What should we find in the toolbox of any successful artist? Talent? (maybe). Networking skills? (you bet). Hard work and dedication? (of course). A gregarious nature? (it helps). And nerve? (well in the case of British artist Martin Creed – absolutely.)
There’s no point getting worked up about the stuff that pours out of Creed’s studio, he has been successful for many years and has work in collections that include the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A composer and performer as well as an artist, Creed who was born in 1968 achieved worldwide notoriety in 2001 when he won the Turner Prize with an installation of a light going on and off in a room. The jury praised the work saying, they "admired the audacity in presenting a single work in the exhibition and noted its strength, rigour, wit and sensitivity to the site".
Creed (on the right) with his first band Owada (Artimage)
He has been a member of bands producing one note compositions and songs featuring minimalist repetitive lyrics such as “Nothing” and “Fuck Off”. Creed comes from a musical background – his parents played the cello and piano.
In his 1999 BBC series “This Is Modern Art”, artist Matthew Collings argues that artists who emerged in the 1990’s (such as Creed) were accepting of the nothingness in contemporary art because their sensibilities had been formed at art school by 1980’s blankness, they found normal the ‘icy white nothingness that art had become.’
Collings takes Creed to task over the work “Screwed Up Sheet of A4 Paper”. Creed said he wanted to make something from a piece of paper and a sphere seemed the most obvious shape. He likes that it seems to disappear when you “put it in the world. It looks like a reasonably well made sphere”. Collings laughs, “No it’s not, it’s just a screwed up piece of paper”. He asks what’s the concept, how does he make a screwed up piece of paper into a sphere and then a work of art? Creed responds “I don’t call it a work of art, it’s a sphere – a ball of paper”. Is Creed being disingenuous?
Creed gives all his work numbers as titles. He doesn’t want to distinguish between any of them. He says he doesn’t have any philosophical basis to make decisions about a work of art or life, or any basis at all to make decisions. Deciding on what coloured shirt to buy is a challenge. He starts from nothing.
Work No 701 (2007)
Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian had her work cut out trying to discover what makes Creed ‘tick’ as an artist. He claims to make no distinction between producing his work and life, such as buying a pair of trousers. “It’s all about trying to live, you know”. He finds everything in the world profound and claims not to know what art is. “It's a magic thing because it's to do with feelings people have when they see something. If the work is successful, it's because of some magic quality it has." A magic quality the artist has put into it? Asks Higgins. "It's not in the work," he says. "People use the work to help them make something in themselves. So the work is a catalyst."
Knowing that Creed can be brought to tears by Beethoven, she asks him if a pair of trousers can make him cry. "No," he concedes. "But I don't sit listening to a pair of trousers for 40 minutes." Higgins was getting nowhere.
Work No. 200 (2007)
In 2014, Creed held a massive retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery titled “What’s The Point Of It?” This included a row of nails banged into a wall, a huge video of a penis slowly becoming erect before deflating again (for the over 18s), and if you think that’s tasteless, I’ll spare you the details of 2 other videos. There’s a Ford Focus which suddenly comes alive with doors, bonnet, and tailgate opening, radio playing, engine running – getting the power windows to operate was a work in progress. Critics argue that Creed treads a very fine line between the mindfully simple and simple minded.
Work No. 1686 (2013)
In reviewing the exhibition, the Guardian’s Tim Adams states “you can't help feeling you might need quite a low bar for knowingness, a spotless mind for innocence, a Buddhist master's understanding of joy, to appreciate it fully.” Thus with his difficulty in making judgements, on deciding whether one thing is more important than another, Creed simply gives that ‘thing’ a number and adds it to his collection.
Perhaps a century on from Duchamp, nothing has changed.
References;
“This Is Modern Art”, BBC Channel 4 (1999)
The Guardian