Michael Craig-Martin in conversation

Richard Noble, the Head of the Department of Art, talks to Michael Craig-Martin, Emeritius Professor of Art.

Richard Noble: I understand that you first came to Britain in the 1960s?

Michael Craig-Martin: I came to England in 1966 when I was barely 26. I left Yale in June and I was teaching at Corsham art school in September.  They hired very interesting people, there was lots going on, it was very fun. Within a year or two I had been introduced to almost every artist I had ever heard of in England – Patrick Caulfield and Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton and Dick Smith and Howard Hodgkin. Then I got a gallery – the Rowen Gallery – and I had my first show in 1969.

RN: Was it normal at the time to be teaching as well as making your work?

MCM: It did not seem surprising to me that I would teach and work. We were all spoilt post-war children who had lived quite comfortable lives in rising expectation in America so it suited our middle classness that one would teach and work. First of all, because it gave one a comparatively decent income and, secondly, because it kept one in the business. I would spend half the week teaching and the other half of the week working.

RN: And then you at a certain point moved to London?

Yes I moved to London after two years at Corsham. I went on teaching there for an additional year but I was living in London. Then I got a job at the Canterbury College of Art and while I was there I met Jon Thompson [then Head of Art at Goldsmiths].  Then in 1970 I had a lifeline thrown to me which was to be artist-in-residence at Kings College Cambridge for two years and that rescued me from too much teaching and too much  travelling, being paid terribly little and being desperately poor all the time. Suddenly, we had a reasonably nice life for a couple of years and so I was able to devote myself entirely to my own work for a couple of years right at this crucial moment. Anybody who things those jobs aren’t important is wrong, it was really very very important.

In 1973 I came to teach at Goldsmiths and it was extraordinary. At the time the school had a terrible reputation for being anarchic - some student had burnt the library down in the late 60s which is not good for a college – actually burning the library of all things! So my friends commiserated with me for the nightmare that I was stepping into. But Jon was just an amazing person and totally passionate about teaching and about art education. He went to a lot of trouble to get me there, he made me feel like I was the person he wanted there. He hired lots of young people, people the same age as me or younger than me were coming in. Our idea was to completely renew the idea of art education, which was very much Jon’s agenda. We were going to re-invent British art education.

RN: So it was really from the beginning when you came to Goldsmiths that the prospect of transforming art education was there?

 MCM: Absolutely, and at this school that no one mentions, its out on the suburbs – it’s not in Gower Street, it’s not  in South Kensington, not in Chelsea, its out nowhere. We’re kind of left alone which seemed to be important.

RN: Was it in Myatt Fields then?

MCM: No that was 10 years later. We were at New Cross and there were the temporary huts on the back field. They were supposed to be there for about 3 years after the war, we moved in the 70s and they were there until at least the 90s! Then there were some studios down at Surrey Docks and some studios were in the Main Building.

RN: You came from Yale which was an art department in a larger, very august, university setting. You’d been at Cambridge and then you came to Goldsmiths which was an art department in a larger university setting. I would guess that most of the people you worked with had come from art schools which were quite a different kind of environment and I wondered if that mattered or was significant?

MCM:  I considered that I had been unbelievably lucky and I had an absolutely wonderful education at Yale. It transformed my life – the life I have today is entirely because of happened to me there. It introduced me to an entirely different level of thinking about art, what art might be, what being an artist could be. When I arrived there I had such naive ideas and it was a very sophisticated place and I was very lucky because I was there at a great moment. When I came to England one of the things I discovered was there was an amazing number of really interesting artists. Many of those British artists had hated their own education and they felt deeply let down by it, there had been no depth or intellectual calibre to what they’d been taught – they’d been taught skills that were not useful. Their motivation at Goldsmiths was slightly different to mine. Mine was, how can we make it something that was more like what I had the good fortune to have myself. Theirs was, how can we invent the education we ourselves want? That’s a fabulous motivation. We want to give to others what we wished we had.

RN: So when this came together in the mid 70s, did it begin right away to draw in interesting students or did it take a bit of time to build up? The old adage that your reputation arrives on foot but leaves on horseback.

