Martin Creed - When Nothing Matters?

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

Let There Be Coloured Light - Dan Flavin

It was more than a coincidence that a nation that gave us Donald Judd could also produce the artist Dan Flavin.  In fact, the two met in 1962 at a gathering in a Brooklyn apartment organised to discuss the possibility of a cooperative artist-run gallery.  Their friendship developed and the two became known as “Flavin and Judd” for a while, indeed Judd named his son Flavin Starbuck Judd.

Untitled 1970

Many of Flavin’s installations were site-specific, such as the one above.  In the December 1965 issue of Artforum, Flavin wrote “I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctions in the room’s composition.”

In the final episode of his 1996 series “American Visions”, critic Robert Hughes referred to the age of anxiety in modern America, fed by the cold war and the general disillusionment with government following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.  He visited the Judd ‘shrine’ in Marfa, Texas to illustrate his point, but he could equally have visited a Flavin installation for while the play of coloured light could be construed as beautiful, there is an anxiousness with his vast empty scenes.

Untitled (for Ksenija) 1994

Flavin was born in New York in 1933.  He became a Catholic altar boy and trained to be a priest.  He recalled being ''curiously fond of the solemn high funeral Mass, which was so consummately rich in candlelight, music, chant, vestments, processions and incense.''  This, no doubt, became a major influence on his work as an artist.  He is described as a minimalist sculptor and is considered to be the first artist to employ electric light in a sustained way.

Installation at Menil’s Richmond Hall 1996

An article in the New York Times describes Flavin’s art as “brazenly radical and very much in the vein of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades”, but apart from the use of manufactured materials, I don’t see any correlation at all.  But then the article goes on to describe Flavin’s installations as having an “ecstatic beauty that was at once painterly and architectural”.

Flavin became adept at combining the intense lines of colour of the light tube with their softer diffuse glow and the geometric arrangements of the tubes.  In 1971, he illuminated the entire rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, but he was just as successful illuminating a corner as below.

It was very daring of Flavin to move sculpture away from the figurative to the impersonal use of industrial materials.  In 1989, he extended his range by illuminating the exterior of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden, Germany.  Works such as these have been described as symphonic.  I often wonder if he had an influence on artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Kimsooja who I covered in earlier blogs.

Flavin arrived at the idea of using fluorescent tubes after several years of painting and drawing in the abstract expressionistic manner.  These were followed by a brief period in the late 1950's and early 60's of making boxy wall reliefs in strong monochromatic colours, to which he attached coloured light bulbs and fluorescent tubes.

According to the PBS program The Art Assignment, minimalist sculptors decided to abandon the pedestal to dismantle the separation between the viewer and the art.  Judd argued these works were neither painting nor sculpture but specific objects occupying space that didn’t necessarily reference anything.   And it’s worth noting that the artists themselves hated the term minimalism.

Work such as Flavin’s contains no secret, no hidden meaning, there is nothing to interpret.  It is what it is, and thus it was a complete break with the past where meaning may lie somewhere inside the object waiting to be unlocked.  Instead, the meaning lies in the viewer’s interaction with it, the context and the strong feelings it can evoke for presence, absence, space and light.  It is argued in the PBS program that in a world filled with complexity and information and “lots and lots of stuff”, minimalist art can be a balm.  I’m not about to argue.

Flavin died in 1996 from complications arising from diabetes.  

It’s now hibernation time for me, I’ll be back around mid January.

References;

The New York Times

PBS: The Art Assignment

Art Forum