One hopes that it will be a long time before the obituary writers turn their
attention to Michael Craig-Martin. He is, after all, only 67, displays
enormous energy and is enjoying the most productive phase of his career. But
when the first paragraphs of those mini biographies come to be written, they
will have to balance the two roleshe has played in the story of modern
British art: the teacher who became godfather to Damien Hirst and the Young
British Artists, and an artist in his own right.
At Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s Craig-Martin taught and counselled
Hirst and a clutch of other students who would become the stars of Brit Art.
But they weren't influenced only by his avuncular advice. Craig-Martin's An
Oak Tree, consisting of a glass of water standing on a shelf next to a text
claiming it is such a tree, has been described by Hirst as “the greatest
piece of conceptual sculpture”.
Now Craig-Martin, who no longer teaches, is disgorging work at a furious rate
and later this month will reveal the results of his first foray into
ceramics, a two-storey mural in a stairwell at the new Docklands Light
Railway station at Woolwich Arsenal. Street Life features giant images of
everyday objects such as keys, a book, a drink can, in the artist's
trademark vivid colours.
He has produced public works before, including a giant fan on the side of a
building on Euston Road in London. The attraction of creating art in a
public space, he says, is that it is seen by a huge number of people who
would never go to a gallery or a museum. “It's a very interesting way of
touching an audience you might never otherwise have access to.” He wanted to
“make something that was very lively and uplifting for that moment you are
with it and also sticks in your head and becomes part of your journey”.
Anyone who knows Craig-Martin's work will recognise the mural as his. For
decades he has been working with these objects and these colours. He keeps a
database of 200 or so everyday objects that he has drawn. Sometimes he adds
a new drawing, but this is his essential artistic “vocabulary” that he
deploys for many of his pieces. “We construct our whole lives out of a very,
very small vocabulary and I think what I am doing is quite similar. I am
taking these images and I play with them and each time I make another
sentence, a new phrase, but the words are the same.”
There is an aspect of his fascination with everyday objects that “I can't
honestly explain”, but he says that he is attracted to questions of what
makes one object a work of art and another not. He plays with scale and by
producing vast representations in his Woolwich mural he wanted to show that
“there's a heroic of the ordinary”.
The objects - coffee pots, mobile phones, shoes, office chairs -- are “not
things that people really notice because they are so ordinary”. But there is
an “extraordinary” richness of the associations people might make when
viewing them.
Years ago Craig-Martin took the view that it was more interesting to deal with
the things that people deal with all the time. “It was much easier to be
interested in the extraordinary and the special, whereas what is really
interesting is finding interest in things that are not automatically
extraordinary and special and to try and make them special.”
The walls of his large, bright studio in Islington are hung with recently
completed paintings and works in progress. He creates the outlines of the
objects with black tape. As with his limited image vocabulary he restricts
himself to the same 24 to 28 colours in his paintings, although the tones
may change a little when he operates in different media. “Without the
limitation you can't work,” he says. He claims that he is only being
explicit about a truth that applies to the work of most artists. “The actual
palette of Francis Bacon or Rembrandt is not enormous.”
The colours for the mural were slightly less intense because of what was
available for the 2,000 or so tiles, each of which was a foot square and had
to be individually, laboriously, screen printed.
He hopes that travellers will see the mural and spin off on a little mental
journey at the beginning or the end of their day. But although the Pop Arty
images are easy to look at, it is harder to see that he is saying anything
as interesting as he did with An Oak Tree in 1973. Of that piece he says: “I
think that the suspension of disbelief that it asks for is the same thing
that every art work asks for. If you are not prepared to do that, it is a
meaningless and empty experience and won't work as art. This is what art is
about.”
Craig-Martin was born in Dublin but grew up in America, where his father, an
agricultural economist, worked for the UN and the World Bank. His parents
had little interest in art but he became fascinated by the avant garde. He
recalls being mesmerised at the age of 13 when he came across a magazine
edited by Marcel Duchamp, who had caused uproar in 1917 by trying to exhibit
a urinal. There were no art lessons at school so he took classes in the
evenings.
