'Martin Creed: Feelings' at Bard College

A Toys 'R' Us World

ROBERT ZALLER

There’s a new Tate in London, in a refurbished power station on the South Bank, a spiffed-up British Museum (still clinging to those old Elgin Marbles), and a lively gallery scene. A small show of new British art at the Museum of Modern Art last season suggested a coming generation of talent. But right now, the signature piece of the decade is Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, a work that arguably satirizes the feeding frenzy of the contemporary art market while, in good postmodern style, playing into it with its $100 million price tag.

You can argue that Hirst is simply part of the long-established tradition of shocking the bourgeoisie. Nothing new here, except that the voltage needs to be turned up: Even we bourgeois can get jaded. But next to the nastiness of Hirst’s gambits, the Martin Creed show at Bard’s Hessel Museum conveys an almost endearing quality.

Creed, still a younger artist at 39, created a furor several years ago when his Work No. 227: Lights Going On and Off won the Tate’s Turner Prize. (Creed numbers his works, not by year and number in the manner of Jackson Pollock or Clyfford Still, but in simple order of completion— surely a thoughtful if anxious gesture to future scholars and hagiographers, who’ll be able to chart his Pilgrim’s Progress from A to Z.)

Stepping into a time capsule, circa 1985

Lights Going On and Off, true to its title, was an assemblage of lights on a timer. This old-hat exercise goes by the name of Conceptual Art. It was passé when Creed trotted it out, but perhaps the Tate jurors thought the bourgeoisie might still be shocked by awarding it the Turner Prize. If so, they were right. But the whole Creed show at Bard has a similar quality. It’s like stepping into a time capsule, circa 1985, even though many of the works are chronologically recent.

As one moves from room to room, checking off some pieces with a “Been there, seen that,” or, in the happier case, with a “Nice to see you again,” one feels a gratifying sense of pre-Hirstian nostalgia. No nastiness here, or almost none, until one enters the room where a video runs alternating images of vomiting and defecation. Even here, though, there is an apparent homage to Pollock, with the vomit spray functioning as action painting.

The idea behind Conceptual Art was that the viewer was invited to furnish content and value to objects or displays that appeared to have neither. A genuine avant-garde was at work in this approach. Just as, a century ago, Cubism anticipated the breakup of the classical space-time continuum in physics, so Conceptual Art broke ground for the IPOs of the high-tech boom of the 1990s, when investors poured their nickels and dimes into start-up dot-coms. Thus is art always associated with cutting-edge thought— in the former case, with Einstein; in the latter, with Alan Greenspan.

Nails yes, breast no

Conceptual Art worked not only with investor credulity, however, but also with the manipulation of space, which was also a function of late capitalism (as in expanding markets and contracting services). One wall of the Bard exhibit features a knob-like protuberance— perhaps a breast?— poking out of an expanse of white wall. Another has seven nails of decreasing size driven into it (decreasing if one reads them from left to right, increasing if from right to left).

Sometimes this works; I liked the nails, though not the breast. The conceptually-minded reader may conclude that this says more about me than the art itself, but you get the idea. A large stack of plywood at angles to the rear corner of an otherwise empty room was particularly effective, as was a perilously canted pile of black beanbags.

Creed’s assemblages are mostly playful, even reassuring; this is a Toys 'R' Us world. A floor arrangement of 110 balls, ranging from beach balls to marbles (Work No. 406, if you’re still counting), makes its point about the many light-hearted uses of the sphere as well as the aleatory nature of much contemporary art, for objects on display lend themselves to any number of permutations (and consequently potential new “artworks”). If the idea of a masterpiece implies a thing that is just so and can be no other, Creed offers us works that, despite the meticulous accounting, are just for the moment, an inhabitation of time as temporary as their inhabitation of space.

Yet their transience is an undeniable part of their appeal; the nails will be removed from the wall, the balls from the floor, and even if their arrangement is precisely reconstituted elsewhere, that “elsewhere” itself enters them as an alteration. In a perishable world, playfulness can be a dead serious response.

Is ersatz nostalgia original?

Creed embraces virtually every medium available to the artist— painting, drawing, photography, video, audio (every room has its own beeps and clicks), sculpture, relief— and virtually every style as well. This too is a form of self-protection, for only if anything can be construed as art can art be assured of a continued existence.

On these terms, it may be said that Creed is genuinely an artist, and transience not merely his charm but his subject. Even his appropriation of styles already “historical” for us is shrewdly judged, for if the idea of tradition is absurd in the postmodern world, then the only originality is an ersatz nostalgia that rediscovers the passé as novelty. To say nothing new is precisely the newness he brings us.