Press Release

MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN TRANSIENCE 25 November 2015 – 14 February 2016 Serpentine Gallery

This winter, the Serpentine presents an exhibition by Michael Craig-Martin (b. Dublin, 1941), one of the best-known British artists of his generation. This is the first solo show of Craig-Martin’s work in a London public institution since 1989 and brings together works from 1981 to 2015, including his era-defining representations of once familiar yet obsolete technology; laptops, games consoles, black-and-white televisions and incandescent lightbulbs that highlight the increasing transience of technological innovation. The exhibition features new wallpaper that has been conceived especially for the exhibition. From the earliest work in the show, a wall drawing first produced in 1981 (the same year that the first personal computer was made available), to a painting from 2014 that depicts the minimal lines of an iPhone, Craig-Martin’s work has recorded the profound impact that electronic technology has had on the way we consume and communicate. The exhibition explores the seismic shift from analogue processes to digital technologies that informed the production and distribution of new kinds of objects in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Craig-Martin's early works explored the conceptual possibilities of contemporary art, testing the boundaries between functional and functionless forms. The introduction of digital technology in recent years has resulted in the breakdown of the relationship between form and function, a process that Craig-Martin captures in his depictions of successive inventions, from the battery to the cassette to the laptop. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in his seminal book Understanding Media, which Craig-Martin read shortly after it was first published in 1964, ‘technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation’. Craig-Martin’s work holds up a mirror to these alterations, reminding us that we are as much produced by the objects we invent as they are by us. Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Co-Director, said: “Craig-Martin's acute observations present an extraordinary picture of recent developments in the production, processes, functions and form of the objects that populate our world. His work reveals a search for the ultimate expression of contemporaneity in a way that we all experience – through the items we use every day.” Craig-Martin has participated in a number of Serpentine events and group exhibitions: Memory Marathon (2012); Map Marathon (2011), Wall to Wall (1994), Here and Now: Twenty-three years of the Serpentine Gallery (1993); Objects for the Ideal Home: The Legacy of Pop Art (1991); Vessel: Sculpture, Glass, Ceramics (1987); Summer Show 5 (1976, as selector) and Art as Thought Process (1974). He also produced a new map, linking the Serpentine’s two buildings, to celebrate the opening of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2013.

For press information contact: Miles Evans, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1544 V Ramful, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR Image Credit: Michael Craig-Martin Xbox control

Notes to Editors Michael Craig-Martin (b.1941, Dublin, lives and works in London) Selected solo exhibitions include: NOW, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, China (2015); Michael Craig-Martin at Chatsworth, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK (2014), Less Is Still More, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2013); Michael Craig-Martin. New Painting and Sculpture, Roche Court, Wiltshire, UK (2011), Signs of Life, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Germany and Works 1964–2006, IMMA, Dublin, Ireland (both 2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and fig-2, ICA, London, UK (both 2000) and A retrospective 1968–1989, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (1989). Selected group exhibitions include: Summer Exhibition 2015, (chief coordinator) Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2015); The Indiscipline of Painting, Tate St Ives, UK (2011); Forgetting Velázquez: Las Meninas, Museu Picasso de Barcelona, Spain (2008); Intelligence, New British Art 2000, Tate

Britain, London, UK (2000); Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany (1977) and The New Art, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (1972). Craig-Martin is represented within public collections, including Tate, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. He was appointed a CBE in 2001 and elected a Royal Academician in 2006.

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DIREC TO RS’ FO REWORD

When I started drawing these ordinary, everyday objects in the late s, I thought they were pretty stable in the world; I assumed that they would not change over time....I realise now that the things I was drawing were objects that had been designed or invented in the period dominated by the principle of form follows function....Today this is much less true.*       -     is one of the most influential and bestknown British artists of his generation. Born in Dublin in , he studied Fine Art at Yale University, USA and moved to the UK in , later teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London, mentoring the generation of artists who came to be known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). Craig-Martin’s early work tested the boundaries between functional and functionless forms, though in the late s his practice became centred on drawings of commonplace objects, leading first to wall drawings, then site-specific installations, and, eventually, paintings. His acute observation of ordinary objects has created an era-defining lexicon of consumer products. Transience is the first solo exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work in a London public institution since  – coincidentally, the year that the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – and it focuses on his painting and drawing practice through the lens of technology. It brings together works from  – the same year that the first personal computer was made widely available – to works made in , a period that highlights the increasing speed with which new innovations replace existing technologies. The exhibition includes representations of objects that have been familiar but are now obsolete, including cassettes, blackand-white television sets and incandescent lightbulbs. More recent works, featuring laptops, memory sticks and iPhones, chart the seismic * Michael Craig-Martin, ‘On the transience of objects’, from Michael Craig-Martin: On Being an Artist (Art Books Publishing Ltd, London, ), p..

