Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed 9781350009257, 9781350009271, 9781350009264

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Introduction
Statements
Chapter 1: Where in the (art)world is Martin Creed?
Chapter 2: Martin Creed’s ‘workless’ works of art
Chapter 3: S T U P I D A R T
Chapter 4: How not to be an uncollectible artist
Chapter 5: An expression of the essential: Martin Creed and the celebration of the ordinary
Chapter 6: Martin Creed: Conceptual art and more
Chapter 7: The logical and the phenomenological in Martin Creed’s chairs
Chapter 8: Which ‘Martin Creed’?: Or switching from insignificance to significance
Chapter 9: Process art as an aesthetic alternative: Martin Creed’s Glasgow connection
Index of Names and Works
Thematic Index

Citation preview

Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplifies cuttingedge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Comunication, Milano). Forthcoming in the Series: Visual Metaphor and Contemporary Art, by Mark Stall Brandl Faith in Art, by Joseph Masheck Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art, by David Carrier

Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed Edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Elisabeth Schellekens, Davide Dal Sasso and Contributors, 2022 Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Martin Creed, Work No. 227, The lights going on and off, 2000; dimensions variable; 5 seconds on / 5 seconds off. Installation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2007. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0925-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0926-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-0924-0 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors

vi vii

Introduction  Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso 1 Statements  Martin Creed 7 1

Where in the (art)world is Martin Creed?  David Davies 9

2

Martin Creed’s ‘workless’ works of art  K. E. Gover 27

3

S T U P I D A R T  Diarmuid Costello 45

4

How not to be an uncollectible artist  Alessandra Donati and Anna Pirri Valentini 63

5

An expression of the essential: Martin Creed and the celebration of the ordinary  Davide Dal Sasso 83

6

Martin Creed: Conceptual art and more  Elisa Caldarola 105

7

The logical and the phenomenological in Martin Creed’s chairs  Gregory Minissale 121

8

Which ‘Martin Creed’? Or switching from insignificance to significance  Clive Cazeaux 133

9

Process art as an aesthetic alternative: Martin Creed’s Glasgow connection  Diego Mantoan 151

Index of Names and Works Thematic Index

171 175

Illustrations Figures   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Martin Creed, Work No. 200, Half the air in a given space, 199814 Martin Creed, Work No. 850, Runners, 200815 Martin Creed, Work No. 1000, Broccoli prints, 2009–1028 Martin Creed, Work No. 1059, The Scotsman steps, 201132 Martin Creed, Work No. 203, Everything is going to be alright, 199948 Martin Creed, Work No. 83, A protrusion from a wall, 199350 Martin Creed, Work No. 916, 200871 Martin Creed, Work No. 210, Half the air in a given space, 199975 Martin Creed, Work No. 265, 200198 Martin Creed, Work No. 189, Thirty-nine metronomes beating time, one at every speed, 1998106 Martin Creed, Work No. 227, The lights going on and off, 2000108 Martin Creed, Work No. 997, 2009122 Martin Creed, Work No. 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, 1995140 Martin Creed, Work No. 79, Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall, 1993155 Martin Creed, Work No. 651, LOVE, 2007164

Tables   1 Levels of Categorization (on the Left) and Examples of Each (on the Right)123

Contributors Elisa Caldarola is Research Fellow in Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Padua, where she then held a series of postdoctoral positions. She has been a Fulbright visting scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park and a visiting research student at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. She has published on depiction, caricature, the meta-ontology of art, conceptual art, installation art, site-specific art, Ernst H. Gombrich and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Some of her papers have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Ergo, Open Philosophy and Rivista di Estetica. Recently, she published the monograph Filosofia dell’arte contemporanea: installazioni, siti, oggetti (2020). Clive Cazeaux is Professor of Aesthetics in the School of Art and Design at Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, UK. He is the author of Art, Research, Philosophy (2017) and Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida (2007), and the editor of The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2011). His doctoral study – at the Technische Universität, Berlin and at Cardiff University – focused on how recent theories of metaphor in art and science can be informed by Kantian philosophy. With an education spanning art and philosophy, he enjoys being a philosopher in an art school, especially the epistemological questions thrown up by artistic research. His other research interests are the philosophy of metaphor, the relation between art theory and practice, and the place of aesthetics within phenomenology. Diarmuid Costello is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he convenes the MA Philosophy and the Arts and co-directs the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. He is a past chair of the British Society of Aesthetics and a past recipient of Leverhulme Trust and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowships and a major AHRC award. He works across analytic and continental aesthetics with particular interests in the philosophy of photography and post-1960s art history and theory. His On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry appeared with Routledge in 2018, and he has co-edited special issues of the Journal of Art and Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry

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and Art History on the philosophy, theory and criticism of photography. He is currently working on a volume of essays on recent and contemporary artists and a monograph, Aesthetics after Modernism. Davide Dal Sasso is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy. He holds two master’s degrees (philosophy and art history) and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Turin in 2017. He is a member of Labont – Center for Ontology, and Curator of Dialoghi di Estetica (Dialogues of Aesthetics), the philosophy and art section of the magazine Artribune. His research focuses on the relationship between philosophy, aesthetics and contemporary arts, with a particular interest in questions concerning conceptualism, expression and representation, and the role of practices in the arts. He is the editor of the new edition of Ermanno Migliorini, Conceptual Art (2014) and the author of Nel segno dell’essenziale L’ arte dopo il concettualismo (2020) and of The Ground Zero of the Arts: Rules, Processes, Forms (2021). David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is the author of Art as Performance (2004), Aesthetics and Literature (2007) and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (2011), editor of The Thin Red Line (2008) and co-editor of Blade Runner (2015). He is currently completing a monograph defending a non-aestheticist understanding of how artworks differ from other artefacts. He has published widely on general metaphysical and epistemological issues in philosophy of the arts and on philosophical issues relating more narrowly to film, photography, performance, music, dance, theatre, literature and visual art. His doctoral research was on the realism/antirealism debates in metaphysics, and before focusing his research on philosophy of the arts, he published a number of papers on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Alessandra Donati is a lawyer of counsel in Nctm Law Firm, professor of comparative law at the University of Milano-Bicocca and head of the Art Law Programme in the Master in Contemporary Art Markets at NABA (Nuova Accademia Belle Arti, Milan). She is Director of the course ‘Curator of Artist’s Archive’, organized by the Italian Association of Artists’ Archives (AitArt), Director of the legal study series on ‘Comparative Art law’ ESI Publisher and Member of Editorial Board of the International Review Art and Law. She is Deputy Chairman of the Scientific Committee of AitArt and Member of the Scientific Committee of the Center of Research on Cultural Heritage Bi-Pac of Milano-Bicocca and of Careof, an organization for contemporary art research

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in Milan. She is the author of PACTA, Protocols for Authenticity, Cure and Protection of Contemporary Artworks, adopted by MIBACT in July 2017. K. E. Gover is currently a JD candidate at Harvard Law School. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. She was a philosophy professor at Bennington College, Bennington VT from 2005 to 2019. She held a visiting professorship at Columbia University in 2019–20. She has published scholarly articles in International Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the British Journal of Aesthetics, among others. Her art criticism has appeared in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly and the online magazine artcritical. Gover is the author of Art and Authority: Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art (2018). Diego Mantoan is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in contemporary art history at the University of Palermo and holds a PhD magna cum laude from the Freie Universität Berlin. He is among the founding members of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities. Recently invited as a visiting fellow at NYU, he has lectured at Bibliotheca Hertziana, UCL, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Universität Bern, and Galerie Belvedere Vienna. His The Road to Parnassus (2015) was long-listed for the Berger Prize 2016, further editing the volume Paolozzi & Wittgenstein (2019). He was Assistant Director and Jury Secretary at the Venice Biennale, developing art archives for Douglas Gordon (Berlin), Sigmar Polke Estate (Cologne), Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf) and Museo Rimoldi (Cortina). As a public art historian, he collaborates with Rai Radio3, Goethe Institut, Fondazione Teatro La Fenice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Gregory Minissale is Professor of contemporary art and theory at the University of Auckland, and he has been the lead investigator on several art-science projects on eye tracking and art, mental health and art, and politico-aesthetics. He works across the analytical and continental divide in analysing art and visual cultures. He specializes in empirical aesthetics and philosophical approaches to art and is the author of Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism (2021), The Psychology of Contemporary Art (2013, paperback, 2015) and Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Perspectives (2009). He has also published studies on and queer and schizo-analytical approaches that destabilize the arthistorical canon. His next project explores the philosophical and psychological relevance of complexity theory to contemporary artistic practices.

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Contributors

Anna Pirri Valentini is a postdoctoral researcher at LUISS University in Rome and adjunct professor of Art Market Legislation at NABA-Nuova Accademia Belle Arti, Milan. She holds a PhD in analysis and management of cultural heritage from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, defending a thesis on the controls of cultural property export in Italy, France and England. During her PhD, she was Visiting Research Scholar at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, École Normale Supérieure Paris Saclay and the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2015, she graduated cum laude in law at La Sapienza University (Rome) with a thesis on the relationship between law and contemporary visual art, including artists’ contracts. Elisabeth Schellekens is Chair Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University and Vice President of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics. Her research interests include aesthetic normativity, non-perceptual art and non-sensible aesthetic value, aesthetic reasons, conceptual art, moral obligations to art and the relations between aesthetic, moral and cognitive values. Publications include Philosophy and Conceptual Art (2007), Aesthetics & Morality (2009, second edition 2021) and Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? (2009). She is currently working on a manuscript on aesthetic experience as a form of understanding.

Introduction Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso

The main aim of this collection of chapters is to highlight and explore the many philosophical questions and themes raised by the work of British artist Martin Creed. Born in 1968, Creed is one of his generation’s most important and influential artists, winning the Turner Prize in 2001 and the subject of numerous solo exhibitions all over the world. His body of work stands out as one of the foremost contemporary expressions of art’s potential to continually transform itself, incessantly renewing its forms, manifestations and aspirations. More than most other artists, Creed bridges the artistic expectations of the end of the twentieth century – the period during which he received his training and embarked on his career – with the demands of the present century – forging new lines of enquiry at a time of hitherto unprecedented heterogeneity in art. Creed has worked with an impressive array of artistic media throughout his career, including painting, photography, performances, installations, videos, music and more. His unique use of artistic media and techniques represents a strikingly innovative take on both conceptualist and minimalist approaches in conjunction with more traditional artistic practices (such as, for instance, his paintings and sculptures). Immediacy, seriality (as witnessed, for example, in the naming of his pieces after their serial numbers) and a striking economy of means are some of the most prominent qualities which mark his artistic projects. Surprisingly perhaps, Creed is neither a trained philosopher nor even a selfconfessed student of the discipline. Unlike some artists, he has never openly expressed a desire to explore philosophical themes in his work; nor has he claimed to be influenced by any particular scholarly theory or tradition. Nevertheless, his output offers substantial rewards for philosophical inquiry, not least because it raises numerous themes central to aesthetics. For Creed in many respects personifies the idea of a pioneering artistry which seeks to investigate the very artistic impulse itself. Art here becomes a ‘meta-reflexive practice’, leading to pieces which, as they are being created, reveal their own double nature. On the one hand, his works emphasize agency, idea and a tradition

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where the presence of material objects threatens to become almost irrelevant; and, on the other hand, they follow a path on which the material, far from being cast aside in the name of ideas, is again framed as indispensable. This recovery of materials, not obviously reconcilable with conceptualist influences, seems to rest on two assumptions in particular. The first is the idea that art is the de facto analysis of art, where such an analysis cannot be conducted purely intellectually or immaterially. The second concerns the way in which the reintroduction of materiality does not necessarily result in a limitation or loss of artistic freedom. Rather, it increases the range of possibilities and experiential variety which art can offer. In Creed’s work, we find a poetic tension where each piece can be seen to oscillate between idea and action, concept and object, theatrical performance and everyday communication. By allowing indeterminacy to determine the work’s meaning, this balancing act motivates the art-making, turning it into nothing short of its own generative source. Considering the evolution of Creed’s production from the 1980s up until the present day, we can see a continuous oscillation between tradition and innovation in art. Let us consider some examples. Work No. 83 is a fairly small wave-like protrusion emerging from a white wall. Work No. 850 consists of different persons cyclically running around the rooms of a museum. In Work No. 928, we find four tables of different sizes stacked on top of each other. Work No. 2811 consists of a video in which the artist sings about the fact that he is wondering what he is doing. Work No. 370 presents a collection of balls of different colours and sizes placed on the floor. Each work exemplifies five aspects of Creed’s artistic output that seem especially resonant in the context of philosophical aesthetics. First, Creed celebrates the simple things. But this simplicity must not be confused with banality. The attempt to better understand how the simple should be distinguished from the trivial runs through Creed’s entire body of work. Second, Creed’s work raises a range of questions concerning artistic appreciation. Minimizing his own intervention in or manipulation of the media in the creative process, the boundary between art-making and living in the everyday is blurred. Art and life must not – and cannot – be separated. Third, in Creed’s compositions we find elements of both conceptualism and minimalism. Arguably, the redefinition of conceptualism is made possible through the reinvention of the reflective parameters and a return to some degree of materiality. Fourth, this way of doing art – reducing the work to a minimum, celebrating simplicity, renewing the conceptualist approach – casts new light on the values of contemporary art in general. This also means considering Creed’s works for their social value within

Introduction

3

the artistic community and their lawful preservation for the future. Fifth, Creed’s work also stresses the relevance of procedure and process in art-making. This involves experimenting with an endless range of artistic practices and expressive media, such as electric timers and balloons. To make a work is, in a sense, to overcome it. Beyond the things, for Creed, are the works of art. The chapters collected in this volume offer different theoretical explorations all joined in the common goal of shedding light on the philosophical content and implications of Creed’s work. In the opening chapter, David Davies tackles several of these concerns head-on by confronting the question, ‘Where in the (art)world is Martin Creed?’ In his chapter, Davies brings to the fore the many ways in which Creed’s creative approach overlaps with his experiences of everyday life. One of the puzzles Creed presents us with, Davies argues, is the way his compositions often resist interpretation through the usual explanatory strategies. Contrasting an approach broadly based on Arthur C. Danto’s contextualist theory of art with a perspective which sees Creed’s works ‘as part of a broader performance’ (p. 21), Davies offers a new conciliatory route to the interpretation of the work itself, now placed at a ‘metalevel respective to the putative “works” as usually conceived’ (p. 10). On this line, a more far-reaching concept of art as performance, even capable of incorporating Creed’s own statements and interviews as well as his exhibited works, is that which enables Danto’s requirements for something to be art to be met. The artwork urges us to cast doubt on the boundary between art and life, the unique and the everyday. If one of the most recognizable features of Creed’s work is the connection with everyday life, another is his focus on the creative process itself. In fact, Creed often curtails his own creative interventions to the point where the idea of ‘making something’ becomes questionable. By examining the ways in which Creed’s works invite us to reflect on the nuts and bolts of the artistic process, K. E. Gover points to a method relying on a ‘simple, self-referential logic’ featuring ‘unexpected, everyday objects’ (p. 27). But to what extent can everyday objects be understood or indeed appreciated as ‘works’? What is at stake here, Gover explains, is the very nature of what ‘doing art’ or an ‘artwork’ amounts to. As she writes, ‘Martin Creed’s art invites us to stop and reflect on just what we understand artistic labour to entail’ (p. 29). Outlining four senses of ‘artistic labour’, Gover highlights Creed’s role in confirming the workless character of contemporary art, a characteristic signalling how such art ‘may command respect precisely in virtue of its perceived freedom from labour’ (p. 29). For Creed, emphasizing the role of simplicity is a way of directing our attention to the elementary in art. Seeing beyond the everyday function of material objects is

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central to experimentation in contemporary art. In his chapter, Diarmuid Costello examines Creed’s art in the light of the artist’s idea of making ‘stupid art’. What does this mean? Costello foregrounds two aspects in particular that help us answer the question: first, stupidity can have a function in art which it does not have in life in virtue of being context dependent; second, stupidity can be considered a form of artistic intelligence which guides the creative process. These two aspects, Costello argues, ought to be scrutinized further if we are to fully understand Creed’s artistic approach. Making stupid art, in other words, is far from stupid. Rather, to highlight ‘incapacity or diminution of achievement under some description’ is to isolate and treat our human failings with ‘gentle, solicitous indulgence’ and thereby to implore ‘us all to forgive ourselves, just a little bit’ (p. 58). Now, if art is mainly expressed through the manipulation of mundane everyday objects to be found all around us, and this manipulation or artistic intervention is minimal to the extent that the hand of an artist is sometimes scarcely noticeable, a further set of questions arise: How can we determine things like artistic authenticity and originality? Alessandra Donati and Anna Pirri Valentini explore precisely this concern from a legal point of view. Which issues of authentication and copyright are the most pressing in contemporary art or in ‘artworks characterized by a low degree of materiality and a high degree of ease of reproducibility’ (p. 69), and how do they relate to Creed? Two tools stand at our disposal, Donati and Pirri Valentini argue: contracts and certificates of authenticity. The task of protecting the integrity of works such as Creed’s, including installations and ephemeral works, challenges the limits currently set by laws on art. In this sense, objects and materials that traditionally enjoyed merely documentary status potentially become, according to Donati and Pirri Valentini, crucial signifiers and guarantors of artistic intention and status. It is a well-known fact that Creed rejects the suggestion that he is a conceptual artist,1 at least if by ‘conceptual art’ we mean an artistic production that privileges ideas over materials, linguistic analyses over emotional and sentimental responses, rationality over human relationships. Two of the volume’s contributors, Davide Dal Sasso and Elisa Caldarola, address this problem. Dal Sasso examines the possibility that Creed may indeed be considered a conceptualist if we go against the grain and understand conceptualism in terms of a return to the primacy of expressiveness. Dal Sasso investigates Creed’s artistic practice while arguing that the economy of means which characterizes it is pivotal in order to involve the audience. Through his works, Creed expresses the essential celebrating the ordinary, namely he shows the deep relationship among art, human nature and everyday life. In a similar vein, Caldarola explores the possibility that at least

Introduction

5

some of Creed’s works are best understood as both conceptual and installation pieces. Caldarola argues that works like Works Nos. 127, 160, 227 and 1197 are works of conceptual art, because they are presented for intellectual appreciation. She also points out that, at the same time, they are works of installation art which have certain expressive properties that can be appreciated aesthetically. Being a work of conceptual art and being a work of installation art, Caldarola claims, are two compatible properties. Creed’s way of organizing objects and arranging them to forge a relationship between them presents viewers with a distinctly intellectual challenge, in particular in relation to the question of why a piece is structured in the particular way it is. Through a careful analysis of Work No. 997 (consisting of five chairs stacked on top of one another), Gregory Minissale examines the special relationship between rhythm and repetition which characterizes much of Creed’s art where, it is argued, we find ‘a struggle between logical thought, responsible for arranging or classifying objects in an ordered manner, and feelings or sensations which emerges spontaneously from memories’ (p. 125). As a result, Minissale develops a proposal according to which we are to consider Creed’s work on the one hand in terms of categorical structures, seriality, repetition and Wittgensteinian analysis, and, on the other hand, in terms of the ‘embodied, emotional and rhythmic aspects of lived experience’ (p. 127) based on sheer feeling. The central question for Clive Cazeaux brings us back to theme of the relation between Creed the artist and Creed the artworld phenomenon. In the penultimate chapter of the collection, Cazeaux sets out to explore how the simple or the insignificant can become imbued with a philosophical meaning to the extent that it subsequently becomes an object of appreciation and evaluation in its own right. It is in the ‘transition from insignificance to significance’, Cazeaux explains, that a thing becomes ‘an object of attention’ (p. 134), and the artist becomes someone who prompts us to look at that transition process as part and parcel of the artwork. The question about who Martin Creed is, then, cannot be separated from the question about how ‘any ordinarily overlooked detail can be elevated and transformed into an object for close, careful consideration’ (p. 134). If our understanding of Creed’s work is ultimately inseparable from our understanding of who Martin Creed is, then the context provided by the collection’s final chapter sheds light by offering interesting insights about the influence of the Glasgow scene on Creed’s artistic production and identifying a Scottish way of doing process art. Considering some of Creed’s early works, Diego Mantoan outlines a historical account of the main developments in his

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career. By doing so, he stresses the influences of other artists on Creed’s work, primarily by exploring an interesting comparison with Douglas Gordon. If the artistic importance of Martin Creed’s work is beyond question, its philosophical relevance is perhaps less well established. Yet to establish just this is the aim of the present volume. For, as it will be clear to the readers of these chapters, Creed’s work consistently presents itself on the fault lines which exist in the distinctions philosophers also wish to raise up to the light – between thought and feeling, object and subject, presence and absence, concept and action, form and intention, theatrical performance and everyday behaviour. And, not least, with the perennial question of art and non-art. In Creed’s perhaps most famous work, Work No. 227, we can see these distinctions at work: when the lights go on and off, we question established categories and thereby, as the artist himself sees it, enable the very creation of art.

Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank the authors of the chapters collected in the volume. In addition, we should like to extend our gratitude to Colleen Coalter and her colleagues at Bloomsbury Publishing, the art critic and curator Demetrio Paparoni, Pia Capelli and Guy Dammann. Thanks are also due to Martin Creed, Corinne Bannister, Vanessa Cotton and the staff at the Creed studio for their support and for making themselves available. An interview with the artist, conducted in the summer of 2018, was instrumental to the editors’ deeper understanding of Martin Creed’s vision and artistic goals – insights which actively shaped the structure of the current collection. We are also extremely grateful for the statements provided by the artist, one of which is written specifically for this anthology, and which serve as a preface to the chapters. Martin Creed also enabled our authors to cite conversations recorded by the artist and include these as such in their contributions. Lastly, we would like to thank the scholars who agreed to participate in this project with us and share their thoughts and interpretations of the philosophical questions raised by Martin Creed’s work with the wider scholarly community. It was a pleasure to work with you at every turn.

Note 1 Cf. Eccles and Creed 2010: x.

Statements Martin Creed

I don’t know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying. (Martin Creed, 2001) I got myself into a mind trap. And now I’m looking for a mind trap map. I can’t get out of this mind crap. I’m looking for a mind crap gap. (From ‘Mind Trap’, Martin Creed, 2013)

Talking about it There’s only one word for it, and that’s it. Sorry, that’s nine words. No, I mean thirteen. Wait, it’s actually thirty-three words, including this one and this one and this thirty-three. (Counting there’s and it’s as one word, thirty-three as two words, but not counting this sentence.) But what with all of those ifs and buts and ands and its, it’s easy to lose track of it. It’s a mystery. It never ever seems to add up. There’s always more of it. Words can help to get a handle on it, but they can run away from it too and it can get out of hand. They can just make it worse. But they don’t mean it, it’s not their fault. Words can’t help it. (Martin Creed, 2020)

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1

Where in the (art)world is Martin Creed? David Davies

For reasons that I shall try to clarify in the first three sections of this chapter, Martin Creed is perhaps the most puzzling of the many highly creative and imaginative contemporary visual artists to have emerged from British art schools over the past forty-odd years. Creed is puzzling because he seems to elude the kinds of explanatory strategies that aficionados of late-modern and contemporary art employ to counter the scepticism of those who find such art trivial, or inaccessible, or sophomoric. To answer those who claim to find nothing of artistic interest or value in the kinds of objects that they encounter in presentations of contemporary art – dead sharks suspended in tanks, unmade beds, defaced versions of classical prints and childlike drawings of unrecognizable objects1 – we reach – literally or metaphorically – for Arthur Danto’s response, in his 1964 paper ‘The Artworld’, to those of his contemporaries who voiced similar aesthetic doubts about exhibited stacks of Brillo boxes and heaps of brown felt.2 To see such things – or indeed to see anything – as art, Danto famously said, ‘requires something that the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of history of art, an artworld’ (1964: 580). In Section 1, I briefly expand upon Danto’s aphorism and indicate how it might seem to provide an appropriate answer to sceptics about late-modern visual art. In Section 2, I look at some commentators who have offered just such an interpretation of Creed’s works. In Section 3, I consider Creed’s own remarks about his art, remarks that might seem to count against any interpretation or defence of his works that draws in this way on Danto’s dictum. I also raise some philosophical worries about Creed’s remarks. In Section 4, I consider an alternative critical response to Creed that does not take his remarks about his art at face value, but views them as an integral part of an artistic performance in the context of which all of his individual ‘works’ are properly located. This effectively

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reidentifies the ‘work’ towards which a Danto-like approach is to be taken, placing it at a meta-level respective to the putative ‘works’ as usually conceived.

1 Danto elaborates at much greater length upon his 1964 dictum in the opening chapters of his 1981 monograph The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. By this time, the term ‘Artworld’ had been co-opted for different purposes by George Dickie: Dickie (1979) uses Danto’s term ‘Artworld’ to refer to ‘the broad social institution in which works of art have their place’. As Danto pointedly remarks in the preface to his book, Dickie’s sociological conception of the artworld, as a collection of institutionalized frameworks for the presentation-for-appreciation of those different kinds of artefacts we think of as art, fails to preserve Danto’s stress upon the need to locate such artefacts in a historically developing practice of artistic making and of thinking about things made. While Danto’s term ‘Artworld’ may have been repurposed, the sentiments expressed in the dictum, however, endure in his book; and the more general idea that artworks are partly constituted by the relationships in which they stand to an Artworld in Danto’s sense has been further developed, and generalized across the arts, by a number of other writers (see, for example, Binkley 1977; Levinson 1980; Currie 1989; and more recently, Davies 2004). As is clear from the fuller presentation of Danto’s ideas in Transfiguration, his point was not merely, or even primarily, about what is necessary for the appreciation of artworks – for ‘seeing something as art’. It was, more fundamentally, about their very constitution and about the conditions under which they come into existence. The famous thought experiment with which the book begins – featuring a gallery of perceptually indistinguishable red rectangles – presents us with two related challenges: (1) to explain how some entities can fail to be artworks, although perceptually identical to entities that are artworks, and (2) to explain how two perceptually identical artworks can be radically different works, belonging to distinct genres and having distinct artistic meanings. Danto offers two further thought experiments to clarify his views on these matters. First, he discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, viewed as itself a kind of thought experiment that explores the nature of the literary artwork. Ex hypothesi, we have two identically spelled texts, which result from two distinct acts of generation taking place in two very different arthistorical contexts. While some have argued that literary works are individuated

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solely by reference to their texts (see, for example, Goodman and Elgin 1988), Danto, citing Borges’s narrator, points to various respects in which the subject and style of the two inscriptions differ in virtue of the time, place and manner of generation of the respective tokens. These differences, Danto claims, are not external to the works but are among their essential characteristics: ‘the works are in part constituted by their location in the history of literature as well as by their relationships to their authors’ (Danto 1981: 35–6). To further elucidate how art-historical context is partly constitutive of artworks, Danto offers another thought experiment. We are to imagine a work by Picasso, titled Cravat, produced in the heyday of American Abstract Expressionism. The work consists of an ordinary tie covered smoothly with blue paint showing no evidence of brushstrokes. We are also to imagine a child producing a perceptually identical object by identical means – painting a tie of the same manufacture as Picasso’s smoothly with blue paint. The salient question is why (we assume) Cravat is an artwork, whereas the child’s painted tie is not. Rejecting any easy ‘institutional’ answer to this question, Danto suggests that we ask, first, why other artists, such as Cézanne, could not have produced the same work that Picasso did. The answer, in part, is that, as Danto argued in ‘The Artworld’, the ‘concept of art’ only allows for certain things to be created as art at a given time. But, more specifically, Danto claims that Cézanne could not have produced a work with the same subject as Picasso’s work, if, as Danto suggests, the subject of Picasso’s hypothetical work is the fetishization of the brushstroke in Abstract Expressionist art at the time when the work was created: ‘The paint was applied smoothly and carefully, and every trace of brushstroke was purged: it was a repudiation of painterliness (le peinture), of that apotheosis of paintand-brushstroke (or drip) which defined New York painting of the 1950’s as a movement’ (1981: 40). Obviously Cézanne could not have created a painting with this as its subject, but this is not just because he died long before Abstract Expressionism was born. The child, we can assume, lived after the flourishing of Abstract Expressionism, but would not have internalized knowledge of such features of the artworld so as to be able to draw upon them in conferring content on the physical product of his painting activity. It is in virtue of having properties that stand in this kind of relationship to a history of artistic making and theorizing that Picasso’s Cravat is an artwork, and it is the possession of these kinds of properties that, for Danto, is the defining condition of artworks. Thus, as in the examples in the first and third of his thought experiments, there can be indistinguishable objects, one of which possesses properties of this sort – we may call them ‘artworldly properties’ – while the other lacks them. It is this central

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claim of Danto’s that I had in mind earlier when I suggested that he provides us with a ready-made strategy for countering those who are sceptical about the artistic status and artistic value of the kinds of entities that we encounter in exhibitions of late-modern visual art. Among the more noteworthy examples of such scepticism is Tom Wolfe’s diatribe against late-modern visual art in his 1976 book The Painted Word. Wolfe proposes a strong discontinuity between late-modern visual art, starting with Abstract Expressionism, and earlier visual art. While traditional artworks are able to ‘speak for themselves’ and provide a ‘visual reward’ to those who yield to their perceptual advances, late-modern works, so Wolfe claims, serve merely to illustrate contemporary art theory. Danto’s account allows us to reject the idea that any artwork can speak for itself and to maintain that what is crucial to the proper appreciation of both late-modern and earlier visual artworks is grasping those artworldly properties that they possess in virtue of their respective histories of making. In this broad sense, all art is about other art, because all artworks possess such properties in virtue of the relationships in which they stand to a history of artistic making and reflection upon that making. There is then no discontinuity in the nature of those entities that are late-modern artworks, merely a discontinuity in the accessibility of late-modernist artworks as art: it is in virtue of the rich and changing nature of artistic creativity over the past seventy-five years that it takes more effort to grasp the distinctive ‘artworldly’ properties that bear upon the appreciation of particular late-modern works (see Davies 2007). It is by properly locating the dead sharks, unmade beds, and defaced drawings of the YBA’s in their respective subregions of the artworld, and thereby grasping the distinctive artworldly properties that each possesses, that we can properly appreciate the artworks of which they are the vehicles or into whose vehicles they enter. In each case, the artist has internalized the relevant features of the artworld and so can confer upon their works artworldly properties grounded in those features. The same strategy allows us to question the artistic status of much so-called Outsider Art (for an exploration of the latter, see Davies 2009). Like the child’s tie, it might be argued, the artefacts produced by outsider artists, while they might visibly resemble what we take to be unquestioned artworks produced by ‘insider’ artists, fail to possess those artworldly properties that are the distinguishing feature of genuine artworks. The outsider artist’s concern with making things as expressed in the artefacts he or she produces fails to confer such properties on these artefacts since, by definition, the outsider artist has not internalized features of the ‘artworld’ and therefore cannot draw, even if unconsciously, upon

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those features so as to confer upon her product the kinds of artwordly properties distinctive of works of art.

2 Creed’s work, as is well known, has been subject to considerable critical attack (and even physical attack!) from those moved by a Wolfean scepticism towards his output. To give one well-known example, the ceremony held at Tate Britain to award the 2001 Turner Prize to Creed’s The lights going on and off was accompanied by a demonstration outside the gallery by those who took Creed’s work to epitomize everything wrong with the contemporary British artworld. As The Times reported (10/12/01), Outside, a group of artists known as The Stuckists, who campaign for traditional artistry, staged a protest. As guests arrived for the evening affair, they mocked Mr Creed’s work by flashing torches on and off and called for the resignation of the Tate’s director, Sir Nicholas Serota. Charles Thomson, a co-founder of The Stuckists, said: ‘It has gone beyond a joke . . . the only people who cannot see how ridiculous this whole thing is are the organisers themselves.’ Mr Thomson said Mr Creed’s work exuded ‘outstanding stupidity’.

The works for which Creed first became known, created in the early to mid1990s, consisted in a set of typed instructions, on a sheet of A4 paper, for the carrying out of a certain set of operations involving everyday materials. As with all of his creations, the works were numbered by reference to the relative time of their creation and could not be exhibited or sold without the execution of the instructions. In many cases, the instructions were multiply executed in slightly different ways or using slightly different materials that nonetheless complied with the instructions. Some representative examples are the following: Work No. 74: As many one-inch squares as are necessary are cut from oneinch masking tape and piled up, adhesive side down, to form an inch cubic stack. Work No. 79: Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall. Work No. 81: A one-inch cube of masking tape in the middle of every wall in a building.

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Work No. 88: A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball. Work No. 100: On a tiled floor, in an awkward place, a cubic stack of tiles built on top of one of the existing tiles. Work No. 102: A protrusion from a wall. Work No. 115: A doorstop fixed to a floor to let a door open only 45 degrees. Work No. 140: A sheet of A4 paper torn up. Work No. 188: Two protrusions from a wall. Other works, superficially similar, seem to get their point not from the instructions themselves but from the specific manner in which these instructions are satisfied by an object or an installation. One of the best-known examples is Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space, a specification which was met, when the work was exhibited, by filling the room with balloons (see Figure 1). The work for which he won the Turner Prize and aroused the ire of the Stuckists, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, returns to the more minimal themes, with no specification as to how often the lights perform in accordance with the description. Creed (Durland 2004) has said that, in different instantiations of this piece, the time interval is determined by how long it will take a receiver to pass through the room where the work is installed – something that will in turn depend upon whether the room is empty of other works – and thus how frequently the lights must go on and off in order for this to be noticeable to the receiver.

Figure 1  Martin Creed, Work No. 200, Half the air in a given space, 1998; white balloons, multiple parts, each balloon 12 in. / 30.5 cm diameter; overall dimensions variable. Installation at Galerie Analix and L Polla, Geneva, Switzerland, 1998. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

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These works seem to represent a departure from the apparent minimalism of his earlier works, and the same applies to another much discussed work, Work No. 850 (see Figure 2), catalogued with the additional title ‘Runners’ on Creed’s website and executed within the confines of Tate Britain in 2008. The instructions in this case are for a (usually different) person to run as fast as they can every thirty seconds through the gallery. Each run is followed by an equivalent pause. Other works combine Creed’s interest in the visual with his work as a musician. For example, Work No. 409, For elevator and choir, first exhibited at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2006, involves an elevator one’s journey in which is accompanied by the voices of the Birmingham choir Ex Cathedra, rising as the lift rises and descending as it falls. Finally, there are pieces like Work No. 232 (1999), a large neon sign with the words ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’ spanning the façade of Tate Britain. This slogan appeared in much less flamboyant fashion on two earlier pieces by Creed.

Figure 2  Martin Creed, Work No. 850, Runners, 2008; dimensions variable. Installation at Tate Britain, London UK, 2008. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/ Artimage 2021. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

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One might think that Creed’s pieces are prime examples of artworks that can be ‘seen’ as such only if one locates the art objects in a context of artistic making and artistic theorizing upon which Creed draws in order to confer upon them specific ‘artworldly’ properties partly constitutive of the works for which they are the vehicles. Adopting the ‘Danto’ strategy outlined in Section 1, we might seek to supplement the minimal nature of the perceptually appreciable features of these art objects by ascribing to them artworldly properties deriving from Creed’s allusions to the works of other contemporary or earlier artists, comments on those works, or exploitation of both the content and the creative techniques of earlier artists. It might then be claimed that the ‘subject’ or ‘meaning’ of Creed’s works makes essential reference to these aspects of the ‘artworld’ context in which he is working just as was the case with Picasso’s hypothetical Cravat.​ Some commentators on Creed have assumed that this is indeed the right way to ‘get’ his pieces and to answer the criticisms of those with Stuckist inclinations. A striking example of this strategy is a 2007 article in The New York Times by Roberta Smith. I shall cite Smith’s article at some length, highlighting those passages in which the strategy is employed: Mr. Creed belongs to a continuum that begins with the Dada artists, yet he displays a lot of formalist savvy. He is a very late Conceptualist with no bias against objects, a devotee of the rarefied art-in-the-street tendency of Situationism whose favorite situation seems to be the white cube of the gallery. He has a Minimalist’s sense of scale, color and unhampered space, but his fabrication is often very low-tech, which means that Minimalism’s use of repetition, progressions and intervals can turn odd. A possible homage to Donald Judd’s stack sculptures consists of five black bean-bag chairs stacked one on the other, held up by their own weight in a slouching, lumpen yet vertical form that Judd would probably have dismissed as too figurative. . . . Mr. Creed seems to build deliberately on avant-garde precedents both to comment on them and to flaunt the idea of originality. His contribution to the tradition of the modernist monochrome involves extensive use of the bright-tofluorescent highlighter and marker pens. . . . A tiny cube made of one-inch-square pieces of masking tape might be a work by Tom Friedman, but it is more interesting as a thumbnail sketch (literally) of a plain yet imposing 8-foot-high stack of 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood. Similarly a floor piece made of 110 balls – many of them colorful, from marbles to beach balls – can bring to mind Jeff Koons and Sylvie Fleury, but it has an obvious cheapness that neither of those artists would allow. The backdrop of this piece is a wall painting reminiscent of the work of Sol Lewitt, except that

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Mr. Creed’s is made with a common paint-roller and based on one of his own doodlelike drawings.

In a similar vein, Jonathan Jones (2008), in a commentary on Work No. 850 (the ‘running’ piece), remarks rather archly that one might think – in spite of the lack of any evidence in Creed’s pronouncements on the work – that the piece is a reference, for the cognoscenti, to a scene in Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part: The artist explains that he was inspired to create it after a visit to see the mummified corpses of Palermo’s 19th century elite, when time was rushed and he had to run past the bodies. Well, maybe, but I can’t help wondering if he was also inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à Part in which the heroes run the length of the great gallery in the Louvre where French history paintings are displayed. . . The Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain is very similar to the hall in the Louvre, in both cases the runners cover the length of the room, and while Creed’s runners pass a great British painting by Turner, Godard’s characters sprint past David’s Oath of the Horatii.

Consider, finally, the following passage from the Tate Britain web page (Tate Britain 2001) celebrating Creed as the winner of the 2001 Turner Prize: A central theme of Creed’s work is the nature of art itself, the relationship between art and reality, art and life, a preoccupation of much modern art, and he explores the boundaries in interesting and unsettling ways. His Work No. 143, installed on the façade of Tate Britain in 2000 [as Work No. 232], set out in blue neon the equation ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’. This has been interpreted in a number of ways, one of which is as an assertion of the necessity of art as an integral part of the world and of life. On the other hand it could suggest that art makes no difference or even does not exist. This questioning comes from deep within the artist who has said ‘I don’t think of myself as an artist’ and suggests the intensity of his reappraisal of what art is.

