A runner sprints the length of Tate Britain's echoing, austere Duveen gallery as if the hounds of hell are chasing him. This is what artist Martin Creed has decreed: Run as if your life depends on it.
The runner isn't late for lunch, or fleeing in horror from a bad date. He's part of Creed's new commission for the Tate, Work No. 850, which for the next four months will fill the neoclassical expanse of the Duveen gallery with the sound of pounding feet. Puma has provided the running shoes, and the great British public is providing the muscle.
The fleet-footed volunteer bolts past Frederick Leighton's 1885 sculpture, The Sluggard – a yawning, muscle-bound nude – and pauses at the entrance of the gallery. He flies off the mark, and the drowsy patrons in front of him scatter, a little boy in a lime jacket shrieking with delight and giving chase.
“The kids always want to run after them,” says a guard.
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The little fellow clearly cannot read the sign on the wall: “For reasons of public safety, we ask the public not to run or obstruct the runners.”
Of course, the public has already been asked to run – in fact it's been actively recruited in order to make Work No. 850 work at all. The gallery has signed up about 50 runners so far, mainly through specialist publications like athletic magazines. Four of them are on duty at a given time, sprinting the 86 metres of the gallery, doing 15 dashes per half-hour and then taking a break. Each one of them had to send in a CV and pass a fitness exam. The reward? A chance to work with one of Britain's best-regarded, most irreverent young artists, all the while dodging tourists who move at the speed of drugged snails. Oh, and they get £9.35 – just over $19 – an hour.
Work No. 850 has drawn predictable groans of despair from certain members of the British public, who are pulling their blue hair out at the prospect of tax dollars being spent on this spectacle (never mind that it's being sponsored by Sotheby's and Puma.) Martin Creed will be laughing somewhere –– he's the most impish of artists, having already stuck a piece of putty to a gallery wall, filmed some guy throwing up, and won the Turner Prize for turning lights on and off.
The inspiration for Work No. 850 came from a trip that Creed took to visit the Capuchin monks' catacombs in Palermo, Italy: He and his friend were told they had five minutes to see the extensive collection of the dead, and raced around as if – well, as if their lives depended on it. They fell about laughing at the absurdity of it all. “Running fast is the exact opposite of death,” Creed says. “It's an example of aliveness.”
Volunteers responded quickly to the Tate's request for runners. What Creed has realized – he once half-filled a room with balloons for gallery-goers to navigate – is that the quickest way to engage the public's interest is to engage the public. Indeed, it's never been a better time for Joe and Jane Smith to step into the frame; if they can't be artists, they can become the art.
Next year, they can step onto the empty pedestal in London's Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley's new living sculpture: He won the Fourth Plinth competition with a proposal that it be occupied 24 hours a day by regular folk. Some time next year, the officials who run Trafalgar Square will begin accepting volunteers to stand on a plinth, alongside Lord Nelson (on his column), King George IV, and a couple of long-forgotten heroes of the Imperial quest to take over the known world. What will these ordinary folk do? Sleep, eat, dance, read, fondle each other – who knows?
Thanks to the context, the ordinary will become, for a time, heroic. Gormley explains his people-on-a-pedestal by saying “the subjective living body becomes both representation and representative, encouraging consideration of diversity, vulnerability and the individual in contemporary society.” Or: The city's changing all the time, why not its art, too? An ordinary punter, already excited by Gormley's plan, put it rather more succinctly: “I think it will be an absolute hoot!”
In November, Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will transform Trafalgar Square into a giant dance of light, images and passersby with Under Scan, “the world's largest interactive video installation.” People walking through the square will cast long shadows, thanks to two giant projectors; in each of these shadows, filmed images will appear. The pedestrians in the square are then free to interact with the people who pop up in their shadows.
The idea of public participation isn't new, but it does seem that artists are becoming more intrigued with notions of subjectivity and viewpoint just as the public sheds its inhibitions about being on show. In the pre-Big Brother era, could you have found enough people to sprint through a gallery or stand on a plinth while spectators munched their sandwiches and pointed?
The Tate Britain, where Work No. 850 runs until the middle of November, continues to look for fleet-footed art lovers. “Yes, we're still recruiting,” says a gallery spokesperson, “so spread the word.” At least now the world's speedy exhibitionists have a place to spend their afternoons.
