Michael Craig-Martin : An Oak Tree (1974)
Excerpt from John A. Walker’s Art and outrage (1999).
Michael Craig-Martin - Oak Tree - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
-
Michael Craig-Martin. An Oak Tree (1974).
Since his art is cerebral and clinical it does not have the popular appeal of David Hockney’s nor the sensuous attraction of Howard Hodgkin’s. Conceptual art is appreciated primarily by art world intellectuals. If Michael Craig-Martin is known to people beyond the art world, then it is for his thought-experiment An Oak Tree (1973) which was first exhibited at the Rowan Gallery, London, in April-May 1974. (The piece had the whole gallery to itself.) It was shown again in a one-man exhibition that toured Britain during 1976-77 and in his retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989. A version of it is now owned by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
According to the critic John Roberts, An Oak Tree “is a charming work” which “takes its place alongside other object-pieces of the same period which test the limits of the real.” During the 1970s, it was scorned by such figures as Fyfe Robertson and Giles Auty as the epitome of charlatanism. Unlike populist critics, I will pay close attention to the four, constituent elements of the piece: (1) a small shelf, made from glass, attached to a wall by metal brackets nine feet from the ground; (2) upon which stands, in the centre, a plain drinking glass two-thirds full of water; (3) a printed text, red in colour, in leaflet form (designed by Malcolm Lauder) entitled An interview with Michael Craig-Martin; and (4) the title An Oak Tree.
Elements one and two, therefore, are both transparent, everyday objects which the artist has purchased and chosen to present rather than to create. These banal objects have been displaced from their usual bathroom setting to an art gallery. The fact that they are displayed so high up means they are out of reach, thus endowing the works with a tantalising, teasing character. Element four, the title, is puzzling because of the discrepancy between its natural referent— oak tree— and the actual, man-nade objects on the wall. One is reminded of Magritte’s famous caption “Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe” inscribed beneath an image of a pipe (The Use of Words 1, 1928-29).
Element three, the text consisting of questions and answers, is written in a manner reminscent of Wittgenstein’s philosophical discourse. Since the interview was generated by Michael Craig-Martin, he performed both the role of the artist and the role of the questioner, that is, the one who claims to perform miracles and the sceptical viewer. Specifically, the artist asserts that the physical substance of the glass of water has been changed into that of an oak tree, the change took place when he put the water in the glass. But of course the viewer’s eyes do not confirm this assertion— though with some effort of will a degree of resemblance can be detected between the vertical glass standing on the horizontal shelf and the disposition of the trunk of a tree rising from the ground (the water would thus equal sap).
Michael Craig-Martin - Oak Tree - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
ads by artdesigncafe
Facebook comments