3 The ‘puzzling nature’ of Creed’s work to which I alluded in my opening paragraph emerges when we place such interpretations in the wider context of his own descriptions of his work and of its significance. Consider, first, the passage from the Tate Britain website just cited. There is absolutely no doubt that Creed’s works raise ontological questions. In particular, they raise questions

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about when we have an instance of one of his works. Not, presumably, when we have an object or event that as a matter of fact complies with the instructions. We would surely also require at least that the object or event complies as a result of someone following the instructions. But is this sufficient, or must the following of the instructions be in some way authorized by Creed? For example, if I now, in accordance with Creed’s instructions for Work No.88 but without any communications directly with the artist, crumble a sheet of A4 paper into a ball, is this an instance of Work No. 88? And is Creed the one who judges when something is to count as an instance or an installation of one of his works, as was presumably the case with the installation of Work No. 81 in the offices of the London firm, Starkmann Ltd, in 1993? But the Tate’s attempt to present Creed’s works as deeply concerned with philosophical questions about the nature of art, and the subsequent reading of his claim that he does not think of himself as an artist as an expression of such concerns, sits uncomfortably with Creed’s less equivocal pronouncements on such matters, pronouncements which suggest a much more literal reading of that claim. In the first place, he seems to completely eschew any interest in the nature of art, delegating such questions to critics and theorists and espousing only what seems to be a rather naive form of institutionalism. In a 2008 interview about Work No. 850, he states: Artists do not make art. Artists make things, objects, whatever it may be, paintings, sculptures . . . they make stupid objects which get used as art by human beings. . . I’m actually not the person to ask about whether this is art, because it’s not me who decides if something is art or not . . . the person asking that question can decide for themselves . . . the fact that certain objects are used and treated as art by the general world that we live in . . . art’s just a word.3

Again in response to an interviewer who asks, ‘why do some people find your work so hard?’, he responds that maybe this is because it is so easy. Taking The lights going on and off as an example, he remarks that people find this work difficult if they think there is more to it than making something happen in a room without putting something into it. He then remarks, ‘I think that art is anything that people collectively think is art’ (Scott 2014). There is no doubt that these observations express opinions about what makes something art, but they do so in a way that seems to completely distance such matters from what Creed takes himself to be doing in his own creative activity. There is no suggestion here that either Work No. 850 or Work No. 227 is intended to raise questions about the nature of art, or to present challenges to

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existing answers to those questions. On the contrary, Creed’s remarks express a disinterest in engaging with such questions, either in his work or in discussions of his work. As for the attempts of critics like Roberta Smith to ascribe a rich assortment of artworldly properties to Creed’s oeuvre, his own pronouncements are even less accommodating. He explicitly repudiates all attempts to situate the interest of his work in the context of the contemporary artworld, or to present him, as Smith so fulsomely does, as self-consciously navigating the sea of ‘isms’ of contemporary art theory. Consider, for example, the following representative passages: I don’t agree that I am a conceptual artist. Sometimes I get called a conceptual artist, but I don’t believe in conceptual art, you know, in the sense that I cannot separate ideas from feelings from what I can see or sense – everything is ‘conceptual’ or not, senseless or sense full.4 I think if specialized knowledge is needed for something then I think it’s not good enough. That’s what I think about my work – if someone feels like they have to know something about it, something specialized, other than just being a human being, I think I need to work harder. I would be happy if my work gives someone some fun.5 I don’t strive for minimalism. It’s not what I want. It’s just that I end up with a black & white thing because I can’t choose a colour, or I end up with an empty room because I don’t believe in anything enough to put all my faith in it and place it in the middle of a room and say ‘Hey, look at this’. Because doing an exhibition is like that, like saying ‘Hey, look at this, isn’t it great!’6 I want the relationship to be between the work and the rest of the world . . . but as soon as you put two works together there begins to be a relationship between them, and then when there’s three or four or more of them, then before you know it the interrelationships between the works have multiplied, and that can be wanky, like a band playing across the stage to each other and not out at the people who have come to see them.7

If we ask what does motivate his production of works that seem to critics like Smith to be such obvious explorations of minimalist and conceptualist themes, his own descriptions of his artistic activity focus on his sheer love of making things out of ordinary materials. What interests him, he maintains, is only the process of fabrication, something he fears is not adequately manifest in the resulting product: The process is very important. In fact, that is all there really is. For me it is just about trying to make things, trying to do things. I thought that the problem with some of the sculptures, or some of the visual works, that I was making, was that

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Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed all you saw was the end result. You couldn’t really see what happened. That got me to working more and more on music and film and theatrical works. Where it gets made in front of you while you’re watching or listening.8 I find it difficult to describe my visual work because I don’t really know what it looks like. I just know that I want to do things.9 The way that things look comes about as the result of a process of one thing leading to another, and maybe that is the most important thing. You never know what you are going to get out of anything. The result is often a failure in terms of what you might have hoped for. Quite the opposite of a goal being achieved or anything like that. But that is probably true of most things. I think the worst type of work maybe comes when you’ve got some idea of . . . some pre-judgement . . . and so I think the best way to work is to try to be kind of open to whatever may come, to be as open as you can to let things happen while you are working, and not to have some kind of goal in mind. To be hopeless.10

Taken at face value, these remarks seem ill-fitting for one to whom the Danto strategy would be appropriate. Unlike the kinds of pronouncements characteristic of Hirst and the Chapman Brothers, there is no reference here to the works of other artists (pace Roberta Smith), or to theoretical positions within the artworld such as minimalism and conceptualism, and thus no indication as to how we should delimit the subregion of the ‘artworld’ in which the putative artworldly properties of Creed’s works might be grounded. Contrary to the claims of the Tate website, there seems to be no engagement in, and no interest in engagement in, explorations of philosophical issues about the nature of art. There is simply an expressed interest in the process of working with materials, the kind of thing we might expect to hear from an outsider but not from one who meets Danto’s criteria for being an artist. There are also internal puzzles in Creed’s remarks. His claim that ‘art is anything that people collectively think is art’ seems to be a social variant on Donald Judd’s assertion that ‘it’s art if someone calls it art’ and, so read, is open to parallel objections. Talk of ‘calling something art’ or ‘thinking that something is art’ seem to presuppose, for its intelligibility, a prior conception of what it is for something to be art, lacking which we have no grip on what ‘calling something art’ or ‘thinking something is art’ involves. A more serious question is how we can reconcile (a) Creed’s claim that what matters for him in his art is the process of making, something that the finished visual artwork rarely makes manifest to the viewer, with (b) his claim that his works should (to echo Wolfe) ‘speak for themselves’ – ‘I want what I want to say to go without saying’ (Coombes 2001) – and should require no knowledge on the part of the receiver.

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One way to resolve this apparent conflict is to insist upon a separation between what motivates Creed as an artist – the intrinsic rewards of engaging in different processes of making things – and what his works offer to the receiver – something that the receiver will find engaging even though she knows nothing of the formative process or of anything other than the manifest properties of the art object. But if we interpret Creed’s remarks in this way, then they can bring no solace to those theorists who have argued that the artwork itself, as the object of critical and appreciative attention, is to be identified with or is partly constituted by the kind of process whereby the finished art object is produced. Such theorists include the following: Richard Wollheim (1980), who talks of criticism as ‘retrieval’, where retrieval is ‘the reconstruction of the creative process’, thought of as ‘something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself ’ (185); Denis Dutton (1979), who also stresses that the appreciation of an art object must involve grasping it both as ‘a visual, verbal, or aural surface’ (29) and as a performance: ‘works of art represent the ways in which artists solve problems, overcome obstacles, make do with available materials’ (24); and Gregory Currie (1989) and myself (2004), who have defended the idea that the work of art, as the object of critical and appreciative attention, is an action type or an action token, respectively. Creed, if read in the way just considered, seems, rather, to be identifying the object of critical and appreciative attention with the finished product, denuded of both the process that produced it and any body of theory in terms of which to interpret it. The concept of the appreciable work here seems to be the bare thing itself, the very antithesis of the Danto-esque work clothed in its array of artworldly properties.

4 The forgoing, however, is not the preferred critical strategy on the part of those critics and commentators who seem to be aware of the difficulties sketched earlier in reconciling the adoption of the Danto strategy to Creed’s works with Creed’s own comments on those works. The preferred strategy, rather, has been to treat Creed’s expressed pronouncements as part of a broader performance, and to see this broader performance, incorporating both the verbal pronouncements and the exhibited works, as the means whereby Creed satisfies Danto’s requirements for being art. This interpretive strategy is apparent in a number of commentators, and is perhaps assumed in the passage from the Tate website cited earlier. Consider, for example, the following comparison between Creed

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and the musician David Byrne in a 2011 piece in The Guardian International Edition by Paul Morley: Creed is also a self-conscious showman, if a more down-to-earth fantasist, who uses the gallery as a theatre. He happens to work as an artist in a world that is quite small and enclosed, but which gets the sort of coverage that enables him to develop and maintain himself as a character. This character, possibly ultimately the work of art itself, giving visible and audible permanence to fleeting, mysterious, sometimes ordinary thoughts, is somewhere mixed in with being a comedian, philosopher, composer, writer, archivist, entertainer, craftsman and brand manager.

A more recent piece (2016) by Roberta Smith suggests a similar analysis: A jack of all mediums, including music, he is part court jester, part circus master, part philosopher and also something of a Luddite. At 47, he has spent the past two decades setting off subversive vibrations along the fine lines between art and life, art and silliness, and art and provocation, melding Conceptual Art smarts and Minimalist literal-mindedness. Simplicity, modesty and obviousness appear to be his bywords, all the better to disturb the assumptions of preciousness, skill and aloofness basic to art.

This way of interpreting what Creed is about has some definite explanatory virtues. For example, it might help to make sense of some of the qualities of Creed’s interviews, and might also suggest that others are fellow collaborators in his ‘performance’. Consider, for example, his interview with Chris Coombes for Tate Magazine on being nominated for the Turner Prize: To me there’s a danger in, eh, trusting what you’ve done so, you know, let’s say you do and make some things and maybe . . . let’s say some people buy them and some people like them and, ehm you know, I think that there’s a, eh . . . there’s a natural, there’s sort of a natural inclination to kind of believe that therefore those works or those ideas are . . . ehm, are good. . . . And then it’s tempting to accept them and make something in relation to something you’ve already made, and so on and so on and, eh, I don’t know, you know, I don’t think that’s good. . . I don’t like that. . . I think maybe it’s better to try to get back to the beginning . . . to try to start again. . . I mean I don’t find it really very helpful in trying to make things to think about past things. That’s why I don’t like, that’s why I think I’ve sometimes found it difficult to show a number of works together. Because most of the kinds of things I’ve done have tended to be a bit big singular or small but big or small but singular . . . eh, and eh . . . and ehm, eh the problem . . . the problem is for me to . . . you know? You see, I want the work to, ehm. . .

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I want the relationship to be between the work and the rest of the world . . . but as soon as you put two works together there begins to be a relationship between them, and then when there’s three or four or more of them, then before you know it the interrelationships between the works have multiplied, and that can be wanky, like a band playing across the stage to each other and not out at the people who have come to see them.11

The appearance conveyed in this interview that Creed lacks any of the theoretical sophistication one is accustomed to find in interviews by contemporary artists who have learned their trade in art school, enhanced by the apparently cruel transcriptions of every hesitation, stumble and misstatement by Creed in obvious violation of the usual salubrification of artistic pronouncements by the critical press, is disconcerting. But, on the interpretive hypothesis currently under consideration, this can be viewed as merely part of the performance. Creed, playing the part of the insider’s ‘outsider’, is engaged in a performance in which interviewers and critics can also play their part by ascribing the usual kind of artworldly properties to the works even if such ascriptions are belied by other aspects of the overall performance. But, if Creed’s apparent artworld naivety is really just part of a performance, it would be part of a truly remarkable performance, given the tone not only of the transcribed interviews but also of the actual filmed interviews.

5 In this chapter, I have identified a puzzle in grasping the artistic significance and value of Creed’s work, but I do not claim to have resolved that puzzle. As I suggested earlier, if we take Creed’s pronouncements about his work at face value, it is difficult to justify the adoption of the standard interpretive strategy for making artistic sense of the art objects that serve as vehicles for late-modern art. If, on the other hand, we take his pronouncements to be merely part of a larger artistic performance that also includes his apparent ‘works’, we can indeed bring him under this interpretive strategy, but we seem to require a larger covert ‘conspiracy’ in which other artists and critics play their complementary parts. While the ingenuity and intelligence of Creed’s works do not make the first option – Creed as almost an ‘outsider’ artist whose interest is in making things out of everyday materials – an attractive one, the alternative – Creed as a faux ‘outsider’ taking part in a complex performance that makes fun of some of the pretensions of the artworld – is not very attractive either. Of course, if

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we ascend one meta-level higher, we might understand Creed as an artist who wishes to present us with precisely these difficult alternatives. In that case, Tate Britain would have been quite correct in saying that Creed seeks to challenge our understandings of the nature of art, but this is not a conclusion I would feel confident in endorsing.

Notes 1 The references here are to Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the Chapman Brothers’s defaced versions of a set of prints of Goya’s Disasters of War, and Luc Tuymans’s Recherches. 2 The references are to series of works by Andy Warhol and Robert Barry. 3 Tate Britain (2008). Original quote: ‘because it’s not me who decides if something is art or not . . . the person asking that question can decide for themselves . . . or should, you know, question in general the fact that certain objects are used and treated as art by the general world that we live in . . . art’s just a word.’ 4 Durland (2004). Original quote: ‘I don’t agree that I am a conceptual artist. Sometimes I get called a conceptual artist, but I don’t believe in conceptual art, you know, in the sense that all art, all work is “conceptual” or not.’ 5 Younis (2012). 6 Durland (2004). Original quote: ‘I don’t strive for minimalism. It’s not what I am striving for or seeking. It’s just that I end up with a white thing because I can’t decide what colour to use, or I end up with an empty room because I don’t believe in anything enough to put all my faith in it and place it in the middle of the room and say, “Hey look at this.”’ 7 Coombes (2001). Original quote: ‘I want the relationship to be between the work and the world . . . but as soon as you put two things together there begins to be a relationship between them, and then when there’s three or four or more of them, then before you know it there’s a big kind of . . . eh, narrative within the work.’ 8 Sans (2004). Original quote: ‘For me the process is very important. In fact, the process is all that there is. For me it is just about trying to make things, to do things. The problem with some of the sculptures, or some of the visual works, was that all you saw was the end result.’ 9 Sans (2004). 10 Durland (2004). Original quote: ‘Basically the work ends up the way it does through the process. . . . The way that the work looks and the nature of the work is the result of the process, and for me, that is the most important thing in my work, the process. The result is often a failure. But I think that is probably true of most work. I think the worst type of work usually comes from trying, when you’ve got some idea of .

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. . I think the best way to work is to be kind of open to whatever may come, to be as open as you can to let things happen while you are working, and not have some kind of goal in mind.’ 11 Original quote: ‘I want the relationship to be between the work and the world . . . but as soon as you put two things together there begins to be a relationship between them, and then when there’s three or four or more of them, then before you know it there’s a big kind of . . . eh, narrative within the work, within the work . . . and I think that . . . I don’t know.’

References Binkley, T. (1977), ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35: 265–77. Coombes, C. (2001), ‘Interview with Martin Creed’, Tate Magazine, 27. Available online: http://www​.martincreed​.com​/site​/words​/chris​-coombes​-interview (accessed 20 April 2018). Creed, M. (2018), ‘Martin Creed’, Available online: www​.martincreed​.com​/site (accessed 20 April 2018). Currie, G. (1989), An ontology of Art, New York: St Martin’s Press. Danto, A. (1964), ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61: 571–84. Danto, A. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davies, D. (2004), Art as Performance, Oxford: Blackwell. Davies, D. (2007), ‘Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late-Modern Visual Art’, in P. Goldie and E. Schellekens (eds), Philosophy and Conceptual Art, 138–56, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, D. (2009), ‘On the Very Idea of “Outsider Art”’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (1): 25–41. Dickie, G. (1979), ‘What is Art?: An Institutional Analysis’, in W. E. Kennick (ed.), Art and Philosophy, 82–94, New York: St Martin’s. Durland, C. (2004), ‘Martin Creed: Twenty (More) Questions’, Wrong Times, 1. Available online: http://www​.martincreed​.com​/site​/words​/questions​-by​-corinna​ -durland (accessed 20 April 2018). Dutton, D. (1979), ‘Artistic Crimes: The Problem of Forgery in the Arts’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 19 (4): 304–14. Goodman, N. and C. Z. Elgin (1988), Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, London: Routledge. Jones, J. (2008), ‘Reviewing Martin Creed with the Benefit of Reflection’, The Guardian, 30. Available online: www​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​/jonathanjonesblog​/2008​/ jul​/30​/martincreed (accessed 20 April 18). Levinson, J. (1980), “What a Musical Work Is’, Journal of Philosophy, 77: 5–28.

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Morley, P. (2011), The Guardian International Edition, 30 January 2011. Available online: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/video​/2011​/jan​/30​/martin​-creed​-paul​ -morley (accessed 20 April 2018). Sans, J. (2004), ‘Blow and Suck: Martin Creed Interviewed by Jérôme Sans’, Palais de Tokyo / Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2004, 76. Available online: http://www​.martincreed​ .com​/site​/words​/jerome​-sans​-interview (accessed 20 April 2018). Scott, C. (2014), ‘Interview with Martin Creed’, Show Studio ‘In your face’. Available online: https://showstudio​.com​/project​/in​_your​_face​_interviews​/martin​_creed (accessed 20April 2018). Smith, R. (2007), ‘The Bearable Lightness of Martin Creed’, New York Times, 7 July 2007. Available online: https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/07​/13​/arts​/design​/13cree​.html​ ?pagewanted​=all (accessed 20 April 2018). Smith, R. (2016), ‘Martin Creed’s Anti-Spectacle at the Park Avenue Armory’, New York Times 9 June 2016. Available online: https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/06​/10​/arts​/ design​/review​-martin​-creeds​-anti​-spectacle- at​-the​-park​-avenue​-armory​.htm​l?​_r=0 (accessed 20 April 2018). Tate Britain (2001), ‘Webpage on Martin Creed as the Winner of the 2001 Turner Prize’, Available online: http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/whats​-on​/tate​-britain​/exhibition​/turner​ -prize​-2001 (accessed 20 April 2018). Tate Britain (2008), ‘Tateshots: Video Interview on Work No. 850’, Available online: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-U8Fl45​-DFw (accessed 20/04/18). Wolfe, T. (1976), The Painted Word, New York: Bantam. Wollheim, R. (1980), ‘Criticism as Retrieval’, in Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn, 185–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Younis, R. (2012), ‘Interview with Martin Creed’, Loud & Quiet Magazine, August 2012. Available online: http://www​.martincreed​.com​/site​/words​/reef​-younis​-loud​-quiet​ -july​-2012 (accessed 20April 2018)

2

Martin Creed’s ‘workless’ works of art K. E. Gover

1 Martin Creed’s Work No. 1000: Broccoli prints (2009–10) consists of 1,000 framed square cards, each bearing a brightly coloured print made from a broccoli stalk. The installation of these prints at Creed’s Hayward Gallery retrospective filled a large white wall, towering over viewers like an enchanted forest made of Smarties-coloured trees. The broccoli prints exemplify what is so seductive and yet infuriating about Creed’s art. As with many of his other works, it is made according to a simple, self-referential logic (Work No. 1000 consists of 1,000 prints) and features unexpected, everyday objects. The arboreal shapes share a formal similarity, which provides visual unity even as each print appears to have been made using a different stalk. Like Damien Hirst’s spot paintings that came a decade before, they form a vast matrix of candy colours that are both pleasing to look at and at the same time kind of sinister. The dark subtext of what is ostensibly a whimsical display is generated by both the sheer volume of the prints, with their totalizing effect on the wall, and the forced gaiety of the bright palette and silly subject matter. The fact that the broccoli prints are nakedly that – prints made from bisected broccoli stalks dipped in pretty paint – exemplifies the absurd, inventive simplicity of Creed’s approach to making artworks (see Figure 3). While in some respects Work No. 1000 is typical of Creed’s artistic output, he is perhaps most famous for those works whose constitutive objects are so slight, in which the gesture is so minimal that they seem like pretentious inside jokes, or (as his detractors would have it) passive-aggressive insults. In other words, he is best known for works of art that make conspicuous the absence of an artwork in the usual sense, and which anticipate their rejection as such. Work No. 79, Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a

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Figure 3  Martin Creed, Work No. 1000, Broccoli prints, 2009–10; various paints on card; 1,000 parts, each 7.1 x 7.1 in. / 18 x 18 cm. Installation view at Casino Luxembourg. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Andrew Smart, AC Cooper LTD.

wall (1993), which is exactly what its subtitle says, turns an object usually used for affixing an artwork to the wall into the artwork itself, as does Work No. 54, Four paintings (1990–2000). Work No. 960 (2008) consists of a row of cactuses in pots of graduated sizes; Work No. 233 (2000) is a framed piece of paper with the words ‘fuck off ’ in tiny print. Work No. 127, The lights going on and off (1995), which won the Turner prize in 2001, consists of no tangible object at all, but simply the lights turning on and off in the gallery. As if inviting the judgement that his work is trash, Work No. 88 (1995) consists of a piece of white A4 paper crumpled into a ball. Since most of us have probably made objects that are visually indistinguishable from Work No. 88, it invites the hackneyed question of just what gives Creed the Midas-like ability to turn what, for the rest of us, is literally garbage into a work of art. The centrality of common, everyday objects in Martin Creed’s art – broccoli, balloons, crumpled paper – represents another sense in which his work could be described as a double-edged sword, earning Creed praise for his ‘selfless’, ‘democratic’ approach to art-making, on the one hand, as well as the inevitable derision for being an emperor-has-no-clothes charlatan, on the other.1 No matter how one responds to Creed – and his work demands a response – it practically forces the viewer to take a position on it as art. Creed is like Jeff Koons in this respect: the fact that he has been enthusiastically embraced by the art establishment invites sceptics to regard his work as a synecdoche for all

