Is this my/your/our puzzled regard of the context and/or content of a half full half mPT oak tree which I see before me? Or is it yet a dagger? 'Unsheathe your dagger definitions!' (JJ)

 
Shakespeare : Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There's no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,

Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.

With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

                                    [a bell rings]

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Michael Craig-Martin
An Oak Tree 1973

click image to enlarge

Summary (from Tate website)

An Oak Tree consists of an ordinary glass of water placed on a small glass shelf of the type normally found in a bathroom, which is attached to the wall above head height. Craig-Martin composed a series of questions and answers to accompany the objects. In these, the artist claims that the glass of water has been transformed into an oak tree. When An Oak Tree was first exhibited, in 1974 at Rowan Gallery, London, the text was presented printed on a leaflet. It was subsequently attached to the wall below and to the left of the shelf and glass. Craig-Martin’s text deliberately asserts the impossible. The questions probe the obvious impossibility of the artist’s assertion with such apparently valid complaints as: ‘haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?’ and ‘but the oak tree only exists in the mind’. The answers maintain conviction while conceding that ‘the actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water ... Just as it is imperceptible, it is also inconceivable’. An Oak Tree is based on the concept of transubstantiation, the notion central to the Catholic faith in which it is believed that bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ while retaining their appearances of bread and wine. The ability to believe that an object is something other than its physical appearance indicates requires a transformative vision. This type of seeing (and knowing) is at the heart ofconceptual thinking processes, by which intellectual and emotional values are conferred on images and objects. An Oak Tree uses religious faith as a metaphor for this belief system which, for Craig-Martin, is central to art. He has explained: 

I considered that in An Oak Tree I had deconstructed the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element, belief that is the confident faith of the artist in his capacity to speak and the willing faith of the viewer in accepting what he has to say. In other words belief underlies our whole experience of art: it accounts for why some people are artists and others are not, why some people dismiss works of art others highly praise, and why something we know to be great does not always move us. 

(Quoted in Michael Craig-Martin: Landscapes, [p.20].) 

Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, raised in the United States and has been living and working in England since 1966. His early work of the late 1960s was influenced by such American Minimalistsculptors as Robert Morris (born 1931), to whose work he applied his own brand of Conceptual thinking. His first exhibited works were series of hinged boxes that appeared functional but were impossible to use. Apparently impossible balancing was often used to create visual puns. In Six Foot Balance with Four Pounds of Paper 1970 (Tate T07975), the image of a four-pound weight printed onto four pounds of paper hung in equilibrium with the weight itself, suggesting an equality of some kind between image and object. In the early 1970s, in a series of works utilising mirrors, Craig-Martin explored relationships between physical and psychological perception. In Faces1971, installed at the Tate Gallery as part of 7 Exhibitions in 1972, viewers entering booths, which each contained a mirror, were likely to encounter the face of another visitor in another booth where they expected to find their own. Conviction 1973 (Tate T01764) consists of a series of eight small mirrors attached to the wall above eight statements, written directly on the wall. The phrases ‘I recognise myself’, ‘I know who I am’, ‘I understand why I am as I am’ and ‘I accept myself’ alternate with question marks undermining the certainty of the statements. Craig-Martin intends these to set off processes of questioning in the viewer as he alternately looks at his reflection and reads the words and question marks. The two separate activities of seeing - which relies simply on ocular vision - and reading - which depends on an underlying structure - are oppositional forces in this work. With An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin introduces a third element, that of belief or faith.

An Oak Tree was a watershed in the artist’s work. He has explained: ‘everything before that was trying to take the whole structure of the thing apart’ and ‘everything that comes after the Oak Treeshould be seen as me trying to put the pieces together again’. (Quoted in Flash Art, no.152, May-June 1990, p.132.). In his subsequent works, such as Reading with Globe 1980 (Tate T03102), Craig-Martin established a language of drawn objects and planes of colour relating to intellectual processes and physical experience. Following the logic of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made, which was established in 1917 by titling a urinal 
Fountain (remade 1964, TateT07573), Craig-Martin sees everyday objects as models for works of art. He has stated: ‘I try to get rid of as much meaning as I can. People’s need to find meanings, to create associations, renders this impossible. Meaning is both persistent and unstable.’ (Quoted in Michael Craig-Martin: A Retrospective 1968-1989, p.73.)

Further reading:

Michael Craig-Martin: Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 2001, [pp.19-20]

Michael Craig-Martin: A Retrospective 1968-1989, exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1989, reproduced (colour) pl.18

Michael Craig-Martin: Selected Works 1966-1975, exhibition catalogue, Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol 1976, [pp.18 and 27-31], reproduced [p.30]

Elizabeth Manchester

December 2002

Shake by Shake : annotated image by Shakespeare clipped from t0day's Business pages of The Age.

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