special focus
Chris Gilmour, Auto Taxi, 2006,
cardboard, glue, lifesize. Courtesy Perugi
good-enough effort. This hint at Morris reminds us that any new reliance upon the
Artecontemporanea, Padova
legibility of effort – or the lack thereof – to secure aesthetic value traces its precedents
to the so-called process art of the late 1960s. But for those artists, the privileging of
process was simply a strategy by which to overcome the tyranny of ends over means
and the temporality that that kind of object production (aka Minimalism) entailed. So
for Yvonne Rainer, performance could become a Continuous Project – Altered Daily
(1970); and for Richard Serra sculpture could be defined as Tearing Lead from 1:00 to
1:47 (1968).
The problem with ‘process’, however, was that it simply flipped the means/ends
dichotomy on its head and so left exposed the delicate underbelly of artistic ‘means’
itself, which was now understood according to its component parts: labour, time and
materials. And too singular a focus upon any one of these aspects of artistic means
would render nearly unrecognisable – or rather, ‘illegible’ – results. The most extreme
case here being John Cage’s 4’33”, first ‘composed’ in 1952, which means it stands as a
kind of process piece avant la lettre, just as it initiates the issue of effort in extremis.
Of course, within our contemporary moment, it is Martin Creed who can
most lay claim to that Cagean sensibility by making effort, and its relative legibility,
a medium of artistic practice. Creed’s work does not fall at one or the other end of
the high- (eg Gilmour) or low- (eg Sibony) effort spectrum, but rather occupies the
entirety of its continuum. Think of the now-iconic Work No. 227 (The Lights Going On
and Off) (2000), or Work No. 557 (2006), composed of a series of standard A4 sheets
methodically filled in by strokes of black marker, or Work No. 503 (2006) and Work
No. 600 (2006), two pieces which reconceive shitting and vomiting as essential forms
of – effortful? effortless? – ‘production’. As these examples should make plain, Creed
has even self-consciously reconceived the artistic ‘oeuvre’ itself as the accumulation
of so much ‘work’: the ultimate gesture of accumulation, a lifetime’s worth of efforts,
which, of course, Creed has now taken to ‘replaying’ in his Variety Show performances,
those entertaining reminders of much of what he has ‘done’, lest it all become a little too
illegible.
Carlos Amorales, Black Cloud, 2007,
25,000 paper moths, dimensions variable.
© the artist. Courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert,
New York and Paris
79 artreview
ART TRENDS 2.indd 79 6/12/07 15:40:29
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