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that is wrong with contemporary art and artists generally. On the other hand, critics who suggest that Creed is not a real artist because his works are just made from everyday objects risk exposing themselves as uneducated in the historical and theoretical developments in Western art that have led us to this moment. That is to say, whichever position one takes with respect to the value of Creed’s artistic output, one becomes vulnerable to criticism, as either an apologist of the contemporary art establishment and its orthodoxies or an unenlightened viewer, ignorant of the theoretical context that provides the conceptual tools for appreciating his work. My aim in this chapter is not to resolve the question of whether Creed deserves his acclaim. Rather, I have the more modest aim of elucidating some of the questions, peripheral to the one of worth and quality, that Creed’s work engages. The primary question that I see tacitly operating in Martin Creed’s artwork is the question of whether, to what extent, and in what way, they are ‘works’, and hence by extension in what way Creed’s artistic activity can be understood as ‘work’. We tend to use the term ‘artwork’ unthinkingly as a generic term for any object or performance indexed as fine art. Martin Creed’s art invites us to stop and reflect on just what we understand artistic labour to entail. This question is salient because contemporary art is often seen as having been liberated from the concept of work. As curator and New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni says in the epigram that opens this chapter, and which originally appears in a piece that he wrote on Creed, contemporary art’s ‘birth’ is marked by the absence of labour: The birth of contemporary art corresponds to a process of emancipation from the concepts of work and labour. Contemporary art is based on the conviction that the value of the artwork is separate from – or inversely proportional to – the quantity of labour required to produce it.2

It is unclear whether the pun there is intentional, though the notion of a labourless birth is certainly suggestive. Gioni claims that a, if not the, constitutive feature of contemporary art is its inversion of previously held assumptions about the nature and value of labour in the creation of artworks. In this new regime, artists not only do not have to work hard in order to make important works of art, but the ‘workless’ work of art may command respect precisely in virtue of its perceived freedom from labour. If true, then ‘artworks’ are anachronistically and misleadingly named as such. They don’t require work to make, and they do not appear to do any work in return. Gioni’s claim gives rise to a philosophical question concerning the nature of the connection between the value of an

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artwork (and I take it that Gioni means a work’s aesthetic value, broadly speaking, rather than its economic or art-historical value) and the labour that was required to make it. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a definitive answer to that question, I want to make a beginning by examining this question in light of Martin Creed’s provocatively ‘workless’ artworks. This brings us to two observations: first, it is not exactly clear what we mean by artistic labour. As I explain in the following text, there are different conceptions of what properly counts as the ‘work’ involved in creating the artwork. An artist may reject one form of artistic labour only to replace it with another kind. Second, the question of what artistic labour entails is not primarily empirical: it is not a matter of peering into artists’ studios and observing what they do. Rather, it is a normative one, bound up with the contested questions of what an artist should be, what he or she represents in our culture (visionary, rebel, parasite, jester, martyr, charlatan) and why they deserve the cultural capital associated with our most prestigious art institutions.3 Hence, the question that animates this chapter is not, ‘does Martin Creed work to make his works?’, but ‘what does Martin Creed’s art reveal to us about the meaning and value of artistic labor?’ In what follows, I show how Creed’s work speaks to and, at the same time, challenges various conceptions of artistic ‘work’. I argue, pace Gioni, that contemporary art is not really liberated from that concept as a regulative ideal and that it is still beholden to the concept of artistic labour. It may reject certain ideas about what form that labour takes, but the expectation that artists do some kind of work to make their works is stubbornly persistent. Martin Creed is a particularly interesting case to discuss in light of the concept of artistic labour because he actively engages with it as a theme and as a problem in his work. One way this manifests itself is in the fact that commentators frequently describe his artworks as ‘democratic’, presumably because it often seems that anyone could make them. But this description of his oeuvre, which is connected to the idea that it is freed from labour, is misleading. It offers an idealized reading of Creed’s work in abstraction from the rarefied, elite context in which it circulates. I argue that we cannot appreciate the extent to which Creed’s work engages with the question of artistic labour and its connection to aesthetic value unless we take this social context into account. This brings me to a second related point. The philosophy of art tends to maintain careful boundaries between the kinds of questions that it wants to ask of artworks and the other dimensions in which they accrue significance and value, be it social, cultural, economic or historical.4 Although ‘purely’ philosophical inquiries can be very illuminating, they run the risk of overlooking essential

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factors that contribute to any robust, conceptually viable analysis. As I show in the analysis that follows, our evaluation of the frequently made claim that Creed’s work is ‘democratic’, and that it is liberated from the norm of artistic labour, must take into account the socio-economic context in which it circulates and acquires significance, attention and prestige.

2 The notion that contemporary artists do not have to work to make their works can mean different things. As we have noted, Martin Creed’s artworks invite the observation, for some laudatory, for others a reproach, that they do not require specialized skill or effort to make. And yet a salient feature of his corpus is that each work is named according to the formula ‘Work No. XX’, and assigned a number in the order in which it was made. As if in rejoinder to Gioni’s claim that the constitutive feature of contemporary art is its freedom from work, Creed nevertheless labels each of his creations as such. This is the most overt indication that Creed’s art expresses, exemplifies and elucidates our contemporary ambivalence surrounding artistic labour and the question of whether artists are understood to ‘work’ when making their ‘works’. The first and historically oldest sense of artistic labour is that it involves technical skill or craftsmanship, and it is this primary sense of artistic labour that Creed’s work most obviously resists. His art often entails minimal technical effort to execute: the broccoli prints are not representations of broccoli limned by the artist but are made by pressing the stalks directly onto the page; the row of nails in graduated sizes of Work No. 701 (2007) was selected and nailed into the wall but evince no traditional artistic skill or technique in their form or execution, and so on. At the other end of this same spectrum are works, such as Work No. 1059, The Scotsman steps (2011), in which a flight of stairs is faced in different kinds of marble. It clearly required a great deal of skilled labour and logistical work to execute (sourcing all of the different varieties of marble, for example), but the skills are not specifically artistic skills, and they were presumably not performed by the artist himself. When Creed’s artworks do entail one of the traditional modes of artistic making, such as painting, the method he uses to make them seems designed to thwart successful execution in any traditional sense and seems gratuitously difficult. Examples include his ‘jumping up’ paintings, in which the canvas is placed overhead and he must jump up to add each stroke of paint, and the ‘blind paintings’, made without looking. So, the first

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and most obvious way that Creed’s so-called works are in fact free from work is that they generally reside outside of the traditional modes of artistic production and the attendant technical skill required (see Figure 4). Another possible reading of the claim that contemporary art is ‘emancipated’ from labour is the idea that artists no longer have to physically execute the works that they author in order to count as the author. The days when a work of visual art was supposed to have been made by the hand of the artists themselves – bearing their mark, attesting to their skill, blessed with their evident touch – are ostensibly long gone. In the 1960s, Sol LeWitt, an important artistic forebear to Creed, published instructions for completing ‘his’ drawings in magazines that invited anyone to instantiate them.5 The proposition that the drawing would be an authentic LeWitt, even though executed by another, was a clear challenge to abstract expressionism’s fetishization of the artists’s gestural presence in the work. (Warhol’s 1962 paint-by-numbers series, Do It Yourself, made a similar point.) It is not as though Creed’s works do not require some degree of work to

Figure 4  Martin Creed, Work No. 1059, The Scotsman steps, 2011; marble; dimensions variable. Commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery with support from the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund for Edinburgh Art Festival 2010. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

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produce: someone has to blow up all of the balloons, make the broccoli prints, face the steps in marble and install the protrusions in the gallery wall, and it is almost always the act of paid assistants. But we do not care whether Creed was the one who did that kind of work, because the fabrication of the art object is no longer the kind of work that matters for artistic authorship.

3 Even as artists are freed from the expectation that they labour over the physical disposition of their works, the choices they make articulate a vision, a conception. This brings us to a more recent development in the meaning of artistic labour: the conceptual. To a traditionalist this does not count as ‘real’ artistic labour at all, because the process is largely invisible. In place of the easel painter labouring at a canvas, or the Abstract Expressionist in bare feet pouring and dabbing at a swath of cotton duck on the floor, the conceptual artist merely thinks, decides, selects and instructs.6 Creed’s artistic contribution consists in his seemingly limitless imagination for turning mundane objects into artworks. The impersonal and uniform titling of Creed’s works according to number stands in sharp contrast to their widely varied, often absurd content. Creed does not specialize in a specific medium: the whole universe of objects, words and sounds is at his disposal for his ‘works’. And yet, while the content of these numbered works seems highly idiosyncratic and playful, they are often created according to a governing logic that appears to divest the artist of control, choice or determination once the rules of that particular work’s game have been set in motion. This is how Creed’s art simultaneously engages with and pushes against our expectations of what artistic labour properly consists in. Creed may not physically execute his works, and while their programmatic, rule-bound character seems to void them of personal expression, he is nevertheless responsible for having conceived the widely varied, playful forms that they take, and so they are in that sense ‘his’ creations. In other words, no matter how simplistic, absurd or programmatic the logic governing any individual work in Creed’s corpus, he is ultimately responsible for having chosen the system or formula according to which the work is made. As with LeWitt’s instructions, and as with postmodern dancer Trisha Brown’s choreographic systems for generating sequences of movements, the artist is ineluctably responsible for the work being what it is and how it is. Despite

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fashionable claims to the contrary, artistic authorship is not dead and never has been; it just takes different forms.7 However, just as we seem to have landed on the proper identification of Creed’s artistic labour – the conceptual – we find in his printed interviews and some of his works themselves that Creed denies this characterization, insisting that his work is equally, if not primarily, about feelings.8 As if to underscore this claim, or mock it, Work No. 287, Feelings (2003) consists of the word ‘FEELINGS’ spelt in purple neon.

4 This brings us to another very important sense of artistic labour, the emotional and spiritual ‘work’ of self-expression that we might identify as romantic in origin. Once we move away from the notion that artistic labour is primarily skilled craftsmanship, the labour of art-making is replaced with the emotional and/or spiritual struggle for self-expression. Under such a conception, artistic labour is cast as a kind of birth pain, in which the artist struggles to expel and express something deep within that must come out, and who retains a deep bond with their creation, regardless of the reception that awaits it.9 This artistas-labouring-mother metaphor points us to an essential ambiguity regarding the status of the artist’s creative activity as labour: on the one hand, if we take the metaphor literally for a moment, neither the product (the offspring) nor the act of expulsion (the labour) is the result of conscious deliberation and intention: they happen naturally and of their own accord. The art-offspring will develop and emerge whether the artist wants it to or not. On the other hand, the labour of expelling the product requires exhausting, painful effort, even sacrifice on the part of the artist.10 The artist’s ‘presumed intimate bond’ with his or her creation comes about not primarily because of the work they put into making the product, but because the result is so personal in nature.11 This modern understanding of artistic labour is connected to our assumption that the artwork is the personal expression of its author, for its own sake. Rachel Wells echoes the views of other commentators on Creed when she claims that his art is a repudiation of this kind of artistic labour, pointing to his ‘instinct to avoid individual expression’. As Wells puts it, ‘throughout his oeuvre, Creed seems to be searching for the complete removal of his artistic subjectivity, and to present viewers instead with a minimal action or mark that is, as far as possible, drained of individual attention or assertion.’12 It is not simply that Creed makes works out of quotidian objects which leads Wells et al. to this observation.

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In some cases, even works made from found or ready-made objects can be seen as intimate works of personal expression: for example, Félix González-Torres’s pile of ever-replenishing candies is a memorial to his lover Ross, who died of AIDS. In Creed’s case, however, his practice of unsentimentally numbering rather than naming his artistic offspring, their formulaic, rule-governed character, and their apparent lack of symbolic content, all yield the impression that they are nonexpressive and even self-effacing. They are simply ‘works’, they are just things he made, or, more precisely, things he had the idea of making. Yet, as we have noted, Creed claims that his work is about feelings, and that it is in fact expressive.13 As if to drive the point home that his work is not merely conceptual, but a form of personal expression, we confront the Sick and Shit series of films (2006–7), which show people vomiting and shitting, respectively. Here the notion of the artist struggling to expel a treasured creation is turned into a vulgar parody of itself.14 When we wonder what such works might possibly mean, Creed explains that ‘I wanted my work to be more like a vomit than a rumination’, which suggests that the work is not the result of careful deliberation or mental labour, but simply a spontaneous emission. As Fer puts it, ‘the expressive model of the artist isn’t just rejected but ejected repeatedly, over and over.’15 The banality of the acts displayed in the shit and vomit works exists in tension with the fact that it is unconventional, if not taboo, to put these private acts on public display, and in such a rarefied context: the white cube of the contemporary art museum is echoed and anticipated by the white setting against which the acts are performed. In commenting on these works, Creed explicitly disavows the notion that he is a conceptual artist, by identifying his art-making as a kind of involuntary, a-rational expulsion of the inner: The more I work, the more I think I don’t know what I am doing. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. It is like sweat or shit. It comes out as I go along. As you do one thing over here, something else comes out over there. It is not what you think you are doing. It is like scum on top of things or like sediment at the bottom. It builds up while you are doing other things. Working feels like trying to face up to what comes out of you. Art is shit. Art galleries are toilets. Curators are toilet attendants. Artists are bullshitters. [. . .] What have I done? I can say I have moved. What have I made? I have made movements.16

Here Creed calls into question the familiar reading of his work as impersonal, calculated and conceptual, as a denial of his personal expressivity. But he also reveals the complexity of the notion that artistic expression is work or labour

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by presenting us with a description of his own art, and all art-making, as the unplanned, unintended by-product of the artist’s other activities. Rather than being a precious object or a meaningful symbol, he suggests that all art is abject excrescence, and all artists are ‘bullshitters’, people who say things for effect without concern for the truth.17 (Of course, by labelling artists ‘bullshitters’, he also calls into question the veracity of his own assertion.) With this statement, Creed apparently agrees with Gioni’s observation about the ‘workless’ character of the contemporary artwork, by claiming that his works are not the result of intentional, goal-oriented effort. They simply pour forth from him, like the bodily emissions that the people in his shit and vomit videos deposit for the camera. As Creed is elsewhere quoted as saying, ‘making work, living, doing things, can feel a lot like vomiting – you cannot stop it – it’s out of your control. It’s a convulsion in a desperate attempt to feel better in a difficult situation.’18 Of course an important difference between these two kinds of expression is that one usually wants to get as far away as possible from vomit once it erupts, whereas creative acts (as metaphorical offspring) tend to be named, nurtured and, in some cases, collected, appreciated and treasured. Interestingly, tellingly, Creed does not provide us with video footage of himself vomiting or shitting in these artworks. What poured out of him is in fact not the bodily substance but rather the idea for these videos. In this sense, Wells is right that Creed has distanced one aspect of his subjectivity – his physical, bodily presence – from the work. He has outsourced the literally expressive act to willing participants, leaving himself as author unsullied, pure. Creed is thereby able to have it both ways when it comes to artistic expression: on the one hand, he is the author of the films, responsible for their conception and design, and on the other hand he is physically absent from the disgusting reality of its execution. Another way to read the Shit and Vomit works is that they are an instance of Creed’s anti-elitism, and that he has made an artwork that celebrates those aspects of our basic humanity in which we all share, and hence that equalize us. In one of his text-based works, Creed suggests an equivalence between art-making and excreting, referring to shit as ‘the sculpture which everybody makes every day, or nearly every day, or even more than once a day!’19 This connects to the critical commentary on Creed’s work that often praises it for being fundamentally ‘democratic’. It is unclear what exactly this means: Is it democratic because it often features everyday objects? Because of its occasionally crass content? Because anyone could make it? It could be any or all of these. Nevertheless, the egalitarian quality of Creed’s work is one of its greatest sources of approbation. For example, Gioni (again) states:

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Creed’s art is intrinsically egalitarian, profoundly democratic. Paradoxically, he seems to be bent on eliminating talent, erasing the exceptional, imposing a series of basic rules that can be applied to any situation. Creed works on the fundamentals.20

This claim that Creed’s work is ‘intrinsically egalitarian’ signals the author’s understanding that this democratic element of his work does not play out in practice, as his work is shown and legitimized by elite institutions of contemporary art. But Gioni’s insistence that Creed’s work itself is democratic and egalitarian makes it seem as though it were purely accidental, or as Gioni says, ‘paradoxical’, that its elite institutional placement and legitimation should be so profoundly at odds, status-wise, with an internal logic that levels down and rejects status. Darian Leader, echoing the notion that Creed’s work is democratic, elaborates on the putative tension between the work and its context: This passion for equality works against a certain conception of art and its place in the world. Art, we are often told, is about making something special, separating it off from the rest of the world and giving it a new dignity and status. Museums and galleries then house these objects, reinforcing the sense of privilege and inequality. Yet the internal principle of Creed’s work does exactly the opposite: it is committed, most of the time, to doing away with choice, to reducing privilege and to making things equal. This strange democracy has the effect of making audiences uneasy as they search for a hidden meaning or some exception in the array of monochrome felt-pen drawings, metronomes or sound pieces.21

Germaine Greer echoes this as well when she refers to Creed’s ‘egolessness’, and Pissarro notes, approvingly, Creed’s ‘profound and sincere humility’.22 But what, exactly, is egoless about a man who is notorious for offering up videos of people vomiting and shitting as works of art? What is humble about an artist who is able to turn a crumpled wad of A4 paper into an artwork, in unlimited edition (yet sold out currently), costing £150? It is a ‘strange democracy’, indeed, because the apparent principle of equality that Leader points to is set against and enabled by the rarefied world of contemporary art. The materials that Creed uses to make his work may be humble (and in the case of the Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227 (2001) may not consist of any material object to behold at all), but this surface humility is sustained by its tension with the elite institutional settings that consecrate it. Certainly, the presence of Creed’s works in the West’s most prestigious art institutions invites the assumption that they must be very significant or meaningful – otherwise, they wouldn’t be in those institutions in the first place.

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The ostensible conflict between the populism of Creed’s works and the rarefied settings into which they are placed is not a paradox, as commentators like Leader and Gioni suggest. For these are the only settings in which they could meaningfully be placed, and in that sense his work can be seen as a profoundly anti-democratic gesture. One could even see Creed’s work as profoundly elitist precisely because of its democratic pretences. While in theory anyone can index a crumpled wad of paper as an artwork, only certain people are able to win acclaim and prestige for doing so. What is beguiling about contemporary artists is not that they do not work, but that their work consists in effecting this mysterious transformation of ordinary objects into profoundly meaningful and valuable ones. While it is very difficult to become the kind of contemporary artist who can win prizes for making lights turn on and off, it is somewhat easier to acquire the skills necessary to appreciate contemporary art. Nevertheless, it is certainly not a skill readily available to all, and this is why the claims that Creed’s work is ‘democratic’ ring untrue. The tension between the conventional art lover and the knowing, sophisticated viewer is a matter of class, of distinction. One has to have the disposition, as Bourdieu would say, the habitus, to appreciate Creed’s works in order even to understand the esteem they are given in the artworld.23 As sociologist Howard S. Becker puts it: less involved audiences look precisely for the conventional formal elements the innovators replace to distinguish art from nonart. They do not go to the ballet to see people run, jump, and fall down; they can see that anywhere. They go instead to see people do the difficult and esoteric formal movements that signify ‘real dancing’. The ability to see ordinary material as art material – to see that the running, jumping, and falling down are not just that, but are the elements of a different language of the medium – thus distinguishes serious audience members from the well-socialized member of the culture, the irony being that these materials are perfectly well known to the latter, although not as art materials.24

As sociologists like Bourdieu and Becker point out, the appreciation of everyday materials as art is, ironically, a sign of sophistication. It distinguishes the serious art lover from the casual observer who naively expects displays of virtuosity and skill when confronted with artworks. If one does not understand that the ‘deskilled’ work of contemporary art is, as Gioni says, a liberation from the traditional view of artworks as painstakingly crafted artefacts, then one will miss the meaning of the gesture and misapprehend the work entirely.

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5 This brings us to a fourth sense of artistic labour, which is the displacement of the ‘work’ from artist to audience. The artist apparently does little to no work in the conventional sense, but the audience must ‘work’ in order to understand the artwork, and their engagement with the art thereby completes it.25 Hence, the artistic labour is transferred, by a clever sleight of hand, from artist to audience. Creed’s works challenge the viewers to search for meaning, even if ultimately the meaning consists in the artwork’s refusal to yield the kind of significance that we are taught to look for. This also leads his apologists and supporters to discount Creed’s own ‘aw shucks’ disavowals of artistic virtuosity and to insist that he is in fact a serious artist, hard at work making those seemingly easy and empty works. As Tess Jaray, his former art school teacher at Slade Academy, explains, [Creed’s] protestations, both clever and believable – ‘they are just things’, even set to music, as in his I like things – may be a touch disingenuous. There is nothing casual in these casual works. On the contrary, there is a fierce formality holding them together. [. . .] There is great complexity here, wrapped in many coverings of apparent simplicity. There is real understanding of how scale may be manipulated to amuse, and thereby disarm. There is no ‘spoofing’, no ‘conning of the public’, as the tabloids would have us believe. (This is rarely the case with real artists.) Rather, Creed presents essay after essay in meaning in meaninglessness, and draws serious, focused attention to the absurdity of our tiny and solipsistic concerns on this planet.