MCM: The funny thing is the year I arrived there were some of the most interesting students I’d ever had. In those first years, Tony Bevan was one of the students. Jon was interested in the wayward students, the difficult, stroppy, slightly crazy people. He was interested in, as I was, art that wasn’t just defined by painting or sculpture in the traditional sense. So I became the person responsible for the group of students who were the wayward and difficult ones. People used to laugh, they’d say: “Great we got rid of them onto Craig-Martin!” There were students doing performance, film or video, writing, installation. At the time all of this stuff was very speculative, it was a small part of the art world at that time. This was very, very close to the cutting edge of what was going on in the world outside. I can truthfully say that during the 70s there was no place in London to see more interesting art than at Goldsmiths. You couldn’t have gone to a Gallery and seen more interesting stuff.

RN: So did the different disciplines begin to dissolve at a certain point?

MCM: Jon had dissolved the departments and already merged them before I arrived but there was still the residual character of these groups. The studios at Surrey Docks were all painting; the ones in the workshops were all sculpture students. My students, who were in the backfield in the huts, were undefined. Although the groups officially they had ceased to exist, there was the residual character and students chose which one of these groups they wanted to be in. Then a little miracle happened, the school got Myatt Field which had been an old teacher training college and suddenly the school was lifted and decamped into this amazing place. It was large enough for us but not terribly big, the textiles department was there too. There was a library, canteen, offices, studios and workshops and that was it. Suddenly for this department that had been very complex and spread around, suddenly we were all brought together and it became a hothouse dynamo. I was asked if I could have an academic overview of the place in those early years. After two years, there were no painting and sculpture divisions – everyone was mixed up, it became physically inevitable because of the building.

RN: Did you have the sense that already there was a certain momentum. Once it was all located in one place the different groups began to become interested in each other and feed off each other?

MCM: In the early 80s at Myatt Field there were some young people, like Julian Opie and Lisa Milroy, who for the first time were having success in the outside world. It became possible for the kids at Goldsmiths to see that you could go to Goldsmiths and have a life, a visible life, as an artist. Of course all the people that went to Goldsmiths always went on working but the people in the 70s really struggled when they went out. And then the pinnacle of that came in the mid to late 80s which is really when the YBA thing happened and that happened in this hothouse of Myatt Field.

RN: It sounds to me as though the whole process of building this up took roughly 10 years?

MCM: It’s like everything else in life that seems like it happened overnight - it took 10 years before you knew about it. Nobody expected the amazing thing that happened. I did have moments when I thought “Is this the next generation of artists that were going to dominate?” I did think that.

RN: The YBAs were all at Goldsmiths in an extraordinarily short space of time, I can’t think of any other art school that has had so many students become so successful from a relatively small programme for a very short period of time. Did you have a sense when they showed up that there was some extraordinary about them?

MCM: My experience of teaching is that I have never been to any art school, no matter how crummy I thought the school was, where I didn’t meet interesting students. Art schools attract interesting people.  But I became aware that I was seeing an exceptional number of very, very interesting people. I tried to mix the people and get them to be familiar with each other. The thing about Myatt field that was really fun was that I could get there and in 15 minutes I could go through the school and see everything that anybody had done since I was there. If I saw anything interesting by anybody I didn’t know, I would introduce myself and tell all my tutees to go and look at this stuff. I’d invite that person to a seminar so that anything at all that was interesting, everybody’s on to it. It generated a kind of dialogue amongst the students, getting used to talking about each other’s work, looking at each other’s work in depth, being jealous of each other and being competitive with each other in the best possible way. If I did a seminar and Sarah Lucas did something fantastic then Gary Hume was pissed off because she got all the attention and he wanted it – it’s a normal human thing but it had amazing effect. First of all it was consolidating and then escalating. One of the things that was incredible good fortune for all of them was Damien [Hirst] doing Freeze.  They were all doing diverse things but Freeze gave them a group identity. It made them see themselves as part of one thing. Then subsequently, everything that happened to one helped all the others.

RN: Do you think that kind of engagement where you would challenge them to be interested in each other and to talk to each other gave them a confidence that allowed them to project what they were doing in the professional world?

MCM: A lot of it is to do with having the confidence to speak your mind and having the words to speak your mind. If I was mixing people who did photography and performance with people who did painting or sculpture, everyone is starting to learn the criteria and the language that different disciplines need. You don’t have to be a painter and only talk about painting, you can have a view about sculpture – you can understand how a sculptor thinks that’s slightly different to you do. One of the things that I thought was very striking, in the seminars, as soon as anybody did anything really terrific – everybody could tell. That is a very important thing to see happen. Many students go through art school without not only that not happen to them, but they don’t witness someone else having that happen. And once you’ve seen that you want it again – it’s a drug.

