Michael Craig-Martin

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: In July I went to North London to speak to Michael Craig-Martin in his studio about the work he’d done for the Serpentine six months earlier.

Michael Craig-Martin: I always like the idea of exhibitions where you go from one artist’s world to another world. You need enough work, enough of a place for each person to really feel like you’ve entered their mind and their vision in that piece. This exhibition was perfect for that because each artist had a room and it was dramatic change when you went from one world to another.

LG: How has working on the wall has developed over the years?

MC-M: It’s, quite strange looking back because the first works that I did, in the late sixties, were box pieces and they were all free-standing. All that work was done in the sixties, since then I’ve hardly done anything that wasn’t on the wall, it’s nearly always been attached to the wall, using the wall. I did a great many works, which involved using shelves. You know, everything from the Oak Tree piece, all those things involved shelving. And so, very early on it struck me that there was something very intriguingly different work which makes a relationship with the wall than work which makes a relationship with the floor. And that there’s some strange way in which work on the wall becomes pictorialised that obviously is of interest to me. But there is something about the way a work engages with the place and becomes part of something. I’ve always been very interested about the idea of the perimeter of the work. Where does the work end, this emphasis of edge and is it’s own edge a regular thing that you get in something that’s framed or where there’s a border between it and the world. Or is it something that’s got a very irregular perimeter and is somehow then engaged in that, in that world, the wall.

LG: It seems that something significant happened in the sense that some of the earlier work, before the wall drawings, seemed to have a system element.

MC-M: I’ve always tried to find ways of not having to make decisions, decisions based on something that seemed arbitrary to me and so I was always drawn to using systems of organisation which exist in the world. You make a little decision and there are consequences, which can be complex. I’m not sure if that quite answers your question but then with the new work, where the walls are coloured, the images have been reduced to only single images rather than multiple images. They’re always about composition. Their meaning arises from the way in which one reads a compositional relationship. Whereas that’s not so true in the works with colour, when there’s only a single object and you can really see the whole of that object. And that object is coloured which makes it much more specific and less generalized than when it’s just the outline. And then by colouring the wall, of course, one does engage with the architecture of the place and one does do something, which also intrigues me, which is the idea of engulfing the person in some aesthetic experience. It’s something very slight but by becoming engulfed in it, it becomes somehow important. It becomes grand.