overdue. Artists like Auguste Rodin incorporated Sigmund Freud’s ideas into their works, Cragg says, and Marcel Duchamp, who took a urinal and called it art, also introduced readymades. “When I was a student, we realized we were selling out of ready-made products, but then people like Damien Hirst took it to another dimension with a shark in a tank.”

Cragg’s first job was in the lab, which is intended for children studying stem materials, but he says that without art lessons, they have difficulty visualizing what they are learning. “Art is one of the best ways people can have a better life. It makes life more livable. To ignore that, in the way it has happened in Britain, is almost a crime.”

He still loves what he does, saying: “I hate holidays. Twenty-five years ago, everyone needed a holiday. I spend a lot of time in Scandinavia so we found a place where we can spend the summer in a very beautiful place where there is the ocean and nature – and a studio! This is perfect for me, it’s my dream.”

He shows me a list of new ideas on his phone and reads through some of them. “First and second, remember, for a while, long pause, on and off, way to go, path, backtrack… I’m not telling you that these are future sculptures or anything like that. They’re just things that pass by the time I wake up.”

Was that worth a month of thoughts? “I hate to say it, but that was last night.”

Cragg was amazed by the popularity of contemporary art, which was unimaginable when he was starting out. “Now, everywhere you go there’s its own gallery. I live an hour away from 40 galleries showing contemporary art. But in Britain, there was only London. And in France, only Paris. When I was in France, arts bodies were trying to take modern art to the countryside – but people were throwing food at it!”