Not many people would think of Hamilton, Ont., as a place to go looking for the shock of the new, but, happily for the Art Gallery of Hamilton, this week it's suddenly the place to be. With the Tate Britain having just announced their Turner Prize winner -- the 33-year-old conceptual artist Martin Creed -- AGH is looking like the cat that swallowed the canary, thanks to their current small and exquisitely timely exhibition of Creed's work.
So what is there to see? As media watchers who enjoy the scornful despoiling of contemporary art will by now be fully aware, not much -- at least, not at first glance. Creed won the $45,000 prize for one piece, Work #227, the lights going on and off, created in a limited edition of five, and currently on show in Hamilton. Quite simply, the work consists of the lights in the gallery switching themselves on and off at 30-second intervals.
According to Madill, Creed tinkers with the lighting for intensity and placement in the architectural space. The timing, too, is a variable he likes to manipulate; at the AGH, he experimented with the variables for three days -- 10 seconds, 15 and 30 -- before settling on his current format, which he liked best, given the large volume of the gallery. (An earlier work in the same vein had a five second on/off pulse.) Given the perennial suspicions of contemporary art and the Emperor's New Clothes, the lights going on and off feels like the product of an artist engaged in a kamikaze game of chicken with the critics. (There really is "nothing there.") And they loved it.
If all this is making you harumph, you ain't heard nothing yet. Creed has been developing a nice little following in British art circles for some time now with his lighter-than-air works which build on the earlier traditions of conceptual art, from the 1960s and seventies. One could cite here Richard Long and Hamish Fulton's documented walks in the countryside; Walter de Maria's Earth Room -- a New York gallery filled with dirt; Vito Acconci's Following Piece, where the artist surreptitiously tailed a different unsuspecting member of the public for 23 consecutive days; or Yoko Ono's directive to "Whisper. Ask the wind to take it to the end of the world." All of these were artistic gestures intended to reposition the act of art-making outside of the grasp of commodity exchange and into the field of pure ideas, pure communication. (Of course, the art market will always find a way to prevail, then as now. Creed's editioned works sell for £10,000 each, for which the collector receives a certificate of artistic intent.)
Creed is certainly cut from the same antimaterialistic bolt, and shows the same love for the ephemeral and the quietly subversive as the first wave of conceptualists. One of his earliest forays, shortly after his graduation from the Slade School of Art in London, was mailing a ball of crumpled paper to the director of the Tate (his secretary smoothed it out and sent it back by return post). Other highlights have included installing a neon sign atop the façade of the former London Orphan Asylum, which read "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT"; filling a gallery with balloons equal in volume to half the space of the room ( Work #201; half the air in a given space, shown in New York in 1998); or installing a rubber doorjamb at the gallery entrance so that the door can only open to 45 degrees ( Work #115, installed at Javier Lopez Gallery in London in 1995). A certain amount of frustration seems to be something Creed likes to provoke, in works that the British art critic Matthew Higgs has described as "object situations."
Work #115 relates to the second work in the Hamilton show, titled Work #142; a large piece of furniture partially obstructing a door. The title, as they say, says it all. The scruffy looking sofa in question came from the local Amity second-hand shop in Hamilton, and sits at a jaunty 45-degree angle to the doorway of a small, side gallery -- discreetly making a nuisance of itself. It is brown and white. And that's all there is to say about it.
Of course this kind of thing can make people wildly cross -- although Madill reports the public has been more intrigued than outraged -- and Creed's insouciant stance, easily mistaken for mockery, will only up the intensity factor. ("Art galleries are places where I have been allowed to do what I do," the artist has said, "but that doesn't make what I do 'art.' ") Yet there is little doubt that his manipulations of the world around him impact on us, heightening our awareness of our surroundings.
So what is it like to experience the lights going on and off? No real surprises at first, but then your mind does start to play tricks on you. One has the uncanny sense, after a while, that this big white gallery space is strangely alive, a benign but cavernous giant blinking creature that has you in its maw. One starts to reflect on the nothing that is in the room, and the nothing that is not, to echo Wallace Stevens's famous phrase -- the emergency fire hose in its little glass case, the electrical outlet, the exit with its illuminated sign. The armature of the museum itself -- its alimentary points on entrance and egress, and its machineries of safekeeping -- becomes subtly more conspicuous. What are we doing here anyway?
Then, of course, there is the shift from dark to light, which Creed has slowed to a glacial pace. (Earlier works of the artist have used metronomes set at various rhythms; tempo is an ongoing fascination for Creed, who also performs in a London rock band called Owada.) The effect is stangely pacifying. Even though the lights are turned on and off abruptly, it takes a split second, in this huge space, for the light to be flushed from every corner. Light thus takes on a strangely liquid texture. It's not usually how we think about it. In fact, we don't usually think about it at all.
Madill says, as well, that she has noticed that visitors will talk at full voice when the lights are on, but drop their voices to a whisper when the lights switch off -- a result, perhaps of the way that light and darkness shift our sense of the intimacy of a space. One little boy visiting the gallery came up with one of the most astute observations of all, says Madill. "When the light are on," he said, "the room looks so big. When the lights are off, it gets small."
"The whole world + the work = the whole world," Creed wrote in an enigmatic and characteristically humble conceptual theorem, originally exhibited in 1999. Creed has said that he made the lights turning on and off because he was reluctant to clutter up the world with more stuff -- an attractively ascetic impulse for a commodity-congested age, but hopefully not one all artists will emulate.
Elsewhere, Creed has said that, if he had to have a number instead of a name, he would want to be thought of as a zero. ("You know, it's exactly half way between negative and positive," says Creed, "and since I'd find it very difficult to choose a number, zero would be the number that would cause me the least worry.")
On this proposition, perhaps, both his critics and admirers can agree. But to my mind, this exhibition provoked not so much a "harumph" as an "ah-ha." Or maybe, even, a contemplative "ah-so." Contemporary Art Project Series: Martin Creed continues at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until Feb. 3.