But, and it is a crucial but, turning nothing into something is surely the essential alchemy of art. And the works are not just things: they are somethings, and he makes them matter.26 Here Jaray exhorts us to look beyond the artist’s own humble disavowals about his works and to see them instead as a collection of paradoxes: these apparently casual, simple works are not in fact casual or simple at all, if one but has the eyes to see through their deceptive surface. In fact, they contain profound complexity and meaning, with a message about meaninglessness. What seems like playful whimsy becomes, in almost mystical fashion, its opposite: they are works that draw ‘serious, focused attention’ to our ultimately absurd existential condition. With this defence of Creed as a ‘real artist’, we see that the concept of artistic labour slips in, as Jaray implies that his ‘essay after essay’ entails effort and intention on Creed’s part. It is an artistic labour whose exact nature remains cloaked in magic and mystery: Jaray refers to it here as ‘alchemy’.

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Joachim Pissarro echoes Jaray’s message that Creed’s work, despite appearances, is both profound and virtuosic when he says: One could say that Creed, with disarming ease and spectacular agility, takes us through his oeuvre on a shuttle back and forth between the ‘next-to-nothing’ and the absolute; between the immanent and the transcendent; between all and nothing (of which, the lights going on and off offers a fabulous metaphor).27

In Pissarro’s words, Creed’s work embraces the most fundamental metaphysical oppositions and thereby also manages simultaneously to be humble and profound. By referring to his ‘disarming ease and spectacular agility’, he suggests that if Creed seems not to work at his works, it is only because he is so skilled at making it look easy to take the audience on this mystical ‘back and forth’. Seen in another light, however, the mystery dissolves. Artists who work in the idiom of appropriation, like Martin Creed, need both specialized training and even talent. They inevitably have art school pedigrees and other insider experiences in which they have mastered the codes and vernacular of the contemporary artworld, so that they are best placed to judge which gestures, which appropriations, are likely to gain traction.28 It is not that appropriation artists do not possess technical skill; it is simply that they possess a different kind of skill than the academy-trained artist did 200 years ago. And in that sense, even the appropriation artist must work to make those effortlessseeming works. As Jaray’s own defence of Creed notes, not everyone will be able to appreciate the products of the contemporary artist’s alchemy, to see these humble objects as seriously playful works with real meaning and value. Whether the viewer can appreciate them will say as much, if not more, about her than it will about the art. Gioni’s observation with which this chapter begins – that the constitutive feature of contemporary art, and by extension, the artist, is their emancipation from labour – conceals a much more complicated state of affairs. Martin Creed’s corpus and its critical reception reveal our conflicting attitudes and expectations regarding artistic labour and lead us to the observation that it is not simply ‘workless’, and it is not thereby ‘democratic’. And I would stipulate as a general rule that whenever one form of artistic labour is denied or rejected, it is replaced with another account of the artist’s work in order to justify the cultural value accorded to his or her works. No matter what the form or medium, no matter how unconventional or avant-garde, we expect artists to labour in the production of their creations, even as we also expect that they be freely given, as a kind of gift or sacrifice to the culture. Martin Creed’s persona and oeuvre

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represent a challenge to this complex set of dynamics even as he cannot help but participate in it. As a contemporary artist, Creed is a master, but he is no exception.29

Notes 1 Ibid.; Greer (2010); Leader (2010); Pissarro (2014). 2 Gioni (2010: 24). 3 See Shiner (2001: 201); Sturgis et al. (2006). Notice that even the phrasing of Gioni’s assertion – that art is ‘emancipated’ from labour, suggests that prior to the contemporary turn artists were enslaved to such an expectation. This tugs on the modern archetype of the artist as a sufferer. 4 See, for example, Arthur Danto’s insistence that he meant the term ‘artworld’ in a purely ontological sense and rejected George Dickie’s reading of his theory as a sociological observation about how unconventional works like ready-mades are taken up and accepted by the establishment. Auxier, R. E., and Lewis E. H., eds (2013: 429). 5 Once LeWitt gained fame and notoriety, this utopian or idealistic ethos was severely curtailed in practical terms so as to protect the authenticity of his works. No one can just execute a LeWitt anymore and have it count as a genuine LeWitt. 6 See Goldie and Schellekens, eds, (2007). 7 See Gover (2018); Hick (2017); Livingston (2005); Mag Uidhir (2013). 8 Creed and Eccles (2010: 10). 9 See Kwall (2009). 10 A paradigmatic example of the latter would be the poet Charles Bukowski, alcoholic, addicted, postal worker who laboured at his writing for years in obscurity before getting discovered and becoming famous. 11 Rigamonti (2006: 355). 12 Wells (2015: 43). 13 Tom Eccles: What kind of artist are you? Martin Creed: I think if I had to use one of those words I would call myself an ‘expressionist’. Creed and Eccles (2010: 10). 14 Creed is not the first to make this joke: Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961), which supposedly contained his own potted excrement, made a similar point. On this connection, see ibid., 10–11; Fer (2011). 15 Fer (2011: 15). 16 Creed (2010: 6–7). 17 See Frankfurt (2005). 18 Pissarro (2014: 123). Original quote: ‘“is like” the creative act: you cannot stop it; it is stronger than you; there is a profound need for it to come out.’

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19 Excerpt from Martin Creed, Work No. 989 (2009). Original quote: ‘the sculpture which everybody makes.’ 20 Gioni (2010: 20). 21 Leader (2010: 38). 22 Greer (2010: 26). Pissarro (2014: 123). 23 Bourdieu (1984). 24 Becker (2008: 50). 25 The art theorist and critic Michael Fried famously decried minimalism as ‘theatrical’ because it was not self-sufficient, but required an audience to engage with it in order to transform those sterile metal and plywood boxes into works of art. 26 Jaray (2010: 35). 27 Pissarro (2014: 121). 28 Consider, for example, the career of artist Dahn Vo, whose career trajectory is described here: Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Artist Questioning Authorship’, The New Yorker, 29 January 2018. 29 I thank Jack Lindsay for his research and editorial assistance in the completion of this chapter.

References Auxier, R. E. and E. H. Lewis (eds) (2013), The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, Chicago: Open Court. Becker, H. S. (2008), Art Worlds, 25th Anniversary edn, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Abingdon: Routledge. Creed, M. (2010), ‘Foreword’, in Martin Creed: Works, 6–8, New York: Thames & Hudson. Creed, M. and T. Eccles (2010), ‘Interview’, in Martin Creed: Works, 10–17, New York: Thames & Hudson. Fer, B. (2011), ‘Ifs and Buts’, in Martin Creed: Collected Works, 9–16, Vancouver: ABC Art Books Canada Distribution. Frankfurt, H. (2005), On Bullshit, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gioni, M. (2010), ‘The System of Objects’, in Martin Creed: Works, 20–4, New York: Thames & Hudson. Goldie, P. and E. Schellekens (eds) (2007), Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gover, K. E. (2018), Art and Authority: Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Greer, G. (2010), ‘When Nothing Is More Than Enough’, in Martin Creed: Works, 25–7, New York: Thames & Hudson. Hick, D. (2017), Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jaray, T. (2010), ‘Somethings’, in Martin Creed: Works, 35. New York: Thames & Hudson. Kwall, R. R. (2009), The Soul of Creativity: Forging a Moral Rights Law for the United States, Stanford University Press. Leader, D. (2010), ‘Forms of Attachment’, in Martin Creed: Works, 36–41, New York: Thames & Hudson. Livingston, P. (2005), Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mag Uidhir, C. (2013), Art and Art-Attempts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pissarro, J. (2014), ‘The Innumerable Martin Creed’, in Hayward Gallery (ed.), Martin Creed: What’s the Point of It?, 121–8, London: Hayward Publishing. Rigamonti, C. (2006), ‘Deconstructing Moral Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal, 47 (2): 353–412. Shiner, L. (2001), The Invention of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sturgis, A., R. Christiansen, L. Oliver, and M. Wilson (2006), Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, ed. National Gallery, London: Yale University Press. Tomkins, C. (2018), ‘The Artist Questioning Authorship’, The New Yorker, 29 January. Wells, R. (2015), ‘Fact and Responsibility: Approaches Towards the Factual in Contemporary Art’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 60 (1): 39–53.

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3

S T U P I D A R T Diarmuid Costello

Martin Creed has often remarked on his desire to make stupid art. It is just one indication of the difference in temperament between the artworld and the philosophical world that no one seems to have thought this an aspiration worth questioning. When Creed says that he wants to make stupid art, it’s clear that he understands the qualifier ‘stupid’, atypically, as an honorific, value-conferring term. To make stupid art or, as he sometimes also puts it, to make stupid things, or (another variant) stupid things to be looked at, is meant to be a good thing – in fact the stupider, the better. Why would someone want to do something so idiotic? Indeed, why would someone given to doing something so idiotic not only admit as much but positively broadcast the fact – unless, of course, they were (very) stupid themselves? But there’s nothing stupid about Creed, for all his well-documented and (some might think) irritatingly flaunted neuroses. So, take the deflationary explanation off the table. The interesting question is why a smart person would want to do something stupid – if making stupid art is in fact to do something stupid, which is not obvious. One suggestion might be that stupidity has a heuristic or other value in art that it does not have in life, or at least a different salience or significance. If so, what might that be? This is what I want to explore here. But first we need a better grip on the target term. For something else that is taken for granted whenever Creed professes his desire to make stupid art or things (claiming not to know what art is, he tends to use the two interchangeably) is that we all, Creed included, know what stupidity means. But perhaps we do not. So what is stupidity: Is it one thing, or does it come in a variety of stripes or strengths? If the latter, what must they all share to count as instances of a common kind? This turns out to be a surprisingly neglected topic in philosophy, for all its valuing of smarts. Given this, it may help to start with a brief taxonomy of forms in the immediate

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vicinity that Creed might conceivably have in mind. In doing so, I take my cue from Creed himself.

1.  Stupid . . . like nature? It’s brilliant. It reminds me of something I think Gerhard Richter once said: ‘I want my art to be stupid like nature.’1

What would it be for an oeuvre or a work to be ‘stupid like nature?’ I have some sense of what this might mean for Richter, but I am not convinced that it could mean the same thing for Creed. What it expresses for Richter, I take it, is the aspiration that his work might have the same mute obduracy as nature, an existence as unquestionable as a rock or clod of earth. Richter’s desire that his work be ‘stupid like nature’ is, at bottom, the hope that it be similarly free of the distorting partiality of human subjectivity, and hence – at least potentially – as unarguable as nature. This is a theme to which he often recurs when discussing his reasons for taking photography as a model for painting. But it is not credible to suppose that this can pick out the sense in which Creed’s art is stupid, since his art seems so centrally involved, not with nature, but with various human foibles and failures, and in particular with stilling various forms of human anxiety, perhaps chiefly his own. Thus, he often talks about making art in order to ‘feel better’, and explains his preference for simple things and gestures, and especially their repetition, in terms of offering a ‘reassuring handhold’ with which to navigate the ‘soup’ of life – by providing something simple, clear and comforting to focus on. So, what might stupidity mean for Creed, for whom the imperative ‘Make Stupid Art!’ seems to function almost like a general, action-guiding maxim or ideal? Could stupidity be an organizing principle of sorts, Creed’s own, idiosyncratic form of thoughtfulness, perhaps even a kind of artistic – as opposed to academic – intelligence? Creed specifies the kind of stupidity he has in mind, in citing Richter’s remark, by celebrating the music of Bob Dylan in the following terms: It’s the most beautiful, peaceful music, but also the funniest, most thoughtful and stupid music I could imagine. It feels like it’s got everything in it, but without necessarily making sense. Things fly in from the left, right and centre. There are different ideas, turns of phrase, beautiful pieces of music, catchy bits, but it’s mysterious and I can’t understand it. It doesn’t add up. [. . .] I don’t know what an artist is, but I’d say if anyone is one, Bob Dylan is one.2

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It could almost be a gloss on Creed himself. But for just this reason, when Creed says, ‘I just make stupid things’, it does not seem plausible to think that his work could be stupid in anything like the same sense as nature. For if this is what Creed has in mind, it suggests a kind of freewheeling, unconstrained creativity much more than it does something with the unquestionable existence of a clod of earth. Indeed Creed’s work is strikingly unlike nature in being full of rich, semantic equivocation and knowing, self-effacing humour. Like his upbeat neon signs with their bright, stupid optimism, it is beguiling and irritating in equal measure. Take Work No. 203 (1999), in which the legend EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT is picked out in jaunty white neon. This could, conceivably, be offering the kind of glib reassurance that the majority of Creed’s critics, taking it at face value, seem to suppose. But it might just as easily be read as bitingly sarcastic, even cruel. It certainly did not seem reassuring in its original incarnation, spanning the entire 13 metre entablature of Clapton Portico. By the time of Creed’s Work No. 203, this dilapidated neoclassical façade, flanked by two covered colonnades, was all that remained of the once-imposing London Orphan’s Asylum, opened to some acclaim by the duke of Cambridge in 1825.3 Since Creed’s commission, the near derelict Portico has taken on new life as the scrubbed-up face of Clapton School for Girls, mirroring the gentrification of the surrounding area.4 Once again, one could see this as bearing out the sign’s upbeat message. But whether Hackney’s E5 in its current guise – all midcentury modern, bike shops-cum-espresso bars, sourdough this and artisanal that, catering to a mix of Hipsters and BoHo Trustafarians – really constitutes ‘being alright’ for the local residents Creed’s Work No. 203 originally spoke to, many of whom did not survive the hike in rents attendant upon the area’s rapid transformation, is debatable (see Figure 5). My point is that how such works should be taken is a lot less obvious than typically seems to be supposed, and is heavily context dependent. The same words displayed elsewhere, as Creed has done on many occasions since, will have entirely different connotations. To my knowledge, Creed has to date resisted the temptation to locate the sign, provocatively, on the site of any historical atrocities. However, one might see this, contrary to the implausibly perky, happy-go-lucky readings of Creed, as a natural extension of its acerbic underlying logic, and one that would make the blackness of Creed’s humour, though lightly worn, impossible to ignore. Creed has commented on his Work No. 850 (2008), in which individual runners sprint the length of Tate’s Duveen Galleries at half-minute intervals

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Figure 5  Martin Creed, Work No. 203, Everything is going to be alright, 1999; white neon; 1.6 x 42.6 ft / 0.5 x 13 m. Installation at The Portico, Linscott Road, London, UK, 1999. Commissioned by Ingrid Swenson. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

before swiftly exiting stage right, in a way that makes this unmistakeable: ‘I think this work is very much like life; runners come and go, just as we do, and they’re all alone, just as we are . . . you know?’ (Creed 2008a).5 Elsewhere Creed has remarked of the same work that, if movement is the opposite of death, understood as total stillness, then to move as fast as possible is to be most alive (Creed 2008b).6 Putting these two together: we travel fleetingly through life – each of us alone – as fast as possible in a fruitless attempt to stave off death, before inevitably disappearing. This is not a chipper outlook. So, when Creed says, ‘I just make stupid things,’ or, ‘I make stupid things in order to feel better,’ it does not seem plausible to think this renders his work stupid like nature. So, what else might stupidity be chez Creed?

2.  Stupid . . . like a painter? I think Weiner’s work’s better . . . on account of the fact that it’s more stupid . . . And I mean that in the best possible way, because stupid is good and true to me. I feel stupid. I want to make stupid work.7

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So says Creed of Lawrence Weiner while discussing the work of Michael Asher and Hans Haacke – artists more directly associated with ‘institutional critique’ than Weiner himself – with whom the art critic Alex Coles tries to align him. Creed is characteristically genial, despite the wilfulness of Cole’s suggestion. But what is of interest here is not Cole’s rationale but Creed’s reasons for singling out Weiner in response. Why might his art be thought of, specifically, as more stupid than that of the others? A natural thought might be because Weiner’s art, once one grasps the basic set of parameters according to which it functions, is so matter of fact, blunt and direct – quite unlike the sophisticated machinations of the other two.8 It is as though Weiner – were one to view him as harbouring similar aspirations, which I do not – had reasoned: if one wants to bring the ‘institutional supports’ for art to light, the first thing one needs do is draw attention to them.9 But how best to do that? Framing or otherwise marking the various contextual supports for art is insufficiently concrete or direct. Why not draw attention instead to the actual walls and floors on which artworks hang, stand or lie. Or, as though this were still not direct enough, what about removing the surface coverings of these supports to reveal the underlying materials that actually hold the building up? Thus, in A 36” X 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OR PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL (1968) and, more obliquely, a SQUARE REMOVAL FROM A RUG IN USE (1969), we find the (literal) institutional and material supports for art exposed. ‘Stupid art’, so understood, would be a kind of flat-footed literal-mindedness, an unapologetic directness or lack of circumlocution or allusion raised to the status of an art. But Creed’s art has another, to my mind deeper, connection to Weiner’s art than this, even if it remains much more uneven. The two removal pieces cited earlier emerge directly from the Removal Paintings (1966–8), Weiner’s preceding and final series of paintings. These pared down abstractions consist of one or more fields of flat colour applied to stretched canvases with a rectangular notch removed from one of their corners. Creed’s art similarly develops out of painting; just as Weiner’s breakthrough ‘Statements’ of 1968 derive directly from his paintings of the late 1960s, so much in Creed’s subsequent practice can be traced, more or less directly, to his early work as a painting student at the Slade School of Fine Art (Works Nos. 5–7, 18 [1987–9]).10 In Creed’s case, the early work fixates on the question of what it is to make a painting, which (like Weiner) they address with a kind of dumb, flat-footed materialism. For Creed, to make a painting is, most minimally, to make something to look at

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Figure 6  Martin Creed, Work No. 83, A protrusion from a wall, 1993; plaster, paint; 9 x 4.5 in. / 22.9 x 11.4cm. Installation at the artist’s studio, London, UK, 1993. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

capable of being fixed to a wall – where its capacity to be so fixed is decisive. It is as though Creed had reasoned: paintings and sculptures are both made to be looked at, but only paintings need be attached to a wall for this purpose. So what distinguishes painting, at least from sculpture, is the fact of such attachment.11 Creed’s early paintings make thematizing this central. But even once he leaves painting as traditionally understood behind, an attenuated painter’s sensibility continues to permeate his later work. Like his actual painting, such work remains centred on the question of how to attach things to walls for the purpose of being looked at. I am thinking of his Blu-Tac pieces (Works Nos. 79 and 91 [1993–4]) and the one-inch cubes of masking tape or Elastoplast made by piling up one after another one-inch squares (Works Nos. 67, 74, 78 [1992–3]) to create cubes to be attached either to the centre of walls or to the spaces between other works of art already attached to walls (Works Nos. 75, 81, 86 [1992–3]). But, above all, I am thinking of the curved protuberances (Works Nos. 83, 88, 102, 135 [1993–6]) designed, disarmingly, to be part of the wall itself, so as not to need removal for the wall itself to be repainted (see Figure 6).

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These works are precisely sized to allow a standard decorator’s roller to follow the contour of the wall without lifting or skipping, thereby facilitating an even and uninterrupted finish. According to Darian Leader, their conception dates to Creed’s early experience supporting himself as a decorator. This continually required him to remove paintings from walls in order to paint the walls before reinstating the art (Leader 2010: xxxvi). The curiously literal-minded yet beguiling thought process that Creed’s solution reveals – if only paintings could be part of the walls, one would never have to remove one again! – makes total sense of his admiration for Weiner’s ‘stupidity’, understood as a kind of delectable bluntness. The contented hopelessness of these works – an odd mix of solipsism and wishful thinking, tinged with utopianism – is genuinely moving, resulting in works of real wit and poetic flair. While much of Creed’s later work eschews the wall for other supports, it emerges from painting and remains coloured by this fact nonetheless. In this it is likewise faithful to Weiner’s example. For all these affinities to painting, however, stupid like painters, Creed and Weiner most certainly are not. ‘Stupid like a painter’ is a term widely used, and not in a good way, to pick out the proletarian pose that a certain kind of painter, as though embarrassed by the effeteness of his own discipline, likes to go in for.12 This is to be distinguished from its cognate, ‘stupid like a printmaker’. Though both impute a deficit of ideas, the reasons for the deficit differ. With painters, the pejorative typically picks out the kind of roughly hewn, vaguely threatening men often hailing from some provincial outpost, who like to go about in paintencrusted overalls and have no truck with ideas or those who espouse them. With printmakers, by contrast, it tends to suggest an exhaustive (and exhausting) entanglement with the technical processes necessitated by printmaking to the point that there is no time left over to worry about ideas. If this is what is required to be an authentic, ‘painter’s painter’, it is no surprise that an artist of Creed’s coyly self-effacing temperament should have sought an exit from painting. Creed’s most recent series of paintings for his 2016 ‘What You Find’ show at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost (Works Nos. 2692, 2695, 2700, 2702 among others), created by teams of volunteers squirting paint directly from tubes onto glass or canvas, might (very charitably) be read as some kind of reductio of the ‘stupid like a painter’ shtick, were they not so desperately, unforgivably bad.

