From Concept to Colour

Irish Arts Review

From Concept to ColourAuthor(s): Mic MoroneySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 72-75Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503431 .

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^B FROM CONCEPT TO COLOUR EXHIBITIONS

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M?C MORONEY previews

Michael Craig-Martin, an artist

whose career has kept pace

with one of the most challenging

periods in art history, ahead of

his retrospective at IM MA

This October, Michael Craig-Martin, in his first retro

spective in the country of his birth, joins the small

handful of headline artists who have been curated at

IMMA by Director, Enrique Juncosa. As Deputy Director of Valencia's IVAM Museum, Juncosa curated him in

2000, where the artist mounted a resplendent installation, paint

ing walls in loud, confectionary lime-greens and pinks which

hummed electrically off each other (Fig 5).

Certainly, Craig-Martin would seem to be popular at IMMA. Eye

of the Storm (Fig 4), recently acquired by the

museum, lent its name to last year's big

exhibition from the collection, and embla

zoned the cover of IMMAs impressive cat

alogue. Juncosa explained to me that this

was simply because it was a beautiful image

7 2 JR?aH ABTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2006



AI

which suitably encapsulated the idea of a collection . But the paint

ing - of a dense assemblage of things, like the contents of a halluci

natory garden shed - was also the centrepiece of the exhibition,

occupying the main room in an installation which reprised Craig

Martin s first solo show at New York's Gagosian Gallery in 2003.

Craig-Martin's star has risen sharply in the artworld since the

1990s, long after his arrival on the British 'Conceptualista scene in

the 1960s. His style nowadays is wildly different: the high-coloured,

diagrammatic repertoire of everyday objects writ incongrously large

on modern and classical architecture; or elaborated through paint

ings, prints and new media, such as colour-juggling ' Screensavers'

that rewire one's brain. This autumn also sees him (Fig 2) in Japan

and at the Shanghai Biennale. As he says, 'I never refuse an invite'.

A pleasant, even self-deprecatory man who still speaks in a

diluted American accent, Craig-Martin's enthusiasm for art is

1 Signs of Life 2006

?Michael Craig Martin, Kunsthaus

Bregenz Photo

Markus Tretter

(Courtesy Gagosian

Gallery)

2 Michael Craig Martin (Courtesy

Gagosian Gallery)

3 KUB Facade 2006

?Michael Craig Martin Kunsthaus

Bregenz Photo Markus Tretter

4 Eye of the Storm 2003 acrylic on

canvas 335.3 x

279.4cm IM MA

infectious. An able speaker and writer, he

narrates his own career like a casual, if

authoritative observer, neatly embroidering

himself into art history.

Born in Dublin in 1941, he grew up in

Washington, where he moved en famille

when aged four. His father was a Catholic,

Trinity-educated agricultural economist,

who during World War II, worked with the

British Food Ministry and later with the

fledging World Bank. His childhood was

punctuated by summer-long visits to his

grandfather's house in Donnybrook and the big extended Irish

family. This led ultimately to his early, student film of

Connemara, which he first exhibited in 2001 at the Douglas Hyde

(and recently donated to IMMA). Shot like a moving slide show,

the film prefigures Craig-Martin's obsession with manmade

objects -

endless ruins, crumbling cottages, fishing boats, ropes,

the momentous solidity of a Marian grotto. He seemed less com

fortable filming people: a woman tossing hay; the poignant horde

of gurning schoolchildren.

Attending the 'Golden Age' of Yale's art school, Craig-Martin

befriended Richard Serra, Chuck Close, and Brice Martin. He

also witnessed, in New York, the emergence of Minimalism and

Conceptualism and the self-referential, almost nondescript works

of artist-theorists like Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Sol

Lewitt seemed to flow directly into his own early works, such as

those dysfunctional boxes which formed the earliest of an aston

4

4

ishing amount of work Craig

Martin has planted in the T?te

Collection since 1969.

