Michael Craig-Martin is a hugely influential figure in British art. He has done really well out of it: CBE, knighthood and now a lengthy retrospective at the Royal Academy.
What a shame he’s such a ghastly artist. His work is a trampling of the delicacies and visual charms of art. World-class insensitivity can, if arrived at in the right epoch, pay out big time.
Back in the day I used to present the televised giving of the Stirling prize, Britain’s most prestigious architecture award. One year we toured the new British embassies that had sprung up around the world and in every official entrance hall, looming tall in kiddy colours, was a gigantic Michael Craig-Martin. It was as if he had cornered the market in international foyer art: picturings so banal no one ever had reason to notice them.
The dismay prompted by these blank aesthetics reared up again the moment I stepped into the central hall of this lurid look back. Set on loud walls of Paperchase green, shouting out its ambiguous pop messages in noisily commercial reds, blues and yellows, it’s a heroic display of colouristic insensitivity.
Nothing at the start of the event warns us of the tortures ahead. In his earliest artistic incarnation Craig-Martin was a cool, grey conceptualist. His most notorious early work, called An Oak Tree, from 1973, is a glass of water on a shelf accompanied by a text in which the artist insists that the glass of water is no longer a glass of water because it is now an oak tree.
I hope some absurdist humour was intended. But I doubt it. More likely Craig-Martin is being deeply serious and genuinely believes there is some artistic value in this silly double bluff. There is at least a sparseness to his early work, a poetic minimalism, that makes it viewable in ways the felt-tip horrors ahead are not.
A decade later he became a genuinely helpful figure in British art as a tutor at Goldsmiths, where he nourished and supported the generation that came to be known as the YBAs: Hirst, Lucas, Collishaw and co. It was a particularly lively moment in British art. We should thank him for it.
What followed — alas, what the RA’s retrospective traces in repetitive detail — is the adoption of a pop language that appears determined to mistake the banal for the significant. Working with a dull range of everyday objects (safety pins, lightbulbs, mobile phones), Craig-Martin reduces them to their basic outlines, enlarges them, colours them in shouty shades that you might find in a box of poster paints, and asks us to believe something worth examining is being examined. It isn’t.
Both of his obvious heroes, Duchamp for the conceptualism, Warhol for the pop banality, were poets compared with him. Where Warhol can pluck a tin from a supermarket shelf and fill it with fuzzes and doubts, Craig-Martin, who designs entirely on a computer, repeats his everyday objects with an alarming lack of visual insight.
In a grim show perhaps the grimmest stretch is a room in which some of art’s most subtle masterpieces — Las Meninas by Velázquez, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Manet, Bathers at Asnières by Seurat — are reduced to their flattest outlines and recoloured in a range of plastic tones that belong in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Poor Velázquez, Manet, Seurat, to have this done to them.
Michael-Craig Martin is at the Royal Academy, London W1, to Dec 10