Michael Craig-Martin What Do Artists Do All Day?

I draw these things because I really like the physicality of the world.

I'm not making paper cups or refrigerators.

I'm making pictures, I'm making paintings, I'm making sculptures.

I'm making something that isn't anything like the actual thing

that I picture but I'm making a different object.

So, we've got two objects here.

We've got the one I'm making and the one you see

and they're not the same.

'It never occurred to me, of course,

'in the beginning that what I was doing

'would last me so much of my life,

'that I would spend so much of my life

'devoted to doing this strange thing, er, drawing objects.'

But every time I think there can't possibly be another thing to do,

I think of another thing to do.

It's like stake your claim on the whole world, on everything.

And I'm kind... You know, I have my own way of doing that

but I'm accounting for every single object on the Earth.

That's what I'm going to do, I'm going to draw all of them.

MUSIC: "Allegro from Piano Sonata No.16" by Mozart

The reason I came to Britain and I was able to come

was because I was offered a job

teaching at the Bath Academy of Art,

which was located in Corsham, in Wiltshire,

so quite a small town in Wiltshire.

I had sent slides to about ten British art schools,

none of which I had never even visited

and the only one that wrote back was Corsham, and they offered me a job.

-That's why I came to England.

-Did they interview you?

-No.

I was...there was no interview. I arrived on the doorstep.

They must have been so pleased.

Well, they were horrified when I actually turned up...

They were horrified and tried to dissuade me in the end.

I was stunned because I'd just come from America

where I had been at Yale, which was the grandest art school in America,

and here I was in this countryside

in Britain in a school that was very...

similar...similarly sophisticated.

And one of the things that happened when I got to Britain

was that I discovered

how incredibly interesting the British art world was

and how much richer it was in people,

and in what was going on and the depth of what was going on.

And I also started to understand that rather than being

a second-class version of American art,

it was something quite different.

ALARM BLARES

CHATTER

I first came across your work, I was reading a book one day,

a sort of history of art book.

And I got to The Oak Tree and that was a big moment for me.

Of course, when it's called The Oak Tree,

you can't possibly think about the fact it's a glass of water, you know.

And it was a big moment in thinking about art in a more conceptual way.

I had been working with...

First I started with making objects myself

but the first pieces were box pieces.

Then I moved on to using a mixture of made things

and ready-made objects.

I was trying to find a way of making a work

that in a sense contained its own proof.

And then, of course, I grew up as a Roman Catholic

so, of course, I knew about transubstantiation

and that, in a way, this was key to an understanding of art -

that you see one thing and it is another.

After William and I got married,

his parents suggested that we think about

getting a portrait of me,

which I was...

..I think I was slightly reticent about!

I found it very difficult to think,

with our interest in contemporary art and conceptual art,

to then start thinking about sitting

for a staid oil painting.

I wanted the portrait to be

an interesting work of art,

as opposed to just a representation.

I'm very fond of it.

As fond as you can be...

..of a portrait of yourself.

I remember you came in and the two of us sat

-and watched it for about half an hour.

-I know.

I couldn't take my eyes off it!

I just thought it was beyond fantastic!

I opened the door and there I was - illuminated and moving continuously

and it really wasn't what I was expecting at all.

And we did, we sat down and watched it for half an hour and then

you said, "Do you want to change something?"

And I said no. That was that!

I think it's very interesting how if you can be bothered to sit

and watch it for a few minutes, you...

It says a lot about how you feel about colour

and when I sort of go red-eyed and angry,

you really do feel like I'm quite menacing and angry and other times,

you look incredibly calm and placid and sweet natured and...

But nothing has changed.

Nothing. Just the different colours coming in and fading out.

CLOCK CHIMES

Let's see.

This is, I suppose, the last time that I will be able to have a look

at the drawings before they get framed because the next time

-when I come they'll all have been...

-Absolutely.

They'll all be framed and they'll be on the wall

actually in the old Master Drawings Cabinet.

They'll actually be in place when I see them next.

OK. Let's have a reminder about what we've got here.

So, you've got your Romano, there, of Leo X.

And then you're going into the Northern with the Holbein.

And I'm glad you chose him because he's not in the best

of conditions but I still think he works so well.

I think that's just a wonderful drawing

and I thought when I first looked at the drawings of these faces,

although the faces are from so long ago, you recognise half the people.

-You can see somebody, you see him on the street someplace.

-Exactly.

Yeah. No, completely.

And then that wonderful character which we will come to in a minute

-of the shoemaker. Do you remember his face?

-Yes. Extraordinary.

Just fantastic. And then, again, another Pope but this time Julius.

The other thing that was so wonderful was finding

that there were drawings, really, from children to old age -

men and women, people that had youth and people growing older.

Very, very extraordinary mix.