3.  Two kinds of stupidity But if Creed is not – at least typically – stupid like a painter, just how is he or his work stupid? Is there something more than flat-footed directness involved? I think

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Creed is right, if not for quite the reasons that Creed himself gives: his art is often stupid, in a sense that remains to be fully characterized, as does why this should be considered a good thing, even if he is not – and not because it is stupid like nature. Stupidity of can be predicated on a wide range of creatures, things and events, including persons, animals, objects, actions and kinds of behaviours. One comes across stupid tools (the handle is too short for the intended function, the head too broad for the space typically available for the job) and other artefacts: a stool so precarious one has to keep both feet on the floor to keep it upright, a bucket made from a material that deforms under weight, causing its handle to detach. Stupid pieces of workmanship: being hinged on the left rather than right, the cabinet door impairs the functioning of something else if used; the workbench that, not having been removed from the centre of the room, leaves a workbenchshaped hole in the floor’s varnish. Stupid acts or moves: had he not gratuitously insulted his boss just before the relevant committee, he might not have been passed over for promotion; had she not been blinded by his Bishop, she would not have lost her Queen. Even stupid animals: the dog that chases its own tail, the cat that paws at something on the far side of the glass. But the primary form of stupidity, upon which the others seem to be parasitic, is human stupidity, and it is this that we need a better grip on. This is a surprisingly neglected topic in philosophy.13 What little there is that is relevant derives largely from Robert Musil’s ‘Über die Dummheit’ (1937). The first thing to note about Musil’s account is that stupidity can, but need not, be an all-or-nothing affair. Stupidity in one domain, or under one description, is often consistent with cleverness in others; the celebrated professor forever accompanied by his forgetful double, the brilliant logician bereft of any sign of practical wisdom, and so on. Indeed, for Musil, every form of cleverness or talent has its characteristic forms of stupidity. For this reason, Musil takes what would typically be thought of today as the entirely natural opposition between stupidity and intellectual capacity as rather parochial historically. Conceived in the most general terms, stupidity is instead any form of incapacity, lack of soundness or diminution of achievement: ‘If one were [. . .] looking for the most general notion of stupidity [. . .] everything that is incapable or unsound might, on occasion, also be called stupid [. . .] stupid and stupidity, because they signify general incapability, can occasionally serve for any word intended to characterise a particular incapacity’ (Musil 1990: 276–7).14 On Musil’s account, there are characteristic forms of stupidity for almost any domain one cares to mention – sporting, manual and business stupidity, even parenting and romantic stupidity. So construed, stupidity is simply incapacity under some description.

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The second thing to note about stupidity flows naturally from the first: stupidity is context dependent. The very same act that might appear stupid in one domain or under one description (a wholly inappropriate action for a funeral, say) might be brilliant in another. Think, by contrast to a funereal or wedding context, of the value of the unexpected in a sporting, business or political context. ‘Who could have seen that coming!’ is much more likely to count as approbation in one of the latter contexts than the former. So understood, there is no such thing as the act that is stupid simpliciter; rather, there are acts that are stupid for a given domain or under a particular description. The point for which Musil’s account has been most influential, however, is that stupidity is internally differentiated; it comes in two broad forms independently of context. Musil distinguishes stupidity as a lack (or deficiency) of intelligence or understanding from stupidity as a failure of intelligence or understanding. He calls the former ‘honourable’, by which I take him to mean non-blameworthy. That one is generally slow of mind or dim-witted is an accident of birth, akin to being short of stature; it is not something that one can be reasonably blamed for – assuming blame implies responsibility (Musil 1990: 282). By contrast, the latter involves obtuseness with respect to something in particular about which one might (and perhaps should) have known better, and so for which one can, at least in principle, be criticized. The former is an incapacity that is constitutional and pervasive, the latter a failure that is functional, hence specific to a given context or domain of action. For Musil, the latter betrays a lack of balance between feeling and intellect, and only this dishonourable variety is subject to sanction or critique.15 Musil’s distinction between blameworthy and non-blameworthy forms of stupidity has been taken up in what little philosophical literature there has been on the topic to date. Kevin Mulligan, for example, distinguishes what one might call ‘stupidity proper’ (Musil’s ‘honourable stupidity’) from the mere ‘foolishness’ to which we are all sometimes prone: ‘Foolishness, unlike stupidity, is a trait or vice or habit for which one is responsible’ (Mulligan 2014a: 121). It is a kind of (more or less local, more or less temporary) blindness, indifference or even hostility to cognitive values. This is Mulligan’s take on Musil’s distinction between general weakness of understanding, understood as ‘slowness’ or ‘dimwittedness’, and a ‘higher, pretentious form of stupidity’ (what I described earlier as ‘functional’ stupidity) that – at least for Musil – constitutes a specific disease of culture and the mind.16 Where the former is global and honourable, the latter is piecemeal and diseased. On Mulligan’s account, what makes pretentiousness the characteristic deformation of the intellect is that it presumes to achievements to which it has

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no right. This explains why, for Musil, talking about stupidity is itself often either a sign of it or at least to risk courting it, since it not only presumes to know what stupidity is but implies that one takes oneself to be above it – when making a show of one’s own cleverness is a sure sign of stupidity. To be wise, by contrast, is to be capable of foolishness (Musil’s ‘higher, pretentious stupidity’) while yet avoiding it; it is to have a proper appreciation and knowledge of cognitive values. Because this higher form of stupidity commonly takes the form of pretentiousness, the most effective bulwark against it is modesty. As Musil puts it: ‘Act as well as you can and as badly as you must [so as to act at all – DC], but in doing so remain aware of the margin of error of your actions’ (Musil 1990: 286). Mulligan’s distinction between stupidity and foolishness dovetails neatly with recent work in vice epistemology. For Quassim Cassam, stupidity as a lack of intelligence (such as slowness and dim-wittedness) is not an epistemic vice, since accidents of birth are not blameworthy, whereas stupidity as foolishness or a failure of intelligence (such as pretentiousness) most certainly is.17 One should have known better than simply to assume that one already knows. Here is a conception of stupidity that, at least implicitly, runs deep in the tradition: there is no one wiser than Socrates, claims the Oracle, because Socrates is the only one who knows that he knows nothing. By Musil’s lights, Socrates would be wise to the degree that he is free of pretentiousness, free from assuming that he knows what he does not. Cassam construes vices of the mind, such as pretentiousness, as intellectual defects because they have a negative effect on our intellectual conduct. Vices such as arrogance, close-mindedness, prejudice, imperviousness to evidence and the like are impediments that get in the way of our coming to know how things actually are. One is not lost for examples! But while all such intellectual vices are obstacles to knowledge, not all obstacles to knowledge are intellectual vices. Take insomnia: it is clearly detrimental to knowledge to be too tired to be able to think straight, but it is not a vice. Being something one suffers, rather than something for which one can reasonably be held responsible, the deleterious effects of insomnia on knowledge are not blameworthy. Vices, properly so-called, are thus to be distinguished from mere defects. Because we can be held responsible for vices, but neither defects nor impairments beyond our control, the former are subject to criticism and blame, the latter are not.18 Here Cassam is in agreement with both Musil and Mulligan: whether stupidity is to be considered a vice or a defect depends on the kind of stupidity at stake; as a failure of intelligence it is, as a lack of intelligence it is not. Even if not blameworthy in every instance, or under all possible circumstances, the

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epistemic vices are in principle open to criticism in virtue of their deleterious effects on the acquisition, retention and transmission of knowledge. Stupidity counts as such if and only if it is both epistemically harmful and something for which the person in question may be held responsible. Understood as a failure of intelligence, stupidity meets this test; understood as a lack of intelligence, it does not.

4.  Stupidity in/as art I just make stupid things.

Both Mulligan and Cassam understand stupidity, then, as coming in two broad forms: one blameworthy, the other not. Some of what Musil says, however, implies a threefold division at odds with his official bipartite view, and these passages have been overlooked in the literature. Read closely, Musil considers not only lack and failure of intelligence but also suspensions of intelligence. That these passages have passed unremarked may be because Musil’s examples of such suspension are cases in which panic of various kinds descends on either an individual or a crowd. So conceived, one might naturally think suspensions of intelligence are just one of the ways in which intelligence can fail, making suspension a special case of failure. But this would be too quick: for it assumes, without argument, that all suspensions of intelligence must be involuntary. This might seem like a reasonable assumption to make: Who, after all, would willingly make themselves stupid by suspending their own intelligence? But given the case of an artist who publicly declares his intention to make stupid things, one can reasonably ask whether stupidity need be unwilled: Is it internal to the logic of the concept, or is it possible for one and the same act or thing to be both willed and yet stupid? Can one make oneself stupid or otherwise obtuse, or does its wilful adoption immediately undercut the intended end, making it too ‘clever by half ’? The question has obvious relevance for Creed, who sets out to make stupid things. It also puts us in a position to address the question left hanging earlier, as to whether stupidity might be the characteristic form in which artistic intelligence shows up in Creed. Note that, for this to be the case, one would have to establish not only that it is possible to be wilfully stupid but, in addition, that stupidity has some function or purpose – and hence value – in art that it does not have in life.

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The former seems uncontroversial, given the very broad definition of stupidity as incapacity or diminution of achievement in a given domain adopted here. For there is no reason to suppose that one cannot do something in a more cack-handed, thoughtless or obtuse manner than one is in fact capable of, and do so on purpose. Just look around! People may do this for all manner of reasons: to provoke amusement, to convey contempt, from displeasure at being imposed upon or simply because they would rather do something shoddily than invest sufficient time and attention to do it well. But that stupidity could have a value in art that it does not have in life must also be established, and this may seem less obvious. Otherwise, while it would be possible to be stupid on purpose, doing so would still constitute a blameworthy vice, perhaps even an especially egregious one for being voluntarily entered into. But if stupidity does, or at least could, have a value in art that it does not have in life, what might this be? Recall Mulligan’s claim that to be wise is to be capable of foolishness (Musil’s ‘higher, pretentious stupidity’), while nonetheless avoiding being so. If this relation is understood to be bi-conditional, to be intentionally stupid is to be capable of wisdom while nonetheless forgoing it; it is to renounce wisdom. Once again, we find ourselves back in the company of tradition: for this is what renders both rhetoric and sophistry stupid for Socrates; each prioritizes a mere ‘knack’ for conveying an impression of expertise over genuine knowledge (Plato 2008, 462b–465d). Could this be the kind of stupidity that Creed traffics in, not the appearance of expertise – he would certainly eschew that – so much as the aspiration to bracket, or otherwise outwit, his own intelligence, and if so, why? Musil has various, psychologically penetrating but generally unremarked, things to say about the aspiration to appear more stupid than one is that might be illuminatingly applied to Creed. Aspiring to appear stupid, even when one is not, can be a form of self-protection: there are circumstances in which it may be politic for the weaker party – the one without certain, traditionally valued, skills, abilities or strengths, say – to appear more stupid than he or she is, so as not to pose a threat to a stronger party that might bring down retribution. But while such psychological explanations might help us to make sense of Creed’s motivations, they would fail to address the value, if any, of the resulting acts. So I will set aside such explanations here in favour of returning to the work itself. Consider some representative works by Creed, all of which might be thought stupid. First, there are the stacks of floor or wall tiles made by fixing one tile on top of another so as to build up a cube of tiles fixed to an existing tile in an especially awkward place – such as where one might naturally place a foot while

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sitting on the toilet (Work No. 100 [1994]). Then there are the various door stops positioned in such a way as to prevent the opening of a door beyond 30 or 45 degrees, similarly compromising its function (Works Nos. 115 and 131 ([1995–6]). Or the one-off, ridiculously oversized piece of furniture positioned so as partially to obstruct a doorway (Work No. 142 [1996–2002]). I suspect that many of us will immediately think of at least one friend, colleague or family member whose home this work calls to mind. And this is not insignificant: for all these works recall one or other of the stupid acts, artefacts and kinds of behaviour I surveyed at the outset, even if they cannot simply be equated with such artefacts or acts. For Creed’s work is made to be this way on purpose, rather than being this way as a by-product some or other failure. Then there are the not-so-much awkward or ill-conceived as totally pointless, compulsively neat stacks of A4 paper or plywood sheets (Works Nos. 391 and 571 [2004, 2006]). Or the various scrunched up balls of paper, or paper that has been folded into squares or crumpled into balls before being imperfectly, hopelessly and pointlessly, smoothed back out (Works Nos. 88, 293 and 294; Works Nos. 429, 934 and 935; Works Nos. 430, 935, respectively [1995–2008]). Finally, there are the many works made by arranging things as various as brushstrokes, nails, cardboard boxes, tables, chairs or cactii in size order from large to small or vice versa. All of these works might be described as stupid in the sense that Creed applies to Weiner. All are mind-numbingly dumb. Despite this, at least some feel strangely familiar: smoothing out a crumpled sheet of paper is the sort of thing that any one of us might do absent-mindedly, in a state of distraction or stress. Creed himself often claims that isolating a single act, event, gesture or object allows him to impose some order or focus on the ‘soup’ of life. This is why, he says, repetition is so comforting: it imposes pattern on what would otherwise be mere mess. One of the works that Creed has talked about explicitly in these terms is his Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227 (The lights going on and off [2000]). Not a thing, hardly even a gesture, it is Creed’s solution to the problem of how not to fill his allotted rooms with the expected quantity of stuff: ‘It’s simple, and [. . .] stupid really: you know, that’s [. . .] a stupid work!’ (Creed 2014b).19 A question that naturally arises is why making stupid things should make anyone feel better. Can this really be solely in virtue of isolating a single simple act or thing?20 And even if this does happen, for whatever bizarre reasons, to make Creed feel better, it would be a purely psychological fact about Creed, without obvious relevance or interest for anyone else, certainly not a recommendation of the resulting objects as art – if that is taken to imply something of interest or value to others.

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That Creed’s work does have such interest and value for others is by now amply demonstrated. But why does it have such value – in virtue of what? Making stupid things need not itself be stupid, if it allows Creed to thematize various, all-too-human foibles, weaknesses or incapacities. Once stupidity is understood, as it is here, as incapacity or diminution of achievement under some description, there can be a value not only in isolating such characteristic human failings and lapses so as to bring them to light, but in treating them with such a gentle, solicitous indulgence. It is as though Creed were imploring us all to forgive ourselves, just a little bit. This is what makes his art strangely sweet, despite its generally unremarked darkness. Neither the philosophical literature on stupidity nor the critical literature on Creed has had much to say, either about this attitude we might take towards our own failings or its possible bearing on Creed’s art. Yet, taken together, they may help to explain Creed’s surprising status as something of a national treasure. This bears thinking about: despite going out of his way to make textbook examples of the kind of thing for which contemporary art is routinely pilloried – ‘The artist might as well have taken a dump in an empty room’ (Works Nos. 600, 660 [2006–7]) – Creed’s art is remarkably popular. Why is that? No doubt it is in part because Creed himself is endearingly genial and unassuming, and the work itself often fun, albeit in a pretty basic – and perhaps ultimately grating – ‘bring the kids along, they’ll enjoy it’ kind of way, but this cannot be the whole explanation. Perhaps, by singling out a variety of all-too-human foibles, failings, anxieties and compulsions, Creed offers us an opportunity to forgive ourselves, just a wee bit. Making stupid art, it turns out, need not be stupid at all; it may just be humane. We’re all stupid some of the time. But that’s OK. E V E R Y T H I N G I S G O I N G T O B E A L R I G H T.21

Notes 1 Creed (2014a). I have been unable to verify a source for this claim. Though Richter often makes more general claims about the stupidity of painting: ‘One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting [. . .] if one lacks passionate commitment [. . .] then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy’ (February 1973; in Richter 2009: 70). On the notion of ‘painting like nature’ with respect to Richter more generally, see Guillemert (2017). Original quote: ‘It’s brilliant. It reminds me of something I’m told the painter Gerhard Richter once said: “I want my art to be stupid like nature.”’

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2 Creed (2014a). Original quote: ‘It’s the most beautiful, peaceful music, but also the funniest, most thoughtful and stupid music I could possibly imagine. It feels like it’s got everything in it, but without necessarily making sense. Things fly in from the left, right and centre. There are different ideas, turns of phrase, beautiful pieces of music, catchy bits, but it’s mysterious and I can’t understand it. It doesn’t add up. [. . .] I don’t know what an artist is, but I’d say if anyone is one, Bob Dylan is.’ 3 The orphanage itself decamped to the leafier environs of Watford in 1871, following a typhoid outbreak, after which the building served as the headquarters and first Training Garrison of the Salvation Army. 4 Work No. 203 was the result of a collaboration between Creed, the commissioning agency PEER and Hackney Historic Buildings Trust. 5 ‘Martin Creed/Interview’, ArtPatrolTV, publ. 4 December 2008, at 1 min, 40: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v= YI_kJgjMo. 6 ‘Martin Creed’s Work No. 850/TateShots’ at 1 min, 30: https://www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v=​-U8Fl45​-DFw​&t​=42s. 7 Creed in Coles (2010: 75). Original quote: ‘[Weiner’s] more interesting [. . .] on account of the fact that he’s more stupid. And I mean that in the best possible way, because stupid is good to me. I want to make stupid work.’ 8 I am thinking of Haacke’s archaeologies of political and financial power and Buren’s site-specific detournement of reductive abstraction. By contrast, Weiner’s text works either document, in stripped down form, various actions – such as stacking, cutting or moving diverse objects and materials – that the artist has undertaken, or propose similar acts that could be undertaken. Thus, Weiner’s famous 1968 ‘“Declaration of Intent” reads: 1. The artist may construct the piece; 2. The piece may be fabricated; 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.’ 9 I do not because Weiner is at bottom too deeply materialist in his motivations, in the literal sense of being concerned with objects, materials, processes and actions. On Weiner’s materialism, see Chiong (2013). 10 Several of Weiner’s ‘Statements’ make this trajectory out of painting obvious:

(i) A rectangular canvass [sic] and stretcher support with a rectangular removal from one of the four corners sprayed with paint for a time elapsure; (ii) A removal to the lathing or support wall of plaster or wall board from a wall; (iii) One sheet of plywood secured to the floor or wall. (iv) A sheet of brown paper of arbitrary width and length of twice that width with a removal of the same proportions glued to the floor. See Weiner (1968). Also available here: http://www​.jeffreythompson​.org​/downloads​ /LawrenceWeiner​-Statements​.pdf

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11 Creed uses this as the basis for his alternative route out of the endgame of reductive painting, a route that leverages Robert Ryman’s fascination with the interface between paintings and walls rather than, like Weiner, Frank Stella’s experimentation with various notched and/or shaped supports. Creed’s early paired ‘intrusions and protrusions’ from walls (Works Nos. 19, 61,84, 99, 106 [1989–94]), complicate this story be occupying a kind of liminal space between painting and sculpture. 12 The expression, bête comme un peintre is also common in French, where it has pedigree. See Gaiger (2008: 6, 145); fn. 12. 13 What little there is tends to presuppose that the meaning of stupidity is either self-evident or irrelevant to the question at hand. See, for example, Elgin’s (1988), on the advantages of having as thin a grasp of a situation as possible for securing knowledge, given standard philosophical accounts of the latter. 14 See also Musil (1990: 273). 15 Musil includes pretentiousness under the latter head as the characteristic failure of the intellect. See Musil (1990: 283). 16 Musil seems to have regarded the latter as a peculiarly Germanic disease of the intellect. See Musil (1990: 282–5) and ‘Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Mind’ (1933), also in Precision and Soul. For a discussion, see Mulligan (2014a: 121–3) and also Mulligan (2014b). 17 The account that follows is based loosely on ‘The Anatomy of Vice’, the opening chapter of Quassim Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 2019: 1–27. 18 Cassam, ‘Anatomy of Vice’, 3–4. 19 ‘In Your Face: Interview: Martin Creed’, SHOWstudio (6 Dec 2014) between 1 min 06 and 4 min 36: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=pY3L0cNqDiw. 20 Creed’s practice seems to be a series of dumb attempts to bring a single thing, action, movement or event momentarily into focus, before it sinks back into the general soup. This is why Work No. 232 (2000), originally formulated as an artist’s statement and consisting of the legend THE WHOLE WORLD + THE WORK = THE WHOLE WORLD, typically realized in neon on the outside of buildings, can be taken as a key to unlocking his practice. The whole world is an ocean of stuff: isolating a single thing or act, by making or framing it in some way, may allow us to focus on it momentarily, but whatever one isolates in this way will sink back into the general morass more or less quickly. 21 I would like to thank Quassim Cassam and Jason Gaiger for their thoughtful comments on this chapter in draft: Quassim for pressing me on the issue of Creed’s faux-stupidity, and Jason for suggesting the Shakespearean fool as an analogy for Creed’s brand of knowing stupidity. Both are excellent suggestions, even if I have been unable to deal with either adequately here.

