Dean Hughes

'On Being an Artist' by Michael Craig-Martin

In February 1994 I attended a gallery talk and tour of the ‘Wall to Wall’ exhibition, curated by Interim Art director Maureen Paley, at the Serpentine Gallery, London. ‘Wall to Wall’ was a survey exhibition, of sorts, of artists who worked directly on walls, using the physicality of the architectural space. Irish American artist Michael Craig-Martin, whose book On Being an Artist was published by ART/BOOKS on the 20 April 2015, led the talk and tour that I attended. He was exhibiting one of his immersive room paintings, which detailed everyday quotidian office furniture in acidic lime green, magenta, and blue, all clearly delineated in his trademark black electrical tape. One of the things he said that day has a long register for me, although recounting it now I cannot remember whether it was the product of a natural part of his talk or rather a prompt from a question. Nevertheless, in describing the artistic process of how one enables an idea or material to manifest itself as an object or ‘thing’, Craig-Martin stated simply and beautifully, ‘I make things so that I can have a look at them’. For me at that time (in my first year of an undergraduate Fine Art course), this was a startling assertion for an artist so closely associated with cool-eyed cerebral art production. I found his statement immediately liberating. It was a disarming sentiment in that it placed greater emphasis on experiencing the artwork before judging the worthiness of the idea. I found that Craig-Martin had an ability to distil and communicate complex ideas in a simple manner and disentangle patterns of thought. These qualities were what made him such a compelling teacher to so many at Goldsmiths College, London in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. On Being an Artist is a collection of some 160 pieces of writing by Michael Craig-Martin, some several pages in length, and others little more than a single sentence on topics ranging from the seemingly practical, such as ‘On making things’, to the anecdotal ‘On meeting Andy Warhol’ to the outright autobiographical ‘On me’. The narrative arc of On Being an Artist is akin to that of an autobiography, beginning with his birth in Dublin in 1941 and concluding 298 pages later with ‘advice for an aspiring artist’, yet the book feels more pedagogical than diaristic. The book is constructed in a manner that doesn’t allow itself to be too partisan to any particular idiom and one is left with a strong sense of an attitude rather than cogent details. It is interesting to note that in 1998 in art critic Jerry Saltz’s small book, An Ideal Syllabus: Artists, Critics and Curators Choose the Books We Need to Read, CraigMartin states that he: