Introduction | Martin Creed's Work | Shortlisted Artists | TATE ETC. article

Creed's creative motivation is spectacularly visualised in his neon sign, Work # 232: the whole world + the work = the whole world. Displayed on the façade of Tate Britain in 2000, the specific context lent by the gallery served to advocate the interpretation that art is inex-tricably part of life. At the same time, however, the equation could imply the redundancy of artistic enterprise, and particularly Creed's, in leaving no impression upon the world. Both sentiments are readily embraced by Creed in making his work, but it is the economy of means symbolised by this equation that he strives to adopt, a goal that is realised when a work is achieved as a result of doing nothing at all.

For the Turner Prize exhibition, Creed has decided to show Work # 227: The lights going on and off. Nothing is added to the space and nothing is taken away, but at intervals of five seconds the gallery is filled with light and then subsequently thrown into darkness. Realising the premise set out in Work # 232, Creed celebrates the mechanics of the everyday, and in manipulating the gallery's existing light fittings he creates a new and unexpected effect. In the context of Tate Britain, an institution displaying a huge variety of objects, this work challenges the traditional methods of museum display and thus the encounter one would normally expect to have in a gallery. Disrupting the norm, allowing and then denying the lights their function, Creed plays with the viewer's sense of space and time. Our negotiation of the gallery is impeded, yet we become more aware of our own visual sensitivity, the actuality of the space and our own actions within it. We are invited to
re-evaluate our relationship to our immediate surroundings, to look again and to question what we are presented with. Responding to the actual condition in which he has been asked to exhibit, Creed exposes rules, conventions and opportunities that are usually overlooked, and in so doing implicates and empowers the viewer.