Michael Craig-Martin

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 22 Number 4, 2003

Transcript

William Furlong: I’m in a public space in Milton Keynes: one side is bordered by the Gallery. Michael, shall we start off by looking at this image you've applied to the side of the gallery?

Michael Craig-Martin: Well, I was originally asked by Stephen Snoddy to do an exhibition here to mark the fifth anniversary of the gallery. He suggested that I do the exterior of the building as part of the exhibition and as a special commission for the fifth anniversary. The wonderful thing is that it's a purpose built gallery building so it has few windows. I have painted the facades of things before but here I was to paint the entire building. So I decided to make it a single colour so as to emphasize its totality: it's sense of being this block. Always in my work I'm trying to find a way of using representational imagery in a way that's different from the ways in which it's normally used. In architecture our idea of images in the exterior world, comes fundamentally from advertising; our sense of what's possible in terms of scale. I 'm trying to find a way to use representational images that don’t look like advertisements. I chose the drawer because formally its square shape reflected the shape of the gallery and functionally the gallery is a place where things get put and taken away and that's what a drawer is.

WF: You've challenged other kinds of orthodoxies too in that the art gallery is a place of reverence and you've inverted that so the art is there to be seen as you approach it.

MC-M: Well, I really loved the opportunity of essentially turning the gallery inside out. It's meant to be an invitation to enter. When the gallery was in it's original colours, beige and rust, you hardly noticed it. The theatre was the only thing that you really noticed in this square. The gallery was so unspecific. This is no longer true now that it's bright magenta with a green drawer there's no question about which building you notice first.

WF: It's a public site isn’t it?

MC-M: Yes if one's interested in art in relation to architecture one's also interested in public art. Again one of the things that I have tried to do in the work, where I'm dealing with a large scale architectural project, is to do with the scale of object that is imaged in relation to the grandeur and the immensity of an exterior façade on a building; even the largest thing inside becomes minute when you bring it outside. So to have an unbroken wall of this size is amazing in itself. The drawer is about ten meters wide. Of course the question of putting an image in an architectural context is that I don't want it to look like decoration, I want it to become part of what happens architecturally. One of the things about the drawer that is also important to me is that it is in three-quarter perspective that means that this object is constantly shifting in your vision because it penetrates the plane of the wall. It's slipping away from you and coming towards you, because that's the nature of perspective.

WF: I can't imagine another public gallery in the UK where you could actually do this on the exterior of the building.

MC-M: I have to say I've never seen a gallery anywhere where it would have been possible to do. . What amazed me was that I was given the opportunity to do it.

WF: It's a nice place in this square because it's very used and the kids are here on their skateboards.

MC-M: It's the skateboard centre of the city. On the net this is one of the recommended sites for skateboarding. This little square here is the most urban moment, I think, in the whole city.

WF: What are the issues that inform your decisions about colours, because they're in the main highly saturated primary colours?

MC-M: Well, I don't quite know, but my idea about using colour is to do with the differentiation of one thing from another. I'm not using colour in a naturalistic way, or in an expressionist way. I'm trying to distinguish something, whether it's an object or a part of an object, from another part of an object, or a material from another material. I wanted to make the building magenta to differentiate it from everything else, and the drawer is green to make it different from the wall that it sits on. All of the colours I keep as high as possible so to have as much an assertion of the moment that I can get, which is something that's always intrigued me.

WF: When you say the moment I was thinking of the term visibility. The colours you use have almost the maximum visibility.

MC-M: That's really what I want. I'm happy with the title of this show, 'Surfacing,' as it seems like an interesting way of summing things up. The very high colour that catches your attention gives the present moment a point of departure.

WF: They're almost an index of colour that can constitute values and juxtapositions.

MC-M: One has to say that I did study the Albers colour theory when I was a student and it comes in very useful late in life. I certainly use things that I learnt then as principles for what I do now. But my intention is to use colour as a source of differentiation. I'm trying to stay away from obvious readings of colour. One of the reasons I use this pink magenta, that I've done the building in, is that it seems to do what I want colour to do better than anything else. It's not red, yellow or blue. It's not a primary colour. It feels very artificial even the colour outside, the green is not green. The green is turquoise. I'm always trying to find something that's a little ambivalent. For instance, the colour will change depending on the light. I like that instability of things. If I paint the building red it seems to me it sends a different kind of signal and that's much more a known signal than what it is to paint the building pink.

WF: Now this is one of the central spaces in the gallery and it's a space with monochromatic wallpaper, black and white, with your characteristic black outlined objects.

MC-M: The idea of the wallpaper was to make a continuous skin of imagery. And one of the things that I had wanted to do for a long time was to make images that don't overlap but touch each other at every possible point. It's actually quite difficult to get all these images to do it. And in the set, which is the repeated unit, there are eleven objects. There's a painting for each one of the eleven objects and the painting has a single background colour and then the object that's centred on that is painted in full colour. They can be placed anywhere on the wallpaper where that image appears and when they do, then the wallpaper is read as going straight though the painting with this one object, which suddenly becomes very three-dimensional. It's not just highly coloured it's a way of saying, ‘these are all pictures of forks and this one's a real fork. It becomes real in an entirely different manner.

WF: Could we just talk a little about the actual imagery and how you present it?

