LONDON — British sculptor Anthony Caro died 10 years ago. How to keep it in the public eye? How to stop the possibility of reputation erasure?
Two men have done heavy work on his behalf. One of them is his merchant, David Juda, guardian of the estate. The other is Paul Moorhouse, the director of the Antony Caro Center in Camden, where Caro had his studio.
Thanks in part to their efforts, two Caro salons opened this year. One is in Ealing, northwest London, where a great architect named Sir John Soane built himself a country house called Pitzhanger Manor in the early 19th century. This exposure takes as its theme architecture as a source of inspiration for Caro. The other, Caro and Musicis at Annely Juda Fine Art, near Oxford Circus in central London, and it’s all about Caro and the influence of music.
Although a polite man, dressed in a tweed jacket and of relatively slight build, Caro was a murderer of a maker. He knocked sculptures off their pedestals and bolted, say, a steel cut to whatever came to hand with improvised glee, from first to last. He never knew what he was doing until he had done it. That’s what he loved the most: the thrill of discovering what his hand and eye had done.
The first challenge he had set himself had been to reinvent sculpture itself, to move away from the rigging of the human presence represented by his disappointing efforts at figuration. It was in the 1950s. Architecture as a discipline could contribute to this. There was something pure and abstract about it, even if it was also undeniably useful—for protection from the rain, for example.
The largest of the sculptures is in the central gallery, which faces you as you enter. “Child’s Tower Room” (1983-1984) — with its high gleam of varnished Japanese oak — is a sort of crazy stir-fry of three very distinct ingredients: Tatlin’s Tower, that unrealized monument of the Third International; a pell-mell rolling funfair; and a quirky pepper pot. In short, it’s wild — and the kids love it this morning because it contains a spiral staircase, which you can climb to the viewpoint of your dreams.
In fact, during almost all of Paul Moorhouse’s earnest talk of the architectural significance of the “Child’s Tower Room,” various little children are inside that tower, shouting it out for the sheer pleasure of doing so.
The other works in the exhibition show exactly how Caro put ideas about architectonics into operation. His sculptures, although quite abstract, use what you can easily read as spaces, doors, nooks, a roof-like slope. Sculpture is a constructed thing, with an inside and an outside, through which we are often invited to travel, and whose interior spaces are delimited by walls.
But what about the music? Didn’t Friedrich Schiller once ask: “What is architecture if not frozen music?” The second show takes us on a different journey, and it doesn’t quite convince to the same degree.
Don’t almost all artists (and all poets) tell us that they are influenced by music? The difference with Caro, Paul Moorhouse explains to me, is that most artists don’t TO DO to the music – they turn it off before picking up the brush or the chisel. Caro, on the other hand, would turn up the volume on Brahms or Mozart when creating a large piece, to give his creativity an extra boost.
So when I enter the gallery, it’s at the slight triggering of the piano notes, at a relatively low volume. How exactly did music influence Caro?
Well, here are some parts of the Concerto Series, all created in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Caro cannibalized various wind instruments and from these pieces he fashioned musical sculptures. One, entitled “Castanets” (2000), resembles a withered double horn; another shows a paperclip moving away from itself. Unfortunately, these sculptures do little more than show the expressive shapes of the pieces from which they are assembled, sometimes ingeniously, often amusingly. They also feel underpowered in terms of imagination – more muzak or easy listening than good music.
Architectural forms allowed him to see and develop his creative potential. The music, on the other hand, finds it on the spot. In fact, the best works of this second show were imported from very different periods of its creation and do not at all claim to have been prompted by the power of Beethoven.
Take “Skyline” (Park Avenue Series) of 2012, for example. The ways these steel plates and beams have been bundled and glued together have a precarious and dangerous urban excitement about them. We feel the roar and tingle of the city, always coming and going, on our very pulse.
Compared to the weight of “Horizon,” the musical sculpts sound like dibs and dabs of embellishment.
Anthony Caro: the inspiration of architecture continues at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery (Ealing Green, London, England) until September 10. Caro and Music continues at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Pendant Street, London, England) until May 6. both exhibitions were curated by Paul Moorhouse.
