TONY CARTER, Images of Subject/Object Duality 1968–82, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1983

Exhibition catalogue produced for Tony Carter's mini-retrospective, presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 15 January–13 February 1983, and Musée de Toulon, 18 March–17 April 1983. Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain and Musée de Toulon, 1983. Essay by Fenella Crichton. Staple-bound with colour card wrappers and black-and-white offset reproductions throughout. Bilingual English/French captions. 24 pp., 24 × 21 cm.

A saucepan with a portrait where its base should be. A pair of tuning forks sharpened into something vaguely threatening. Two versions of a knife made for Don Quixote. Tony Carter's objects begin with things that already know what they are, then interfere with them just enough that they stop behaving properly.

Carter, who studied under Richard Hamilton at Newcastle and carried Hamilton's interest in Duchamp forward into his own practice, spent long periods bringing single works to completion: domestic utensils, tools and familiar forms cut, joined, titled and reassigned. The transformation is rarely extravagant. Carter leaves enough of the original object intact that recognition becomes part of the problem — a method a contemporary review in The Spectator described precisely: originals resurfaced with synthetic filler, the hidden image beneath then “exquisitely reproduced in oil paint.”

The cover carries more weight than a survey-catalogue cover usually does. By Bread Only – For the Demise of Icons, 1978–79, is a saucepan whose underside has become a medallion-like portrait — the etched head borrowed from a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. The work was reproduced at the close of the catalogue for British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, curated by Nicholas Serota and Sandy Nairne at the Whitechapel in 1981, and a year after that it became the closing image of Michael Newman’s essay “New Sculpture in Britain” in Art in America — the piece credited with introducing Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Bill Woodrow, Anish Kapoor and Anthony Gormley, among others, to an international audience. Newman positioned Carter’s precise, resurfaced objects as a deliberate alternative to Cragg and Woodrow’s rougher bricolage. The object on this cover is the specific work that influential critical essay chose to end on, a year before this catalogue went to print.

Inside, A sword for Don Quixote – for blade history turns a knife into something caught between weapon, illustration and literary joke, while Season song – Spring turning makes a tuning fork feel closer to a ceremonial instrument than a functional one. Objects float against large areas of white space, photographed almost as specimens. Caption, title, date, object. Nothing is over-explained. The publication becomes a kind of inventory of displaced things — Carter exploiting the fact that an object arrives already carrying use, memory and expectation, so that changing one relationship and adding a title is enough to make the original meaning slip.

Condition: Good to very good. Noticeable rubbing and surface marking to the almost-black rear wrapper, with lighter handling and edge wear to the front. Internally clean and well preserved.