Because I never asked you at the time whether that was something

you are doing consciously or whether it just happened.

I was very struck by the fact that if I just chose the portrait heads

that you ended up with a kind of history of a lifetime

because the drawings tended,

in the collection, to go from infancy to old age

and we have got that all reflected in this group.

And then this is your last one, isn't it?

Which is just, again, a most wonderful drawing of a child's face.

-Wicked, as they say.

-THEY LAUGH

Basically, the head was the closest thing to a close-up

and a close-up is really a kind of modern concept.

The heads nearly fill the page,

which pulls in very close to the surface of the paper.

I think it will give the room a very, very particular ambience.

These are amazingly closely observed faces.

Every face has an entirely different character.

This is drawing on an extremely grand level.

This is such extraordinary observations in the drawings

and that seems to always be the key to drawing.

I thought because I had been using ready-made objects, I thought

I could find ready-made images of the same things.

I thought these drawings existed so I went into the world

to look for them and to my absolute amazement, they don't exist.

Everybody thinks they already exist but they don't.

I had to draw them myself because they weren't there.

I only really draw fabricated, mass-produced objects -

the objects of everyday life.

When most of these drawings were made, there were no objects

in the sense that we have objects because all objects were handmade.

The closest thing you came to having something mass-produced

was in pottery, where people made a lot of pots.

But it wasn't mass production in the sense where we think of it...

where you have the identical thing made again and again

and they are distributed around the world.

They are ubiquitous things.

And so I wanted the character of my drawings to have the same

character of neutrality that the objects had and for that,

I needed to draw in a certain kind of way.

But I'm still trying to make the same kind of

close observation of the things and to take things as close

to what they are as the artists in the Renaissance did.

And although my drawing,

because I have taken away the sense of hand inflection

and personal inflection in the drawing,

the objects themselves resonate with personal meaning.

'So that if I draw something like an iPhone, well, you know,

'an iPhone is a common object and there's an awful lot of them

'around but when I refer to my phone, it's my phone.

'You may have an iPhone but that's your phone

'so it's deeply personal and it's interesting how we'

personalise these apparently impersonal objects.

'I do drawings of individual objects.

'Sometimes, but not always,

'I bring them together to make another drawing

'but that drawing is on the computer.

'In the old days, I used to make slides, transparencies.

'Now, of course, I use a digital projector.

'I project the image on the canvas or on the wall.

'For the wall drawing, I would just project it on the wall

'and then in the film of me doing the wall drawing,

'you can see that there's a projection on the wall

'and that I'm tracing it with tape on the wall.

'Once I've completed doing the drawing, you take away...

'obviously, you take away the projection and you have the image.'

The way I use colour has nothing to do with the way I do the drawing.

I mean, the drawings are as precisely like the thing

'as I can make it and the colour is as artificial as I can make it.

'I can play with the colour in different ways.

'It is, in a way, subverting the drawing.

'It's not playing the same game as the drawing.

'The colour represents all the things about the specificity

'of objects, about our own relationships with them,

'our emotions about them, our feelings about them.

'All these things, to me, are represented in the colour.'

'The colour is what introduces all of the stuff

'that the drawing doesn't account for.'

-There are the scissors. Hannah.

-Yes?

-Can you see the scissors?

Originally I had them further away but they are not very big.

It could definitely go to the left and how much? Like, two feet.

Yeah, at least.

The further back you put it, the smaller it gets.

-Because that looked great coming round that corner.

-Did they...

Have they turned the angle? Didn't we...

I think it was at more of an angle

than it is now but I think this looks good.

I always wanted the light bulb to look like a figure

reclining by the side of the pond.

Surprisingly, it does give that sense of a figure. Very nice.

-It looks like a nude.

-That's what...a reclining nude by the...

A kind of nymph or something by the pond.

This piece has been before previously

in the garden at Number 10 Downing Street

for about six months before it came here.

-And how did it...

-It looks better here...

in this very, very big landscape, big, complex landscape,

I had been worried that the pieces would be...

look very small and they would be very diminished

by the scale of everything here.

But actually they look fine

and it's interesting how the colour

really picks up in the greenery of the landscape.

You really see the pieces very clearly

and you can see them from quite a distance.

I think cos we've got umbrellas going down the side,

-it would be better if the heel was on this side.

-Do you?

OK? We just reverse it around.

Put the orange one where the blue one is, OK?

Except there should be more distance apart

cos I don't want to see one through the other.

And the other thing would be to...

I think the one that's by the lake, there should be one separate,

-which would be the blue one.

-The blue one.

Turn it around so its handle is closer to the water.

I'm going to take the furthest one and we'll do that first and then

we'll put...the other two are going to come someplace in the foreground.

-OK.

