Imma will be an intriguing context for the art of Michael Craig-Martin, whose aim is 'to make space re-visible', he tells Aidan Dunne
Normally, to describe an artist's work as wallpaper would be regarded as something of an insult. In the case of Michael Craig-Martin, however, it's no more than stating the truth. Not all of the truth, however. One room of his retrospective, Works 1964-2006, which opens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) on Wednesday, does feature a work that takes the form of wallpaper and, more spectacularly, the entire ground floor of the museum buildings fronting on to the inner courtyard has been papered over with his work. But the show also encompasses paintings, sculptures, wall drawings, computer art - and a 16mm film.
Echoing Beckett's collaboration with Buster Keaton, his film is titled simply Film, and it is the only one he's ever made. He has given it to Imma, partly because its subject matter is Irish - he shot it in Connemara in 1963 - and partly because the response to its several screenings in Ireland have been incredibly warm and enthusiastic. It consists of a series of almost static shots - "If a flower sways in the breeze that's about as much movement as there is," he notes - of a ruggedly beautiful, depopulated Connemara that is almost unrecognisable now.
He has mixed feelings about it. He made it during his final year at Yale. He'd previously visited Ireland with his parents, but this was an extreme version of Ireland. He was on his own in Lettermore and Lettermullen, and felt isolated. He knew nothing about film beyond the fact that seeing Ingmar Berman's work had galvanised his sense of filmic possibility. So he bought a 16mm Bolex camera and set off with only the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use it.
"I had a light meter, but I was shooting film day after day without a clue as to whether any of it was usable," he says. It was an expensive project, so he had to edit the original stock. "There is only one, hand-cut copy."
It's as if he didn't quite know what to make of it himself, and he set it aside and presumed it was gone forever until it turned up, by chance, in 2000. It is actually very good and visually engrossing. Links between it and the rest of Craig-Martin's work may not be obvious, but they are there. It does what he usually sets out to do, which is not so much to represent or recreate something as to make us look again at what we think we know. The ordinary is made strange.
Craig-Martin, at Imma to work on the installation of his show, is in exceptionally good form - reasonably enough, given that interest in his work has never been greater. He's particularly gratified that the retrospective, his first since 1989, is taking place in Dublin, where he was born in 1941. His father, an agricultural economist, was Irish but based in London, where the family continued to live during the remaining years of the war, before moving to Washington DC. Although ties with Ireland remained strong (and his parents eventually returned to settle here), Craig-Martin himself never lived here.
He was brought up and educated in the United States, initially within a strongly Catholic milieu, though he parted company from the church when he was aged about 19, and he remains critical of aspects of organised religion. He studied art at Fordham and Yale universities.
The influence of Joseph Albers was still strong at Yale when he was there, and among his teachers were Al Held and Alex Katz. The latter he remembers as being particularly tough but incredibly good. His fellow students included Chuck Close, Nancy Graves and Brice Marden.
As is evident from his retrospective, his early work reveals a rigorously methodical mind. The early to mid-1960s were exceptionally fruitful years in American art and Craig-Martin was taken with the possibilities of both minimalism and conceptualism. But, as a graduate, now married, with a child, he could not get a job in the States, which led him to accept an offer from Bath Academy of Art in England. It was the start of a career in teaching, something he managed in tandem with his own work as an artist.
HE HAS BEEN based in London for nearly 40 years, and feels very much at home there. "It's much more international now than when I arrived," he says. "Just as New York is not the United States, London isn't England, so in a funny way I never think 'I live in England'. Because it doesn't really feel like that. When I arrived it was at the tail-end of the bubble of the 1960s. That mood, the euphoria, was already fading, and I saw myself and my friends as part of the next generation."
There was no real audience for the kind of work he was making - cerebral, conceptual. "People didn't really go to galleries as they do now," he says. "It was very rare to sell anything, which is why I own most of my own early work. It's only now, in retrospect, that people have become interested in it."
Of course, a certain number of people were interested at the time. The critic, Richard Cork, who has written the text for Thames & Hudson's new comprehensive overview of his output, responded favourably to An Oak Tree (1973), the single work in a solo exhibition that managed chiefly to irritate visitors.
The Oak Tree was a glass of water on a glass bathroom shelf, installed high on the gallery wall. It was a Duchampian gesture that reflected the contemporary conceptual interest in language and meaning. Cork points out the reference to transubstantiation, a nod towards Craig-Martin's Catholic upbringing.
