Michael Craig-Martin interview

As the final work of Michael Craig-Martin’s exhibition was being wrapped and taken to the Gagosian for his forthcoming exhibition ‘A for Umbrella’, we grabbed him for a quick discussion about his unusual career. Credited with yielding the talents of the Young British Artist movement through his teaching at Goldsmiths in the Seventies, we were keen to quiz him on how this experience shaped his own work…

You’ve had an unusual career trajectory in that you’re arguably as famous for your own work as your career as an art teacher at Goldsmiths. Was teaching art a vocation for you?

Well there was a very strong element of luck for me. I went to Yale Art School at probably its most sensational moment. I was very young and was put in with the graduate students, that contained among others Richard Serra, Brice Marden and Chuck Close, who all went on quite quickly to be very famous people. They gave me a model of what a serious artist was, which was very useful. Consequently I loved my art education. It changed my life completely. And when I moved to England in 1966 I discovered many artists of my generation hated their art education. They thought it was absolutely useless, old-fashioned and academic. It didn’t provide answers to any of the things they wanted to understand.

So was your own positive experience your primary motivation for becoming a teacher?

I had a view that art education was possible and there was no excuse that it should be otherwise. Though I feel it’s more important who your peers are in an art school than your teachers, there was a feeling that Pop artists and the first conceptual artists came through in Britain in spite of and not thanks to their education. By the end of the sixties, the bubble was ending and the gloom and despair of the Seventies was on us. There was very little money and what was very interesting was that a large number of my generation’s artists began teaching, principally because there was so little money around. It was an unusually good period for students, because we were young, we were exploring ways of how to teach.

How does one effectively teach art? Presumably it’s more about the nurture and development of each student individually than a mass indoctrination of your own ideas?

I couldn’t see why somebody shouldn’t do something, why there should be anything wrong with what somebody was doing from their imagination. A lot of art education up to that point was built around telling students that what they were doing was absolute rubbish to do something else. My idea was to make something that was directly personal for who each person was. The difference between Damien Hurst and Liam Gillick or Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume is enormous. Each one found their individual voice.

How aware were you at the time that your teaching was spawning something pretty groundbreaking?

I was conscious of this unusual clustering of very talented people. Part of what I tried to do was generate contact between them. So they became familiar with each other’s work and talking to each other about their work. I always believed that things come out of groups. Art is so unusual because it’s very personal but also it doesn’t have any meaning unless it’s social. It’s something that comes out of an individual but it’s much more likely to grow in the context of other people. Having said this I never had any concept that it would become the Young British Artists movement, as it’s since been called.

Is it rewarding or is there ever an element of envy? You were a practising artist at the same time as teaching many of the Young British Artists, yet you were perhaps better known for being their teacher than being an artist in your own right.

There were times when it was very frustrating indeed. People still often ask me whether I was jealous of my student’s success but it genuinely never occurred to me. I found it flattering and it made me feel all the years I gave to teaching were incredibly worth it. But equally it never occurred to me that if I wasn’t a better artist than these individuals, I was at least as good as them. I stopped teaching completely in 1988, the year of Freeze, and I became suddenly a famous name attached to Goldsmiths when I wasn’t teaching there anymore. In a certain sense I did have the uncomfortable situation of becoming better known through my teaching than my own work.

So how has this changed in the last twenty years?

It’s been the most interesting time for me professionally. Developments happened in the early Nineties that made me feel like everything that happened up till then had been like I was preparing for something. The biggest development was the introduction of computers to my work. If someone had said to me thirty years ago they could develop a machine that could help me do what I was trying to do, I’d have described the computer. The thing that fascinated me was the cut and paste function initially for word processing. It was so easy and I suddenly realised this was what I did with images. So I transferred all the objects that feature in my work onto the computer and I haven’t done anything in the last fifteen years that hasn’t been planned, developed and tested on a computer first.

Is it about more than simply having a image bank form which to copy and paste rather than drawing each object from scratch each time?

Working form a computer helps me to achieve what I want with my art. The bank of object images that I use is certainly easier to work with on a computer than in hard copy. I pull images from the bank, change colours, change sizes, make them solid or transparent, and do thousands of things at the click of a button. Previously to make a drawing that was 10% larger would take half a day, now I click the 10% button and it happens instantly. Previously for a painting I’d have done one or two studies at the most, now I can do up to fifty and I can go back and forwards through each of them in seconds.

You mentioned earlier that the computer helps you achieve what you want to do with your art. What do you want to achieve exactly?

Art allows one to step back and take stock. What I love about the last twenty years is that contemporary art used to be incredibly marginal - people thought it was, at best, unintelligible. Very few people looked at it as a way of gaining an understanding of their own moment, of what it’s like to be alive now. That’s what we’ve gained and what I want to continue. The Tate Modern is full of people who go there to gain some kind of reflection of the time that they live in. It always struck me as amazing that people were happy just to look at the art of the past although it represented values and ideas of people with which they had no contact, and very little understanding of. And when they viewed the things that were created in the context of their own world, they saw it as unintelligible. This has reversed, which is a wonderful development.

Do you feel your work has played a part in this shift?

I like to think I am a part of it. To me there’s a sense in which all art is public. It’s public even if it’s just you in a room with it, or it’s on the street and that’s the opposite end of the discourse spectrum. The thing that always fascinated me about art from the time I was very young was that I felt the written word had all the roots of authoritarianism. The visual world is never authoritarian, it gives options and it always involves options. That’s what inspired me most in the work of Duchamp: the idea that the audience completes the work and without the audience it isn’t fully meaningful. Each person plays a part in that the realisation, not just the interpretation of the work becomes whole. I think this is a very powerful concept and one reflected in my own work.

Click here to read about Michael Craig-Martin's exhibition.

Click here to see a gallery of the artist’s new work.

30 November 2007 | Art