#82: The Dice Sculpture
Guest Contribution
What use is a die that cannot roll?
‘Go into a museum and you will be automatically confronted with a whole category of objects that are all, every single one, fighting against mediocrity.’?—?Tony Cragg
A rolling die will give you a number at random, it will allow you to play a game, place a bet, or make a decision. So what are so many dice doing glued, immovable, to a two metre by one metre object?
It is, of course, a piece of art, specifically ‘Secretions’ by Tony Cragg, currently in the A Rare Category of Objects exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Cragg is fascinated by the material world and several of his sculptures are made from items he has himself collected such as the plastic objects washed up along the river Rhine that he began to collect in 1977 after moving to Wuppertal, Germany.
This sculpture, however, is formed from dice with their numbers determined by chance throws in the studio. Its pattern may be determined by chance, but the dice themselves, and the shape of the sculpture, are manmade. While the dice are mass-produced and fit an established form, sculpted shape is far freer. The artwork thus encompasses the interaction between coincidence, the strict pattern of society, and our own free, instinctive choice and how this combination forms our lives, or indeed, this object.
These dice are objects trapped outside of their usual circumstance, but this allows the artist to project his own meaning on to it. Material culture is full of purpose-built objects, yet to limit them to their intended use is to enforce unnecessary restrictions, to create waste. Instead, reusing and re-purposing can also lead to the discovery of something new. Dice are often found misplaced from their games, rolled under sofas, lost behind a radiator; they are not objects we would pay attention to, but here the sheer number Cragg has placed before us in a striking form lends them a new force, causes a new consideration.
And this is perhaps the purpose of art: to force us to reconsider the everyday, the world around us, by placing it into a situation, namely an art gallery, that makes us truly look at it.
This is how art creates A New Category of Object.
https://medium.com/media/ab933941db58ef9e008c6b88c26c898c/href
Eleanor is an aspiring journalist using her skills in over-analysis to write a weekly blog post about everyday objects. To read more, check out her blog Object, a collaboration with fellow Medium blogger Katie.
#82: The Dice Sculpture was originally published in Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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