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He taught the YBAs but abhors the idea of art as self-expression. Michael Craig-Martin talks to Stuart Jeffries about bucket design, his new show – and being jealous of Damien Hirst One evening, Michael Craig-Martin was driving along, listening to an absorbing discussion of contemporary art on Radio 4. “The guy who was talking was making some excellent points, but there were a few things I disagreed with. It only occurred to me after a long, long time that the voice on the radio was mine. I had to pull over because my heart was pounding.” What kind of person, you’ll be asking, doesn’t recognise their own voice? The kind of person who was born in Dublin, did toddler time in London, but spent most of his formative years in Washington DC, where he acquired a US twang. This still endures despite the fact he returned here in 1966 and became so synonymous with revolutionising the art scene that he’s known as the godfather of the Young British Artists. “The weird thing is I don’t even think I have an American accent.” It’s a great story and almost a metaphor for Craig-Martin’s vision of art. When he started drawing as a teenager in Washington, what struck him was how an image took on a life of its own, distant from the idea its creator had in their head – just as Craig-Martin’s radio voice became an alien phenomenon coming at him over the airwaves. “People call me a conceptual artist, as if the idea was all, but actually what interests me is what happens when the idea becomes a thing. Ideas are by their nature generalisations, something that can be applied to lots of things. But making art is about making particulars, and that particular something can be the generator of a generalisation.” Why do you care about this stuff? “When I was 12, I thought I had stumbled on a gold mine, but nobody around me seemed to care about it.” What little Michael had stumbled across, looking at reproductions of modern art, was a new vision introduced by Marcel Duchamp (who put a urinal in a gallery) and elaborated on by later artists. “Radical art – and I’ve always thought of myself as radical – is always at the frontiers, always speculative, always too radical to be really understood initially. It changes your frame of reference. That’s what Duchamp did.” It’s also what Craig-Martin’s most celebrated work of art did and does. An Oak Tree , from 1973, consists of a glass of water on a shelf in an otherwise empty gallery. “I was trying to work out what was the essence of a work of art. I thought it had to do with suspension of disbelief. You get it in theatre – why not in art?” When An Oak Tree was bought by the National Gallery of Australia in 1977, customs officials initially (and wonderfully) barred it from entry because it was “vegetation”. A rare example of life imitating conceptual art. But, I suggest, there is another vision of art. Not one that is speculative, but one that is reassuring. Isn’t it reassuring to capture the human spirit on paper, to make works that are beautiful? “None of that interested me. As I came across modern art, I knew the only thing to be was an artist. To do that, the only thing to do was drawing. So I took life-drawing classes. It was mostly middle-aged women and me.” What did you get from them? “Irritation. The presumption that life drawing underlies everything in art is fundamentally conservative.” A man with no style A retrospective of Craig-Martin’s drawings opens today at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. Visitors expecting something akin to Watteau’s immensely touching drawings – which are on display nearby at the Royal Academy, and show an artist seizing in chalk the essence of his human subjects while also expressing his own personality – will be confounded. There’s scarcely a human in Craig-Martin’s show, and every image is intended to obliterate rather than express the artist’s personality. “I’ve always wanted to make drawings that were absolutely style-less,” says Craig-Martin. After graduating with an MA in fine art from Yale, Craig-Martin began to draw mass-produced objects: sandals, sardine cans, milk bottles. “I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.” He gave up pencils and used crepe masking tape to produce ostensibly style-less drawings of them. Why? “I wanted to remove my hand from the process of drawing. I drew them without personal inflection.” But isn’t art about expression? “That’s not what interested me. I was interested in how form followed function. Take a bucket: it can’t be twice the size it is because if you filled it up, it would be too heavy to carry. The handle is in a certain place because if it was bigger, the side would hit your leg.” Increasingly, though, the form of manufactured objects does not follow their function. “Think of a mobile phone. You used to have a receiver with a defined earpiece and mouthpiece. Now you just have a box. Today everything looks like everything else. A phone looks like a computer looks like a camera.” There’s a risk, then, that this retrospective will look like a graveyard of once-ubiquitous objects. “True. You think objects are for ever, but mass-produced objects only came in with the industrial revolution and maybe won’t exist for much longer. The irony is that much of what I set out to draw, everyday objects, are curios. Milk bottles, who uses them? So the images become something other than I intended.” What was the intention? “I