Martin Creed

ArtForum, Feb, 2000 by Louisa Buck

It's one of their many paradoxes that all of Creed's immaculately resolved artworks emerge out of an acute indecision. "I find that it's difficult to choose, to decide that one thing's more important than the other," he says. "So what I try and do is to choose without having to make decisions." To this end, he takes the stuff that already exists in the world-air, noise, a door--makes his mundane "materials" fulfill their expected function, and then subjects them to a further series of "nonchoices." Hence the doorstop in Work No. 115 is positioned at the exact point between open and closed; the lights in Work No. 160 are off for as long as they are on; and the balloons in the various "given spaces" have tended to be either "noncolors" like black or white or all the colors one can possibly buy. As far as Creed is concerned, air is the perfect material: everywhere yet invisible, both everything and nothing. Appropriately, his most permanent and conspicuous work to date, a public text piece that runs some forty- odd feet across the frieze of a former orphanage in East London and declares EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT, is made from glass tubes of white neon, a fragile combination of live electricity and inert gas. (A version of the piece is currently on view in a Public Art Fund project in Times Square.)

For not only does Creed encourage his work to make itself, he also likes it to cancel itself out. "I find it a lot easier if it negates itself at the same time as pushing itself forward--so there's an equal positive and negative which adds up to nothing, but at the same time is something too." This perverse desire to make both something and nothing can manifest itself formally, as in his 1994 Work No. 99: an intrusion and a protrusion from a wall, while it also allows his bursting balloons, his thrown-away balls of paper, his buzzing doorbells and flashing lights to dip in and out of the world at large. For 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. When Creed writes EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT across a ruined building in one of London's lowest-income areas, he means just that-but exactly what that means is up to you.

LOUISA BUCK, a writer and broadcaster on contemporary art and a monthly columnist for UK Esquire, is the London correspondent for the Art Newspaper. The author of Moving Targets: A User's Guide to British Art Now (Tate Gallery, 1997) and the coauthor, with Philip Dodd, of Relative Values, or What's Art Worth?(BBC Books, 1991), a companion volume to the eponymous six-part television series, Buck is currently working on Moving Targets 2, which will be published by the Tate Gallery in July. For this issue, in an ongoing series in which writers are invited to introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their careers, Buck discusses the low-key efforts of British Conceptual artist Martin Creed.