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shift from analogue processes to digital technologies that has informed the production and distribution of new forms of communication in the late th and early st centuries. Developments in Craig-Martin’s approach to image-making are also bound up with these technological innovations from wall drawings produced by hand, with tape, to images produced by computers and digitally printed as wallpaper. Craig-Martin’s compositions speak to the ways in which we increasingly encounter images through electronic devices. The overlapping objects in early wall drawings appear to preempt the way in which ‘windows’ of information are now layered on a computer screen, while the simplified frontal perspective of isolated objects in more recent paintings resemble the flatness of a computer screen, casting off the three-dimensional illusionism of previous works. As the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in his seminal book Understanding Media, which Craig-Martin read shortly after it was first published in , ‘technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation’.* Craig-Martin’s work holds up a mirror to these alterations, reminding us that we are as much shaped by the objects we invent as they are by us. As digital technologies become ever more integrated into daily life this exhibition is particularly timely, and we are indebted to Craig-Martin for the dedication and enthusiasm he has devoted to creating this exhibition and publication, including producing a new wallpaper that has been conceived especially for the show. We are also delighted to present a new sculpture Lightbulb (magenta) , outside the Gallery in Kensington Gardens. It has been a pleasure to work with Craig-Martin again after his participation in a number of past Serpentine projects. Most recently, to celebrate the opening of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in , CraigMartin produced a Limited Edition map of Kensington Gardens, showing the location of the Serpentine’s two Galleries. To coincide with this exhibition, we thank him for producing a beautiful new Limited Edition

digital print iPhone 6s , the proceeds from which will make a significant contribution towards the work of the Galleries. The following lenders have been most generous in helping us to realise the exhibition and we thank them: The Devonshire Collection, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and private collectors who wish to remain anonymous. We would also like to thank the Michael Craig-Martin Exhibition Circle for their support, which has been crucial to the realisation of this project: Ambassador Matthew Barzun and Brooke Brown Barzun; Ivor Braka; Dr Corinne Michaela Flick; New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park; Karsten Schubert; and those donors who wish to remain anonymous. This exhibition catalogue has been produced in collaboration with Marie and Joe Donnelly and we remain most grateful for their generosity, without which the publication would not have been possible. Our sincere thanks go to the contributors to this book: Liam Gillick; Marco Livingstone; and Alice Rawsthorn, for their insightful texts that contextualise and expand upon the discussions arising from the focus of this exhibition. We would also like to thank Jennifer Higgie, Editor of Frieze magazine, who first published Alice Rawsthorn’s article ‘New Technology and endangered objects’ in Issue , October , for allowing us to reprint parts of it within this publication. This book has been designed by Peter Willberg and we are indebted to him for his inspiration and hard work to produce such a handsome publication. The public funding that the Serpentine receives through Arts Council England provides an important contribution towards all of the Galleries’ varied programme and we remain very appreciative of their commitment. The variety and depth of the programme of exhibitions, events, architecture and education would not be possible without the ongoing support of the Council of the Serpentine. The Americas Foundation,

* Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message’, in Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man, . http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf (accessed on  October )

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Learning Council, Patrons, Future Contemporaries and Benefactors are also key supporters of the Serpentine’s programme and we thank all of these groups whose funding is essential for the continued success of the Galleries. Finally, we would like to thank the Serpentine team: Lizzie CareyThomas, Head of Programmes; Rebecca Lewin, Exhibitions Curator; Melissa Blanchflower, Assistant Curator; Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager and Joel Bunn, Installation and Production Manager have all worked closely with the wider Serpentine Galleries staff to realise this exhibition and we are most grateful for their hard work and dedication.

Julia Peyton-Jones

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Director, Serpentine Galleries and Co-Director, Exhibitions & Programmes

Co-Director, Exhibitions & Programmes and Director of International Projects

A PE RFE C T WO RL D, JUST O UT O F RE ACH Marco Livingstone I have a passion for clarity,but I am drawn to contradiction and complexity.*           and Conceptual beginnings in the mid-s, Michael Craig-Martin’s work has explored the elusiveness of a self-contained perfect world, one that mirrors the messiness of the real world that we all inhabit but that is complete unto itself and that displays itself as a system governed by logic and reason. Geometry and purity were foregrounded in sculptural structures that mimicked the forms of the simplest, most pervasive utilitarian functional objects, simple box-like containers painted white or grey. Where Paul Cézanne more than half a century earlier had sought to conceive of everything in the visible world in terms of the cone, the cylinder and the sphere, Craig-Martin proposed an even more streamlined response to the visible world, at first choosing not even to depict it but to create an idealised parallel universe of elemental forms. While flirting with notions of the Platonic Ideal and seeking to limit himself to the most fundamental shapes, everyday actions and basic categories of objects, the artist found himself constantly returning – almost in spite of himself – to the expression of human fallibility. The Box That Never Closes of  (see fig.) is one of many early sculptures that conveys the frustrations of daily life, a sense of the ultimate unattainability of perfection and serenity. 4 Identical Boxes with Lids Reversed (see fig.), made two years later, speaks of the inevitability of alternative states: whether displayed with the lids open or closed, these hinged boxes, having been sliced at different levels and angles, have been dispossessed of their immutability and appear now almost tragicomically distended and incapable of carrying out their intended function. * Michael Craig-Martin in conversation with Enrique Juncosa, quoted in Michael Craig-Martin: Conference ( Waddington Galleries, London, ), p..

