A Modern Way of Letting Go Martin Creed gives Reef Younis a tour of What’s The Point of It?, his retrospective exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery Photogra phy: ph il shar p / writer: R eef younis
The last time I spoke with Turner Prizewinning artist Martin Creed it was against the Barbican’s brutalist backdrop, his colourful candy stripe ensemble offsetting the cold grey concrete of the City’s surroundings. In one of the Barbican galleries’ many quiet corners, we discussed his uncluttered approach to his work and the personal process of bringing debut album, ‘Love To You’, to painstaking life. A record driven and defined by the battle between love and hate, it also marked Creed’s first proper experience of exposing his music to a level of scrutiny his visual work has always had to withstand. This time, we’re stood in the South Bank’s Hayward Gallery to a backdrop of 39 snickering metronomes (Work No.112) and a 13ft plus neon installation of the word ‘Mothers’ (Work No. 1092) unnervingly whooshing overhead because, for two months (January 29 – April 27), the ‘What’s the Point of It?’ exhibition is showcasing a retrospective of Creed’s visual work. “Normally all these things were made to be on their own, as I try and make things that can stand up in the world,” he explains as ‘Mothers’ completes another whirring revolution above our heads. The exhibition itself presented a challenge to both Creed and the curators. For the gallery, working to find the right pieces was a conundrum of budget and logistics. For Martin, it represented a proud opportunity but one that came with its own questions. “It’s not actually a show of all the things I really wanted,” he says, “it was a mixture of what I wanted and what was possible due to money, size, space, height, weight. But in that respect, it’s probably quite similar to the way the world works, anyway. When I was invited to do the show I made a list of
everything I wanted to be in it. Some of those things were paintings owned by people in Japan so when it came to it, the budget for the exhibition couldn’t pay for that because flying the painting from Japan and all the insurance and shit could be paying for a whole room somewhere else. In the end a lot of the things came down to really boring business decisions.” The first thing you see, hear, instinctively look to avoid the moment you step into the exhibition is the immediacy of ‘Mothers’ and its imposing, moving frame. It’s a brilliantly enlivening beginning and one that seems pre-orchestrated by particularly clever positioning. “’Mothers’ can only go in here,” says Martin. “I wanted to make it as big as it could possibly be, then to do that, I realised it would actually be quite close to people’s heads. The reason I wanted to make it big was because I thought the word ‘Mothers’ would look good, big. To be a mother, you’ve got to be physically bigger than the baby. It’s not like I set out to be dangerous but when it turned out that it would it be quite imposing, I thought that wasn’t a bad thing, and that was when I decided to make it spin round as well. It was a happy accident.” It brings us onto other works in the exhibition that were born out of trial and error, or enforced selection. For a man whose work and music feels so grounded in the black and white of life, the difficulties of curating an exhibition seem at odds with Creed’s outlook. “It’s frustrating, but it’s not like I didn’t expect it. When they asked me to do the show, I just said ‘Yes!’ because I wanted to have a show at the Hayward. Then the next few weeks after that it’s like ‘Shit!’ and basically a feeling that my life is now going to be taken over
by this for the next two years, and that’s what happened. “One thing is to try and make something you’re happy with or that you’re excited about. Another thing is to take that and try and play it live, or exhibit it in a gallery, and at that point it’s a different thing because it’s a case of making the best of what you’ve got. But even if you like it, maybe it doesn’t look good on that wall, so it’s a case of playing around with things. Juggling.” As we move into the second room, I ask Martin about the works he felt compelled to have in the exhibition; those pieces he wanted to be included outright. It’s a question that makes him pause for thought initially, and a prompt that becomes increasingly redundant as the tour progresses. “I guess I always knew the show would have ‘Don’t Worry’ in it, and the Pyramid paintings, but this fist sculpture is a recent work that I made and I think it’s a bit irrelevant to the show. I was thinking about stuff I made before, like before I was trying to go to art school and stuff like that, and this is a sculpture I made when I was a teenager and my mum kept it,” he laughs. “Last year I got asked to make a trophy for an art prize in a primary school and I remembered this fist sculpture I made out of clay, so I had it cast in bronze and gold-plated with the idea of making a heavy, big trophy for the kids to hold up.” It’s an interesting meeting of an old piece of work re-imagined for a fresh purpose but, as Creed admits, its place in the show goes deeper than merely repurposing. “Although I made this new, it was cast from a thing I made when I was 14, so whenever that is… 1982. There’s also a self-portrait there I made when I was a teenager, and that fits into what you’re saying. I thought it would be good to put something in
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