RN: You said in a recent interview that you would find it difficult to be a young artist nowadays because there is no longer any orthodoxy to rebel against. I wondered if that wasn’t already in a way emerging when you were still teaching? That kind of collapse of avant-gardeist thinking, that sense of there is one movement we have to kill off to move on to the next one. In a way I think you’ve been telling me how you responded to it, but was it significant at the time?

MCM: I do think that in my own career and my own sensibility, I bridge the kind of transition from modernism to postmodernism. My first world as an artist saw itself as the modernist world. When I look back now I can see the cracks in the whole structure of modernists, they were already evident when I was a student –  we didn’t recognise it like that but subsequently you can see what happened.

I think it’s very important what happens in the 80s, when the kind of refuge of modernism has slipped away. This suited my thinking entirely which was that the only refuge in this situation is for each person to do the thing they do well, better. It’s not for me to say that this is more avant-garde than that, this is better, this is more worthwhile, this is more worthy, this is more intelligent. My teaching became entirely focused on the individual person and the focus of teaching and the seminars was: is this person doing the right thing for themselves, which is a big question, and if they are, how can they do it better. The function of the group is to advise.

RN: What you describe is absolutely at the core of what we’re trying to achieve at Goldsmiths now but with vastly more students and a much more formalised structure. But it’s still built around this idea that the student has their work, and to teach them you have to understand what their work is, what it means to them. You have to bring other people to them, to talk about it, to create a situation where they engage. It becomes a kind of talking shop which arms them and gives them a confidence to articulate and believe in what they are doing.

MCM: I think the most important thing is that to be an artist you have to act sometimes without knowing what you’re doing. You have to have the courage to do that and be encouraged to do that. One of the things that I loved about the way Goldsmiths approached things was that it was student-led and also retroactive. If the student doesn’t do something then you can’t really talk to them because you don’t know what to talk about so the student has to do something. It doesn’t matter how crummy it is or how inappropriate, whether it’s really terrible or whether it’s really fabulous. So as soon as there is something, then we can have a conversation and if the conversation is to say that this is really terrible then that’s a conversation. The whole idea was to focus the responsibility on the person themselves rather than a tutor giving a project. It was very much left to them to do something, which everybody says they want to do and then when you’re suddenly presented with the possibility it’s very tough – really terrifying. I always thought the school should see itself as similar creatively to not being in the school, as similar as you can get it but at the same time a totally protective environment. Whereas it’s dangerous to do this on your own on the outside you should be able to do this within the protected environs of the school. We never expelled people, we never put them on probation, and we never threw people out. If people didn’t work you know there is something wrong – nobody goes to art school to do nothing! This idea that the school provides something as close to the outside world as possible but yet it’s really close and intimate – the attitude that we love you and we’re going to take care of you. If you’re going to act dangerously we will support you and see you through that.

RN: We’re completely committed to that ethos and you have to give them the room to fail. There has to be an opportunity somewhere in their 3 years to screw up and if that doesn’t happen then in the end it becomes too safe.

MCM: There are several things now that are so different. We took a totally long term view, somebody arrives in the first year and we’ll see what they’re like 3 years from now. Within that 3 years people go up and down, people collapse, people succeed, people try this and that. We never worried excessively about how somebody was getting on at any one point. To be an artist is a long term thing – you can’t do it to set patterns that fit terms and exams. It comes and it goes. Someone who has been totally hopeless for a year and you think is the worse student on the whole course, may the next year suddenly do something that is so wonderful and transform themselves completely in an unpredicted way. That year where they appeared to fail was not a mistake, it looks like a mistake when you’re in it but if the next year is great, obviously it was an essential factor. The problem now is that everything is regulated, we weren’t regulated at all – no one paid any attention to anything we did. Also now people paying and paying a lot of money – the problem about that is, I would feel the same if I was paying these amounts of money, you want to see a return on your money – you don’t want to wait 3 years to find out this term was ok where you got nothing out of it. You want a more short term sense of reward.

RN: We have structured it in a way that it’s year by year and we don’t pay that much attention until the end – we give them reports and talk to them but we do it in a way that is very supportive. That thing you say where a kid can be a total screw up and suddenly, boom, they’re the most interesting person there. Whatever happened in the first year that confirmed to nobody’s expectations of what they should be doing, was connected to this.