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TH E IMPERMANENT SUB J E CT Liam Gillick in conversation with Michael Craig-Martin

 It is interesting that you have decided to produce an exhibition that focuses on representations of technology in your work. -  Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones and I went through my new book of drawings. One of the things that struck us was the transformation from the analogue age to the digital age, which of course I’ve recorded, because I have kept drawing the things around me. While in the pre-technological age I occasionally represented a black-andwhite portable television or a tape cassette, with the recent work there is a sudden acceleration and there are fifteen or twenty paintings of technological objects – laptops, iPhones, memory sticks, and so on.  So within the exhibition what period of time are we talking about? -  There are two wall drawings from ; one painting from ; and then there are paintings from the s, all on canvas. We have also included recent works that I’ve been making up to the last few months, which are all on aluminium. There is also work made specifically for this exhibition – a special wallpaper and a new sculpture that will be installed outside.  We’ve both lived through a shift. I’m the first generation to use digital technology on a daily basis. In , they introduced pocket calculators into schools, and it was really fascinating that the anticipation of the pocket calculator had been really high.You couldn’t imagine having such a thing. It was relatively cheap but you could suddenly make enormous calculations with no difficulty. Almost immediately, however, it became an everyday object and completely unremarkable. Before

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calculators were introduced, we used to use slide rules, and with a slide rule, you always saw an answer in context.You always saw what was on either side of the solution.  - The slide rule was a form-follows-function object, whereas the calculator is not. If you look back on all the form-follows-function objects, like a hammer, you only have to look at a hammer and you know what it’s for.You know which end to hold just by looking at it, and you can’t do that now with any of the new things – you have to have a familiarity with the basic function of the object. So that’s one of the big changes. The other one is that when I first started making these drawings, the ordinary things were very, very cheap. My idea of something ordinary was something inexpensive.  But there’s a diamond ring in your work, isn’t there?  - Yes, but I did that recently as an example of bling, I would never have drawn that in the past. Now that kind of object seems vulgarly ordinary. People think that something that costs £ is quite ordinary. An iPhone costs a lot of money, but they’re everywhere. They’re absolutely ubiquitous.  In your earlier works, before you started doing isolated, single objects, the interest in the work came from the juxtaposition of things. There was something quite challenging about putting a tape cassette in the same composition as a book and a globe, right?  - Yes, yes exactly.  You were suggesting, even in the very early s, that these things are just other objects in the world. They’re not special. Which wasn’t obvious, because just a few years earlier, the idea of even owning a TV was a big deal. People would buy them on credit. It would be a major purchase for the house.

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-  Well, if you go back to that time, people didn’t even own a TV, they rented it.  Exactly. So was there a turning point where you thought, ‘I’m going to put a TV in here’ or ‘I’m going to add a cassette’? Because there weren’t many representations of these kind of objects until you did it. -  It’s always been a surprise to me that I’m in a territory where there are very few other people, if anybody, drawing what I draw. But at the time I was trying – I’ve always been trying – not to be precious about what it is that constitutes the ordinary. If you’re going to represent the things that are ordinary, they should be the things that are around everywhere. Of course, I only started drawing televisions in the late s, and by that time, everybody had a television. But the thing that was new was having a television with a handle on it, something light enough to pick up and move around.  Some cultural critics correctly warn about the trajectory of technology. They read a lot into it, but in a sense their reading can become rather puritanical and sanctimonious, rather than a genuine critique of processes. In that early work, you seem to suggest that there’s an equivalence between things.Your work removes a portentous fear of phenomena like the ‘evil of television’. As an artist, weren’t you supposed to be showing the dangers of mass communication and technology? -  I always liked the amorality of Andy Warhol – that he just showed you what’s there. I remember when Andy’s work was first shown, people said, ‘Yes, but what’s his attitude towards Marilyn?’. Some thought that the work was no good because he didn’t reveal his attitude towards his subject. My idea was to present everything as equal. The way I made the early work was to do a drawing in pencil on paper. I decided to make them all A size, because that was a convenient drawing pad format,

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and I would draw the object as big as possible within that size. I would then trace the drawing onto acetate. My drawing on acetate became a template for the work. That meant if I drew an armchair, and I drew a safety pin, both images were the same size. In all that early work, everything is equalised, regardless of its status, regardless of its size, regardless of its material. Then in the s I got a computer and suddenly it became possible for me to vary the size of things.  And that process of moving to the computer, did it make you nervous? Did you resist it?  - No, it was a complete liberation, because before the computer, if I wanted to change the size of an image, I had to make a new template, and that might take half a day. As soon as I had a computer, I could push a button and in a fraction of a second I could change the size of an image. I could turn it upside down, I could change the thickness of the line. There are a million things you could do instantly, and, in a way, I think of the work that I did before the computer as merely waiting for the computer to come along. It was as though I’d been anticipating it. If I’d tried to think of a technological way of helping me do what I was doing, I’d have come up with a computer that does exactly what it does for me.  So when people look at the exhibition, they’re going to see some changes, right? And they’re also going to see objects from the recent past that have become obsolete, like the Tungsten Palm Pilot, which I’d actually forgotten about, because it’s completely redundant now.  - I remember I got mine in America, right when they first came out, because I was visiting New York and a friend of mine had one. I brought it back, and I remember taking it to Goldsmiths and the students would crowd around, because they had never seen anything like it.

