Anthony Caro; Interior and Exterior, Karen Wilkins, 2009
A work by Caro can be as exuberant and linear as a Barcelona balcony or as severe and planar as a medieval sarcophagus. He has conjured up intense feeling by making one piece of steel touch another and told turbulent histories by forcing clay, wood and metal to co-exist. Caro remains eager to try materials new to him, curious about the formal, structural and expressive inventions they will stimulate, continuously challenging his own discoveries, exploring their implications but refusing to settle for known solutions.
These sculptures demanded to be experienced in relation to the body. If we are to appreciate fully works such as ‘After Olympia’ (1986-7) or ‘Xanadu’ (1986-8) we must walk beside their extended length, measuring the full extent of the sculpture with our stride and confronting the series of intimately related steel structures that make up the whole as if they were individuals whos presence we test against our own corporeality.
Occasionally, we are granted a tantalising, oblique glimpse, as in the slanting views allowed into the recessed top of ‘Night and Dreams’, yet even here, the thickness of the few visible edges and the solidity of the rest of the sculpture combine to deny us a more intimate experience. Innerness becomes not an option but a potent, evocative abstraction; only visual entry, never physical penetration, is permitted by these enigmatic sculptures and even that, rarely with severe limitations.
Caro’s abolition of the plinth in his sculpture…. was a seismic event. By removing the structure upon which a sculpture stood – and which, arguably, defined a piece as sculpture – Caro challenged audiences to reconsider the space of a sculptural work; no longer did the sculpture exist within the bounded terrain of the elevated, plinth-based world; instead, it shared the space of the viewer. Audience and work were grounded on the same plane. (Smith, 2010:10)
Anthony Caro; Small Sculptures, H.F Westley Smith, 2010
