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Simple Semiotics: Interview with Michael Craig-Martin
Portrait of Michael Craig-Martin. Photo by Simon J. Nicol. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian and the Peninsula Hong Kong.
Michael Craig-Martin is jetlagged. At the hour of our meeting, the Dublin-born septuagenarian rolled into Hong Kong’s upscale Peninsula hotel after having unglued himself from an overextended luncheon. It is March 20, a day after his arrival in temperate Hong Kong straight from foggy England, and the beginning of the city’s week-long annual art frenzy.
We are sitting in the hotel’s coffee shop, overlooking the front yard of the Peninsula where Craig-Martin’s recently-installed work, the post-it-note yellow, water-cut steel sculpture Bright Idea (2016), sits on the edge of a splashing fountain. The work is a commission as part of a series between the hotel and the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, celebrating art week in Hong Kong. (Artists Tracey Emin and Richard Wilson previously took part.) In its fourth year, the series’ curator and RA artistic director Tim Marlow selected Craig-Martin, conceptual artist and an influential cultural figure credited with nurturing the Young British Artists generation at Goldsmiths College, where he taught from 1974 to 1988.
Born in 1941, Craig-Martin developed an eye for composition and color by gazing at the stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals in largely Roman Catholic Dublin. This led to his experimentation in minimalism and drawing, forming an oeuvre of paintings that pop with dense, saturated colors, neon works, murals and sculptures, which conceptually straddle the two-dimensional and three-dimensional field in their form. In the early 1970s, he exhibited his seminal work, An Oak Tree (1973), an installation comprising a clear glass shelf upon which a Duralex vessel of water sits. Accompanying these objects is a wall text that states that the glass of water is in fact, a fully-grown oak tree, erasing the symbolic, aesthetic and indeed material aspect of the glass.
ArtAsiaPacific sat down with the artist to discuss Bright Idea and his relationship with the language of semiotics.
When you’re selecting objects to depict, are there particular sensibilities to the objects that really attract your eye?
The only criteria I ever have is that it should be something that is instantly recognized, and easily recognizable. I never draw anything that is weird. For example, I would never draw a telephone that looks like a rabbit. I would never do that. I draw the most obvious shapes, whatever they might be. I want the viewer to know instantly because it’s part of what the meaning of the work is. And I’m actually giving incredibly little information. The viewer is filling in all the stuff I leave out, which is very interesting to me. I’m very interested in the philosophical idea of what it is to make an image of something. Because an image of a shoe doesn’t look anything like a shoe. Yet we can have the experience of seeing a shoe without a shoe. And that is pretty extraordinary, we do it so naturally, we don’t think about how amazing that is.
One of the things about sculpture is that most sculptures take their sculptural three-dimensionality from the three-dimensionality of the object. So they mimic the object. Whereas I do sculptures that are essentially sculptures of drawings. The illusionism of my work is, even when it’s a sculpture, that it appears two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. So when you face the work head on, you seem to be looking at the full three-dimensional object, and as you walk around that illusion disappears and it becomes a single line. So there’s a very strange contradiction in the work about what sculpture is, of what image-making is, and how much it depends on the point of view.
Doesn’t that view, in some way, depend on the time we’re living in right now? For example, in 200 years’ time, what we perceive
to be the shape of a lightbulb now might not be recognized as a lightbulb . . .
That’s a very interesting question. You know, right now we have what we call “objects.” These are all inventions produced since the industrial revolution. Before things were manufactured and mass-produced, there weren’t as many objects. They were quite limited: chair, table . . . The object is the result of the history of manufacturing. But one of the things that is happening now is that this iPhone right here is many things: it’s a telephone, a computer, a camera. It’s 20 things. But it doesn’t look like any of those things. It’s bland. It’s unbelievably uninteresting. It’s kind of elegant but all the things that we would have identified with these things in the past have all been eliminated. You knew what a camera looks like. This doesn’t look like a camera, this looks like a telephone. And I wonder if this is an indication that maybe the period of objects is a historical moment. This could be a time where so many things are melding with each other. Or where the idea of an object changes from the idea that we’ve had so far. Things are shifting away from being defined and shaped by their function. It took me a long time to recognize this.
What about the use of color in your paintings? You tend to use shades not typically associated with the shapes or symbols. There’s a dissonance.
For me, the colors do two things. First of all, the drawing is completely rational, very straightforward. But the color is irrational. Secondly, the way I distribute the color reinforces sections of the drawings, so I will change the color between the inside and the outside, from this bit to the next bit.
If you go through each painting, the color world of each is completely different. I’m trying to give a different role to the colors, which is the equivalent of specificity. At the same time, these colors have an emotional impact that the lines don’t have. Color carries a lot of feeling and emotion.
Each RA artist has chosen a different location to install their artworks around the Peninsula. Why did you choose the front courtyard?
When I do a site-specific project, I always want it to look so natural that you think it has always been there or it would be funny for it to go now—that it becomes so much a part of the place that it defines the place, but also integrates with it. I’m not making a decoration in the courtyard, I’m actually trying to engage with the courtyard. You can look through it this way and you can look through it that way. Cars and people circle around it, implying that it is round although it’s flat.
I like the way the fountain comes up behind it, and you know, the water almost looks like this electrical filament lighting up inside the bulb. By the way, I’m telling you these things, but I never try to specify anything. That’s why I tend to say: it’s just a lightbulb.
Bright Idea is installed at The Peninsula Hong Kong, Kowloon, until May 31, 2017.
Ysabelle Cheung is managing editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
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