Ways of Seeing

It's bright, it's bold and it's big; everyday items in garish colours and impossible proportions. It's unmistakably a Michael Craig-Martin.  

There's plenty of this in Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy in London, the images you're possibly accustomed to. But there's more as well, some of it very intriguing, some of it a bit over the top.  

And if you don't know much about the history of this Irish-born artist, it's the very first room that you'll find most surprising. We did. Because before Craig-Martin started on all this, he was a conceptual artist. Or should that be a Conceptual Artist? Either way, no need to shudder in horror. This early work is thought-provoking. And quite humorous.

 

The first exhibit is Craig-Martin's most famous from his conceptual period. Or perhaps most notorious. An Oak Tree from 1973 is a glass of water on a shelf, accompanied by a Q&A. Craig-Martin tells his questioner that "I've changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree" but that he'd be "very surprised" if anyone else told them they could see an oak tree. And it will continue to be an oak tree "until I change it". This artwork, or non-artwork, depending on your point of view, is about several things, including how artists see things, about conveying meaning, about belief. It's not at all straightforward, but it's not meant to be. A question arises, however: It's clearly not the same water in the glass as in 1973, because it would surely have evaporated by now. So is it the same tree? 

There's more water in this first room, in milk bottles and buckets, eye-catching and arresting, and making you think about what you see in front of your eyes and your perception. 

Sitting on a shelf are 15 clear bottles of the type that would have been found full of milk most mornings on almost every British doorstep when this work was made in 1970. But while the level of the water in the bottles creates a continuous horizontal line, the shelf they're on is tilted rather alarmingly. It's most disconcerting. Craig-Martin's milkman must have wondered what he was doing with all the empties. 

And how about this for challenging the way you perceive things? Four pails of water are apparently resting on a wooden table top, but then you see that the table has no legs.  

In fact, it's the weight of the water in the buckets that is holding up the table top, which is attached to them by a rope-and-pulley system. Sometimes what you see is not what you think you see. And by the way, the Oak Tree is on the shelf on the back wall. We suspect you can't actually see it, not from here anyway. 

Among Craig-Martin's other early stuff: boxes that look as if they might be bits of Ikea furniture but don't in fact fit together. Now surely many of us can relate to that. 

After some dabbling in neon, Craig-Martin began in the late 1970s to develop his now distinctive silhouette drawings, initially with crepe tape used for electrical circuitry. The tape was intended to allow him to create what was supposed to be an anonymous style free of an artistic signature to depict manufactured everyday items -- fountain pens, say, or cutlery -- things "so famous that you don't even notice them". Ironically, that anonymous style -- later on also reproduced in acrylic paint and in metal sculpture -- is now so distinctive that it's immediately recognisable. 

Now we've always liked Craig-Martin's work, but it has to be said that we've never been faced with such a profusion of it before. A show at the Serpentine Gallery a few years ago was distinctly smaller, and we found his Constellations installation at the Arp Museum in western Germany delightful as we made our way into an exhibition on women artists earlier this year. 

But the experience at the RA felt a little overwhelming, not to say tiring. Those large canvases with their saturated colours were a bit of a sensory overload, particularly in two of the galleries where the backgrounds are not white, but startling shades of turquoise and pink. 

A modicum of Craig-Martin seemed to go quite a long way, and we found ourselves more intrigued by the playfulness and inventiveness and relative restraint of some of his early efforts in this genre. Such as Dolly the trolley.

The black lines of the trolley are actually on two levels, merging into one if seen from a certain angle. Part of the outline is painted on to the coloured panels and black steel rods link up to complete the shape. This gives a degree of three-dimensionality (assisted by the shadow) to what is essentially a two-dimensional wall hanging, teasing your senses as you put it all together. Nearby, you have to unwrap with your eyes the Globe that is partly encased in a blue cube, as if it was too big for its box. 

Now, those "famous" things Craig-Martin decided to paint.... well, some of them aren't so famous any more. The cassette tape, once ubiquitious, is obsolete. Times change, and we liked a series of drawings entitled Then and Now that superimposed a memory stick over a filing cabinet, a smartphone over an old landline phone with a rotary dial.... and a Spotify logo over the cassette.

Craig-Martin, now in his 80s, is continuing to experiment, but we thought that some of his latest pictures were visually unappealing. It's a provocative and beguiling idea to reimagine the great paintings of late 19th-century French art in your own style (and, let's face it, artists down the ages have always wanted to pay their own homage to the greats who went before them). Flat areas of paint, solid black lines, sure. But those bilious colours?  

That's one Michael Craig-Martin we wouldn't want to have on our wall. 

Practicalities

Michael Craig-Martin runs until December 10 at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly in central London. It's open Tuesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1800, extended on Friday until 2100. Full-price tickets including a Gift Aid donation are £22 on weekdays, £24.50 at weekends. You can book in advance here, but you can probably just turn up; this was the thinnest-attended major exhibition we've been to at the RA. Allow 90 minutes or so to see it and the accompanying video installation. The RA is a few minutes' walk from Green Park and Piccadilly Circus Tube stations.

Images

Michael Craig-Martin (born 1941), Eye of the Storm, 2003, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Image courtesy of Gagosian
Michael Craig-Martin, On the Shelf, 1970, Jeremy Brice

Michael Craig-Martin, On the Table, 1970, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Michael Craig-Martin, Dolly, 1983, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Michael Craig-Martin, Globe, 1986, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 

Michael Craig-Martin, Then and Now, 2017, Cristea Roberts Gallery, London and Hugh Nineham

Michael Craig-Martin, Manet's Folies-Bergère, 2023, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian