reviews martin creed
Holly, 2007, pencil, crayon, ink,
pastel and acrylic on paper.
30 x 21 cm. courtesy the artist and
hauser & Wirth, Zürich & london
mArtin creed
douglas hyde gallery, dublin
19 october – 1 december
Rhythm is something of a twilight phenomenon,
happening in neither one action nor another, but
moving between, linking them together. This might
begin to explain how rhythm draws people and
things out of themselves, and also how Martin Creed
might hope to make a scene in which his audience
become rhythmic elements. But if occasionally his
work entertains such aspirations as figuring out what
rhythms hold us, at once it shrinks away, as though
having left a bad joke hanging in the air.
Rhythms emerge in the Douglas Hyde Gallery
as stripes, fill-ins and opposed axes recur across
different scales, sometimes leading to the vertiginous
thrill of uncanny zoom effects, as between the yellow-
and-white striping that fills the north wall of the gallery
(Work no. 840; all works 2007), the textures of felt-tip
on paper and the crosswise layering of plywood (Work
no. 841). As motifs drift in and out of phase with each
other, they give some measure to the architectural
volumes of the gallery, aided on the opening night
by a quartet of tremulous strings. In a rehearsal that
became a performance, the strings made a simple
appeal for an opening level of excitement.
There are familiar nods and winks to various
conceptualist and minimalist leitmotifs here, perhaps
the most enduring of which remains the method of creating necessity from contingency through an arbitrary set
of propositions followed to their end: for example, the decision to fill a series of A4 sheets with every shade of
green felt-tip pen available (Work no. 745), or to cover a wall with a pattern that leaves exactly half the wall painted,
half blank (Works no. 840 and 843). Such trivialised necessity offers a means of negotiating room to manoeuvre
and breathe, and of creating from a moment’s compulsion a world where lightness might gather momentum.
The warping up and away of the uppermost sheets of an 8-by-8-by-3-foot stack of 3-ply registers that the rigour
of placing one on top of another becomes the premise for further contingency, only here such flaws trace possible
trajectories of desire rather than signal pathetic failure. All this is done with an economy that magnifies by reduction,
providing noise without clamour and growth without accumulation.
Roland Barthes once compared his relationship to his institution to the comings and goings of a child tracing
around the calm centre of his mother a circle of play, returning occasionally with modest gifts the nature of which
was surpassed by the giving of them. Creed, too, is generous in play, but the centre around which he traces his
excitement is especially becalmed in this latest show, where he maintains an even lower level of hindrance than
previously. Certainly, enigmatic impediments are prone to conservatism, but one suspects that generosity wears
thin if some of its drama is disallowed by a fretful mother; and as this generosity becomes more contractual than
amorous, the experience of its audience, too, becomes impoverished. Tim Stott
205143 Artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 143 2/11/07 12:19:52
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