Daniel Craig-Martin - Old Masters and Modern Design

Daniel Craig-Martin - Old Masters and Modern Design at the Royal Academy of Arts.

This is the last post on this exhibition that was so enjoyable and thought-provoking. You can see the other three posts on this exhibition here , here and here

 

Michael Craig-Martin frequently cites artists and works of art that have inspired him. In this post he pays tribute to celebrated works of art by reimagining them in his own visual language. One example is Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas. Artists have been intrigued by the way Velazquez placed the viewer in the position of the Spanish and Queen sitting for their portrait. A much later work, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), influenced Craig-Martin to pay homage to Duchampian strategy of elevating everyday objects to fine art.

Manet's Dejuener sur L'herbge, (acrylic on aluminium)

You can see Manet's painting on a blogpost on Manet here . Furthermore, you can see Manet's second version here

Reconstructing Seurat (purple), 2004, (acrylic on aluminium)

One of Craig-Martin's favourite paintings is Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres.  Here, he has reimagined this monumental composition using his own visual language of black outline drawing and vivid, flat colour fields. The artist uses colour to highlight elements of the painting such as the factory smokestacks in the background of this scene of leisure.

As with the previous painting, there is no specific blog post for Bathers at Asnieres but you can see the painting here

Las Meminas,2018,  (acrylic on aluminium)

To see this painting go here . For some examples of how artists have tried to understand this iconic painting you can go  here

Manet's Olympia, 2023, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled, 2013 (Barcelona chair)

Duchamp's Large Glass, 2023, (acrylic on aluminium, in two parts)

The actual title of Marcel Duchamp's landmark work is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. It shows the erotic encounter between the bride (above) and nine bachelors, trapped in a mechanical apparatus (below). Duchamp used a variety of materials on sheets of glass rather than canvas. In his painting, Craig-Martin plays on the tension of paying homage to Duchamp's materpiece while the original work was a rejection of painting itself.

You can see Duchamp's work here and here  (better picture of the work in this second link)

Fountain, 1999, (acrylic on alumium)

You can see Duchamp's iconic installation here and here (this blogpost includes other works by Marcel Duchamp)

Daniel Craig-Martin - the early years

Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts.

This is the second post on this exhibition. You can see the first one here

Craig-Martin is one of the key figures in British conceptual art. Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking and digital media, creating works that fuse elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art.

Educated primarily in the USA, Craig-Martin moved to the UK on completion of his studies in 1966. He exhibited the now iconic work An Oak Tree in 1973. From the mid-1970s he shifted his practice from using ready-made objects to representing them pictorially. Over the years he has developed a wide-ranging 'vocabulary' of everyday items including safety pins, light bulbs, take-away coffee cups and laptops.

Craig-Martin's intention is to explore ordinary contemporary life through the things we make, including consumer goods and works of art. He has sought to create works that are straightforward and undidactic, giving the viewer scope to use their imagination. His concern lies in understanding not just how we think and feel about the world, but how we perceive and experience it daily through the language of images.

Powder-coated steel sculptures in the forecourt of the Academy:

Quite a few of Craig-Martin's sculptures were displayed on the forecourt of the Academy. These monumental sculptures play with the tension between the three-dimensionality of sculpture and the two-dimensionality of drawing. Craig-Martin views these works as sculptures of drawings. From the front, the objects read as being two-dimensional and are easily identifiable, while from the side, the subjects collapse into a single line and the object depicted becomes strangely unreadable. The scale and colours used to represent these familiar items lend them a presence that is simultaneously modest and heroic.

Inside the galleries:

Early works:

Following his graduation from Yale School of Art in 1966, Craig-Martin began to produce sculptural works based on the minimalist and conceptual movements of the time.  One of his earliest is Black Book, which transforms two mundade items into a work of art. Other early projects include his box pieces, which brought geometric forms together with functionality and direct audience participation.

From the early 1970s he began working with ready-made objects such as buckets, milk bottles and clipboards to produce a group of wall-based sculptures that explored the relationship between art and everyday items.  Following An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin felt that he had reached a conclusion to the conceptual path he had been following and returned to basics through drawing and image-making.

