Late in November, I went with Carol to see the Michael Craig-Martin
retrospective at IMMA Had Carol not been so keen to see it I probably would not
have gone. Craig-Martin dubbed the Godfather of Brit art, taught such artists
as Damien Hirst in Goldsmiths Art College, and it was easy to see what a
seminal influence he had been on artists of that generation. He was a monkey-see-monkey-do conceptual
artist – borrowing and stealing the ideas of others freely. Craig-Martins
conceptual sculptures of the 1970s formed and consolidated many of the
conceptual innovations of the 1970s - which for better or worse had formed the
lingua-franca of the art world. What surprised me about his retrospective was
its depth and quality, and its diversity of ideas.
I had expected to hate it, but in
fact I found quite a lot to admire, and I was glad Carol had dragged me along.
But what depressed me about it, was the realization, that success in the art
world, gave one the ability to inflate and make claims for ones work impossible
to the failed or unfashionable talent. Entering IMMA's beautiful courtyard I
discovered its entire lower flower covered in one long continues print of one
of Craig-Martins colourful collections of household objects, drawn in outline
only and overlapping each other. All I could think was: “How much did this cost
to make, and install? And who paid for it?”
Craig-Martins
work plagiarized many of the key ideas of 1960-70s art. One of the key victims
of this had been Patrick Caulfield, whose colourful pop arty paintings of
ordinary objects; Craig-Martin had converted into colourful overlapping line
drawings of ordinary objects. Many of these canvases were beautiful to look at
and very well made. However, Craig-Martin had also hijacked Duchamp's use of
ready-mades, Sol LeWitts use of wall drawings, Warhol's use of designed
wallpaper with painted canvases placed over it, and so it went on and on.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris,
Brice Marden and others whose work, Craig-Martin seemed to convert into
conceptual variations. I would have to have had specialist knowledge of
conceptualist history to know just how grave these various acts of
appropriation were, but I frankly could not give a dam.
Overall, what struck me
most was the use of conceptualized pastiche. One normally thinks of painting or
sculpture when one thinks of pastiche, but Craig-Martin had adopted a newish
strategy of taking the works of others and giving them his own
conceptual-sculptural take. The most witty and effective of these for me were
his Blinds, which seemed to convert
the Minimal canvases of the likes of Brice Marden into muted coloured blinds,
opened or closed to various degrees. Thus allowing each artwork to incorporate
an almost endless element of variation. This idea of variation underlined most
of Craig-Martin’s work and was seen at its best in his computer light boxes in
which his illustrated day-glow objects emerged and disappeared randomly
according to a computer program.
In
many ways Craig-Martin’s exhibition, was an ideal show for art students. For it
showed how with unstinting diligence, money, self-belief and the neck to steal
anything from anyone, one could make interesting art about just about anything.
One did not have to have technical genius, or emotional depth or anything in
particular to say about the world. One merely had to make (or have
professionally made) objects of some craft and professionalism, on any subject
what so ever, no matter how banal (in fact for institutional support, the more
banal the better), but above all else – respect and work within the framework
of the institutional and academic system. Craig-Martin’s work I felt had not
and never would change the world, but it had and would cause a murmur within
the walls of contemporary art institutions – a game of minor aesthetic delight
for those who thought art was nothing more than an intellectual trivial
pursuit.
The
self deception and cultish insularity of the institutional art world was summed
up for me when I entered one of the rooms that held Craig-Martin’s infamous
sculpture Oak Tree which was a glass
half-full of water on a glass shelve about eight feet high up on a wall, with a
plague with a conceptual interview in which Craig-Martin asserted his right to
describe it as an oak-tree. “Oh look there’s the glass of water that’s an Oak
tree!” I chuckled to my girlfriend. “No it is an oak tree!” The invigilator exclaimed
to me. “Oh right.” I murmured, not wishing to talk to her. “It is an Oak Tree!
Read the sign!” She haughtily proclaimed. I had no desire to tell her I had
seen the ‘Oak Tree’ in the Tate in London in 1996, or that I thought it was
utter bullshit. Instead, I dutifully read the conceptual sign that accompanied
the glass of water on a shelf and moved on. But as I did my spine shivered with
the same kind of disgust that had filled me, when I had been forced to sit
through Catholic mass and go along with the religious delusion that wafer and
wine were in fact the body and blood of Christ. I frankly couldn’t care less if
Craig-Martin chose to make the artistic point that whatever the artist claimed
was art – was art. I certainly did not think it an original statement; it was
in fact just another pastiche this time of Duchamp and Kosuth. But I did mind
being told what to think by some snotty nosed gallery intern. The art world
could claim anything they wanted to be art, but I and everyone else had the
absolute right to deny it was art, or that we thought it to be part of a very
smug, pseudo-intellectual, irrational and boring kind.
The
truth about art I had come to believe was – that there was no eternal meaning
to it, it’s grand theories were largely obscure, elitist and subject to
fashion, and it had little or no power to effect any kind of change in society.
Art was nothing more than a mode of communication – part of a cultural
exchange. Sometimes it connected profoundly with its audience (as it had done
in the work of artists like Raphael, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Rothko and Warhol)
but most of the time it was nothing more than a form of wall filler, decoration
and distraction – a form of amusement. Great art works formed part of a visual
debate about existence, and as in any debate some ideas and expressions were
more convincing than others. It was the right and duty of every artist to
pursue their art to the fullest, but there was no entitlement on the part of
their audience to accept their work as profound, meaningful, and beautiful or
something that could enrich their lives. I could see how Craig-Martin’s work
would be highly instructive to young art students, conceptual artists and even
graphic designers, but for me it had no meaning to my work.
Before
we left I.M.M.A we quickly went around Irish
Art of the 1970s which proved to be a very strong representation of Modern
Irish art, but also a store house of artistic ideas and styles now redundant.
Le Broquey was represented by some of his strongest works, which reminded me
that he did in fact have some small talent.
But my
favourite work of the whole day was the photographic work Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll (2004) by Vic Muniz
in the Hearth exhibition downstairs.
This photograph consisted of the image of a girl made up of hundreds of
brightly coloured children’s toys on a white background. From a distance it
looked like a beautiful Fauvist cum Pointillist painting, but up close one
delighted in seeing all the different kinds of children’s toys that were piled
up to form the shape of the girl. The meaning of the work was further deepened
by being based on one of Lewis Carrol’s Victorian photographs of young girls
(in this case Alice Liddell) which with my day’s concern for children were
controversial to say the least. However, the full implications of this choice
of image, was beyond me at the time – all I marvelled at was the cleverness and
beauty of the way the image was made. Not only was it a beautiful image it was
also smart and knowing in the best Post-Modern sense – summing up as it wittily
did so many of the ideas of modernist representation and Post-Modern
re-representation.