This is daft work, but not daft enough by half. A New Thing Breathing, the Tate Gallery Liverpool's "major spring" exhibition, shows recent work by Tony Cragg, the British sculptor who climbed to international fame alongside colleagues Richard Deacon, Richard Long and Bill Woodrow in the 80s.
His first junk constructions were acclaimed for their slightly irreverent grandeur, recycling the non-biodegradable contents of dustbins into droll affronts to the Thatcherite ethos of commercial self-interest. The 90s saw him fashioning more purist abstractions from bronze, stone, fibreglass and ceramics. But the results, as seen here, are Henry Moore meets Mr Blobby. Cragg comes across all seriously metaphysical in his exploration of the lumpy secretions of primal nature and invites nothing more profound than giggling at the back of the gallery.
Towering whirligigs of stone look like limp corkscrews or wobbly pots thrown by a drunk. There's a peppermint-tinted three-legged bugaboo, complete with rude appendages. Everything is sanded down and smoothed off in the simplistic assumption that nature abhors a sharp edge. Even the bronzes masquerade as conch fragments, their rhythmical intricacies blunted by a soporific sea. There's a lolling, sap-green tongue and a squashed dolphin nose. Such zoomorphic cliches are far from innate to the genre: in the same magnificent top-floor galleries some time ago Richard Deacon imbued organic semi-abstractions with a chill and wildly celebratory frisson of otherness.
Occasionally Cragg goes back to piling up recognisable things like he used to, but now the objects are cleaned-up, collectable things. His pyramids of coloured glass bottles would hardly look out of place in Habitat. Things get much more intriguing when he does something weird with his found objects. Thousands of black-and-white dice are glued to a massive sculptured pile of polystyrene, and at last Cragg connects to the more precise physics of mathematical wonderment. One can only question why on earth he doesn't do this kind of thing more often.
Something similarly odd does come to life when he sculpts what looks like a Buddha figurine shot through with holes out of sand blasted ceramics and places it to gaze silently out of the gallery window. I stand next to this ghostly spiritual sieve and gaze out too. The timeless mucky old Mersey chugs past, utterly oblivious.
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