Martin Creed at the Hayward: the faeces, the phallus and the Ford Focus +++++++++ The Haywards Martin Creed show is more like a glorious tour of his mind. Adrian Searle has the time of his life squeezing through balloons, ducking a steel beam – and watching an endless erection Adrian Searle, The Guardian ------------------------ I duck as a huge rotating steel beam, bearing the word MOTHERS in neon, sweeps over my head. You can feel the draught as it goes by. Mothers ruffle your hair and make you cringe – this one could knock your head off. Actual physical harm isnt what you expect from Martin Creed: his neon signs can often be reassuring. Everything is going to be alright, reads one, famously, with a cheery, upbeat fluorescence. Dont worry, says another, its yellow light staining the wall around it. Creeds new show at the Hayward in London is great – one of the best solo exhibitions Ive seen in the gallery. Creed has stripped the Hayward of many of its walls, leaving it open, though anything but sparse and empty. Taking us from an early (and very accomplished) self-portrait, painted when he was 16, to Work No 1813 (the latest version of The Lights Going On and Off, which won him the 2001 Turner prize), the show doesnt so much chart his development as provide us with a tour of his mind. It is an exhibition of extremes and contrasts, from the very big to the very small, from the most offhand gesture to the most laboriously executed. It feels as much portrait as exhibition – of conflicting appetites and contrary desires, of doubts and certainties, of whims and convictions. I like things, sings Creed in one of the songs and orchestral compositions that make up his new album Mind Trap, but he doesnt really. Creed has a thing about things. His art is a repeated exercise in object relations. There is no hierarchy of materials or genres. Everywhere there are things on top of other things: tables, chairs, diminishing lengths of I-beam steel, brushstrokes, cardboard boxes. Things lined up (a row of cacti, ordered by height), things next to each other (a cluster of balls from ping-pong, billiards, rugby, cricket, baseball and American football, like a sports solar system), things that stick out of the wall, and things that probably shouldnt be here at all. There are paintings made with his eyes closed, and a portrait that was hung so high he had to jump every time he wanted to make a mark (and you have to jump, too, to see it properly). There is a sound work in the lift and a sniggering, stoned laugh haunting the space outside the toilets. In one gallery, an attendant plays up and down the scale on an upright piano, while a film plays of the artist shooing dogs. Paintings – all kinds – hang on top of the rollered-on stripes of colour that decorate the walls, and a plaid of crisscrossing stripes fills the wall behind the stairs, and can never be seen in its entirety. The variety of Creeds work makes it hard to talk about touch, manner or voice. But theyre there all the same. His art is marked by lightness and a kind of bravery. It is all a matter of timing, placement and contrast. The show doesnt flag. Creeds art is filled with systems, rules and ways of paring things down to some kind of irreducible physical fact or activity: counting, aligning, ordering, arranging. Like Bruce Nauman, he develops strategies for getting through the day, of making something from nothing and the near-to-hand. Working seems to be less a career than a way of being, a bulwark against creative emptiness. He can make a work from a scrunched-up sheet of paper, a pile of Lego, a roll of tape, every variety of lightbulb or size of nail he can find in a hardware store. But the nearest thing anyone has to hand, of course, is their own body. From the first moment, when you blunder in, negotiating your way past a slightly rancid old sofa that partially blocks the entrance (Work No 142, A Large Piece of Furniture Partially Obstructing a Door), he makes you acutely aware of your own awkward, lumbering physical presence. Being in the gallery is like entering a silent comedy. As you enter Half the Air in a Given Space, which fills a large, walled area with white balloons, you slide through the slithering spheres with a kind of squealing, infant delight as your body displaces them. I feel like a bubble among bubbles, heading towards the snow-like brightness of a distant window, the light refracted through all those balloons. The experience is an unalloyed pleasure. It is also, oddly, a very sculptural one. If you are going to think about bodies, you also need to think about what bodies do. At the entrance to a small and elegantly decorated video chamber, a sign warns that the installation includes works showing bodily functions. On the screen, a woman enters a blank white space, crouches, defecates and promptly exits, leaving her stool on the white floor. Two further vignettes show people noisily vomiting, spattering the floor. These theatricalised purges are the most basic, abject and universal human and animal activities. Theyre neither beyond the pale nor outside culture, but our reactions to them depend on the culture we inhabit. They are also a rejoinder to accusations that Creeds work is shit, or that his paintings might look like puke. There is a base pleasure in the acts, too, and how they make us feel afterwards. Its all very complicated, but they belong among other acts, other gestures. I found a strange link here to the car Creed has had winched up to one of the upper sculpture courts at the Hayward. Every few minutes the engine starts, the horn sounds and all the doors spring open, as does the bonnet. The radio comes on, the wipers start flapping and the windscreen-washer squirts. The car – a silver Ford Focus, the most generic, popular model Creed could find – is doing all it can do, except go anywhere. On another sculpture deck, facing the Shell building, the London Eye and Westminster, an LED video screen shows a mans torso in profile. His penis grows erect, then droops, again and again, in an endlessly repeated performance of human engineering. Things go round and round. The body consumes, the body ejects. Lights go on and off. Things get bigger and they get smaller. The show is called Whats the Point of It? Which is as much as anyone can ask. In some of the artists songs, and in his stage appearances and public talks, you encounter moments of embarrassment and shame, an acting-out of performance anxiety and the fear of failure. As a performer, Creed can make you smile and laugh, not least with his open-hearted ditherings and attenuated pauses, his moments of inarticulacy and the sense that hes surprised anyone would be at all interested in watching him. Its a good act, but its also more than an act. Creed, a fan of country and western, is always walking the line, courting feebleness, abjection and disaster, and this is one of the most affecting things about what he does. Because Creed doesnt fail – or rather, like Samuel Beckett, he is always trying to fail better. Martin Creed Whats the Point of It? Hayward, London SE1 Starts 29 January Until 21 April
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:57:22 +0000
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