Wolves 7, Theory 0, the title piece of James Croak’s exhibition, is a shiny electronic scoreboard stopped at the last minute of the fourth quarter of a game that "theory," apparently, has no chance of winning. For Croak, the wolves symbolize something primordial – be it instinct, death or brute natural force – and theory comprises the strategies of civilization that vainly seek to contain it. The scoreboard is a somewhat wry representation of this uneven battle, as if the inexorable triumph of primal forces over the ordering schemes of science and philosophy could be captured in so prosaic and inconsequential a contest as a high school basketball game.
His Dirtman Shows the Monsters – a larger-than-life sculpture made of cast dirt – suggests a similar meeting of an ever-present primal or supernatural reality with a protective but ultimately fleeting gloss of mundane, civilized culture. The figure (one of several, along with a series of "Dirt Babies," Croak has created in the past two decades), a kind of Everyman, is depicted wearing the anonymous garb of a salesman – overcoat, hat and tie. He holds before him a rack of small gargoyle figures that display various forms of monstrosity. Unlike much modernist figural sculpture with which the Dirtman bears a superficial affinity (e.g., works by George Segal), Croak’s sculpture is as much about its constitutive substance as its form. The dirt suggests both an arte povera repudiation of precious or fine-art materials and a deflating commentary on the ultimate significance and fate of human creations. Here dirt suggests less fertility or integration with nature than defilement or degradation. Ashes remain ashes, dust remains dust, whatever transient forms human ambitions may impose.
Although for Croak the wolf stands as a symbol of the ineluctable force of nature, it is not a nature understood in an Edenic or pastoral sense. Rather, it is a kind of mythical or ur-nature, one associated with a primordial existence, chthonic gods and the enigmatic and destructive figure of the sphinx. Such a sphinx – assembled from cast resin, the feet and wings of a Canadian snow goose, and the skin of an anaconda – lay coiled in its own room at Stux. In another room, Monolith, a large slab of cast dirt leaning against the wall, evoked ancient forms of religious worship while it simultaneously lampooned the pristine surfaces and aspirations to permanence of certain Minimalist sculptures.
Finally, a wolf cast from dirt walked in a puddle of tar on a mound of more than a thousand books. If the conjunction of wild animal and text was heavy handed and portentous, the wolf itself – raw, mangy, totemic, roughly hewn – stood as a powerful emblem of a primitive force threatening to engulf a culture that can only temporarily keep it at bay.
– Jonathan Gilmore