Black Book, 1967, (cardboard and tape)

Box that Never Closes, 1967, (blockboard, polyurethane paint, varnish and brass hardware)

The lid and base do not fit together so the object cannot perform as an actual container, nor arrive at a neat geometric shape. Stripped of its standard use, Box That Never Closes plays with the viewer's expectations and invites us to question what makes an object a work of art. 

On the Shelf,  1970, (15 milk bottles, water, metal shelf)

Image-Making and Readymades:

Reading Light, 1975, (neon)

In the second half of the 1970s Craig-Martin began working in pictorial representation and image-making, seeking a new way forward in his practice. His neon works were the first in which he drew rather than used real objects.

Untitled Painting No. 3, 1976, (oil on canvas)

His work with found objects continued with his series 'Pictures within Pictures'. By inserting paintings found in London flea markets into the top-left corner of blank canvases, he recontextualised the paintings in a way that 'completely changed their meaning without changing them at all'.

The following decade saw Craig-Martin return to 'readymades', prefabricated objects repurposed as art. He created a series of wall works using Venetian blinds, playfully questioning what we perceive as a painting. He then began to paint similar abstract works dominated by solid colour and patterns of white dashes. These were the first instance of his empathic use of colour.

Untitled (red), 1988

The artist's use of Venetian blinds plays with considerations of colour, form, light and space, with their shapes and solid colours suggesting a proximity to Abstract Expressionist colour-field painting. They also offer a metaphor for painting itself, framing a window onto the world.

Wall Drawings and Sculptures:

Influenced by Marcel Duchnap's use of prefabricated objects and Andy Warhol's focus on pop culture, Craig-Martin continued to incorporate recognisable manufactured items that were in his words, 'more famous than famous. So famous that you don't even notice them'.

He began producing drawings of ubiquitous items, using crepe tape on transparent acetate or drafting film, which were then projected and traced on the wall, again using tape. Through his choice of media, Craig-Martin sought to remove the artist's 'hand' so as to reflect the impersonal character of mass-produced objects. This method also enabled him to layer several drawings of objects, leading to complex compositions. He chose a three-quarter view, showing each object slightly from above to emphasive its three-dimensionality.

Craig-Martin 'draws' with a particular type of crepe tape invented in the 1960s for electronic circuitry. As with his wall drawings, it allows him to achieve his ideal of making the works 'styleless', eliminating all trace of the artist's 'hand'. Ironically, in attempting to make his work style-free he has created a style that is immediately recognisable as his own.

Reading with Globe, 1980, (tape on wall)

Pen and Ink, 1985, (painted steel)

In the early 1980s he began turning his drawings into wall-mounted sculptures, using thin metal rods. The linear simplicity of these drawings and sculptures became his hallmark and the foundaiton of his work to this day.

Sea Food, 1984, (oil on aluminium and painted steel)

Dolly, 1983, (oil on canvas and painted steel)

In this work, there is an early combination of flat and simplified lines, with the bold colours that would become characteristic of Craig-Martin's later style. Merging two modes of artistic expression, the colour blocks refer to abstract art, while the sculptural drawing is figurative.

An Oak Tee, Daniel Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts.  An Oak Tree.

This post is just on An Oak Tree, an installation by Michael Craig-Martin. I saw this artwork at Tate Modern (I think ?) many many years ago, I was intrigued by it so I remembered it very well. But, I did not remember who the artist was. In fact I did not know Craig-Martin's work - it was later that I fell in love with his coloured paintings - so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was the first artwork in the exhibition of Craig-Martin's work at the RA. There will be posts on the rest of the exhibition but this is just about  An Oak Tree.

Following his graduation from Yale School of Art in 1966, Craig-Martin began to produce sculptural works based on the minimalist and conceptual movements of the time.  He began working with ready-made objects such as buckets, milk bottles and clipboards to produce a group of wall-based sculptures that explored the relationship between art and everyday items.