-  Yes. When I did the first drawings, it was hard to imagine that these objects would ever disappear. By the mid-s I began to realise that the things I’d drawn were starting to look old-fashioned. When I began using them, I never thought of them as old-fashioned – just utilitarian. I didn’t want to do drawings of antiques.  In those early tape drawings, there’s a kind of honesty, because you were bringing ordinary things to a level of beauty, and allowing them to be seen properly. They’re not pretentious objects, but they’re special. -  Exactly. Not everybody would draw a bucket or something like that. But as I went on drawing, I reached a point where I suddenly realised that there was a whole body of things that were coming into the world and were becoming ubiquitous, which I’d have no justification for drawing unless I let go of the idea that an object had to have a sense of permanence to become a subject. And so in recent years I’ve done a drawing of an iPhone  and a drawing of an iPhone . They’re only very, very slightly different, but they are different. And so my sense of things has shifted with the nature of these things. In the exhibition, there’s a painting of one of those robot floor cleaners. I really like it, because it’s the first domestic robot – not everybody will know what it is – but in ten years’ time it is quite possible that no one will have the vaguest idea what it is, because it won’t be around anymore. There will be something completely different. To say nothing of all the other things that we’re using. We all use memory sticks for everything, but how long are they going to survive? It’s hard to know. The thing is, you can’t always tell what’s going to stay around and what’s going to disappear. It is this new instability that interests me.  Exactly. Something has changed in terms of time and use. There’s an unpredictability that has started to enter into things.Your work sometimes makes me anxious, in a way, because I see something like

 So there’s an increasing speed of redundancy?

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the Palm Pilot, and it makes me worried that I can’t remember when I last put one down and never touched it ever again.  - I know. And you really never ever touched it again. That’s it, it’s just gone. There was an article in the paper just today: Waterstones bookstore has announced that they’re no longer going to be selling Kindles because there’s no market for them. Nobody is buying them. Isn’t that amazing?  Maybe because you don’t need two things – a Kindle and a big phone.  - And people still buy books. The book is far from disappearing. If anything, the book has become stronger and more special.  Well, again, it’s about seeing things in context. I do read things on my iPad, but I forget what I’ve got on it, because I can’t see the virtual books in context. When you look at a book as an object, it makes more sense to see it in relation to other books.  - Yes exactly.  With photographs, technological devices work quite well, because you’re used to flipping through an album of photographs, but a library of books is very hard to make virtual. Part of the problem with the Kindle is the screen, because how do you see your library in context? You don’t know how long or short a book is, or how big it is. And that’s one thing I was going to ask: when you draw these devices, you don’t represent what’s on the screen. Have you ever thought of representing something on the screen?  - I have thought about it, and I have tried it, but it just ends up looking ‘clever’ in an uninteresting way. The thing I found very interesting about drawing certain objects like the globe was that even though the globe only exists to have a map on it, when you draw it, you don’t have to

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have the map for people to realise that it’s a globe; it couldn’t possibly be anything else, even though it’s completely blank. And when I drew a book, I never drew a book with anything on the pages. The pages were always blank.  But for me, that seems to be important, because it suggests the absent user, to put it in a pretentious way. -  That’s it, of course.  In the Apple inch PowerBook G4 painting of  (see cat.), the keys are very important. They’re in different colours, and the screen is blank. So it’s very human-related. It’s more connected to the handling of something than to what is being displayed. -  But if you go back to my earliest work, like the box in Box That Never Closes of  (see fig.), I always saw my boxes as being very different from, say, Donald Judd’s boxes, which are, in my mind, a kind of idealised perfection, whereas my boxes had hinges and handles.  Yes, they suggested use. -  They were always about use, and so the implication of that absent viewer, the person acting on it, is there, right through everything I’ve ever done.  The objects represented in your work are also your tools. The work Stack of  (see cat. ) – a book, a cassette, and a briefcase – that’s your stuff. That’s your studio. -  It is. Even now, a lot of the things are my own possessions. Sometimes, in the old days, I used to call up friends and say, ‘Can I come over and draw your chair?’ because otherwise I was going to have to buy one. But that’s interesting, because the way I draw objects is very impersonal, yet the things are often very personal. The drawing of a shoe is my shoe.

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 But is there a moment where you realise there’s been a USB stick, for example, sitting on your desk for a while, and you suddenly glance across and think, ‘USB stick – this has become part of my life’? Is there a familiarity test, in a sense?  - Yes, and the thing that’s really extraordinary about it is that I have the things around me for quite a long time, and suddenly I think, ‘Oh my God, I should be drawing that!’ I had this big exhibition in China earlier this year, for which I did fifty paintings, and the exhibition was titled NOW *. I had decided to do an exhibition where every subject was as close to ‘now’ as I could get it. I spent the last two years preparing for that exhibition and I was touching on everything around me that seemed extremely current. So that’s how I ended up doing a painting of a robot vacuum cleaner and a smoke alarm. Once I was on this path of asking the question, ‘What are the new familiar things around us?’, I realised that nearly all of them have a technological edge, because technology has been introduced into virtually everything.  Right, but if you look at some cultural criticism, you’d imagine that we live in this accelerating world where everything’s moving really fast, and there’s all this stuff, and no one can move or think because they’re overwhelmed by everything. In fact, in terms of objects, there’s quite a lot of standardisation still. Like a smoke alarm: I recognise that smoke alarm. I’ve got one in New York.  - Yes, even if it’s not exactly the same.  It’s pretty much the same form. And what’s interesting is that the current anxieties about the digital age are always about excess of content rather than an excess of objects. With technological objects there has been a process of reduction and standardisation taking place. * NOW, Himalayas Museum, Shanghai ( February –  April, ),