MCM: Things are connected they’re just not obviously connected and it doesn’t follow a set pattern – the pattern for one person is different from the pattern from another person. I developed a strong sense in myself and a confidence that I could feel when someone was doing work that was appropriate to their inner self, what they were like. Art is very expressive. People talk about this like its assumed but few people actually think about the consequence of it – a student who is not doing wonderful work, if you look at it carefully, is telling you a lot and expressing an enormous amount about who they are, what they’re good at, what they care about, the level or the nature of their engagement with it. All these things are readable in the work, you have to learn how to do it – and you need time to spend with the person and get to know the person in relation to the work. I could spend unbelievable amounts of time, which I often did, hours and hours and hours over years getting to know people really well so I really had a sense of what their potential was.

RN: These kinds of relationships that you were able to form have gone on. Have you remained close many of the people you taught?

MCM: Of course when they left Goldsmiths I was excited by what they were doing and I felt like if I didn’t continue to engage with them and be supportive, that I was betraying what I had said to them – it was as though I didn’t mean what I said when I was teaching them. The result is that we had so much fun and it was a very enjoyable time. It’s a source of great pleasure and happiness that I am quite amazed that there is hardly anybody from that time that I don’t think of as a friend, it’s quite extraordinary really.

RN: You stayed at Goldsmiths quite a long time. You became very successful as an artist in your own right while you were at Goldsmiths and you stayed on as a teacher. It presumably ate up a vast amount of your time and energy. I was wondering if there was something about teaching that in a way nurtured you own work?

MCM: Of course there were things that nurtured my own work, I don’t see any reason why that shouldn’t be the case. But it’s also in my own nature that I try to make things as enjoyable and as useful as possible. I do think that there is a way in which it’s very hard to do anything unless you are enjoying it, I don’t think you can be an artist unless what you do is enjoyable. Its one of the ways in which one discovers what one should do because if we’re not enjoying it we’re probably doing the wrong thing. I left Goldsmiths for about 5 years and I left the year of Freeze.  I was asked to consider going back and I went back. I spent much more time teaching MA students and I had never done this the previous time, only undergraduates. The postgraduate school became very interesting in the 90s, there were lots of interesting people there – that was a new experience to me. But as the time went on I became so busy I was hardly ever there and then I became aware that there were people who came to Goldsmiths with the idea that I was one of the people they would meet, and it was perfectly possible for them to go to Goldsmiths and never lay eyes on me.

RN: Particularly in the US it’s quite common for very influential artists to work in universities. My sense in Britain is that there is a feeling amongst artists that they are only teaching until they get their career going and then they don’t want to do it anymore. It’s somehow a mark of not being successful and I’ve always thought of you as somebody who belies that. You’re a very important figure because you’ve achieved tremendous success within an education environment and also within the broader professional world.

MCM: Recently I was invited by the students at the Düsseldorf Academy to go and give a talk to them. At the Academy, Tony Crag is the Head of the department, Gursky teaches there, Peter Doig teaches there – the list is just staggering. There is no equivalent of that in Britain. If you go to Columbia or Yale in America the list of artists in the school of visual arts is just incredible. People think of teaching as part of being an artist and there is a sense here that it’s....I suppose every culture has these cliches but maybe they are more potent in England...those who can do and those who can’t teach. Those kind of patronising things. I always considered the only reason I was a good teacher was because I was a good artist. If I hadn’t thought of myself as a good artist it would never have occurred to me to teach. Without patting myself on the back as an artist, I always thought the two were inevitably connected. Certainly in those early years we were very young and very active. I also think there is a generational thing, which is that there were so few galleries and there was so little opportunity of making sales of work and making a living as an artist in England during the 70s. It had been possible for the pop people in the 60s but after that it fades, there are about 3 artists in Britain from my generation who do alright from the beginning and so they don’t teach – people like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, they have a place in the world almost from the beginning. But other than that there wasn’t anything. You had extraordinarily interesting people teaching in my generation. What’s happened is the artists who are successful now can be young. Now teaching itself has become more burdensome.

RN: I wanted to ask you a broader question about you being here and being an important part of, what is by any account, a really dramatic expansion of the dynamism of Visual Art within British Culture since the 70s until now. It is now arguably the most dynamic part of British Culture. The patronising guff you used to get, you don’t hear that anymore. The art schools benefit from this, we have very good students and the people that want to come are clever and interesting. I’m wondering if you think that the role of the art school in the development of this dynamism has been adequately explained or is understood. My feeling is it’s not that well understood.