MC-M: Right There's a certain quality that I've tried to get which is something between the particular and the general. I can't quite remember there's a term for it in my Catholic childhood which was the state of objects, which was somewhere between the particular and the general; it might have been called the virtual. Every image here has been drawn from a single object. I don't draw them from the imagination I draw them from observation. Whether I'm using photography or drawing it from life, it's always an absolutely specific object. I try to capture as much of its specificity as I can and because it's come from this individual source it retains a sense of individuality. That edge between these two things gives a certain quality that I really like.

WF: So you think that's why, even though they’re general, they have specificity?

MC-M: They're not generic; they are particular, but particular in a very peculiar way because everything about the way they're drawn is itself generalized. For instance, the wallpaper is only black lines, and always the same size. No matter what you’re describing it's always black lines. I feel that what I do is to find ways of putting things together.

WF: You take it a stage further by making a selection of the objects that trigger all sorts of challenges and re-present them.

MC-M: I think one of the things that's very interesting, because these are the ubiquitous objects of the modern world that everybody has, not only a general experience of these things but they have very particular experiences. People say to me, ‘I absolutely hate that object’. Some people have very strong feelings that make certain objects pleasant or unpleasant to them. One of the things that first led me to think about ordinary objects came out of something about Andy Warhol. He was the first person who dealt with the notion of fame. There's a difference between a woman's head and Marilyn Monroe’s head. And Coco Cola isn't just a bottle, it's a brand and the brand itself is famous. He never painted anything that didn't have an aspect of being famous. Then I thought, the things that are really famous are the things that are ordinary and everybody knows.

WF: Let's move to the next room Michael. You've taken these very time-honoured paintings and you've painted them in your very characteristic bright colours

MC-M: I've always been interested in trying to do things that touch on art-historical precedents. I've drawn images that were taken from ready-mades done by other artists; Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Magritte and Man Ray and I've also done some paintings based on 'Las Meninas.' Then I got interested in trying to approach two great classic paintings. In the end I decided the only way for me to approach them was to treat them as though they were a shoe or a book or a table. So what I did was to draw them exactly the same way. They were an incredible challenge. It took months to draw the Pierrot. And then I tried to approach them using the same kind of vocabulary as these great paintings. I'm trying to find where does this take one? What does it reveal? It interests me that the drawing is very neutral and everything is as accurate as possible but the colour is kind of crazy. The idea in my work is to always try to bring together two things that are in opposition to each other. The energy of the work comes from this conjunction between two things that don't obviously sit easily together. And I think you see that a lot here.

WF: It's brought it into the ‘here and now’ and I'm almost seeing these paintings for the first time.

MC-M: They are, in a sense, drawn transcriptions and the transcription gives you such a powerful sense of the original picture. At the same time what I've done with the colour is so unorthodox, so unlike the original picture. I've done two versions of each in order to make even more clear how it can be used to make quite different things noticeable.

WF: You've actually re-invented them.

MC-M: My fundamental idea about looking at ancient works of art in museums is that when you go into a gallery and you look at a fifteenth century painting and you pull it into the twentieth century.

WF: Into the present and into your own life?

MC-M: Yes, and I'm trying to act that out through these pictures. This is what actually happens. They are not taking us back. We're bringing them forward, and that's how they become relevant to us.

WF: So Michael, now we've walked into the third space and there are six canvases which contain the sort of imagery that you've been talking about. Were these produced at a different period?

MC-M: All the paintings here are new this year. They've come from slightly different places. Two of them are large assemblages of images, one at each end of the room. The one on red is all the images from the vocabulary of objects that I've used over the last twenty or thirty years. In the facing one, except for one or two, all of images are new. In the first one we have the fan, the bucket, the safety pin, the sandal, and a cassette. In the other one we have the mobile phone and the laptop. t It's to do with the changing nature of the objects in the world and the objects that are ordinary in the room.

WF: In that sense it's quite a commentary on the way in which consumerism and the objects of it reveal a moment.

MC-M: The earlier objects that I used looked more like visualizations of the things that they did. They show you what to do with them because of what they look like. In contemporary objects it's completely the opposite.

WF: Michael, the leaps of imagination, formal presentation and imagery have been quite extraordinary throughout your career. It's worth mentioning that the first time we met was when you did a conceptual art piece 'The Oak Tree and Glass of Water.'

MC-M: Which you recorded right at that time. It's one of the earliest acknowledgements of the work and it was on the Audio Arts tape right there.

WF: The very first issue.

MC-M: Very first issue, it's amazing when I look back at it.

WF: So it's a, it's a joy and a pleasure to be here again today but the actual works seem to me to bear witness to the freedoms and opportunities that a conceptual artist, if there is such a category of human being, is able to make.

MC-M: I thought of myself as a conceptual artist in the broad sense, which is the idea that one could move from one thing to another and try to create circumstances where such movement was possible within one's work. I've always been very resistant to being pigeon holed or being told that there's something that you can't do. One of the things that has disturbed me over the years was the sense of the division that some people make between painting and conceptual art. The idea that all videos are conceptual and all paintings are traditional is ridiculous. There are some paintings which fall into one kind of category and we've had video for long enough to have very conventional videos too. I found it a useful generator for myself to be irritated with things and try to put together things that people think can't be placed together.