In 1966, he migrated to England and started appearing in influential

outings at the ICA, T?te and the

oft-cited 1972 'The New Art,' show

at the Hayward, alongside Gilbert

<Sl George, Art <Sl Language,

Richard Long and indeed Barry

Flanagan. Although he produced

some highly effective pieces at the

time, many seem severely theorised from this distance.1

One 1970's piece, which Craig-Martin still exhibits, On the

Table - four pails of water on ropes which, threaded through pul

leys on the ceiling, pull the 'table' up beneath them - a self-con

tained gravitational conceit which seems to pull itself up by its

bootstraps (Fig 8). I remarked on its visual austerity, but Craig

Martin asserted 'its visual power, its poetry'.

In An Oak Tree (1973); which Juncosa describes as 'an indis

putable classic of Conceptual art'2, a glass of water sits on a high

shelf; with an accompanying Q<SlA wall-text, in which A

announces to a sceptical Q that he has changed a glass of water

into a oak tree - not just symbolically, but by changing its sub

stance, for all appearances to the contrary. It's not without

humour, but Craig-Martin was seriously rehearsing the vocabu

lary of metaphysics and objecthood -

'substance' here being the

AUTUMN 2006 IRISH ARTS REVIEW |

73



Over a high marzipan blaze of

magenta, he hurled two murderous carving knives towards the tabernacle I -

E

74 I IRISH ARTS REVIEW



FROM CONCEPT TO COLOUR

EXHIBITIONS

essence of an object, as opposed to its look, smell, feel and so

forth. This is also, of course, the concept behind the Catholic

doctrine of Transubstantiation - analagous to the necessary sus

pension of disbelief when approaching art. For Craig-Martin, this

piece triumphantly draws a line under his early period.

His change of direction was triggered by Michel Foucault's

essay on Velasquez's magisterial painting, Las Meninas3 and

another by Robert Sokolowski, a priest and professor of philoso

phy who argued that, in a world full of pictures, we must analyse

that 'something... in us that allows pictures to be.'3 Craig-Martin

responded with a quasi-Wittgensteinian manifesto for

'Picturing'4, and began making simple, precisely descriptive draw

ings, with 'as little personal inflection as possible' of everyday

objects so 'embedded in us', we instantly recognise their textures

and materials. From these, he makes slides, which he projects

onto surfaces, to whatever scale he desires. He now has a 'pic

tionary' of about 200 such images, which he constantly recycles

in various combinations: a shoe, chair, table, a jacket, keys, scis

sors, pill bottle, portable tv, headphones, wrist-watch, book, a

globe, filing cabinet. Others are artistic touchstones: Duchamp's

urinal, Magritte's Pipe, a beercan (after Jasper Johns); or refer

ences to his own work: a glass of water, a bucket. More recently,

he has added a mobile phone and a Blackberry.

Some objects now look slightly retro (he has replaced the milk

bottle with a carton; and worries about the casette), making them

redolent of early Pop - a comparison Craig-Martin furiously

resists, despite inevitable visual correlations with, say, artist Patrick

Caulfield. Neither is his work a meditation on consumerism, he

avows. When I comment that his objects are all westernised arte

facts, he sighs. 'I have a different take. It's to do with language and

pervasiveness, how we describe the world to ourselves...'

Craig-Martin says he studiously avoids any statements -

although he often takes refuge in whimsy. In his 2001 Douglas

Hyde show (this being Ireland), the title piece was Landscape,

which used a fan to signify wind, a bucket for water, a garden fork

for earth, a lightbulb for sun - a playful representation of the four

elements, which doubtless soared over the head of the unin

formed viewer. Similarly, at IVAM, he executed an arcane take on

Velasquez's Las Meninas (this being Spain); representing

Velasquez's self-portrait as a fire-extinguisher; the implied viewer

as a pair of spectacles, and the court dwarf as, em, a pencil-parer.

Craig-Martin's vocabulary has remained remarkably consistent

since his early, pallid, immaterial wall-drawings (he showed one at

Rose in 1980^ He first used colour in the 1980s, at first 'explicit and nameable colours', until he expanded in the 1990s; huge

walls of blindingly unstable, artificial hues; his schematic objects

blaring out in hot, zinging complimentaries. Recent years have

seen architectural commisisons, most notably from Herzog and

de Meuron (of T?te Modern fame) on London's Laban Dance

Centre. Apart from a monumental wall-drawing around the the

atre, Craig-Martin provided the colours, inside and out, on the

huge curving facades. 'I'm not interested in decorating architec

ture,' he exults, 'I'm interested in engulfing it.'