In one radical work, An Oak Tree (1973), a glass of water is accompanied by a text declaring that the artist has transformed the object into a tree. With this uncompromising statement, Craig-Martin challenges the perceived roles of artist and audience in making a work of art.

An Oak Tree, 1973, (glass, water, metal and printed text on paper)

The text accompanying the artwork:

Following An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin felt that he had reached a conclusion to the conceptual path he had been following and returned to basics through drawing and image-making.

Yoko Ono - Music of the Mind. Part 3

Yoko Ono - Music of the Mind

at Tate Modern.

This is the second post on this exhibition. If you like to see the first two parts go  here  and  here .  As I would like each post to stand on its own, I have included the introduction from the first post, so, if you have read that already, scroll down to the first photograph.

I am a great fan of Ono's work so it was a real pleasure seeing this exhibition, which by the way, was on quite a while ago. 

I also saw a retrospective of her work in Copenhagen, and you can see that here

Music of the Mind celebrates the work of artist and activist Yoko Ono. The exhibition explores Ono's conceptual practice, foregrounding ideas over objects, alongside her ongoing campaign for world peace. It takes its title from the artist's desire to stimulate the imagination. Ono notes: 'The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people... In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time'.

The exhibition traces Ono's radical approach to art, language and participation, from her early 'instruction' pieces to her recent, large-scale installations. It covers seven decades of her expansive practice from 1955 to today. During this time, Ono moved between Japan, the US and the UK, before settling in New York in 1971.

Following a loose chronology, the exhibition highlights recurring ideas and themes in Ono's work, making connections across time and place.

Ono's art takes many forms. It includes scores, performances, objects, film, music, sound and events. In 1964, Ono published Grapefruit, her foundational book of instruction works. These concise texts, somewhere between poem and score, aim to unlock the mind. Instructions are presented throughout the exhibition, calling you to participate, often with others.

Ono invites one to realise her artworks - to construct paintings in the mind, perform inside a bag, play a game of chess and share memories and wishes. But, most importantly, she invites us to imagine. This collective call to action is a provocation to change the world, one wish at a time.

A dream alone is only a dream.

A dream you dream together is reality.

Yoko Ono.

It's been very difficult getting these posts together, given the nature of Ono's art, its conceptual nature which is very cerebral, but I hope I have done it justice

Film No. 4, Bottoms, (film)

Film No. 4, Bottoms strings together footage off around 200 buttocks. For Ono, they represented 'the London scene today'. Participants included artists John and Barbara Latham, writers George Andrews and Eddie Wolfram, and sculptor David Annesley. The audio includes conversations between the participants, Ono and her husband Anthony Cox. At times, the recordings are deliberately out of sync with the images and mixed with Ono's interviews with the British press. Ono's film score for the work instructed: 'String Bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace'.

The British Board of Film Censors banned Bottoms, deeming it 'not suitable for public exhibition'. Ono staged a peaceful protest outside their headquarters. She handed out daffodils to reporters and held up images from the film with text that asked, 'What's wrong with this picture?'. Ono told the reporters, 'the whole idea of the film is one of peace. It's quite harmless. It is not in the least bit dirty or kinky. There's no murder or violence'. Eventually the film was granted an x rating and screened in selected cinemas.

Poster for world premiere screening of Ono's Film No. 4, Bottoms


Surrender to Peace:

The works below bring together works from the mid 1960s to 2009. They reveal Ono's use of the sky as a metaphor for freedom, her ambition to heal the self and the world, and the message of peace.

In 1983, Ono placed an advert in the New York Times that took the form of an article titled 'Surrender to Peace'. She wrote: 'Our purpose is not to exert power but to express our need for unity despite the seemingly unconquerable differences. We as the human race have a history of losing our emotional equilibrium when we discover different thought patterns in others. Many wars have been fought as a result. It's about time to recognise that it is all right to be wearing different hats as our heartbeat is always one'.

The concepts of trauma and healing run consistently throughout Ono's practice. As a child fleeing the bombing of Tokyo during WWII, Ono found comfort in the constant presence of the sky. She remembers: 'Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me... I can never give up on life as long as the sky is there'.

