Profile: Martin Creed
Feature
As one of the most controversial artists in recent years, Martin Creed has come to represent the Turner Prize for many people. He’s the YBA behind Work No. 227, the lights going on and off, the prize winning installation that featured the Tate’s own lights… erm… going on and off. He’s well known for creating pieces of art which are highly conceptual and owe a lot to the experimental pop art movements of the 1960’s.
Creed was born in Wakefield in 1968, and grew up in Glasgow. In 1986 he began his training at the Slade School of Art in London, the town where he was to stay and develop his talents. He formed the band ‘Owada’ in 1994, releasing a debut album, ‘Nothing’ in 1998 of Dave Cunningham’s ‘Piano 508’ label.
His art work began attracting attention at around the same time. He turned heads in 1998 with ‘Work No. 200, half the air in a given space’, a room which features enough balloons to contain half the air in it.
The naming of Creed’s art follows a specific pattern – a catalogue number (not, incidentally as a chronological marker but as a method of description) and a detailed, literally descriptive title. This pattern was established with some of his earliest work, such as 1993’s ‘Work No. 79, some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall’. Not much guesswork required to imagine what that involved.
From the year 2000 he began creating pieces from neon signs. For these works, the titles given indicate the words of the sign – such as ‘Work No. 225, Everything Is Going To Be Alright’ (2000) and ‘Work No. 232, the whole world + the work = the whole world’ (2000) which was originally mounted on the side of the Tate Britain and now hangs inside the Tate Modern as an integral feature of that gallery’s rehung exhibition.
His most famous piece is certainly his Turner-prize winning piece of 2001. This is less to do with the work itself and more because of the media frenzy which surrounded it, most of which focused on the debate surrounding minimalism in modern art. “What is art?”, the question posed in 1917 by Marcel Duchamp that ‘gave birth’ to modern art was suddenly in the fore again, and Creed’s place in the art history was assured.
In fact, the work is tied to the environmental movement more than to abstract notions of minimalism. Creed has said that he simply does not want to add more ‘stuff’ to a world that already features too much.
www.martincreed.com
www.tate.org.uk
By Tom Knight 26th September
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