-  I think Marshall McLuhan is relevant here. He touched on many important things at a time when nobody had the vaguest idea what he was talking about, and nearly everything that he predicted came true. In the early s he said we were entering the new age of information, and the possession and control of information would become the basis of wealth and power. We all understand that now. At the same time, Buckminster Fuller said that all real human development comes about as a result of trying to do the same thing with less – less materials, less effort, less time. The iPhone is a perfect example: it is a small object that replaces the need for many others. One small memory stick can take the place of hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper. While there are now many types of smart phones and hundreds of variations on memory sticks, they’ve also become standardised objects.  Right, but it’s interesting that the standardised aspects of these things are often the detail in your painting that makes the work readable. What you choose to highlight is always really interesting to me. Like the keyboard in the Apple computer, or the most fantastic one for me – the credit card (see cat. ). With so little information in that painting, it’s basically a Josef Albers. -  Yes, it’s totally abstract. It couldn’t be anything else but a credit card, though, could it?  Right, it’s instantly recognisable as a credit card, and so all of the generalisations for me about design and function and use are completely collapsed in that work. People talk about how Apple devices are so beautiful and so elegant, so minimal, but you look at the credit card and you can’t beat it. The magnetic strip and the white bit in the ‘frame’. -  Yes, it’s absolutely amazing, and when I decided to do the credit card, I looked at the front, just like everybody else does, and I thought, ‘What do I do? Put ten numbers on it? And put some ghastly design on it?’

Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan ( April –  June ).

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And then I turned it over, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s obvious.You want to describe a credit card, you show the back.’  Exactly. So there is this process when you’re working where you have to make these decisions. What I’ve always found so fascinating about your work is that I don’t ever really question the point of view, or the positioning of the object that’s depicted. I just accept it, for some reason.  - That’s what I want. That’s why I draw them all the same. In the new book of drawings, the weight of the line is the same in every single drawing, from the ones that I did in  to the ones I did in .  Right, but some things must be more difficult to draw than others.  - There are things that are very difficult for me to draw. I’ve never been able to draw a comb. I either have to make it too generalised, where I don’t draw all the teeth, or I have to draw every single damn one of them, and that just seems excessive. So there are some things where I’m just stumped as to how to do it, because I don’t want to give more information than is needed.  There are two laptops in the exhibition. One shows a face-on view, which is a very beautiful composition, and then there’s also a threequarter view, as it were.  - That’s right. One has the keyboard as the emphasis. They’re very different views of the same thing.  Are there other examples with different views?  - No, but a change has happened. In the beginning I drew everything from the same point of view, which was a three-quarter angle, slightly above the object.  Like an isometric projection.

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-  Yes.  That projection comes from modernist architecture. It’s a way to reveal volume, and to give as much information as possible. -  It’s the most three-dimensional image, because you’re essentially showing two sides of the object. But what’s happened is, in the last five or six years, I now often draw things absolutely frontally, and that’s the change that you’re picking up there.  It’s an enormous change, and that does seem to reflect a shift in representation beyond art, in the way things are presented to the world. The idea is no longer to show too much information about an object. -  It is very, very different. It changes the object.You see, in a way, when I draw the things at a three-quarter angle, I’m defying the surface of the canvas or the paper or whatever it is, because I’m emphasising threedimensionality. As soon as you turn an image into something that’s frontal, then the represented object is engaging much more with the surface of the painting.  Yes, it’s no longer floating in space, somehow. -  It’s not the same thing. It’s much more anchored.  Well, the work becomes more like a screen. Because when you’re on a screen and you want to see an object, it’s now presented first as a façade that you can then rotate or move around. -  I think, in the past, you would have started with the object at an angle.  Yes. If you look at old print adverts from the s, when a lot of information was given, you see things from an angle. It seems that in your early work, you were using a way of representing things that had been established in order to give the most information.

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 - That’s right.  But that’s changed.  - It’s partly because the range of information in many of the objects has been reduced. In a sense, objects used to be more complex; there was more variety in them. But maybe I am also affected by the fact that things are presented to me more frontally now than they were back then.  This does have implications for art, of course, because in the history of late modern painting, there was an interest in the surface or the picture plane, and something shifted in the work, maybe bringing things closer to those earlier interests.  - When I did the first drawings, I thought of what I was doing as something very conventional, but also, in modernist terms, kind of iconoclastic, which is to emphasise illusionism. I was trying to make the images as illusionistic as possible, and as un-flat as possible. By the time you get to the s, this is a less interesting iconoclasm than it was in the s. I didn’t feel that it carried that challenge that it once did.  What I think was always really challenging in your work is that you wanted to look more closely at the trajectory of modernity as being the trajectory of things in the world. Early twentieth-century industrialisation, as it starts to get influenced by Ford and Taylorism and the production line and certain efficiencies, had a kind of critical double, which was modernist theory. Modernity and modernism were looking at each other quite closely. The great early twentieth-century architects and designers, and even artists, were having a very close conversation about the trajectory of modernity, but then you get Surrealism, you get all these changes in art, and the relationship between modernity and modernism starts to grow further and further apart. But you said,

