He taught the YBAs but abhors the idea of art as self-expression. Michael Craig-Martin talks to Stuart Jeffries about bucket design, his new show ? and being jealous of Damien Hirst
One evening, Michael Craig-Martin was driving along, listening to an absorbing discussion of contemporary art on Radio 4. "The guy who was talking was making some excellent points, but there were a few things I disagreed with. It only occurred to me after a long, long time that the voice on the radio was mine. I had to pull over because my heart was pounding."
What kind of person, you'll be asking, doesn't recognise their own voice? The kind of person who was born in Dublin, did toddler time in London, but spent most of his formative years in Washington DC, where he acquired a US twang. This still endures despite the fact he returned here in 1966 and became so synonymous with revolutionising the art scene that he's known as the godfather of the Young British Artists. "The weird thing is I don't even think I have an American accent."
It's a great story and almost a metaphor for Craig-Martin's vision of art. When he started drawing as a teenager in Washington, what struck him was how an image took on a life of its own, distant from the idea its creator had in their head ? just as Craig-Martin's radio voice became an alien phenomenon coming at him over the airwaves.
"People call me a conceptual artist, as if the idea was all, but actually what interests me is what happens when the idea becomes a thing. Ideas are by their nature generalisations, something that can be applied to lots of things. But making art is about making particulars, and that particular something can be the generator of a generalisation."
Why do you care about this stuff? "When I was 12, I thought I had stumbled on a gold mine, but nobody around me seemed to care about it." What little Michael had stumbled across, looking at reproductions of modern art, was a new vision introduced by Marcel Duchamp (who put a urinal in a gallery) and elaborated on by later artists. "Radical art ? and I've always thought of myself as radical ? is always at the frontiers, always speculative, always too radical to be really understood initially. It changes your frame of reference. That's what Duchamp did."
It's also what Craig-Martin's most celebrated work of art did and does. An Oak Tree, from 1973, consists of a glass of water on a shelf in an otherwise empty gallery. "I was trying to work out what was the essence of a work of art. I thought it had to do with suspension of disbelief. You get it in theatre ? why not in art?" When An Oak Tree was bought by the National Gallery of Australia in 1977, customs officials initially (and wonderfully) barred it from entry because it was "vegetation". A rare example of life imitating conceptual art.
But, I suggest, there is another vision of art. Not one that is speculative, but one that is reassuring. Isn't it reassuring to capture the human spirit on paper, to make works that are beautiful? "None of that interested me. As I came across modern art, I knew the only thing to be was an artist. To do that, the only thing to do was drawing. So I took life-drawing classes. It was mostly middle-aged women and me." What did you get from them? "Irritation. The presumption that life drawing underlies everything in art is fundamentally conservative."
A man with no style
A retrospective of Craig-Martin's drawings opens today at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. Visitors expecting something akin to Watteau's immensely touching drawings ? which are on display nearby at the Royal Academy, and show an artist seizing in chalk the essence of his human subjects while also expressing his own personality ? will be confounded. There's scarcely a human in Craig-Martin's show, and every image is intended to obliterate rather than express the artist's personality. "I've always wanted to make drawings that were absolutely style-less," says Craig-Martin.
After graduating with an MA in fine art from Yale, Craig-Martin began to draw mass-produced objects: sandals, sardine cans, milk bottles. "I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary." He gave up pencils and used crepe masking tape to produce ostensibly style-less drawings of them. Why? "I wanted to remove my hand from the process of drawing. I drew them without personal inflection." But isn't art about expression? "That's not what interested me. I was interested in how form followed function. Take a bucket: it can't be twice the size it is because if you filled it up, it would be too heavy to carry. The handle is in a certain place because if it was bigger, the side would hit your leg."
Increasingly, though, the form of manufactured objects does not follow their function. "Think of a mobile phone. You used to have a receiver with a defined earpiece and mouthpiece. Now you just have a box. Today everything looks like everything else. A phone looks like a computer looks like a camera."
