Michael Craig-Martin
at Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Poland (1994)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 18 February 2010.
This essay was previously published in the catalogue accompanying Michael Craig-Martin’s solo exhibition.
Beginning
The walls of a gallery room are painted from floor to ceiling and from edge to edge in a single, intense colour. Set within the resulting overwhelming visual field is an object, an open book with empty pages, at about waist-height. It is not a real book, but a depiction of one; a drawing with a regular outline. It has the character of a diagram without any particular provenance, without the signs of an artists hand. The spaces between the lines of the drawing are filled with evenly applied colour, in keeping with the character of the drawing. The painted pages are white, the binding blue. The book is ordinary, like an idea of a book. The drawing is like the picture of this idea. The flat field of colour that it is set in, whose intensity is simultaneously attractive and repellent, becomes a field for the idea, a field that might be occupied physically and imaginatively. The book and its field—its space—have become plausible as actual. A transformation has occurred which has made it possible for the drawing of the book to be taken as a book, and for the painted surface of the wall to be taken as a space.Scanning around this space, other things become apparent. A radiator that is a part of the equipment of the room becomes a pictorial element of this brightly coloured (taken as) space. Now the radiator is like the picture of the book, like a picture itself. In the confused condition, the mystery created by the viewers perceptions, the radiator and the book (which is, after all, a picture) have become equivalent to each other. The pictorial or imaginative space and the actual space of the room are not distanced from each other, but continuous. This has been achieved without spectacle, without illusion: it has occurred through the viewers inquiry and judgment. Everything that is visible is plainly explicable in real terms. The colours of the walls have come out of a paint tin, applied with a roller. The renderings of objects lack the sleight-of-hand or the expertise that is associated with artistry. The wall paint and the depictions of everyday household items are all known, understandable and accessible, even apparently ready for use. The viewer has taken a situation as a picture to be taken as a (fictional) situation. The process of comprehension of reality and artifice is compacted in the viewers experience of this work. The means have been provided for activating the processes that make art as ideas visible as ideas and art. These means are visible, physical, actual.
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