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‘I’m going to start to track the trajectory of things in the world.’ This is quite a difficult thing to do.You gave up a lot of the things that artists normally hide behind, like a certain sort of avant-garde attitude, or a certain sort of obscurantism that can be very useful to hide behind. But it’s also very clearly art and not design. It’s not like some of Richard Hamilton’s activities, who would actually design his own ‘better’ objects – for example, he made his own computer.You’re definitely operating within the language of representational art. These are paintings. They’re not Flexi-Jet prints on silicate or newly-designed, alternative objects. -  I’m not a designer, and I don’t make any of these things. I don’t design laptops and I don’t design chairs. Sometimes it’s fun to play at the edges of things, but it has never occurred to me that that’s where my interest is. I’m actually just an observer. The thing that I think is interesting about what I do is that I actually don’t invent anything. I just use what’s in front of me. I increasingly think that invention is the realm of design, and observation is the realm of art.  As artists, we sometimes get interviewed by people who don’t think about art very often. They ask things like, ‘Where was your inspiration for this work?’ They want to know where the art value is and where your visionary creativity comes from. But art is often about making decisions about what to look at and what to represent. There is no inspiration, it’s about choice. Art is a kind of dialectical process, because you obviously have to make a decision about what phone you might represent, because there are actually lots of phones around. But you have made a clear set of decisions. -  The key to drawing is what to draw – not what object, or whether to draw the human figure or whatever, but deciding on the aspect of what you’re looking at that is going to be acknowledged. Because there’s far too much information out there. There are so many options, so many

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possibilities. The way I draw isn’t the only way to draw these things.You could draw them completely differently. I do it the way I do it, and that’s what’s interesting. But this does not reside in the thing itself – it’s me that’s making the choices.  I remember when colour started to appear in your work, and it happened first on a very background level. These transitional works were monochromes with a drawing on them. And then the objects themselves started to be rendered in a different colour to the background. Then the colours started to go haywire. The drawings could still be clearly read, even though they were more and more incredible in terms of the colours. And now there has been a shift towards a frontal view that seems to introduce a certain stability and purity.  - It’s much calmer.  The work became quite crazy for a while, but it seems that it was necessary to do that, to really see how far you could push a representation of something.  - What I saw myself as doing was teasing all the conventions of imagemaking, by using every permutation that I could possibly think of that could be used in a two-dimensional image. Putting things in groups, placing things in front of each other, spreading things out horizontally, stacking things.  It does seem to reflect a specific time.You needed a cassette recorder, a phone, a fax machine. For a while there was an accumulation of objects in order to fulfil some basic communication tasks. Now there’s often only one thing. So there is a connection, I think, with the trajectory of technology in the work, and the need for new modes of representation. If you were to represent a hysterical pile of iPhones, it wouldn’t work. I mean, it could be done, maybe.You could have a bunch of points of

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view, floating, in all different colours, but it doesn’t make any sense within the logic of your work. -  The newest work depicts fragments of things. There are only two paintings in the exhibition like that. There’s a watch (see cat.), and a computer (see cat.). That’s my Piet Mondrian. We had Albers before, and now we have Mondrian.  It’s really fascinating because you don’t need much information to know that this work depicts a laptop. All we need is that little cut-out and the black edge of the screen. -  We need very, very little information, yet what I like about this work, is that I’m not editing out too much information. It’s exactly the same amount of information I would have given you if I’d drawn the whole thing, but I don’t need to draw the whole thing.  Is there anything that makes you nervous about doing this, in the sense that it seems to go against some of the principles in the work, by isolating a certain area of interest? -  I was very nervous at first, and rather resistant to it. As the new works unfolded and I began to consider the whole object to be depicted, I realised that it might not be the only way of looking. This new way of representing objects through details is an entirely credible way of looking at what I do, and it informs something fundamental in my work, which is my sense of being modern in the world, or being in the modern world, which I’ve had since I was a child. It’s not only connected with modern art and modern design and modern architecture and all those things, but also to do with modern processes. Some of my early boxes were made out of Formica. Formica is a modern material. I made things using drafting tape, which was absolutely essential to my work. This was also a modern material – it was only invented in the s. I used slide

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projectors when slide projectors were the latest thing. Now I use a digital projector, and I use inkjet printing.  But they’re not convoluted processes.  - I treat the processes the same as I do the objects.  Right, exactly.  - It’s like my use of the computer, on which I’m totally dependent. It’s such a stupid use, it’s such a limited function. I use a tiny aspect of a single programme to do % of what I do, but it’s enough.

 Right, but I still think it’s really amazing, partly because … -  I didn’t know what it had touched on.  Exactly. Things hadn’t changed enough yet to reveal what was interesting about that painting. I always think that it’s the precursor of a lot of things, that portable TV painting. It’s like, ‘Something’s coming, but technological content hasn’t really caught up with me yet.’ -  All these changing technologies are not just in the objects but in the processes of my own activity as an artist.