While buyers were scarce, there was an audience of fellow artists, sympathetic critics and curators. "There was no money around," Craig-Martin recalls, "which meant that we all taught. We had to. In the absence of an art world, the art schools became the art world. And because you had all these very active, committed artists working in art schools, the quality of teaching was very high."
Most famously, the result was the advent of the YBAs, the Young British Artists, spearheaded (though he doesn't mention it himself) by Craig-Martin's own students, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, during the time when he was teaching at Goldsmiths College (he subsequently returned as Millard Professor of Fine Art there). The situation in art schools has changed now, he feels, in that there is less crossover between practicing artists and teachers.
"Now artists are successful when they are young," he says, and the teachers, meanwhile, don't have the time to pursue their own artistic careers. In fact, it never was easy to combine the two, he points out. "It really annoys me now when people say to me, well, it must be great for you to have time to do your own work now that you're not teaching. I always found the time and energy to make my own work. I did it for 25 years. I'm glad I did it, though it was always incredibly difficult. One of the interesting things about getting older, I find, is that I've realised something about time, which is that what you do when you're 26 is what you do when you're 26. You're 26 for one year and then you're not 26 any more. You can't subsequently do the things you would have done in that time, if you'd only managed to get around to them."
Around the mid-1970s, he began to make simple drawings, trying to compile a kind of visual dictionary of everyday objects, the kind of objects he had used in his conceptual pieces, in a uniform style.
"I was trying to make drawings that were the equivalent of the objects, which were mass-produced, multiple things. I started doing basic outline drawings on A4 sheets of paper," he says. He wanted to eliminate any hint of "handwriting" or expression in the images, so he made tracings of the originals on acetate. "As I'd finish one I'd throw it aside it occurred to me that I could make layered images of multiple objects."
That was the starting point of the wall drawings for which he is best known and which have developed in several remarkable ways.
Projecting slides of the images on to the wall, he traced the outlines in black tape, often on a monumental scale.
"I think of them as sculptures without mass, because they have this tremendous presence without physicality," he says. "You can have monumental objects for the duration of an exhibition and then when it comes down it's just a handful of tape."
His dictionary expanded to encompass about 200 objects, "of which I'd use about 80 at any given time". Given that he's been making wall drawings since the 1970s, surely some objects have dated?
"Well yes," he acknowledges. "Some of the objects look dated, and that made the work seem dated, which upset me. Which is why, when they became relevant, I've incorporated such things as mobile phones and laptops."
THE BASIC TEMPLATE of the wall drawings has proved to be extraordinarily versatile, a kind of universal visual language. Add colour and you have an exceptionally flexible way of approaching practically any space. As visitors to Imma will realise, Craig-Martin's work really comes into its own in context. Not surprisingly, designers and architects, as well as exhibition curators, have noticed this.
"It's created great opportunities for me," he says. "I've been offered great spaces to do things with. What I try to do is make a space re-visible. Often, the people who respond most are those who are familiar with the space." Although colour is perhaps the first thing that strikes you about most of his work, "I actually shied away from colour for a long time". When he thought about using it, his training with Albers influenced him.
"I looked for the brightest hue of each colour, so that they all sit with each other," he says.
More recently, he has used the same technique in a quieter vein. The colours are not as bright, but they are tonally equal, so that nothing jumps out. "I'm an analytical, logical person, so it was a really big discovery for me when I realised that you could paint anything any colour and it didn't really matter," he says.
He assigned a colour to each object in his repertoire, and each composition had a dominant colour. Over time, as he painted entire rooms as part of his installations, he's come to appreciate the emotional power of colour.
"I would have been more sceptical, but looking at people as they move through coloured rooms, you can see how it affects them," he says. "In my more recent paintings I've avoided using black lines and I think I've used colour to widen the emotional range."
The retrospective, and the book, have been useful experiences for him. "I had to go through thousands of images. It actually helped me to make sense of where I am now. That may sound odd, but really I don't tend to dwell on what I did in the past. It's done. I'm very much focused on the next thing, that's what interests me most."
The closest indication of the next thing in this show is what might be described as his recent computer paintings, which, in a way, bring us right back to Film.
Michael Craig-Martin: Works 1964-2006 runs at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Oct4-Jan 14 (01-6129900). An illustrated book, Michael Craig-Martin, with a text by Richard Cork (Thames & Hudson, €35) accompanies the exhibition