Michael Craig-Martin: An Oak Tree (1974)
Excerpt from John A. Walker’s Art and outrage (1999).
The oak tree that looked like a glass of water
During the 1970s An Oak Tree, a work by Michael Craig-Martin, became notorious as an example of the absurdity of Conceptual art. The latter was dubbed by its enemies “con art”.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941. From 1945 to 1966 he lived mainly in the United States where, during the 1960s, he studied painting at Yale University at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He obtained a teaching post in Britain in 1966 and took up permanent residence in London a few years later. He is an artist who shows in upmarket Cork Street galleries and whose works are to be found in the collections of the world’s major museums.
He is also an influential tutor at Goldsmiths College, an art school that trained many of the young turks of the British art world during the 1980s. (In 1994 he was appointed to the Millard Chair of Fine Art.) In addition, Michael Craig-Martin has curated exhibitions and written articles for art magazines. Although some critics claim he is a “radical, subversive” artist, he is in fact a valued member of the arts/media establishment: he regularly appears as a pundit on television arts programmes, serves as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and is a friend of the powerful collector Charles Saatchi.
While an art student in the United States, Michael Craig-Martin was influenced by Minimal art, particularly that of Robert Morris. Like so many others he developed from Minimalism into Conceptualism but his approach differed from that of Victor Burgin and the Art & Language Group. (Craig-Martin continued to use objects and to produce paintings while Burgin employed texts and photographs, and early Art & Language issued journals of their writings.) Writing in 1995, David Lee described Craig-Martin as follows: “He is a figurehead and defender of the faith for Conceptual Art, its most lucid apologist and its most persuasive proponent.”
Michael Craig-Martin has worked in Britain for many years but still speaks with an American accent. Some critics regard his work as American but inflected by British politeness; others characterise him as “a wit” and “a maverick”. He prefers to be called “an artist” rather than a painter or sculptor because, although he has produced paintings and sculptures, his work extends well beyond these art forms. Over the years he has employed many diverse materials and everyday objects: plywood boxes, mirrors, milk bottles, buckets, venetian blinds, housepaints, clipboards, neon lights, and so on. All his works are extremely precise, clearly delineated and professionally presented. Obscurity, blurs, blood and guts have no place in his art. He draws the outlines of such mundane things as lightbulbs, chairs and ladders in coloured tape on walls but not scenes of human suffering, torture or war.
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