-On top of down there is the tracking that's at the end of it.

No, that doesn't make any difference. We'll stop before that.

-Yeah, but I need to be able to get at them.

-Oh, OK.

Amazing operation!

I had no idea...I had no idea really how complicated it was going to be.

They look so tiny out there.

The scale of everything is so enormous.

I think that looks fine. OK.

Will you try and make the angle a bit different from that one?

I mean, the question now is where do we put the purple one?

-That looks lovely, though.

-Yes, beautiful. OK.

It's absolutely fine. This is where it's going to go. That's excellent.

-We'll just put the blocks under.

-Put the blocks under, fine.

And the purple one...kind of here.

Having them with the angles different

and set back from each other at slightly different angles,

it all activates the space between them

and there's so much space here, it's very...

It's possible to articulate but it's very difficult.

And, of course, because there's going to be three of them,

as you're walking they're always shifting in relation to each other.

There's no... I can stand here and say they're perfect

but it's going to be completely different five feet away.

Just like that. Just like that.

The angle is right. Don't turn it any more.

Back a little bit. Back.

Yeah. Like that. Like that. Down.

That's it. OK. OK.

It's very, very exciting.

It's amazing to see them here and the thing that's been particularly

pleasing here is that the works are transparent,

they're just a line drawing, really, in space,

and yet they're holding their own.

You can read the images from a distance.

They work here and in a way that I was worried they might not.

I thought they might be just overwhelmed by the space.

Thank you very, very much. Yeah. Thank you very, very much. OK.

The gadget is fantastic with the straps.

It's perfect because it doesn't hurt the things and they can move...

-They really move very easily.

-Yeah.

-It's amazing how quickly you did it.

I thought we'd never get through it.

I like very much the idea of making something that,

making an artwork that exists in a public space.

I like the idea that it can be very big scale.

If you want to do things

on a big scale as an artist, you have to enter

the world of architecture because that's the enabler of such things.

I'm very interested in the idea of people finding

works of art in circumstances which are not in a gallery.

They are not purposefully going to look at a work of art.

I've done a work at the Laban dance centre in Deptford,

where I worked with the architects for a long time on that.

I've done other ones in the Docklands Light Railway station

in Woolwich Arsenal.

I've done something there.

And the idea is to make something that people engage with

without self-consciously thinking.

Most of the people who see it would probably never go to a museum

but they're in touch with art through what I've done.

That seems like a very interesting thing to be able to do.

GENTLE APPLAUSE

And we are thrilled, of course, naturally,

and I'm sure you are too,

that Michael Craig-Martin himself is here and indeed,

he's going to not only say a few words but take you through

his amazing three exhibitions.

When you go around the house, the first thing that you will see

is the digital portrait that our son and daughter-in-law,

William and Laura Burlington,

commissioned as an addition to the permanent collection here

three or four years ago.

We said it would be lovely to have an...

We probably said painting of Laura,

cos that's what we normally have here.

And then this wonderful digital object appeared and it's just

around the corner here of Laura Burlington and we're thrilled.

It's a real step forward in the collection

and a great deal more interesting than most...

-well, virtually all of the...

-LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH

..the two-dimensional objects we have on show,

of which there are a great many.

Doing an exhibition at Chatsworth, it's not like doing it in a gallery,

it's not like doing it in a museum.

Something different happens here

and part of that that's happened is because this is a family home.

The Devonshires live here.

And all the things that are here matter to the family

and they are interested in contemporary life

and as the Duke has said to me, he does what his forebears did -

he collects things and those things are mixed in.

The modern things that are in the house are not nominal things

that are in the corner or something, they are integrated everywhere.

As you will see going through the house,

they're integrated everywhere

and this is an amazingly unique thing.

What I wanted to do was to recognise something that I saw,

which was that the normal plinths that were here

are incredibly over decorated and 19th-century

elaborate objects in themselves

and to me, they distracted from my ability to look at the sculptures.

The pink plinths are to eliminate visual information

in order to concentrate your attention someplace.

As a matter of fact, concentrate your attention in the sculptures,

which is where it should be.

MUSIC: "Overture from Water Music Suite No.1 in F Major" by Handel

If you go back to, say, the books that children are taught words in,

you will have a picture of a ball and then there is the word "ball"

and the reason for the book is to teach the child, you know,

the word ball but it is based on the idea they already

know what the picture of the ball is because there isn't a ball there.

There's a picture of the ball.

So the child already has learned how to read pictures of things

as though they were the things.

Now, we do that so early we're probably doing that

at about two or three months.

That is the foundation of language, not the words.

It's the pictures of things that are the basis of our understanding,

of our way of formulating how do we get what's around us,

how do we understand.

MUSIC: "Overture from Water Music Suite No.1 in F Major" by Handel