New ideas:

 - I have been thinking about presenting objects that I have simple taken form the everyday. I am considering either displaying them next to a small text or question that will encourage further contemplation in the viewer's mind about this particular object and push the viewer's thoughts past their original understanding, knowledge, and associations with this object.

Examples:

A blank piece of paper - next to it I want to test putting the statement "the upside down piece of paper"
A strange coloured object - "What colour is this?"

These ideas have come from my exploration into the art practise and ideas of Tom Friedman, Martin Creed, and Brandon Cramm.

Interesting article:

Hughes, Dean. "Martin Creed, Down Over Up, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh." Sculpture Journal 20, no. 1 (March 2011): 101-103. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed June 4, 2013).

......(go to website for the introductory part)

 Like all of

Creed’s artwork, it effectively describes and

pictures its own making.

Looking at this painting I began to

think more about an insistent repetition

that permeated the exhibition. Cacti were

ordered by height, a lift described its

descent or ascent through vocal harmony,

and planks of machine-milled wood were

stacked. In Martin Creed’s work there is

always a pursuit of repetition and in viewing the exhibition I became increasingly

aware of my own steps around the gallery.

This sensibility of repetition within Creed’s

work is always paired with a commitment

to the ordinary. As a type of sensory experience, the ordinary is simple yet seemingly

rich and complex: it is humdrum, quotidian, everyday, boring, normal, usual, regular, common, mundane – all these terms

locate the ordinary as something shared

and understandable, while also extending

its resonance by inflection.

Work No. 997 is a good example of how

the ordinary is located by degrees of variation, which introduce novelty into experience. Standing over two metres high, five

chairs of diminishing size – and explicitly

differing models – are stacked on top of

each other to produce an elongated structure that tapers towards the top. Like a

human pyramid, but with chairs, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that each

(aside from the bottom one) is sitting on

another chair. It brings to mind Tony

Cragg’s sculpture Minster, from 1991. Here

as well, pointlessness is at the heart of

Creed’s conglomeration of objects. There

exists a futility in seating a chair on a

chair; as seats these objects are rendered

useless save for their own ordered containment. Formally similar to other works in

the exhibition, such as Work No. 396, which

is composed of a stack of planks of wood,

Work No. 997 demonstrably eschews standard usage and begins a new structure as a

contemplated art object. Likewise, Work No.

701 is made from seven nails of varying

sizes knocked into the wall. Presented in a

line, too low to be of any obvious practical

use, the nails protrude from the wall to differing degrees. The bigger the nail, the further it extends into the room, the smaller,

the closer it gets to the wall. Without the

auxiliary agency that nails are company

to, they become mechanisms for how an

artwork appears and stays in a space for

focused consideration.

Taken as a whole, Creed’s exhibition at

the Fruitmarket dwelt on the structure of

expectation. The ordinary is categorized

simply because an experience, or object, is

conversant with a pattern of familiarity

that does not introduce novelty. A simple

row of cacti ascends or descends in height,

depending on whether you look at it from

the front, or from the back. It is difficult

not to see it as an exponential graph

describing a trajectory both towards and

away from something. As with all the work

in the exhibition, a point is established and

things move forward or back.

There is something antonymic about

an exhibition that dwells upon the

ordinary in such a committed way. This

exhibition of a series of artworks composed of objects, actions and orderings,

whose origins are quotidian and everyday,

could not remain within such a normalized

realm. The irony of Down Over Up was that

simple approaches became complex under

scrutiny. This quality was not helped by the

exhibition’s title, which the works themselves avoid by adopting the quasi-title,

Work. This is the tension around which

the majority of Creed’s work seems to

pivot, namely how to remain simple and

direct. This may account for my preference

for his presentation of singular work,

such as Work No. 227, the lights going on

and off, or Work No. 370, balls. But this is

not to suggest that his pieces only work

well within a solo situation. To my mind

his strongest presentations are often

within group exhibitions, such as Work No.

102, a protrusion from a wall, which was

exhibited at Marc Jancou Gallery, London.

This exhibition largely consisted of similarly sized wall-based works, but Creed’s

blob was remarkable in its ability to provide the bedrock of sensory experience

that one could still call ordinary. Work No.

102 remains compelling and strange then

as now, as it exercises novelty by virtue of

its ordinariness.

In a talk given at Manchester

Metropolitan University in 2005, Creed

paraphrased the painter Gerhard Richter

by saying that he wanted ‘to make art that

was stupid like nature’. In presenting a

series of differing works linked by the quality of ordinariness, Down Over Up seemed

to ask the next question: how can you

remain humdrum in a world composed of

a pattern of attention?

Dean Hughes

1. Martin Creed, Work No.997,

2009. Courtesy the artist and

Hauser & Wirth. © Martin Creed

and The Fruitmarket Gallery

(photo: Gautier Deblonde)