Michael Craig-Martin had a chat with the curator of a Tate St Ives exhibition of abstract painting today for our MA Arts guest lecture. He came across as likeable often ending answers to questions by saying something like 'that's just the way I am'.
By coincidence I was introduced to his piece An Oak Tree in my first lectures at art college, probably in an attempt to broaden minds or something or something. Anyway, further than my knowledge of that work and his subsequent big object drawing things, I didn't really know what, why or how he did what he did.
One Michael Craig-Martin work that I would sometimes encounter, depending on my route to work, was his mural for the Woolwich DLR station. The mobile phone in the mural would catch my attention. I would think about how the model of phone pre-dated the station, opened in 2009, by quite a few years.
Here is the mural from the station. The phone is tucked away a bit at the back near the pink football.
Here is the phone as you would see it coming up the stairs.
I knew the DLR part of the station had opened in 2009 because I remembered it opening; I remembered my friend travelling on the the extension to see what it was like. Exciting friend. ANYWAY This is a wrong phone! A displacement phone!
It was in fact as revealed in the talk I attended not a result of some sort of conspiratorial element but as the result of Michael Craig-Martin love of templates. He reuses all his templates for objects from the moment they were created onwards, the templates remain the same. He said his templates once created become timeless in there re-usage but to me in light of my relationship with the mural in Woolwich they appear more like time travellers.