 When I talk to people who are, say, twenty years younger than me, their obsession is with the screen and the information inside the device. So there’s a lot of work being made now about the space of the screen, and the digital information that’s on the screen, and the feeling of touching and waking up the screen, and that feeling of your finger moving around. But what’s odd about your works is that they’re not reliant on that, right? They’re not reliant on content.  - No.  It’s really fascinating: there are all these artists around now, they’re playing with technology and flow and touch and all this stuff about the affective screen, and haptic feelings and so on, and then you realise that you’ve been drawing all of these things for thirty-five years. I remember that portable TV painting, Untitled (television) from  (see cat. ), and I remember thinking, ‘There’s something in there that’s really important.’ Maybe it’s the representation of a screen waiting for content.  - That painting has only ever been shown once, at the Whitechapel Gallery in . It’s been in a crate ever since.

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O B J E C TS I N TRANSI TIO N Alice Rawsthorn

         ironies of contemporary design is the plethora of pre-digital objects that are already obsolete, or soon may be, that are still visible on our phone and computer screens. To make a call on most smart phones, you press an old-fashioned telephone handset, email is usually identified by a postage stamp or paper envelope, the calculator by a vintage pocket calculator and digital books by the printed pages of a traditional book, which is, at least, a little less naff than the hideous wooden bookcase that symbolised Apple’s iBooks function not so long ago. Enabling the .% of us without doctorates in advanced computer programming to instruct something not much bigger than a cigarette packet to undertake the thousands of tasks of which a smart phone is capable is a Herculean design challenge. When those multifunctional phones were first introduced, it seemed sensible to help their baffled users to learn how to operate them by providing visual clues in the form of familiar objects or activities that fulfilled similar functions in ‘real’ life, just as it did with early computers. But doesn’t it seem odd that we should still be taking cues from the very things that the applications on those devices are threatening with extinction? Objects have come and gone from daily life throughout history, after being supplanted by things that were – or seemed to be – superior in terms of their size, power, speed, durability, sustainability or whatever else has appeared desirable in design’s equivalent of the Darwinian process of natural selection. But there have been few eras in which so much new stuff has appeared and so many old things have disappeared at such frenzied speed as this one. Important though it is to reflect on

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what design innovations, like driverless cars and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, will mean to us in the future, it is also worth considering which once ubiquitous objects we are likely to lose, and how their demise will affect us. Michael Craig-Martin has explored such issues in his work for nearly four decades by depicting the objects that have become familiar to him at different times. He began in  by making the first black tape wall drawings in which images of seemingly unrelated items were laid one on top of the other. One drawing combined a sandal, sardine tin and hammer; and another a book, fork, safety pin, pair of shoes and pistol. By the early s, Craig-Martin was focusing on a smaller selection of less disparate objects, mostly ones he used in his work as an artist and teacher, like the book, cassette tape, television set, briefcase and clipboard in Stack () (see cat. ). The mix of objects was fairly similar in a  painting Eye of the Storm (see cat. ), but a year later, the first digital devices, a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA), appeared in Biding Time (magenta) (see cat. ). Tellingly, both were branded products, Sony Ericsson and Palm Pilot respectively, rather than generic examples of their types. Subsequent paintings have portrayed the smart phones that have replaced Craig-Martin’s original mobile, and the increasingly sophisticated laptops he has acquired over the years, as well as a robotic floor cleaner (see cat. ), Microsoft Xbox game controller (see cat.) and memory stick (see cat. ). Not only has Craig-Martin produced an impromptu taxonomy of the products we encounter on a daily basis, he has documented the speed with which newfangled gizmos, like PDAs and mobiles, have appeared in our lives only to disappear after being superseded by technologically superior devices, in their cases by smart phones. Such an exercise would be fascinating at any time, but is especially so now. The last time that the contents of daily life changed on a similar

scale was at the turn of the th and th centuries when the introduction of electricity to millions of homes fuelled the development of cleaner, more efficient electrical products, which dispensed with the need for antiquated contraptions like gas lighting. So thrilling did electricity seem back then that the Parisian artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay took to meeting their friends in places where newly installed electric street lighting was due to be switched on for the first time, and cheering loudly at the glow of the bulbs. The catalyst for the current changeover of objects is the transistor, the tiny device that conducts and amplifies power in computers and other digital products. Scientists have proved so successful in their efforts to make them ever smaller and more potent since their invention in the late s that several million transistors can now be packed on to a microchip that would originally have contained three or four. As a result, our phones and computers have become progressively smaller, lighter and faster with such cavernous memories that they fulfil the functions of hundreds of products: from printed books, newspapers, magazines, diaries and maps, to telephones, cameras, calculators, watches, sound systems, television sets, compact discs, cassette tapes, PDAs and a multiplicity of other things that may soon be surplus to requirements. Any object whose function can be executed more efficiently by a digital application now faces the threat of extinction. Take the door key. Exquisitely crafted though keys were for centuries, and despite their rich symbolism – the word ‘key’ is a synonym for importance – how can a jagged scrap of metal hope to compete against an app that can open and close the doors of your home even when you are not there? Not least because the app is also safer. Anyone can let themselves into a building or drive off in a car if they find the key, but you can prevent them from doing so by protecting an app with a security code. Like so many possible victims of the digital cull, keys are what could be called ‘promissory objects’. Like cash and postage stamps, their value lies not in themselves

