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)
1.jpg)
