POP GOES THE EASEL

MICHAEL Craig-Martin is Dublin-born, with Irish blood on both sides, but the greater part of his (very) active career has been spent in Britain, and it is with British art that he is usually identified. Yet he speaks with a muted American accent and it was in the US that he received his art training. Otherwise his style is entirely "international" and his speech is fluent and relaxed. When he came to Britain in the 1960s, it seems to have been with no particular conviction that he would stay there.

"My parents went to London sometime in the 1930s, and at the end of the war my father went to America. Because he had been dealing in food, he became involved in the UN and the start of the World Bank. They put the "head office in Washington, and that is why I grew up there I lived there from the time I was three.

"All my art education was in the US. I grew up very much as an American, but every three years my father was given leave. When he retired, they went to Ireland - that was 25 years ago. My mother died last year, and my father is in a nursing home in Dublin. I have a sister.

"At first I went to a university in New York - Fordham. I had thought of going to a good art school, but I didn't know anything about them then. I was very unhappy at university, so I moved to Yale and the art school there. I didn't know at the time that I had gone to the best art school in the US, and at the best period.

"The people who taught me there included Jack Tworkov, Al Held, Alex Katz. We had visiting teachers too Jim Dine, Frank Stella. The people who studied with me included Brice Marden, Serra, Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky - a very talented generation, and all people who were serious about art. My immediate impression was that everyone there was completely committed, completely serious about what they did.

"When I finished my MA degree, in 1960, I was offered a teaching job in England. At that time I was married, with a small child mouths to feed! We came to London with the idea of staying there a year, or maybe two, and essentially I have never left."

He recalls the London art climate of that time, the mid-1960s: "It was still very much the age of British Pop, but I considered that all those people were very much of another, older, generation from my own. The people I identified with more were Gilbert and George, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long. I was friendly with all of them - I have been friendly with Barry Flanagan for many years now.

He had started as a painter, and then started making constructions. From there he moved gradually into conceptualism and was included in the exhibition of British conceptual art at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. The following year he exhibited the famous Oak Tree, which featured a glass of water on a shelf (seen at Oliver Dowling's Gallery in Dublin, among many venues); he spoke then of the process of "transformation" involved, and it became a theme of contention at the time. Certainly it was a milestone in his career.

"After that I started to re-examine the whole idea of representation. I reduced everything to the point where it was unnecessary for me to involve myself in the actual making of anything in creating a work of art. But having done that, I felt that the most interesting thing was to examine the whole process of what makes something. So I started making images for the first time. Before, I had used simple objects; now I came to make images of simple objects.

That has gone through various transformations, and now I am making paintings."

He shows me a catalogue of his recent works - simple, banal objects ("unhierarchical" is the word he uses) isolated in virtually abstract space, sharply linear though in warm colour, and very like the prints he has shown recently in Dublin. A certain kinship with 1960s Pop seems to me to emerge from them, but he discounts this and points out that his aims are very different. He likes the idea of a kind of emotional neutrality in art - in this, he does not deny the legacy of Andy Warhol - and points out that while these objects are universal and everyday, they mean little in themselves and yet can summon up all sorts of different associations for different people, and in different contexts.

In his studio - which is in Kentish Town hangs a kind of minimal abstract work which, he says, goes back years and bears little relation to what he has done since. On another wall opposite hangs an example in tubular glass of the "wall writing" for which he is probably best known; Craig-Martin tries to switch it on, but no current comes and he abandons it with a shrug and a smile. If he goes on talking much more, he remarks whimsically, he might talk his whole Dublin lecture away.

He is conscious, he says, of always being out of step with current developments, though he has followed them very closely: "When I did certain things, there wasn't much interest at the time, but there is much more interest in them now." But he feels a certain closeness to the work of contemporaries such as Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow - both of them sculptors, not painters.

ABOUT his teaching career, a role in which he is now very prominent: I came to England when I was a teacher, and I have taught ever since - except that in the late 1980s I stopped for a few years. I went back to Goldsmiths (College) where I am now a professor. I like teaching and I think it is important for an artist. From the start, I was intrigued by its possibilities. As one of the 1960s generation, I questioned everything `what is the work of art?' and so on. The question of `What is teaching?' became just as relevant. As the nature of art changed, clearly the nature of teaching much change also.

"I felt that my own education had been very good and very useful. It was a different kind of teaching in England, so I started to figure out what was needed.

In the 1970s the nature of the work we were doing, and the nature of the period, meant that most of us thought we would never make any money. So a lot of people spent a long time in art schools. The generation before us had not done much teaching, but my own spent a lot of time doing it and I think that has had a real impact.

"Much of my teaching has been at Goldsmiths. I am one of the people who helped to develop the teaching and ethos of the college, and it has tended to be highly effective. And though what we are teaching now is like what we were doing 25 years ago, I still think it is the most radical college in its approach. The young artists I am associated with are all Goldsmith graduates." He emphasises the lack of distinction made between first-year students and third-year ones - all get much the same treatment and attention, he says and the interaction of many disciplines and media, including photography; if students want to change from one medium to another, nobody tries to prevent them.

Though Michael Craig-Martin is Irish by birth and ancestry, and is well known in Dublin art circles both as an artist and a teacher (he was included in the 1980 Rosc exhibition), strangely enough he has never had a major exhibition in Ireland. The lecture he has to give excites him in advance: "I am trying to think out a way of doing it which is different from anything I have done before. I am certainly not going to read a lecture! I hope to show a lot of colour slides and do something like what we are doing now - to talk about the roots of it all, and how it happened."