Hayward Gallery
It might be easier to think of Martin
Creed as a composer—that’s what, in any case, I felt having taken
in the striking retrospective of his work a few months ago. The first thing that
greets one is a quantity of metronomes, ticking away at various
speeds. Anyone who’s fond of the analogue metronome will know the
piece by György Ligeti Poeme
Symphonique—for 100
metronomes—that are wound up and tick away to their hearts content,
slowly unwinding themselves until silent. Creed’s piece is
essentially the same, plagiarised even, only that it appears his
metronomes don’t wind themselves down.
Perhaps
this is the difference: in all of Creed’s work there is this
‘alternation’—big and small, on and off, to and fro, up and
down. But it’s an ceaseless alternation: it doesn’t wind itself
down, it only (merely) winds you up,
or entrances you, until you leave. Another example: in the lower
gallery one of the gallery assistants is tasked with the arduous
responsibility of playing Creed’s piano piece. The pianist must
start at the bottom and wander up the chromatic scale to the top,
before waiting for a while, before going down again. Over and over.
Cage
famously said, ‘if
something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still
boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one
discovers that it is not boring at all.’ It is this tradition in
which Creed works. But Cage’s work, unlike his demeanour, was often
quite severe—or at least austere. Creed’s early works sometimes
had a Cageian austerity, but he never appears to have displayed
severity; he’s always trying to charm us. Cage’s paintings (which
went on a touring exhibition in 2011, also organised by the Hayward)
are serene, repetitive painted drawings around stones, whose
positions are determined by chance, exercises in self-dissolution.
Creed’s paintings are much more playful, for want of a better word:
he is blindfolded, or using brash colours, or of late very naïve.
Creed’s repetitive paintings are not the Zen ensō
calligraphy of Cage; they are broccoli prints in acrylic.
Creed’s
car, the Ford Focus out on the Hayward terrace, is played like an
instrument. After sitting there blithely for a minute or two, it
suddenly springs into action, all of its functions delivered at once.
The doors open, the wipers flick, the engine starts and the radio
blares. Then it ceases, ready to go off again. One is reminded of
Cage’s 1962 score 0’00”:
‘in a situation with maximum amplification and no feedback, perform
a disciplined action’.
Like
a composer, Creed has everything in a catalogue. In the nineteenth
century, musical Gesellschaften
were
set up to edit and catalogue the works of the great composers for
their new audience—composers’ scores, what had been seen as a
functionary, disposable blueprint for performance by patrons half a
century before, were increasingly seen as the gateway to eternity. By
collecting everything together and giving it a number, it was newly
locatable in this world of bourgeois publication. By the twentieth
century composers were doing this themselves; but visual artists have
not be subjected to the same kind of ‘catalogue-mania’—perhaps
because the dissemination of plastic artworks is still vaguely
feudal, artworks inherit provenance records, and often are spirited
away outside of the public gaze. No one knows just how many Warhols
there are, least of all, in all probability, when he was around for
his fifteen minutes, Mr Warhol himself.
All
this makes Creed’s numbering system all the more enticing—he’s
almost the only artist who does it—and it emphasises his intense
productivity. His catalogue numbers a quantity already up there with
the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis,
both of them having produced more than 1000 works. But of course,
Creed’s work is not latter-day Bach; aside from its sometimes being
single sentences or scribbles, its mode of valuation is radically
different. Creed’s new organ piece (or should I say, Work no. 1020)
is being premiered on the refurbished Fesitval Hall Organ, alongside
a complete programme of Bach pieces. Any composer in their right mind
would be terrified by such a prospect—but Creed’s art-making is
simply in a different kind of place. Not necessarily an ahistorical
place, but a place that looks at the procession of history with an
indifference bordering on mild curiosity.
My abiding
sensation coming away from this exhibition was not, predictably, how
charming and whimsical (and who wouldn't hate that description) this work
is. Instead, this is work which is vaguely but noticeably worrying,
even sinister. The unending bouncing up and down, turning on and off,
opening and closing, going in and coming out. It is unending
alternation from which there is no escape. Indeed, why would you want
to escape? Lest you forget, everything is going to be all right.
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