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but in what they promise to give us, making them superfluous as soon as something else emerges that is capable of delivering it more efficiently. That fate is already befalling the plastic key cards that unlock the doors of hotel rooms using mechanisms like the one in Craig-Martin’s Untitled (hotel door handle)  (see cat. ). Key cards seem doomed to be shortlived as interim design solutions. Yet even things that are equally effective as their digital equivalents are vulnerable. The pocket calculator is an example. Odd though it seems now, when pocket-sized calculators were introduced in the s, they seemed dazzlingly technocratic with a seductive whiff of the theninscrutable world of computing. So alluring were they to one Soviet diplomat that he secretly bought a Sinclair Executive calculator on an official visit to the West in the thick of the Cold War, only for it to explode in his shirt pocket. His colleagues suspected foul play by Western agents, but the Executive’s dodgy batteries were to blame. Nearly a decade later, Kraftwerk (see fig. ) dedicated a track on its  album Computer World to the ‘Pocket Calculator’ with the lyrics: “I am adding and subtracting / I’m controlling and composing / By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.” A calculating application on a phone is no faster or more accurate than a traditional calculator, but the phone does umpteen other things too, thereby trumping the calculator in terms of convenience and environmental sensitivity. Why risk squandering resources on manufacturing a gadget that is no longer necessary, and why bother carrying it around with you? Like the cassette tape depicted by Craig-Martin in ’s Cassette (see cat. ) and the PDA in ’s Palm “Tungsten” T-Handheld (see cat. ), the pocket calculator is now redundant. Can other imperilled objects avoid the same fate? Only if there are special reasons to reprieve them. Take cameras, like the one in CraigMartin’s  painting Untitled (Self Portrait no.6) (see cat.). Most cameras are doomed, specifically those whose photos are of similar quality to phone snaps. But there are enough people who are willing to invest in

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sophisticated photographic equipment to justify the continued production of high quality cameras and to encourage their manufacturers to sustain their investment in the research and development required for them to evolve in the future. As a result, high quality cameras have retained their functional edge over their app equivalents, but it is difficult to imagine pocket calculators, activity trackers or even keys, whether metal or plastic, doing the same. Another possibility is for a product to be so beguiling in terms of how it looks or feels, and the associations it evokes, that it remains irresistible in its traditional form. Beautiful books made from exquisite paper with visually compelling covers and typography fall into this category. They may have lost the struggle for the ‘survival of the fittest’ against digital books – which are clearly superior in terms of convenience, choice, connectivity and environmental sensitivity – but they could still win another Darwinian battle, the one described in The Descent of Man (). In that book, Darwin analysed why some animals have physical features that have no discernible practical purpose and appear to be purely aesthetic, a phenomenon seemingly disproving his earlier theory of natural selection. Yet such features do have designated functions, or so he explained, typically to arouse the desire of prospective mates and thereby persuading them to breed, as the peacock’s magnificent tail and the richly coloured plumage of male pheasants are intended to do. A similar principle can be applied to otherwise obsolete objects. If they are desirable enough, they might survive, though not necessarily indefinitely. Conscious though I am of the functional shortcomings of printed books, I feel fond of them, just as I do of finely crafted wristwatches, fuelled by my memories of growing up with them. So does Craig-Martin, who painted his wristwatch in both  and  (see cat. ). Anyone in their teens or twenties would see such objects very differently, unencumbered by nostalgia, which is why fewer people will perceive them as being engaging over time.

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There is also a risk that surviving in the fetishised form of beautifully fabricated objects made in expensive limited editions, as vinyl records have done, may be a pyrrhic victory. Enticing though they can be, how can such elitist products recapture the cultural potency that was so important an element of their predecessors’ emotional appeal? Just as it is impossible to imagine a contemporary vinyl album cover articulating the spirit of a generation of young women as adroitly as Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of an icily androgynous Patti Smith did on ’s Horses, how can the jacket of a special edition book represent the hopes and fears of a section of society as eloquently as Penguin’s paperbacks when Jan Tschichold was head of design there in the late s, and Germano Facetti in the s? It cannot. The only foolproof way for an endangered object to survive is for it to be designed so ingeniously that it offers us something its digital challenger cannot match. An example is a traditional book whose physical qualities enhance not only the reader’s emotional attachment to it as an object, but also his or her understanding of its contents. The Dutch designer Irma Boom does this brilliantly, often using the tactile qualities of unusual papers and cutting techniques to guide us deftly through the text, or to tantalise us. Both strategies are deployed with aplomb in Weaving as Metaphor, the  book she produced on the work of the US textile designer Sheila Hicks (see fig.). Boom covered it in uncoated, roughly textured white paper, which ages when handled, acquiring a patina that reminds its owner of the pleasure of reading and re-reading it over the years. She also created jaggedy page edges by having them hacked with a circular saw. Another Dutch designer, Joost Grootens, has achieved a similar feat in reinventing the traditional printed atlas and dictionary by devising new ways of organising and depicting information in the form of maps, charts, graphs and other visualisation techniques that are best deciphered in print, not pixels (see fig. ). But Boom’s and Grootens’s books are rare exceptions. Unless other vulnerable objects can produce equally compelling reasons to justify their survival, they will perish, just like the once thrilling, now redundant early

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digital gizmos in Craig-Martin’s paintings and drawings. As for the analogue products that linger on in the ghostly form of the operating symbols on our phone and computer screens, how long will it be before the same user interface designers who devised them realise that fewer and fewer of the people who are clicking on those motifs can remember ever having used what they represent?

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