Famed for his striking images and signature sculptures of everyday items, Michael Craig-Martin still thinks that London is the greatest city on earth. His reasons are intimately connected to his career, including his retrospective at the Royal Academy.
Painting The Town
When the Dublin-born artist first came to England in 1966, he had just spent 5 years at the Yale School of Art, immersed in Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art and upheavals in music, design, and architecture. At that time, the London art world was embryonic, despite the exceptional quality of its artists and a strong art school tradition; he reminisces at having been a “very privileged immigrant.”
Today, Craig-Martin is very much part of the art intelligentsia, championed by arguably the world’s most influential commercial gallery, Gagosian, and enjoying a far-reaching career of global exhibitions and teaching. But he retains something of a unique status – a veteran who still feels they might have something to prove.
Craig-Martin makes work of inescapable modernity, but it is the early Renaissance that, for him, exemplifies art’s power. “At that time the average person never saw an image unless they had a coin: there were no pictures, prints or magazines,” he says. Churches were the awe-inspiring exception, filled with decorative frescos, sculptures and ornaments. “People went in and they were overwhelmed by what they saw. They recognised the stories and narratives; these super sophisticated works of art were made for – and understood by – ordinary people.”
An Invitation To Conceptualism
While our image environment is now different, artists still have influence over our visual culture and the values this conveys. Craig-Martin sees his shows as a chance to stimulate rather than preach, with the audience as his partner. “I don’t have an agenda,” he declares. “I’m an observer and a recorder.”
Collaboration with the audience has defined Craig-Martin’s practice since the beginning. For his first London solo show in 1969, he presented visitors at the Rowan Gallery with sets of boxes that either did not close or had their lids reversed (Box that Never Closes, 1967). “There was an action that was implied or asked for,” he says of the hinges or handles to be manoeuvred.
This invitational mode of conceptualism found its most piercing form four years later with An Oak Tree (1973), in which Craig-Martin presented a glass of water on a shelf accompanied by a written Q&A. “What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water,” he explained in the text. Here the viewer is participant as both believer and sceptic.
Experiencing The Extra-Ordinary
Craig-Martin’s methods of representation have evolved, but his emphasis on our shared experience of objects has remained the same. Drawings and paintings have taken the place of conceptual installations and his visual inventory has been updated to reflect how technological advancement has altered day-to-day life.
“When I first started to draw, my sense of something ordinary was something very inexpensive that anybody could have,” he explains. Now people are just as likely to be carrying an iPhone as they are a pen – a drastic change in sophistication and value. “I’m trying to engage the audience in an appreciation and understanding of ordinary life,” Craig-Martin explains. Audience means everyone. Ordinary means everything. Depicting an iPhone (Untitled (iPhoneX), 2019) or a Coke can is not about endorsing commodification or even skewering modern technology, but about recognising that brands and objects now occupy as significant a space in our shared consciousness as religion or language. “It’s not to do with consumerism or possession,” Craig-Martin emphasises, “It’s to do with identification.”
The other misconception hinges on the term “man-made objects”, which is often used to describe his ordinary subject matter. “We tend to describe the world in terms of natural and man-made as if the two are fundamentally at odds with each other. That is wrong, because we are nature as much as the plants, the trees and the animals. And when we make things, we are doing something that is natural to us. In a way, the iPhone is as natural as a stone.”
Coded Colour Palettes
To understand Craig-Martin’s work today, you have to understand his approach to colour. And, perhaps most importantly, the fact that it was only in the 1990s that he began to employ the bold tones that now define his paintings. In the first 30 years of his career, Craig-Martin had developed a precise conceptual, sculptural and drawing practice rooted in both the geometric exactitude of 1960s Minimalism and the radical ontology of Marcel Duchamp. In influence and execution, he was at that point “an artist of the Seventies,” he explains.
That all changed in 1993, when Craig-Martin decided to employ what he terms “big colour”: painting a room, wall or surface in a single block shade. The Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán, renowned for his use of a single colour over a large surface, was a key influence. Up to that point, his work had been described as ‘interesting’, one of the art world’s more tepid descriptors; “When I introduced the colour, I had an emotive response, and that struck me.”
Craig-Martin had studied the colour theory developed by the Bauhaus veteran Josef Albers at Yale, but only then in Paris did he see how to use what he had learned at art school – a bottom-up epiphany in his fifties that artists normally have in their twenties or thirties. It led to a painting practice which Craig-Martin now describes as his “centre of gravity.” But there is more continuity than people realise. “Frankly, I see my work now as no less conceptual than my early work. But then people don’t think painting is conceptual.”
It is the colour in his paintings that provides context and therefore “emotion and specificity” for the audience, he believes. “The term art is a generalisation. Works of art are always particular. And the more particular a work of art, the better it is.” Some things, though, cannot be depicted. Art, Death, Painting and Sex are rendered by the artist as word paintings, a comment on the limits of the image and a wry nod to effability (Untitled (Death), 2008). “I can’t draw art. I can’t draw death. I can’t draw abstractions because there’s no object,” Craig-Martin says. “And so the only words I’ve ever used in the work are abstractions.”
Polychromatic Perspectives
Craig-Martin’s work is about exploring the nature of representation, and questioning the material and perceptive mechanics of the image. The works of American artists Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha Hon RA come to mind, which rely on both language and colour experimentation. “The greatest miracle of picture-making is the fact that you can make a picture of something at all – and that we can read it. When we make a picture, we experience the thing that isn’t there.”
Craig-Martin’s interests haven’t always been in vogue, and a degree of patience has been involved in sustaining his long career. “The art world does work by decades, largely – whatever is going on in one decade is usually rejected by the following one,” he says. “In the 80s came the New Spirit in Painting [a resurgence of expressionist art]; that wasn’t really me and I found it difficult to know how to keep my feet. In the 90s I was very comfortable.” Craig-Martin was teaching at Goldsmiths at the time, mentoring future YBAs, including Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst, as well as Julian Opie, whose style most clearly echoes that of his mentor.
Art is a ‘calling’ rather than a job, Craig-Martin claims, but he doesn’t sentimentalise the sacrifices involved in forging a creative path. He is far more awed by dancers – the destruction of the body in the name of art – and gratitude, rather than a sense of inevitability, emanates around his success. “One realises that success creates opportunities and, if you seize those opportunities and act on them when they arise, they create further successes. It’s circular. The people who have lasted have acted well on their opportunities. So, with new works like Cosmos, it may be that I’m about have a whole new career as an immersive artist.”
For six decades London has been his inspiration and resource. Now it is his plinth. “I’ve had a steady career, but never a big moment,” he concludes. “The big moment is this.”