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References Cassam, Q. (2019), Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chiong, K. (2013), ‘Words Matter: The Work of Lawrence Weiner’, PhD thesis, Columbia University. Coles, A. (2010), ‘Stepping In Time/Over Time with Martin Creed’, in Martin Creed (ed.), Down over Up, 66–89. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery. Creed, M. (2008a), ‘Martin Creed / Interview’, ArtPatrolTV, publ, 4 December. Available online: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v= YI_kJgjMo. Creed, M. (2008b), ‘Martin Creed’s Work No. 850/TateShots’, Publ, 3 September. Available online: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-U8Fl45​-DFw​&t​=42s. Creed, M. (2014a), ‘Why I love Bob Dylan’, The Guardian, Wed 18 June. Available online: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/culture​/2014​/jun​/18​/martin​-creed​-why​-i​-love​ -bob​-dylan. Creed, M. (2014b), ‘In Your Face: Interview: Martin Creed’, SHOWstudio, 6 December. Available online: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=pY3L0cNqDiw. Elgin, C. (1988), ‘The Epistemic Efficacy of Stupidity’, Synthese, 74 (3): 297–311 Gaiger, J. (2008), Aesthetics & Painting, London: Continuum. Guillemert, A. (2017), ‘“Painting Like Nature:” Chance and the Landscape in Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs’, Art History, 70 (1): 178–99. Leader, D. (2010), ‘Forms of Attachment’, in Martin Creed: Works, xxxvi–xli. London: Thames & Hudson . Mulligan, K. (2014a), ‘Anatomies of Foolishness 1927–1937’, Yearbook, Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien (KVHAA), Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities: Stockholm. Mulligan, K. (2014b), ‘Foolishness, Stupidity, and Cognitive Values’, The Monist, 97 (1): 78–82. Musil, R. (1990), ‘On Stupidity’, in Musil, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 268–286. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Plato (2008), Gorgias, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richter, G. (2009), Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters: 1961–2007, London: Thames & Hudson. Weiner, L. (1968), Statements, New York: Seth Siegelaub/The Louis Kellner Foundation.

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How not to be an uncollectible artist Alessandra Donati and Anna Pirri Valentini1

Martin Creed’s artistic production represents a challenge for copyright and property law for different reasons; different legal instruments and techniques might be used to allow for their acknowledgement, protection and circulation. His artworks are often characterized by a low degree of materiality and a high degree of ease of reproducibility. For this reason, the question of legal documentation gains a particular importance. In this chapter, Creed’s artworks will be analysed in relation to questions of authentication and circulation in the art market in the light of two legal instruments: the contract and the certificate of authenticity.

1.  Art is just a word2 1.1  Authorship and originality in the work of Martin Creed As Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus and Andy Warhol taught us, everything today can in principle become an artwork, or a part of one: air, light, energy, space, time, gestures, perception, other artworks (including those already made by other artists), previously existing images and objects, the relationship with the viewer, the context of the exhibition and, above all, the artist’s ideas and intentions. In recent decades, contemporary art has expanded the relevant kinds of media by intentionally blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, discourse, gestures and behaviour, innovating its modes of expression in search of the dematerialization of the artwork. We seem to be moving towards a conception of ephemeral artworks or as something which has, somehow, to be ‘reactivated’, including the participation of the public into the

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realization or manipulation of the work itself. The art of the twentieth century has reconsidered itself and the role of the artist, in a general development in art aimed at examining the process of artistic creation as an aesthetic product, as well as its modes of exposure as components of the very definition of the work of art. In Martin Creed’s varied production, many unusual media are used: in addition to paintings and drawings, there are videos, installations, balloons and several different kinds of everyday objects, light or, simply, ‘just a word’. Rather than producing ‘something new’, Creed’s works often represent small ‘interventions’ into pre-existing materials or situations. His artistic practice has been described in the following terms: ‘Crossing all artistic media and including music, his art transforms everyday materials and actions into surprising meditations on existence and the invisible structures that shape our lives. His minimalistic approach strips away the unnecessary, but preserves an abundance of wit, humour and surprise.’3 This variety of means of expression does not easily find itself covered by adequate legal recognition and protection, in particular in terms of copyright, contract law and property law. Creed’s artworks are interesting artistic practices that challenge the limits set by the law on art, even if art is free and, arguably, boundless. Copyright law was structured at the end of the nineteenth century in reference to classical ideas of art, where artworks were by and large identified with physical objects such as statues and paintings. Classical art suggested the consolidation of classical categories, such as uniqueness, originality and authenticity of the artwork, which were well suited to a way of expressing creativity centred on the figure of the artist-subject and his or her productobject, the artwork. The traditional legal definition of artwork is therefore that of an object in which the artist’s personality is expressed through his or her concrete intervention. This means that the artist’s intervention needs to be detectable and perceivable as it should be aimed at modifying the raw materials by which the artwork is made. As Walter Benjamin (2008) once noted, the traditional artwork – while having a (more or less declared) conceptual content, a symbolism, a formal and cultural value – becomes, once finished, an object. As such, it is marketable because the creation has become a material commodity in the proper sense and can be protected legally as an object expressing an intention or an aspect of the artist’s personality. However, several forms of expression typical of contemporary art are more complex, because they are not only perceivable through the observation of the object and through the consideration of its formal completeness. This

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is to say that the concrete intervention on the object is not always detectable. The identification of the artworks is rather possible through the reconstruction of the artist’s intention. The conception is of primary importance, sometimes regardless of its objectification in the traditional sense, which is left of secondary importance. The work can often consist of installations, common objects (ready-mades), images (including artworks of others), a project to be realized or implemented, and instructions. Since this complex configuration, the documentation describing the elements of the artwork and their maintenance plays a crucial role for the very existence and permanence of the work of art. Such documents are extremely important also for safeguarding the identity and authenticity of the artwork over time and, therefore, of its connection to the original artist’s intention. The process of materialization of the authorial imprint involves, and must involve, the attention of the jurist because the instruments used for the purpose of giving materiality to the artwork is a legal instrument (see Donati 2012a): a contract – or more properly and generically a legal transaction – or even a certificate of authenticity.4 Generally speaking,5 it can be said that, regardless of the definitional differences between countries,6 legal systems in Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, like the Court of Justice,7 entail that, for the purposes of copyright, there must be a prior assessment of the existence of an original creative form, that is, of the material footprint of the artist’s personality engraved on the product.8 This is mainly due to a different evaluation of the work of art compared to other forms of authorial expression, such as literature and music. Again, in the visual arts, the doctrine cannot be detached from the author’s ‘rélation charnelle’ with the matter and from a relationship ‘sinon intime au moin physique entre le créateur et la matière’ (Pignatari 2013: 124). The rigorous application of this criterion – the search, that is, for the artist’s personal imprint on the raw materials – would therefore exclude ready-mades and totally ephemeral visual artworks (where there is no material evidence of the artist’s creative activity) from the protection of copyright, because they have no original form in which the intention of the artist was definitively materialized and fixed (cf. Walravens 2005).9 Installations and conceptual artworks that do not present this transformation are also excluded from copyright protection, placing their foundation in the project idea. Conceptual and minimal artworks, in fact, place their originality not in their concrete materialization but in the idea they manifest.

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A paradigmatic example of this is the work with which Creed won the Turner Prize, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off,10 a work consisting of the idea of a process – turning on and off the light in an empty room every five seconds. The work arguably consists of the idea rather than its realization; the artist has not made any change to the material, and the work is easily reproducible: the protection of copyright does not apply because no object was created and modified to bear the imprint of the artist’s personality (Fenzel 2007). As far as the visual arts are concerned, therefore, copyright protection is at best only partial today; it only protects some artists because it only covers a part of contemporary artistic production, namely works objectified in a material form in which the artist’s personal intervention is evident. Conceptual artists like Creed, however, have cast aside the principle on which the rationale for copyright and moral rights for authors is based: both legal regimes for protecting authorship are linked to the notion of the work as the outcome of the artist’s action, or the material making of an object as the personal expression of its creator. The problem is particularly acute in countries that require fixation as an essential condition for the protection of artistic expression, such as in the United States and the UK, and also in countries where the work must meet the requirement of originality, such as France, Italy and Germany. In response, artists themselves have developed a complex system of objectification and traceability of non-material works, using it as their own through tools provided by the law – specifically, by means of the contract and the certificate of authenticity (see Donati 2015a: 987). Examining these practices is important because it provides insight into the possible functioning of a different approach to authentication and to the control of authenticity. However, we have to point out some isolated signs of openness to the protection of conceptual and ephemeral artworks. In France and the UK, judges have occasionally managed, in fact, to establish the originality of an artwork by qualifying it through the recognition of the artistic authorship of the work itself, and therefore recognizing it as a protected creation overcoming the current and traditional schematizations.11 In particular, in French plagiarism trials, judges have occasionally adopted a broad interpretation of the notion of original form, including in it the expression of an aesthetic choice – formally recognized in relation to an aesthetic and intellectual choice – and its conceptual productivity capable of translating the artist’s personality and therefore not freely usable. For example, in the case ‘Paradis’,12 where the judge recognized the importance of ‘the context’ when conceptual art is at stake and took into account the artist’s

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choices by considering that the combination of different elements demonstrates a certain level of creativity and of sensibility that should be protected by copyright law (Markellou. M.P. 2012). French judges therefore have at times emphasized the creative process of the work itself by including in it ‘les immanents à l’oeuvre d’art tels que le choix créatif, l’aléatoire contrôlée, l’intentionnalité de l’artiste et le contexte d’exposition’ (Cf. Walravens 2005: 468). On the other hand, in order to protect new forms of expression – such as installations – British judges have proceeded to stretch the interpretation of the rigid list of protected media envisioned by the law, such as ‘collage’ and sculpture. For instance, in the case of Oasis,13 ‘collage’ was understood as a ‘collection of unrelated things’ which of course must be materially fixed – a criterion which, as suggested by the judge, can also be applied to conceptual works like, for instance, Carl Andre’s bricks, Richard Long’s stone circles and Gilbert & George’s living sculptures and, therefore, also to many of Creed’s installations, such as those mentioned in the second part of this chapter. Another conceptually malleable category has been that of sculpture. Consider Judge Mann’s significant ruling in the 2011 sentence Lucasfilm v Ainsworth:14 in identifying the requirements to qualify a work as a sculpture, instead of a criterion of absolute evidence – the so-called elephant test – which courts have usually used in such cases, he proposed an articulated multifactorial approach which was focused on giving priority, in order to establish whether or not granting copyright protection to that ‘object’, to the reconstruction of the artist’s intention in defining the artwork. In this context, by way of example, the judge proposed to distinguish between Carl Andre’s pile of bricks ‘temporarily on display at Tate Modern for two weeks, plainly capable of being a sculpture’ and ‘the identical pile of bricks dumped at the end of a driveway for two weeks preparatory to a building project’ (Lucasfilm v Ainsworth, 2011). It is possible to imagine Judge Mann visiting Tate Modern before making such a decision: he was probably inspired by an appreciation of Richard Long’s or Carl Andre’s work. But what would have Mann thought had he seen, at Tate Modern, the runner of Creed’s Work no. 850?15 How would he have categorized that artwork? It is evident that, both in common law and in civil law, many of Creed’s works can hardly qualify as artistic creations or works of art from the point of view of copyright, as they do not meet the requirements stipulated by positive law and jurisprudential interpretation. In addition to not falling under any of the categories envisioned by the common law copyright – works of painting, sculpture, collage – Creed’s works are often not fixated on a material support by the artist’s own manual intervention, nor do they present, from the point of

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view civil law, an original form, as they are not the result of the artist’s personal intervention but rather a project of education or information related to the methods of realization and activation of the work itself.

1.2  From ownership of an artwork to the legitimized access to information The artistic practices described earlier as examples are devised in order to highlight the prominent importance of the documentation, and therefore the information contained. The availability of this information regarding the nature of the artwork and the instruction that allow for its authentic conservation are fundamental for its identification since in conceptual artworks the idea underpinning the creation is predominant compared to its objectification. The peculiar character of these artistic practices make them symbolic of a new cognitive and cultural economy whose aim is to find a legitimization rather than a property right over the good. The legitimization of the artwork’s reactivation calls every time for the artist’s declaration and every time implies the possibility of disclaimer of authenticity (see Donati 2017a: 161). In this context, it is important to give new value to the certificate of authenticity that is released by the artist, which expresses the will of the artist, his or her certified description of the artwork and his or her interpretation of it. Contrary to other documents such as catalogues, scripta and so on, the certificate and the contract have official legal validity, and for this reason they play a key role. The boundary between the work of art and the work of thought is very thin: the work of art, in this sense, is very close to musical composition as it delegates its realization to a third party. These are works that Nelson Goodman has called ‘allographic’, distinguishing them from ‘autographic’ ones (see Goodman 1968). Autographic works are also created in a single stage, whereas allographic ones, like music, involve a phase of creation and one of implementation. In a certain sense, this is an inescapable corollary of Benjamin’s theory about reproducibility of works of art (see Benjamin 2008): in the face of the loss of its aura, an artwork, may be reaffirmed through procedures considered constitutive of the work itself. Within this context, the unique ‘auratic’ artwork often exists, paradoxically, in multiple, replicated forms (particularly with sculpture and installation, video art, and photography), coexisting in different places and times (see McClean 2018). Given the easy reproducibility of the conceptual work, in order for the latter to retain its aura and remain unrepeatable, the artist

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tries to establish, for each creation, an individual documentary and negotiation relationship with the acquiring collector. This relationship becomes part of the artwork as the sole guarantor of its uniqueness and authenticity: the aura of the artwork moves onto the documentation of the exclusive and personalized relationship between artist and collector. A similar situation is found, in general terms, also with ephemeral works and installations that require this kind of reactivation. It is thus necessary to distinguish between documents that enable one to retrace the origin of the artwork from the documents that state the artist’s will. In a more general sense, information thus achieves a binding and necessary value and function: it is no longer a historical–cultural narration of the work, as in the case of objectively definitive works of art, whose comprehension is affected by the interpretation of the historian and the curator, but the documentation of the artist’s ideation-intention (cf. Heinich 2014) as well as of his or her creation. In this way, the work necessarily comes with its own manifesto – an integral part of the work itself and of its identity. The artist is and remains ‘present’ even after having put his work in circulation. The information work, in order to persist over time, must be preserved. For many contemporary works, the archive therefore acquires a new value: not only as a place for preserving the memory of the artist’s life and activity but also to keep the memory of the aura, the artist’s idea, the information and documentation of the creative process necessary to reactivate the work of art (Donati 2016: 161). In one important sense, then, the authenticity of the artwork now depends on the quality of this information. The pace of the art and that of the law run at different speeds. The document modes for recognizing art differ from country to country. In fact, many have labelled conceptual art as being ruled out by the legal definition of artwork outlaw and conceptual artists as ‘copyright criminals’ (see Meyer 2007; McLeod 2005). Conceptual art was conceived and is achieved as outlaw vis-à-vis copyright, at least in its traditional meaning. Yet, this ‘illegality’ not only is related to copyright but also affects the law of contracts and varies according to different national laws. Creed’s artistic production represents a challenge for copyright and property law for different reasons; different legal instruments and techniques could be used to allow for their acknowledgement, protection and circulation. With regards to artworks characterized by a low degree of materiality or a high ease of reproducibility, the legal documentation is extremely important. Rooted in the tradition of conceptual art, the authenticity of Creed’s artworks and their

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possibility of exchange will be analysed especially in the light of two legal instruments: the contract and the certificate of authenticity.

2.  Exchanging and preserving authenticity in Martin Creed’s artworks and installations Creed’s artistic practice is historically rooted in the traditions of minimalism and conceptualism. From a legal point of view, the first difficulty which arises in approaching artworks inspired by conceptualism16 deals with the possibility of protecting and converting the artist’s ‘idea’ into something with a sufficient degree of materiality to render its juxtaposition with the legal definition of artwork possible.17 As was debated by Lucy R. Lippard (1997) and Benjamin Buchloh (1990),18 conceptual art, despite its ambitions with respect to immateriality, never quite managed to escape from creating a commodity-object art. In fact, the classical corpus physicum of an artwork (such as a painting and a sculpture), instead of disappearing, has been replaced by a set of administrative procedures meant to provide the necessary legal basis for the affirmation of conventional property, financial interest and other intellectual property rights.19 These administrative procedures are normally translated into certificates of authenticity or contracts, legal instruments which allow for the possibility of an artwork’s being circulated, transferred and exchanged. How does Creed’s artistic production fit into such a tradition? And what does a collector buy when he or she purchases one of Creed’s artworks?20

2.1  Material artworks: Ownership of the artefacts and obligations to maintain their authenticity Work No. 916 (see Figure 7), Boxes (2008), as well as Work No. 285, Things (2002), or Work No. 88, A sheet of paper crumpled into a ball (1995), are all artworks that could raise these kinds of legal considerations. Normally, when a collector purchases one of Creed’s artworks that has a corpus, a certain degree of materiality, he or she receives the artwork along with a certificate stating its authenticity.21 Usually, this kind of certificate confirms the authenticity of the artwork, both in the case it is signed and released by the artist and in the situation where it is produced by the gallerist.22 ​

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Figure 7  Martin Creed, Work No. 916, 2008; boxes; 78.7 x 24 x 24 in. / 200 x 61 x 61cm. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

As in these cases, on the issue of a certificate of authenticity, particular attention should be paid when artworks are pieces made of degradable materials that eventually will need to be changed or substituted. In such situations, the artist, the collector and the gallerist are expected to produce valid legal transactions at the moment of the exchange, as well as in the case of further circulations of the artwork. Generally, contracts are necessary for the alienation and the circulation of artworks,23 and the parties should be very rational in making clear the will of the artist and the rights and duties of the collector.24 Such agreements are essential in order to preserve the very authenticity of the artworks.25 For instance, what if an alteration of the raw material constituting the artwork occurs? Can it still be considered as the same piece purchased by the collector or not? Of course, this question is relevant for any kind of artwork (including the more traditional ones), but in those where the creative intervention of the artist on the raw material is limited, or even lacking, this issue is even more crucial.

