James Croak - Hardcover

McEvilley, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810963795 ISBN 13: 9780810963795

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999

Synopsis

James Croak (b. 1951), one of America's most original artists, has produced an astonishing and idiosyncratic body of work during the past 20 years. Using a variety of innovative materials and techniques, including taxidermy, latex rubber, tar, and his trademark cast dirt, he has created art of astonishing presence and feeling. The mysterious darkness of his earthen material seems to convey something of the terror and anxiety of our uncertain time, and simultaneously a sense of contemplation as an avenue to spiritual renewal.

Fully illustrated, the book follows Croak's experiments with Minimalism through the art of the figure that chiefly holds his attention today. A groundbreaking essay by Thomas McEvilley places his art in historical context. Also included is an interview with the artist by Barbara J. Bloemink, executive director of the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, which probes into the sources of Croak's powerful and compelling work.

About this title

Review

"McEvilley ultimately argues for Croak's ever-expanding discovery of ways to connect his sculpture to that of the past, from Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp, to the Baroque energy of Bernini and the classical resolution of Greek kouroi, while at the same time firmly holding on to a relevant critique of present-day society at large. Drawing connections between the jagged trajectory of Croak's alternately operatic and frozen figures and the histories that they allude to, both social and art historical, is a difficult task managed well by McEvilley. His essay could serve as a model of how to place contemporary art within larger historical contexts without boxing it in to ill-fitting aesthetic considerations. Although McEvilley does occasionally sacrifice some of the probing spirit and dark humor of Croak's pieces, this seems to be unavoidable in order to make the valuable points that he does. McEvilley takes the different worlds of Croak's sculpture and resolves them into an evolving stream of ideas, always linked to external references which anchor them and argue for a status quo that is open to the evolving critique, and the change, of additional transformation." -- Tom Csaszar, Sculpture Magazine, October 1999

Thomas McEvilley's James Croak revisits one of the wilder West Coast artists of the past two decades, somebody who, like the Sots artists revisits the past of the culture for the sake of critiquing it. In 1982, Croak's "New Myths and Heroic Metaphors" series featured a full-sized Pegasus, a stuffed horse with feathered wings bursting through the roof of a customized '63 Chevy. Croak went on to create shuffling men sculptured from compressed, cast dirt, as well as a series of latex "New Skins for the Coming Monstrosities" that evoked all our uncertainties about the body and the need for protection from outside and inside forces. Easily one of least classifiable artists of the moment, Croak is easier to love at some of his artistis moments than others, but the sheer quantity of serious weirdness-or weird seriousness-latent in his work makes this one of the more strangely appealing books of the moment, even without McEvilley's characteristically instructive placement of the artist in the eddying sidestreams of postmodernist sensibility. -- Jerry Cullum, Art Papers Magazine, September, 1999

Synopsis

James Croak has produced an idiosyncratic body of work during the last two decades using a variety of unusual materials and techniques, including taxidermy, latex rubber, tar, and his trademark, cast dirt. This illustrated study includes an essay placing Croak's art in historical context.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0810963795
• ISBN 13: 9780810963795
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 143