They are ubiquitous in art galleries around the world: the audio guide tells the stirring visitors the full story of what they are looking at and sometimes how they must feel.
In the eyes of Sir Tony Cragg, one of the world’s leading sculptors, they are a “terrible” modern scourge that “confuses” the enjoyment of art. “I think they look sad,” he said. “It’s a new image of the world that I really don’t like and I strongly distrust.”
Krag opens a major exhibition at Castle Howardone of Britain’s most spectacular stately homes, made even more famous as the setting for Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton.
There are 28 sculptures in the house and gardens – most on view in the UK for the first time – and there are definitely no audio guides to the exhibition.
“We are delighted,” said Castle Howard’s chief curator, Christopher Ridgway. “We don’t want to be too prescriptive.”
In Cragg’s eyes, audio guides ruin the experience of viewing art. “The way I encountered art and engaged with it is simply to stand in front of a piece of art and have my own experience. That’s what’s so fantastic about looking at things.
“To format things with someone else’s opinion… why? Why are you doing this
“When you come to a work of art, you come to it with the sum of your education, your personality, your upbringing, your life experience, and you find in a work of art your relationship to these things.
“You don’t want anyone else getting involved. I think it relativizes the experience of the artwork.”
Cragg said he longs for the days when “you just walk into a gallery and there’s whatever’s there, Carl Andre and his bricks on the floorsay, and you just had to put up with it”.
He does well with labels as long as they stick to just the title, artist and materials. “It doesn’t mess with people’s experience,” he said. “But not what the artist had in mind. Who cares what the artist was thinking?
“Are you listening to music and someone explains what you’re listening to?” That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Are you reading another book about the book you read? You read poetry because it is poetry, not because someone is going to explain it to you.”
There are no audio guides in the new show, the first exhibition of contemporary sculpture in the North Yorkshire properties.
Instead, visitors will have to decide for themselves how they feel about the glass bottles, vases and cups precariously stacked in the Vanbrugh-designed Temple of the Four Winds.
It’s a magical place. Known to some as Charles and Sebastian’s wine tasting venue in the 1981 film Brideshead Revisited, the place where they got drunk. For others, it may be where Simon and Daphne enjoyed their honeymoon in Bridgerton.
Elsewhere on the estate is a magnificent plinth in the middle of a small tank which has not been placed on it since it was built in the late 18th century. There is now a 5m yellow gold sculpture titled Above the Ground (2015).
Made of fiberglass, it looks like it should be outside the headquarters of a futuristic, possibly evil global corporation. Or it can be relaxing, reminding people of floating clouds.
The point, says Cragg, is that we, the visitors, decide what to watch and how to feel.
Liverpool-born Cragg, 75, has been based in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977 and has a formidable international reputation. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and his public sculptures can be found all over the world, whether in front of the Bundestag in Berlin or in the countryside near Consett in County Durhaman unexpected and brilliant surprise for coast to coast cyclists.
Nicholas Howard, whose family has owned Castle Howard since it was built in 1699, said Cragg was the perfect person to usher in a “new era of contemporary art” at the estate. “After living with the pieces for a few weeks, I really feel like they belong here,” he said.
“With his amazing eye, Tony placed the pieces so that they didn’t feel like interventions, but rather like something that grew organically.”
Cragg has strong views on commoditizing art, and audio guides are a terrible aspect of that. “My voice is not the only one in this,” he said. “You hear it among the artists and even among the visitors – they don’t want it anymore. It turns people off.
“But I think it’s just a phase and we’ll get through it and grow.”