He studied fine art at Yale, where he was exposed to Abstract Impressionism,
Pop Art and Minimalism and became convinced that art emerged when talented
young people worked alongside each other. No surprise then that he was drawn
to teaching while he established himself. He came to Britain in the 1960s to
teach, at Canterbury, King's College, Cambridge (where he was
artist-in-residence), and latterly at Goldsmiths, where in the late 1980s he
had his most talented crop of students.
“I had this wonderful thing happen: after all these years of teaching I had a
period in which a great many of the students I had taught had quite
remarkable success. If you have been teaching, what greater reward can there
be?”He was struck that having so many talents at one time was unusual.
“Partly through my own efforts they connected with each other and they
became curious and interested in each other's work and they also became
jealous of each other in the most healthy, ruthlessly ambitious way.”
Hirst organised Freeze, an exhibition of work by 15 students including
himself, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and Angus Fairhurst. Thanks to
Craig-Martin's contacts it pulled in such luminaries of the art world as
Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota. “At the time Damien was not the most
interesting by any means,” Craig-Martin says. “One of the things that is
forgotten is that what was seen as his great gift was curating and I can
remember people saying to me: ‘Is Damien going to be an artist or a
curator?'”
At the beginning Hirst was not commercially-minded. “People often think that
Damien was always interested in making as much money as possible. He's been
very clever at doing it. But if you want a formula on how not to get rich,
painting dots on people's walls is a sure-fire way. This is not somebody
whose first idea was to get rich. The sense of money and marketing came
later and he began to realise the potential and began to play games with it.
Essentially that's what his career has been: playing the market against
itself.”
Hirst's old teacher is in no doubt about where his former pupil stands now.
“He is an extremely important artist. It's very clear that Andy Warhol just
was his age. And Damien has been for us that person of great, great
historical importance. In terms of how his work will be seen in 50 years
from now, who knows? But in terms of the history of our time there are very
few people who actualise the moment. That's a very special thing. And very
few people do it at such a consistent level and over such a long period of
time as Damien.”
He remains close to Hirst and many of the other YBAs. “I see lots of them
still. I love them. Damien often asks me to go to see his work after he has
done something new. He asks me to come round to the studio and see it. Maybe
it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I sometimes get the impression
that if they do a show and I say ‘this is really a very good show', I think
that pleases them. I also feel my students are protective of me and put in a
good word when they can.”
He hastens to point out that “it's made out I was the only person who taught
them, which is absolutely ludicrous”. At Goldsmiths at the time students
could request one-on-one tutition from any of 25 artists. “People like
Damien had a fantastic education. Nobody gets that education now.” He has
not taught at Goldsmiths for ten years and is scathing about the expansion
of universities and the effect it has had on the level of personal
supervision that students receive.
He has a genetic artistic legacy too. His daughter Jessica Craig-Martin, born
of his marriage in 1963, is a photographer who documents New York society,
and has sold her work to Charles Saatchi. Today her father, who came out in
the 1970s, is featured in newspaper lists of the most influential gay people
in Britain. He has a five-year-old grandson.
He speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent, carries an Irish passport and feels it
is to his advantage as an artist that “I have such an odd sense of identity.
I don't feel properly British. I don't feel properly American. I don't feel
properly Irish. But I feel comfortable thinking of myself in any one of
those categories. I certainly think of Britain as home, certainly think of
myself as Irish and certainly think of myself as culturally American. I feel
both comfortable and uncomfortable with all of these.”
A few years ago he was appointed CBE but received the insignia from the Queen
only in November because he felt “kind of shy”. In the event he loved “the
mixture of grandeur and kitsch. A very English occasion.”
The father of Brit Art was unhappy as a young man because success eluded him.
But this year he has exhibitions of new work in Beijing, Seoul, Berlin and
Istanbul. “I have done a staggering amount of work in the past two or three
years. I'm taken aback myself. I'm very lucky. I'm at an age where, frankly,
as an artist you could be out to pasture.”
Woolwich Arsenal station will open to the public in mid-January