He certainly tried that with his installation this summer in a

deconsecrated Catholic church as part of his big Bregenz museum

show in Austria (Fig 7). Over a high-marzipan blaze of magenta,

he hurled two murderous carving knives towards the tabernacle,

while the niche walls swarmed with his detritis of modernity.

More recently, Craig-Martin's motifs - so long outlined in

black and mutually opaque - have become transparent and out

lined in weak, shimmer y colours; overlapping dimly beneath a

veil of horizontal dashes. This is how he filled one room in the

Bregenz Kunsthaus this summer, with a chilly, floor-to-ceiling,

100-meter-long scroll of objects. The display was inkjetted onto

huge, vinylised five-metre-wide sheets designed to cling-fit the

walls and fittings - a technique he will use in his IMMA instal

lation, which will run for 200 metres along the arcaded walkways

around the courtyard. He intends to relieve the 'inertness' of

IMMA's masonry with some rampant colour, which should

rather rend the fabric of an Irish winter afternoon.

The First Floor Galleries will host his retrospective, from the

earliest Conceptualist work, through works in neon, to works mix

ing sculture and pictorial forms. His recent computer pieces are

garish 'animations' of Seurat's Baignade (Fig 6) or Piero della

Francesca's The Flagellation; again in poppy homage. His old

friend, UK critic Richard Cork, has written a monograph for an

accompanying IMMA/Thames &l Hudson publication.

Oddly, when discussing colour, Craig-Martin talks about

'emotional effects'. Otherwise the work is cerebral, cool, disem

bodied. Although he says it attempts 'to address difficult ques

tions in straightforward language', very few are articulated. It

seems marooned in the elegance of ideas; never excavating any

thing truly human.

The only time I remember Craig-Martin using the human fig

ure - apart from a recent painting which included a grim-reaper

ish skeleton - was in 1982. Two part-sculptural paintings,

Zeitgeist 1 and II, depicted a soldier upside-down, high-up on a

wall. Although almost a topical piece -

made during the

Falklands War -

Craig-Martin commented that the drawing was

of a toy soldier, thus 'disengaged from reality' and 'at a double

remove from what is 'pictured. The T?te website notes that this

perhaps echoed detachment from a faraway war - all suggesting a

kind of negation of knowledge, of moral engagement.

But such evasion of uncomfortable political issues suits

inward-looking public art musea. The sophistication of Craig

Martin's work conceals itself behind an utter simplicity - one

long, arbitrary pictogram rendered huge in the pleasure principle

of high colour which, surveys find, the public always responds to,

if often in some bemusement. I

MIC MORONEY is a writer and art critic.

Michael Craig-Martin, Works 1964-2006, 4 October 2006-4 Jan 2007. East Wing, First Floor Galleries, IMMA. All Images ?The Artist.

1 The best overview of Craig-Martin's work of this

period is Lynne Cooke's essay, The Prevarication of Meaning, in the catalogue for his 1989 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Michael Craig-Martin:

Retrospective 1968-1989. 2 From Juncosa's essay, The Sign Lover' in the cat

alogue Michael Craig-Martin, IVAM Centre del

Carme, 2000-2001

3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An

Archaeology of the Human Science (1966, First

English edition 1970, Routledge 1989 pp3-18) 4 "Picturing." Robert Sokolowski Review of

Metaphysics 31 (1977): pp3-28. 5 Artscribe, October 1978

5 Installation at the

Centre del Carme

2000-2001

?Michael Craig Martin

6 Reconstructing Seurat (Orange) 2004 acrylic on

aluminium panel 187 x 280cm

(Courtesy Gagosian

Gallery)

7 Installation at

Johnanniterkirche

Feldkirch 2006

?Michael Craig

Martin, Kunsthaus

Bregenz Photo Markus Tretter

8 On the Table 1970

wood, metal, water,

rope 122 x 122cm

IMMA Collection

AUTUMN 2006 IRISH ARTS REVIEW |

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From Concept to Colour