Martin Creed, Installation View Hauser & Wirth Coppermill, 2007
Copyright Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London
All photographs by Hugo Glendinning
Martin Creed's new show at Hauser & Wirth is the last of three large-scale shows at the gallery's Coppermill space, and could hardly be in more marked contrast to Christoph Buchel's vast accumulation of unreformed stuff. Creed's absurdly reductive approach to artmaking was bound to encounter a few problems when it came to filling a place like this - a space too big for his balloons, even. Perhaps he has felt the pressure of living up to both Buchel's well-received installation and the cavernous ex-factory itself, but the vast black and white DVD projection that confronts the visitor upon entering the space showcases a newfound (and clearly very knowing) spectacularity as well as signs of the artist's growing confidence in the use of film. A looped four-minute scene shows, in close-up and in profile, a male-female act of copulation: 'from behind', viewed from the side, as it were. The quality of the film is not unlike black and white beauty photography, of the kind seen in television advertising, and is slowed a little to register the thrusting and wobbling of flesh. The film is shown only when the lights are off, which, of course, happens at intervals à la the artist's Turner Prize-winning piece.
'Work No. 725'
Rather than simple oppositions, seriality is perhaps the reigning leitmotif here, though binaries (male-female, black-white, silence-noise, ascent-descent) do proliferate, and it is Creed's musical interests that are foregrounded in the majority of the works, if only by visual analogy. 'Work No. 725', a large stack of plywood resting, top-heavy, on a smaller stack of plywood, has its printed batch numbers jumbled to resemble - from a distance - musical notation. Real music came to life at Thursday's preview, however, as facing the screen and cutting diagonally across the gallery floor, a single-file trail of eighteen musicians (perhaps a veiled homage to Steve Reich's 1974-76 pivotal work, 'Music for 18 Musicians'?) sat in order of the natural timbre of their instruments, headed by the highest-pitched (a triangle) and with a bass drum bringing up the rear. They treated us to a rendition of Creed's latest composition, 'Work No. 673', for which the musicians, starting with the triangle-player, begin playing the same note, one after another down the line, until they are plucking, striking, blowing and bowing in unison. They then rest for the same amount of time as they have been playing, before starting again, this time from the bass drum end. And when the orchestra took a break upstairs, 'Work No. 736, Piano Accompaniment', began, for which the pianist is instructed to play each note of the piano, ascending from bottom to top, before pausing and descending. The score for this work sits atop the piano, written in prose in true Fluxus style. We can also glance the orchestra's scores on their music stands, which make simple geometric patterns on the page - in the conductor's case, tessellating triangles - and bring to mind the visuality of John Cage's scores.
'Friends', 2007
Elsewhere, there are the usual nods to Nauman, Serra, Buren and Co. These are, respectively, a yellow neon-light piece reading 'friends', three stacked, rusty I-beams resembling a mini-'Tilted Arc', and a wall painting of diagonal black stripes occupying the entire east wall of the gallery. But despite a certain amount of recycling of Creed's earlier ideas, the overall impression is of a genuinely imaginative engagement with the legacy of (post-) minimalism, both that of the gallery and concert hall, a compulsive teasing-out of both humour and pathos.
Bill Roberts
Martin Creed
HAUSER & WIRTH COPPERMILL
4 May - 29 July, 2007
Opening: Thursday 3 May, 6 - 8 pm
92 - 108 Cheshire Street
London E2 6EJ
T: +44 20 7729 1252
Following Coppermill, Creed has a solo survey show at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York, opening Saturday 7 July, and a solo show at Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin beginning 5 October. In addition, Creed is working on an extensive publication that will present a survey of his oeuvre. MARTIN CREED COMPLETE WORKS 1986-2007, with comprehensive essays by Germaine Greer and Massimiliano Gioni, will be published by STEIDL Hauser & Wirth this winter.
Martin Creed performs regularly with his band, and they can next be seen at Goldsmiths College Student Union, London, on 11 May.
Bill Roberts is a writer based in London, and a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
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