Michael Craig Martin. Interviews

The IMMA Series is the voice of the artist, through the various forms of statements, essays, interviews and illustrated works from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Rachael Thomas, the Head of Exhibitions at IMMA, explores Michael Craig-Martin's fascination with fundamental questions regarding the nature of art, representation, authorship and the role of the viewer. By discussing Craig-Martin's style of detached conceptualism, Thomas reveals his connections to minimalism and the influence John Cage and Josef Albers have had on his practice and teaching. The interview also investigates semiotics, and ultimately the function of language itself. Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and brought up in the United States, studying Fine Art at Yale University School of Art and Architecture in the early sixties, when the teaching legacy of Josef Albers (Yale, 1950-1958) was still extremely prominent.
He returned to Britain in the mid-sixties where he became one of the key figures of the first generation of British conceptual artists. At Goldsmiths College he taught Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, among other artists who would become known in the early nineties as the "Young British Artists".