MCM: Earlier in the conversation I said that during the 70s to me the most interesting place to see new art was at Goldsmiths. There has been an art world since the 50s in NYC and there has been in Paris for the last 100 years. What these places have today is a continuation of something that’s been going a long time. We didn’t have that and instead of that we had the art schools. During the 70s and the 80s it mattered as much where you taught as it did where you had been a student. If you were teaching at Camberwell or at Goldsmiths it told you a lot about what an artist’s interests where. The diversity of schools, so many schools in London and so many different histories and the antagonism between them was essentially a creative antagonism. In a way I think that the dominance that the art schools had is less-so now precisely because there is the art world that was missing before – as it’s arisen the schools now are in a position that’s much more like art schools are in many other places it seems to me. I don’t think they have the kind of dominance in the culture that they did.

RN: I would say one of the things that art departments or art schools do now is they bring people in from all over the world. The reputations are very strong, people come and they stay. I don’t know how true that was in the 1970s and 1980s but it certainly is the case now.

MCM: This was not the case in the past. I think that the people that teach – particularly if they’re well known – it’s not so much what they teach or what they do, their being there attracts good people to come. It’s the students who make the school not the teachers. The schools were really excellent but it was mostly British students. People didn’t come to Britain in order to be an artist – people went to Germany or Holland or the United States. It’s only in this transformation that people think that this is a place to come. That’s why it’s become an art centre but it’s really the art schools that are the ones that created this thing to make it this attraction.

RN: The government is now privatising higher education, broadly speaking, they’re shifting the cost of running art departments and all other arts subjects on to the students. So we’re faced with a kind of crisis with how we can continue to provide them with studios, the space, and all the accoutrements. One of the things I discovered coming from a Philosophy background is that art education is expensive!

MCM: There is never enough space or materials. Making anything in any period is expensive. Today making the tiniest thing is unbelievably expensive, every material is expensive. I think this is an incredible dilemma and I don’t know honestly what the answer to it is. I don’t know much anymore about what happens in America. But in America education was always private and I went to Yale, a private university. It was comparatively expensive when I was there. I was staggered when I came to Britain and discovered everyone was on a grant, it would never have occurred to me. There are many things that Britain has adopted and adapted from the United States, but they only tend to take part of the story and leave out the other part. The part that’s been left out in education…since American education has been private for several hundreds of years, over those hundreds of years benefactors have produced scholarships. There’s hardly any student at a reasonable university in America who isn’t on some kind of scholarship, you can say the fees are what they are but hardly anybody actually pays them. They pay something and it certainly isn’t cheap. But I was speaking some years ago to one of the Deans at Harvard and they do what they call ‘blind admission’ where all the financial status is on the back of the paper and all the academic stuff is on the front and they never look at the back until they’ve chosen the students. Harvard is a very rich school, the richest school in the word, but it does do this. When they’ve chosen the class they turn over the paper and see what they need to do to get them in there and then the school helps them find the financial backing to be able to do this. It seems to me that in Britain we’ve ended up with the worst of both things, we end up with these astronomical fees with none of the background of scholarships and benefits of ways of helping people.

RN: From our standpoint now the challenge is that we need a narrative that enables us to go to people – our alumni, the commercial dealers and collectors to say, here we are – we can’t only take rich kids, we have to take the best applicants that we’ve got and they can’t all afford it.

MCM: If you are going to have this kind of privatised situation, you have to have a new kind of dialogue about all that. I do believe personally, my own career is an example, I do believe in putting something back. If you’ve had a lot, putting something back into the system seems to me to be a proper thing to do and I’m very surprised not everybody considers this.

RN: It seems to be an ethos that’s very, very strong in the US. As you said in the beginning it changed your life being at Yale and that’s given you a sense that education is important and these things need to be supported.

MCM: I’m used to the idea that they can’t survive without that kind of support. We have a situation where there’s been a period of enormous transition in all of this. The people who went to Goldsmiths who have had enormous success were the people who have had the last benefits of essentially a subsidised education. They don’t have experience of this new thing. It’s difficult to understand that if you have not actually confronted it. Of course when their own children go to art school they will understand and that won’t be far along!