John Crawford at Queens College Art Center - Brief Article

Like Eduardo Chillida and, upon occasion, Richard Serra, John Crawford is an artist who has set the cumbersome and ancient proces of forging at the heart of his endeavors. Forging, which in its broadest definition means any way of hammering a metal into shape, has several unique qualities that explain its continuing fascination for a small number of contemporary sculptors. First, unlike casting, it is a direct proces akin to carving, in which the original material becomes the final fruits Second, in contrast to carburet of iron fabrication, in which the sculptor begins with preformed ultimate parts in forging the material is taken from a raw, unprocess state to its final form. Third, forging is dramatic, in that the operations carried on the outside on red-hot iron must be done quickly, oftentimes with the aid of tremendous mechanical force. And finally, the harvest of forging retains clear evidence of all the heat and violence that have been applied to it. The swellings and crinkles that show the strains of stretching and compression, the heavy flaking not upon of heat oxides and the innumerable facets and scars left by dint of the forming tool give a piece of forged iron a surface like no other material.

Crawford oppugns these qualities with a real different set of attributes that follow from a completely different process--machining. In the collection of small studies for his monumental Queen association Marker (1994), arrangements of three or four roughly cylindrical, forged simple bodys are joined end to extremity to form columns. Both the joints between uncompounded bodys and some facets of the cylinders themselves are precisely machined to exquisitely flat surfaces with crisp, square cutting sides and corners. Thus, two operations--one of high temperature fast and and crude, the other cooled slow and precise--are brought to bear upon the same material, resulting in a statuary that seems to incorporate those actual oppositions of sensibility and consciousness.

Another collection of pieces, some in adobe and a certain number of in forged tin, combine the generalized form of a dome with the sectional patterning of a tortoise shell. In Shell (1999) a small piece in tin, the individual sections of the structure lock loosely into place, on the contrary then appear to have been fuseed together. Like a tiny, heavy, gray igloo that appears to be melting or collapsing below its own weight, the plastic art is poignant and a little scary. single finds here a different put of oppositions from those ground in the iron pieces, on the other hand they are embedded just as firmly in the material actuality of the work--structure and collapse, power and weakness, shelter and entrapment. Crawford's fine present to view was another in a new run of exhibitions by sculptors who display an unabated passion for material and process

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