There's a risk, then, that this retrospective will look like a graveyard of once-ubiquitous objects. "True. You think objects are for ever, but mass-produced objects only came in with the industrial revolution and maybe won't exist for much longer. The irony is that much of what I set out to draw, everyday objects, are curios. Milk bottles, who uses them? So the images become something other than I intended." What was the intention? "I wanted people to realise how extraordinary everyday objects are, and think about what image-making is. The impulse was never nostalgia, kitsch or a critique of consumerism."
There is a deeper irony. In his very effort to be style-less, Craig-Martin created a style, and a style that made him bankable. Those drawings and paintings where everyday objects outlined in black tape float out of bright red, yellow or blue backgrounds? Craig-Martin. A glass of water on a shelf? Craig-Martin. "Style is something you impute to a body of work. It looks like a linear trail, but while I was doing it all it was haphazard."
The anti-art era
Another irony is that his austere, quasi-philosophical art investigations are delightful in themselves, as if his images have indeed taken on a life of their own. One drawing in the new show is called Manhattan: in it, filing cabinet, ice-cube tray, a torch and other everyday objects assemble like a cityscape; another, Tropical Waters, has gun, lightbulb, can opener and other objects swirling like fish.
Craig-Martin never thought his kind of art would be popular. He casts his mind back to 1972, when the Hayward put on a show of British conceptualism called The New Art. "At the time, the people who cared about this stuff were just me and some artist friends. Art objects were deemed crazy and unintelligible, with people dismissing them because of what they read, not what they saw. There was practically no interest in art. Any press attention was vilification. I thought it would always be like this. But now people look to art rather than to theatre as a cultural model ? an extraordinary change."
Isn't he responsible for that change? That, at least, is the story: in the 1980s, as an art teacher at London's Goldsmiths, Craig-Martin created and nurtured that generation of British artists who would transform one of the most visually conservative, anti-art cultures into one that was, and remains, art-crazy. "People think I gave Damien, Tracey and all the others career information. To say I did underestimates them. They were all beneficiaries of some tremendous art education that existed in British art schools from the 60s to the 80s, but they all knew those days were nearly over and that they couldn't do what I did as an artist, which was to fall back into teaching.
"They also knew they couldn't do what lots of artists have done ? go on the dole. There was no dole. They knew the only way to survive was through their work. They had a sense that there was somebody out there to speak to, and started to work with the idea of an audience before there was an audience." Wasn't that Thatcherite entrepreneurialism? "It was more generous. The art world is usually a cruel place. I wouldn't recommend anyone going into it unless there's something here." He pats his chest. "With the YBAs, I saw a generosity I'd never witnessed before. When a collector came to a studio, the artist would say, 'Do you know so-and-so's work?' And if the collector said no, the artist would take them round to so and so's studio. It was a magical time."
Didn't you feel jealous of their success? "Of course! I remember Damien showing Charles Saatchi his idea for a shark in his notebook, and Saatchi saying, 'I'll pay for that.' There was nothing like that level of interest ? or money ? for my generation. In the 80s, only the Lisson Gallery was interested in new art. One gallery! Now there are 40 or 50." And you've benefited from that? "Sure. In lean times, I used to say yes to every commission ? just in case there wouldn't be any more. Now I don't have to."
Craig-Martin works six days a week. He's currently producing works for an outdoor sculpture show that opens this month at the New Art Centre in Wiltshire, and curating a room at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. Why work so hard? "I'm 70 this year, and I'm conscious that everything seems to be working physically, that my energy is there. But I'm trying to accomplish as much as I can because at some point I know that won't be the case. When you're 30 or 40, you don't think about it ending, about falling apart or dying. I do, so that's why I work hard."
? Michael Craig-Martin: Drawings 1967-2002 is at Alan Cristea Gallery, London W1, until 4 June. Details: 020-7439 1866.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/04/michael-craig-martin
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