Ono is deeply critical of violence, believing the world can start to  heal if violence is confronted. Much of her work is an invitation to see the world differently, from another perspective. This approach is encapsulated in the a work A Hole. A pane of glass shot by a bullet reads: 'Go to the other side of the glass and see through the hole'.

A Hole, 2009, (engraved glass, shot with a bullet hole, steel frame).





Engraved: A Hole/ Go to the other side of the glass and see through the hole.





Fly, (24-minute film)

Ono and Lennon settled in New York at the start of the 1970s. They continued to collaborate on projects and Fly was made during this time.

Ono has long explored the dynamics of power, vulnerability and violence in her art and music. In this film she engages with the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Second-wave feminism moved beyond the first-wave focus on suffrage, advocating for far greater societal change. For Ono, this includes explorations of power structures, women's oppression and role in society, discrimination and the nature of equality.





The score of the film reads, 'let a fly walk on a woman's body from toe to head and fly out of the window'. It features actress Virginia Lust, real flies 'supplied by New York City' and a multilayered soundtrack that mixes Ono's voice with guitar instrumentals by Lennon. Ono describes both the woman's body and the fly as representations of herself. The fly carries associations of dirt and decay while also embodying the concept of a free spirit. Ono frequently explores flight as a physical act and a metaphorical concept. Both act as symbols of liberation and empowerment.

In 1971 Ono wrote her manifesto, The Feminisation of Society, noting: 'If we try to achieve our freedom within the framework of the existing social set-up, men, who run the society, will continue to make a token gesture of giving us a place in their world'.

Helmets (Pieces of Sky), 2001, (military helmets, puzzle pieces, instruction)

Ono invites us to take a piece of the sky, which she sees as a hopeful symbol of limitless imagination. The pieces are presented in German army helmets from WWII, referencing the violent fragmenting of hope through war. Despite being dispersed, the puzzle pieces are still designed to come together and reform the sky. They suggest the possibility for healing through collective action or thought.

'Take a piece of the sky. 

Know that we are all 

part of each other'.






Add Colour (Refugee Boat)

Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono's instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: 'Just blue like the ocean. You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white'.

Ono made her first Add Colour work at the Chambers Street loft in 1961, splattering sumi ink onto a long stretch of raw canvas. She developed the idea in 1966, at Indica Gallery in London, inviting her audience to add colours to small blank canvases to make a collective work of art. With Add Colour (Refugee Boat), Ono invites us to consider the impact collective action can have. The work encapsulates her belief in human agency and her understanding that 'we are sharing this world' and sharing our responsibility for it.

Ono conceived the work after being moved by international press coverage of the hundreds of thousands of refugees risking their lives to travel to Europe by sea. This participatory work invites you to reflect on this urgent and ongoing refugee crisis. 

The personal is political:

The last two works reveal Ono's use of personal experiences and reflection to encourage collective responses.

My Mommy is Beautiful is a two-part work exploring our relationship to our mothers. Suspended at height, a series of photographs embody Ono's humour and humanity. She comments: 'one has to look up at the vagina and the breasts on the ceiling - rather like looking up at your mom's body when you are a baby'. 

Ono invites you to: 'Write your thoughts of your mother. Or pin a photograph of her to the canvas'. The hope is that the work evolves over the course of the exhibition as an intimate homage to mothers.  

My Mommy is Beautiful

Write your thoughts

of your mother.

Or pin a photograph

of her to the canvas.

Ono states that all her work 'is a form of wishing'. The exhibition closed with WHISPER, performed by Ono in her eightieth year. The artist's powerful vocals repeat the words 'I wish... let me wish'.  For Ono, our most important wish is one for peace. In her words:

Power works in mysterious ways. We don't have to do much

Visualise the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE.

Thoughts are infectious. Send it out.

The message will circulate faster than you think.

It's Time for Action.

The Action is PEACE

Think PEACE, Act PEACE, Spread PEACE.