Reviewed: Michael Craig-Martin, Landscapes, Douglas Hyde Gallery until November 23rd (01-6081116)
Michael Craig-Martin's transformation of the Douglas Hyde's normally grey, gloomy space is striking, but the most surprising aspect of his exhibition, Landscapes, is to be found in one of the gallery's odd little corner spaces, where a film he made a long time ago is being screened continuously. Projected from a DVD disk copied from his original black-and-white 16mm edit, it is a portrait of Connemara in 1962. As a succession of flickering images of lattice-work stone walls, ruined houses, archaeological sites and majestic seascapes proceeds at an extremely calm, even pace, it becomes clear this is a compelling documentation of an Ireland that is now substantially and irrevocably changed.
Craig-Martin is best known for a few things. For his early, conceptual work, An Oak Tree, which argues the point that a glass of water on a shelf is an oak tree because he says it is. For his on-going series of wall drawings and paintings, in which simple, linear images of everyday objects are inscribed directly on to gallery walls.
And for the fact that he taught Damien Hirst et al at Goldsmiths College in London (he gave up teaching completely a few years ago to concentrate on his own work) and is often credited with being one of the godfathers of the Young British Artists - an accolade he shrugs off. He is not known for film, and his Connemara film is, he says, the only one he has made, something almost forgotten.
Yet while it may be an aberration in his work overall, and though it is a youthful project, it has a stylistic rigour and a concentrated aesthetic sense that are impressive. Craig-Martin was born in Ireland during the war years. His parents were Irish but lived in London, and his mother travelled back to Dublin to give birth. So, he spent just the first weeks of his life in Ireland, then it was on to London. Later, the family moved to the US, where he was educated.
Curiosity brought him to Connemara for two weeks in 1962. He had borrowed a Bolex camera that he didn't really know how to use. The sole visitor in a guest house, he explored the countryside and found a remarkably beautiful, largely unpopulated landscape, littered with abandoned houses in various states of disrepair, cris-crossed by dry-stone walls - and a lively sense of community.
As he recalls: "When I started filming, it occurred to me that I had no idea how long each shot should be. So I tried to film every view for the same length of time. Then, when I was editing, I thought, well, why waste any of the footage I thought was good, so I just left in the full length of the takes I liked." As a result, the film has a quiet, rhythmic evenness of pace. "There is something very placid about it," he agrees, a quality augmented by the lack of camera movement. There are just a couple of tracking shots, otherwise the camera sits impassively on its tripod, calmly absorbing the scene before it.
Given Craig-Martin's subsequent wall drawings, the ubiquity of beautiful dry-stone walls is noteworthy, if only for the contrast between their improvisational, rugged functionality and the cool architectural settings that have become the artist's canvas.
Nowhere more so than in the Douglas Hyde. He has obviously thought carefully about how to approach what is an undeniably difficult space. In fact, he remarks with an air of frankness: "I came to see exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde whenever I've been in Ireland and I always thought it was an impossible, gloomy, bunker-like space. I never think of myself as making critiques of the architecture but certainly what I do draws attention to the architecture."
His approach to the Douglas Hyde was to draw the disparate elements of the fragmented space together, to transform the atmosphere through the use of colour, and to disrupt the interior's sense of scale - which he does very cleverly. Outline images of standard objects - light-bulb, pitchfork, bucket and so on - are picked out against walls painted in vibrant colours, including a startling magenta that is his favourite ground colour. It is one of a standard palette of just 10 or so colours, all of them taken from the Dulux colour chart.
"One of the things I liked about the space here was the fact that I could do something I've always wanted, which is to have an image over two floors. There's an odd, narrow cavity here, so the image of the pitchfork is partly visible from above and continues beneath. You have to move around the space to integrate the image. In effect, the space of the gallery is a painting, and you have to participate in the space of the painting to make sense of it all."
Like the colours he uses, the images are uniform, standard views taken from a repertoire built up since the 1970s, when he began to make wall drawings. "I wanted objects that were everywhere but invisible, invaluable but valueless - like the milk-bottle. I thought it would be easy to find standard, diagrammatic drawing of such things but I quickly realised that it wasn't." So, he makes the drawings himself, one for each object, and that drawing (originally on acetate, now on computer) is pressed into service whenever he decides to use that particular object.
His wall paintings can be complicated assemblages of objects, but the Douglas Hyde one is relatively simple, perhaps in response to the complexity of the space. As he sees it, part of his intention was to map out the perimeter of the building from the inside. What he has done has the effect of unifying and homogenising the spaces. The huge images have a kind of gravitational pull that holds the overall space together and simplifies it. But they also render the perimeter curiously transparent - it is as if the heavy concrete presence of the gallery has dematerialised.
It is, of course, a temporary effect, but one well worth catching.
