Martin Creed: What’s the point of it?

Martin Creed: What’s the point of it’
Hayward Gallery, London
29 January - 27 April 2014
Review by Daniel Barnes

The joke about playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order is the perfect analogy for Martin Creed’s work: something that teeters on the cusp of failure and uncertainty ends in a meticulously executed gesture of artistic dissonance. It succeeds precisely in virtue of the fact that it eschews the high-mindedness of art while effortlessly achieving a prized artistic goal.

Creed’s erudite mind and nimble hand enable him to explore the fundamental ambiguity of all things. This is art which offers a plethora of things to see and yet always dissolves into an idea, simultaneously affirming and denying the entire world. It is like minimalism with a shock of colour and conceptual art with an injection of emotion.

The Hayward has gathered a selection of work which covers the full depth and breadth of a career, and resisted the temptation to litter the gallery with obstinate texts that spoil jokes and ruin surprises. The show feels comfortably abundant, but does not overstate the repetitions or diminish the power of the more subtle pieces. The volume is rightly set somewhere between intrigue and irritation.

The scale of the works ranges from the exhilaratingly imperceptible, like ‘Work No. 79 Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall’ (1993), to the plainly intrusive, such as ‘Work No. 1092’ (2011), a colossal neon sign on a heavy beam that rotates at variable speed, eliciting equal measures of wonder and terror. There is often the suggestion of minimalism with something like ‘Work No. 701’ (2007), seven nails of decreasing sizes in the wall, but it is thwarted by the formal regularity with which this motif recurs in ‘Work No. 960’ (2008), a row of cacti. Again, the step pyramid form reappears in stacks of boxes, tables, chairs, railway sleepers and paintings. Repetition of form in different colours and materials here suggests that there is a bigger point than cold, stark emptiness.

Creed’s trick is to do something disarmingly simple, leaving all possibilities open and dictating nothing, so that, despite appearances, it is not minimal or conceptual at all. Rather, he is a great expressionist, where each work is Creed’s emotional thesis and antithesis, plus the viewer’s own synthesis, aptly illustrated by ‘Work No. 200 Half the air in a given space’ (1998) where a sea of balloons falters between a claustrophobic threat and childish delight.

A few years ago, I wrote that ‘Work No. 227 The lights going on and off’ (2001) was the first great artwork of the 21st century. That seemingly hyperbolic statement was confirmed by being immersed in its earlier incarnation, ‘Work No. 127’ (1995). Bathed in the perpetual flicker of light and dark, it becomes clear that Creed does something which contemporary art has forgotten how to do. At first glance, it just looks like the sort of art that enrages the Daily Mail, but in reality it is precisely the kind of art we desire: simple, elegant, rich and expressive of all that occupies the human condition, namely, anything and nothing at all.