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Martin Creed's Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off helped him to win the Turner Prize in 2001; it also led many journalists to place him in the vanguard of a new generation of "neo-conceptual" artists. Creed has openly doubted the validity of this comparison, pointing out the conceptual component in all art. Yet despite his protestations, critics might be forgiven for comparing Creed to late-1960s artists who tried to make viewers think about the ideological and institutional underpinnings of art rather than its status as so many objects. It was a conceptualist, Douglas Huebler, who justified his occasionally invisible artworks with the announcement, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more" (S. Siegelaub, January 5-31, 1969, New York, 1969).
Creed makes slight, often mundane works and stages seemingly inauspicious interventions in gallery spaces. Polyvalent titles and the deft use of conceptual ambiguity are paired with a light humor and unique understanding of the poetry of everyday objects, demonstrated by his 1995 multiple Work No. 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball--that many art world denizens inadvertently threw away--and Work No. 79, Some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall.
Creed plumbs language for truisms, and has used neon to turn such phrases into veritable Zen koans. Famously, Work No. 225 Everything is Going to be Alright, was emblazoned on buildings in several cities. While it might have come across as naive or crassly ironic, Creed's reassuring lullaby paradoxically put the viewer in control. In order to make sense of his statement, we were forced to confront our own credulity and skepticism along with the faint ridiculousness of our almost innate desire to believe him.
In Work No. 275, Small Things, Creed's defiantly huge neon letters turn viewers into Lilliputians. As Dan Flavin did in his all-white monuments, Creed uses uncolored neon and relatively simple means to commandeer a large space. In comparison with Flavin's formal interventions, or Joseph Kosuth's tautological works (such as Five Words in Blue Neon, 1965), Creed's enormous installation seems at first to be a deceptively simple exercise in irony. But his entire body of work is an exegesis on the world of meaning in what he calls "small things," including those exhibited in his aptly titled 2006 exhibition "I Like Things," at Milan's Palazzo dell'Arengario.
Creed has said that his art is "50 percent about what I make and 50 percent about what other people make of it" (M. E. Vetrocq, "Artful Dodger" Art in America, September 2006, p. 149). For no work is this observation more true than his celebrated 1998 Work No. 200, Half the Air in a Given Space. Like Andy Warhol's famous helium-filled Silver Clouds, Creed uses balloons to create an interactive installation and lets viewers complete the work by intermingling with them. The work begins with a mathematical instruction: calculate the volume of a space and blow up white 12 inch balloons until they occupy half of its volume. Creed's installation is simultaneously logical and absurd. As with Bruce Nauman's Half, the work is completed, and even disrupted, by the viewer's own embodied engagement with it and the space it occupies. Visitors "make" the sculpture by frolicking amid party balloons of invisible, packaged air, even as they simultaneously upset the original equation by taking up their share of the oxygen. Half the Air in a Given Space transforms 100 percent of "nothing" into a truly unique, participatory, kinetic sculpture.
Such a work illuminates the rightness in Creed's unwillingness to assign fixed meanings to his artwork. Instead, he generously puts us to work, so that the meaning we create is our own. As Louisa Buck has observed, "the art of Martin Creed is both of and about the world we inhabit, where options are open, decisions are difficult, and the most banal matters sometimes have the most profound impact" ("Martin Creed," Artforum, February, 2000, p. 111).
MARTIN CREED (b. 1964)
Work No. 275: Small Things
Details
MARTIN CREED (b. 1964)
Work No. 275: Small Things
soft white neon lights
67 x 736¼ in. (170 x 1870 cm.)
Executed in 2001.
Work No. 275: Small Things
soft white neon lights
67 x 736¼ in. (170 x 1870 cm.)
Executed in 2001.
Provenance
Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva
Literature
Center for Contemporary Art Ujadowski Castled, ed., Martin Creed: the whole world + the work = the whole world, Warsaw, 2004, pp. 18-21 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Private View 1980-2000: Collection Pierre Huber, June-September 2005, p. 9 (illustrated).