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The less is the degree of physical intervention by the artist upon the artwork, the more relevant and complicated is the determination of its very nature and its essential characteristics. If the artwork is identified with an idea rather than a material representation, does this imply that, in order to preserve the authenticity of the artwork, it is necessary to restore a cardboard box or a sheet of paper or not?26 The described situation raises several questions regarding the artistic dimension, legal doubts and, last but not least, economic issues (since the disappearance of the authentic work determines also the loss of its economic value, causing a depreciation of the owner’s assets). As Grampp puts it, ‘Economic value, strictly speaking, is the general form of all value, including that which is aesthetic and that which is not aesthetic but is value of another kind.’27 In the light of these considerations, the crucial factor is whether the artwork is understood as being the concept of a number of cardboard boxes of different sizes and piled one upon the other – no matter the colour, the brands and the products represented – or the actual pieces of cardboard so assembled. In the same way, it is extremely important that the artist clarifies whether the original neon bulbs that create the luminous effect of Work No. 285, Things, are essential elements of the artwork or, instead, whether they can be substituted.28 It is important that the original contract between the artist and the collector, as well as the subsequent contracts for future exchanges of the artwork, makes transparent such aspects, giving the buyer a clear idea both of the artist’s conception of the artwork and, contextually, of the rights and responsibilities that he or she is taking. First of all, in order to be binding for the parties, the obligations arising for the artist or the owner are to be expressed in a valid contract. In this regard, it is necessary to take into account the rules determining the legality, and thus the enforceability, of such agreements, as established in national contract law. Considering the relevance of this documentation to the artwork’s authenticity, it follows that it is the owner’s responsibility to respect the obligations arising from the contract. Artworks that stipulate an active role for the owner in the maintenance of their authenticity require also a good degree of clarity and specificity at the moment of the transfer of the artwork. The safeguard of the authenticity of a contemporary artwork very often depends on the production of an adequate documentation by the artist concerning his or her creative process and, very importantly, the possible interventions with regards to its restoration, reactivation and maintenance.29

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Recalling our original question (what does the collector buy when he or she purchases a Creed’s artwork?), for artworks made with degradable material, which could need to be changed or substituted, the buyer will acquire some physical objects (the cardboard boxes, the neon tubes, or the sheet of paper crumpled into a ball) and, perhaps, she or he will take responsibility for an action or series of actions: to maintain exactly those boxes (through material restoration probably) or, for example, to change the light bulbs. Another relevant question is this: Are those obligations binding only for the first buyer, or are they automatically transferred to future collectors? From the perspectives of both civil law and common law, an ‘automatic transfer of obligations’ seems not to be possible by default. This is due to the fact that the law of contract, in both legal systems – even if with different regulations from country to country – adopts the principle of privity, which basically establishes that a contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations arising under it on any person or agent except the relevant parties.30 This being the legal framework of the matter at stake, the artist, in order to guarantee and ensure the authenticity of his/her artworks, can provide for a system of binding obligations for anyone coming into possession of one of his/ her artworks (to be established since its very first sale) allowing for a personal control over its circulation. In the event of an alteration of the artwork, different remedies are possible, depending on the legal status of the artefact and the relevant legislation.31 In Italy, for example, it is possible to refer to two legal regulations, depending on whether the artefact is an artwork or a cultural property item.32 For contemporary artworks and cultural property items, both being granted copyright moral protection, Article 20 L. 633/41 states that the author ‘has the right to claim the paternity of the artwork and to take position against any deformation, mutilation or other modification, and any act to the detriment of the artwork itself, which may be prejudicial to his or her honour or reputation’. In the light of this article, the artist (or the legitimate holder of his/her moral rights, after the artist’s death) could blame the non-fulfilment of the owner’s commitments only if it were possible to demonstrate that the way the artwork is preserved has caused such damage as to prejudice his/her honour or reputation. This means that not any kind of damage to the artwork is actionable, but only those damages which bring modifications capable of prejudicing the honour and the reputation of the artist.

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For cultural property items, by contrast, the protection for the maintenance in their original status (being granted to the physical maintenance of the artefact) is more objective. Article 20 of the Code of the Cultural and Landscape Heritage specifies: ‘Cultural properties may not be destroyed, damaged or adapted to uses not compatible with their historic or artistic character or of such kind as to prejudice their conservation.’ It is important to mention the relation, especially in the tradition of civil law, that exists between the ownership of some kinds of contemporary artworks (specifically, those that need certain kinds of interventions or that need to be reactivated) and the right of property. In fact, the former could come into conflict with the character of absoluteness that characterizes, in the tradition of civil law, the concept of ownership and the rights in rem in general.33 With this in mind, the special request to maintain, to reactivate or to replace certain non-essential elements of the artwork charged to the private owner of a contemporary artwork could represent an ‘enfeeblement’ of the right of property (see Gambaro 2017), undermined in its possibility to be performed completely.34

2.2  Protecting the integrity of contemporary artworks: Installations and ephemeral works Work No. 210 (see Figure 8), Half the air in a given space (1998), or Work No. 227, The lights going on and off (2000), are artworks for which the legal implications associated with their circulation are different than the other works by Creed previously analysed. The first example is an interactive installation consisting of a room half-filled with white balloons, each balloon being 12 inches/30.5 centimetres in diameter, where the audience is completely submerged. The second one consists of an empty room which is filled with light for five seconds and then plunged into darkness for five seconds. ​ In these examples, the corpus mechanicum of the artwork is lacking,35 so that the original question ‘what does a collector buy when he or she purchases a Creed’s artwork?’ is even more urgent. In these examples, where any physical artefact is delivered to the buyer, the artwork could be represented by the idea described in the certificate of authenticity.36 In this case, would this certificate be legally an object of property, or a contract from which some obligations to activate the installation arise, or both of them? This type of question has triggered the interest of art law scholars37

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Figure 8  Martin Creed, Work No. 210, Half the air in a given space, 1999; white balloons; multiple parts, each balloon, 16 in. / 40.6 cm diameter, overall dimensions variable. Installation at Cabinet Gallery, London, UK, 1999 (detail). © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

in recent years. The answers differ depending on the system of circulation chosen by the artist and, again, by the legal system taken into consideration. As highlighted throughout this chapter, the emergence of artworks characterized by a low degree of materialization and by a high degree of ease of reproducibility has demanded the support of legal practices and of an adequate documentation. According to artistic practice and the requirements for the maintenance of artworks, the documentation associated with the latter assumes different roles and functions. For some artists,38 as observed by scholars (see Donati 2012a; McClean 2010) and North American jurisprudence,39 it is possible to consider the certificate of authenticity itself as the artwork; the certificate contains the description of the latter, it embodies it, and there is a shift of the duties of maintenance from the artwork to the document.40 In such cases, the loss or the destruction of the certificate, if established as such by the artist, could be

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sanctioned as a loss of the artwork. In other cases, there are artists who consider the certificate of authenticity as being part of their artwork, but only if the document is ‘completed’ and ‘performed’ in connection with other kinds of operations, such as actions described and requested by the artist in order to permit the circulation of their artworks and the maintenance of their authenticity.41 It is crucial, therefore, that installations and artworks, characterized by a low degree of materialization, are completed and identified in the documentation that accompanies them (cf. Donati 2015b: 208 ss.), making clear how the relation between art and law is more necessary than ever.

Notes 1 Notwithstanding the common exchanges of ideas, comments and references, the first part of the chapter (Art is just a word) has been written by Alessandra Donati, and the second part (Exchanging and preserving authenticity in Martin Creed’s artworks and installations) by Anna Pirri Valentini. 2 TateShots: Martin Creed, Work No. 850, Interview, on http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/ context​-comment​/video​/tateshots​-martin- creed-work-no-850. 3 Available online: https://www​.southbankcentre​.co​.uk​/venues​/hayward​-gallery​/past​ -exhibitions​/martin​-creed​-whats​-point- it. 4 In this sense, it is worth considering the recent offer of special insurance policies concerning certificates of authenticity of conceptual works of art by Crystal & Company in partnership with AIG Private Client Group, part of the American International Group, Inc. (AIG). 5 For an exhaustive comparative analysis, see Donati (2012a) as well as Donati (2017b: 11). 6 The question ‘what is art?’, from the standpoint of intellectual property, can be answered in two profoundly different ways on a legal level. Civil law systems – for example, Italy, France and Germany – have adopted a broad definition (see the Italian article 1 of the law 633 of 1941 on copyright, which reproduces the Article 2. 1 of the Berne Convention, by virtue of which ‘Intellectual creative works that belong to literature, music, the visual arts, architecture, theatre and cinematography are protected under this law, whatever the way or form of expression’. A similar definition is found in France, Article 112-1 of the Code of propriété littéraire et artistique: ‘Les dispositions du présent code protègent les droits des auteurs sur toutes les oeuvres de l’esprit, quels qu’en soient le genre, la forme d’expression, le mérite ou la destination’). Common law systems, instead, apply a very strict definition of what is protected by copyright (only the mediums enumerated in

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the copyright law are protected), and, moreover, in the United States and Great Britain, there is a further requirement: it is necessary that the work be fixed in a tangible medium and in a definite period of time. The fixation procedure must be characterized by the artist’s personal intervention. For example, US Code, Title 17, § 102(a) protects only ‘original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device’. See, for example, Krystyna Gmurzynska-Bscher v. Oberfinanzdirektion Köln, C 231/89 or Ingrid Raab v. Hauptzollamt Berlin-Packhof, C 1/89, in which it was claimed that one should exclude artistic photos from Chapter 92.2 of the Combined Nomenclature, as these media cannot be qualified as serigraphs, lacking a personal and manual intervention of the artist in the making of the original, whose reproduction would follow by a mechanical printing process. Cf. for example, Trib. Milano, 25 March 2014 n. 4116; the same principle is expressed very clearly in France. See Cass. civ., 1 December 2011, in Petites Affiches, 2012, n° 113, p. 14, note C. Frutueau where the court states that ‘une oeuvre n’est originale que lorsqu’elle porte l’empreinte de la personnalité de son auteur, indépendamment de son caractère nouveau’. See also the more recent case of Camille Claudel’s bronze statues, cd. ‘affaire de La Vague’, Cass, civ., 4 May 2012, n. 11-10.763 Mme Claudel, épse Bonzon et al. c/ Mme Reine-Marie Paris et al., in Bull. Civ., 2012, I, n. 103; Cfr. in Petites Affiches 2014, n° 34, p. 7. See Kelley v. Chicago Park District, no. 04 C 07715, 2008 WL 4449886 (N.D. Ill. 29 September 2008). See Carpenter and Hetcher 2014. For a more complete bibliography, see Donati (2012a: 34, 53). The lights going on and off won Martin Creed the Turner Prize at Tate Britain in 2001. A previous edition of the artwork is Work No. 127, The lights going on and off, 1995. A paradigmatic case was that of Brancusi v. United States, 54 Treas Dec, 428, 429 (Cust. Ct. 1928). See infra. See Cour Cassation Fr., 13 November 2008, no. 06-19.021 (Arrêt Paradis), where the artist’s intervention – in particular in this case the word ‘Paradis’ in gold lettering placed on a dilapidated door – manages to give the space an innovative characterization; VG Bild-Kunst v. Museum Schloss Moyländer, 2010 District Court of Dusseldorf, Chamber: 12 Civil Division, Application Number: 12 O 255/09, final reversed by BGH, 16 May 2013, Az. I ZR 28/12. Creation Records Limited and Others v News Group Newspapers Limited, [1997] EMLR 444, [1997] EWHC Ch 370 (cf. Stokes 2012: 40). Lucasfilm v Ainsworth [2011] UKSC 39, [105]; cf. Lydiate 2012–13: 111. As Martin Creed himself put it: ‘The work consists of people running through the gallery or consists of a person running through the gallery every 30 seconds’, in TateShots: Martin Creed, Work No. 850, Interview. cit.

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16 Sol LeWitt, in ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Art Forum, 1967, gives the definition of conceptual art as follows ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt in Alberro and Stimson, eds, 1999: 13) . 17 As Stapleton, J. affirms in ‘Intellectual Property and the Knowledge Economy’, the main achievement of Minimalism ‘was not to criticize copyright but to shift the location of copyright away from the revealed object (the displayed object) and place it in its documentation’ (Stapleton 2003: 117–18). For a survey concerning the circulation of conceptual art, see: Alberro (2003); McClean (2010); Donati (2012a). 18 See the preface of Lippard (1997), and Buchloh (1990), especially pp. 118–19: the introduction of a legalistic language and an administrative style of the material presentation of the artistic object.’ 19 As McClean (2010) writes: ‘Conceptual artists and their descendants can be described as bureau-philes fascinated by bureaucratic forms and procedures.’ 20 The selection of artworks used for this article is not due to personal preferences; instead, it is a selection based on the suitability of the artworks to represent certain legal issues. 21 Many thanks to Florian Berktold, executive director of HAUSER & WIRTH London, for his kind collaboration. 22 The certificate of authenticity could, at the same time, give the owner proof of ownership in the case his/her name is expressly mentioned on the inside of the same certificate, issued, in this case, in the event of each change of owner. This possibility occurs, for example, in the circulation of Daniel Buren’s artworks, thanks to the constant use of his personal certificate of authenticity, the so-called Avertissement, available online: https://danielburen​.com​/pages​/archives​/ bibliographie​_texts​/text​:6. This certificate, as conceived by Buren, contains the name of the buyer and is issued in the event of each new circulation of the artwork. It ascribes the authenticity of the artwork and confers the ownership only if the possessor respects the different clause contained in the Avertissement. 23 Recently, the necessity of a new genre of certificate for the circulation and acquisition of contemporary artworks has been recognized and formally requested also by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. This new certificate, named PACTA (protocolli per l’Autenticità, la Cura e la Tutela dell’Arte contemporanea), and the related guidelines for use, have been issued with the act 7/2017 DG-AAP. It is available online: http://www​.beniculturali​.it​/mibac​/ export​/MiBAC​/sito​-MiBAC​/Contenuti​/Avvisi​/visualizza​_asset​.html​_1054867027​ .html. See Donati (2017a). 24 The first contract conceived specifically for the circulation of artworks has been the ‘Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’, created by the will of the curator Seth Siegelaub and then drafted by the lawyer Bob Projansky. For a survey

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of the studies on artists’ contracts, see, among the others: Kee (2017); Buck and McClean (2012); Donati (2012b). See, as an example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s contract for his Sculpture sortier station, exhibited in the Metro station Stalingrad of Paris in 2001 purchased by the museum G. Pompidou, analysed by Donati (2017a). This distinction could be understood, for example, by considering the indications given by the artist regarding the essential elements that identify his/her artwork: Are the raw materials originally constituting the artwork essential elements for its very existence? Can they be substituted or not? Grampp (1989, 20–1). For a survey regarding the formation and the relevance of economic value in contemporary artworks, see also: Velthuis (2005, 2007); Horowitz (2014). In this case, the artist should preferably also specify who can be in charge for the substitution, how this can occur and which materials/objects can be used to substitute the original pieces. On this aspect, see Donati (2018). For example, some normative references are Article 1372 of the Italian Civil Code and Article 1199 of the French Civil Code. For a comparative analysis of this issue, see Donati (2017a). In Italy, an artwork is legally considered to be a cultural property item if it has been produced, at least, in the past seventy years, the author is no longer living and it has an artistic interest representing a material testimony with the value of civilization (Article 2.2 of the Italian Code of the Cultural and Landscape Heritage). The tension between the right of property and the ownership of certain kinds of contemporary artworks is analysed, both in civil and in common law, by Donati (2017a: 68). A parallelism, regarding the substance and not the effects or the possible consequences, could be made with cultural properties for which the property, although it is referred to a private individual, is subject to some limitations. Cultural properties are considered to be goods of public enjoyment, and, in this case, enjoyment has to be interpreted as ‘conservation’, since any enjoyment is possible without a properly conservation of the artefact (Zucchelli 2012: 157). See also Palma (1971: 89) et ss. and 334 et ss. Also Work No. 210, Half the air in a given space can be considered as an ephemeral work, since the essence of the installation is the idea and the project itself more than the very balloons. Alexander (2017) discusses the theory called ‘Legal Realist’ that attacked the prevailing conception of property as thing. See also Van Haaften-Schick (2017). For an overview of the legal issues – on contract and property law in a comparative perspective – connected with ephemeral artworks, see Donati (2012a).

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38 To mention in particular: Félix González-Torres and Sol LeWitt. 39 The reference is to Steinkamp v. Hoffman, No. 651770, 2012 WL 1941149 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 22 May 2012). The lawsuit has been reported firstly by Courthouse News, available online: http://www​.entlawdigest​.com​/2012​/05​/25​/1481​.htm. 40 Quoting from the lawsuit: ‘The original certificate, issued and signed by the artist who is now deceased, is a unique and irreplaceable document that cannot be generated a new or replaced. There is no substitute for the original certificate entrusted to the care, custody, and control of the defendants. Since the wall drawings do not constitute freestanding, portable works of art like a framed canvas or a sculpture on a podium, documentation of the work is the key to transmitting it or selling it to a collector or institution, the unique nature of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings renders their accompanying Certificates of authenticity critical to such works’ value.’ 41 See the ‘Avertissement’ of Daniel Buren and the circulation mechanism conceived by Yves Klein at the end of the 1950s for its Zone de sensibilité picturale immaterielle. For the circulation of his zone immatérielles, Klein created the ‘Règles rituelles de la cession des zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle’, described by Donati (2012a) and Ickowicz (2013: 528–34).

References Alberro, A. (2003), Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Alexander, G. S. (2017), ‘Objects of Art, Objects of Property’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 26 (3): 461–8. Benjamin, W. (2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood, London: Penguin. Buchloh, B. H. D. (1990), ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October, 55: 105–43. Buck, L. and D. McClean (2012), Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators, Collectors and Artists, London: Thames & Hudson. Carpenter, M. and S. Hetcher (2014), ‘Function over Form: Bringing the Fixation Requirement into the Modern Era’, Fordham Law Review, 82: 2221–71. Available online: http://ir​.lawnet​.fordham​.edu​/flr​/vol82​/iss5​/11. Donati, A. (2012a), Law and Art Diritto civile e arte contemporanea, Milano: Giuffré. Donati, A. (2012b), I contratti degli artisti Nuovi modelli di trattativa, Torino: Giappichelli. Donati, A. (2015a), ‘Autenticità, authenticité, authenticity dell’opera d’arte: Diritto mercato e prassi virtuose’, Rivista di diritto civile, 61 (4): 987–1025. Donati, A. (2015b), ‘Anche il contratto per conservare l’autenticità dell’opera’, in Villafranca Soisson, I. (ed.), Opera Conservare e restaurare l’arte contemporanea, 209–17, Venezia: Marsilio.

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Donati, A. (2016), ‘Rilevanza giuridica dell’archivio d’artista’, in AA.VV., ‘Rapporto annuale Federculture’, 184–98. Gangemi: Roma. Donati, A. (2017a), ‘La tutela giuridica dell’identità e dell’integrità dell’opera d’arte Contemporanea’, Contratto e Impresa/Europa: 160–83. Donati, A. (2017b), ‘Art as idea as idea. Diritto e creazione artistica contemporanea’, in V. Barsotti (ed.), Arte e Diritto Quaderni del dottorato fiorentino in scienze giuridiche, 11–27, Milano: Maggioli Editore. Donati, A. (2018), ‘The legal relevance of documentation for contemporary art: the authenticity of documents and artworks’, in A. Donati, R. Ferrario and S. Simoncelli (eds), Artists’ Archives and Estates: Cultural Memory Between Law and the Market, 25–35. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Fenzel, C. (2007), ‘Still Life with ‘Spark’ and ‘Sweat’: The Copyrightability of Contemporary Art in the United States and the United Kingdom’, Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law, 24 (2): 541–85. Gambaro, A. (2017), La proprietà, Beni, proprietà, possesso, Collana Trattato di diritto privato, ed. G. Iudica and P. Zatti, Milano: Giuffré Editore. Goodman, N. (1968), Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Grampp, W. D. (1989), Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics, New York: Basic Books. Heinich, N. (2014), Le paradigme de l’art contemporain, Paris: Gallimard. Horowitz, N. (2014), Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ickowicz, J. (2013), Le droit après la dématérialisation de l’oeuvre d’art, Dijon: Les presses du réel. Kee, J. (2017), ‘Félix Gonzalez-Torres on contracts’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 26 (3): 517–31. LeWitt, S. (1967), ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Art Forum, 5 (10): 79–84. Available also in Alberro, A. and B. Stimson (eds) (1999), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 12–16. Lippard, L. R. (1997), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lydiate, H. (2012–13), ‘What Is Art? A Brief Review of International Judicial Interpretations of Art in the Light of the UK Supreme Court’s 2011 Judgment in the Star Wars Case: Lucasfilm Limited’, Journal of International Media & Entertainment Law, 4 (2): 111–48. Markellou, M.P. (2012), ‘Rejecting the Works of Dan Flavin and Bill Viola: Revisiting the Boundaries of Copyright Protection for Post-Modern Art’, Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property, 2 (2): 175–81. McClean, D. (2010), ‘The Artist’s Contract / from the Contract of Aesthetics to the Aesthetics of the Contract’, Mousse Magazine, 25. Available online: http:// moussemagazine​.it​/daniel​-mcclean​-the​-artists​-contract​-2010/ .

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McClean, D. (2018), ‘“Artists” Estates as Guardians of Artistic Legacy: Custodians or Gatekeepers?’, in A. Donati, R. Ferrario and S. Simoncelli (eds), Artists’ archives and estates: cultural memory between law and the market, 138–57, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. McLeod, K. (2005), ‘Freedom of Expression?: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity’, University of Iowa: Iowa Research Online. Available online: http://ir​.uiowa​.edu​/commstud​_pubs​/9. Meyer, E. (2007), ‘Art on Ice: The Chilling Effect of Copyright on Artistic Expression’, Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts 30: 219. Palma, G. (1971), Beni di interesse pubblico e contenuto della proprietà, Napoli: Jovene. Pignatari, O. (2013), Le support en droit d’auteur, Bruxelles: Éditions Larcier. Stapleton, J. (2003), ‘Intellectual Property and the Knowledge Economy’, Phd Thesis, University of London. Stokes, S. (2012), Art and Copyright, Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. Van Haaften-Schick, L. (2017), ‘Art after Property’, C Magazine, issue 133. Available online: http://www​.laurenvhs​.com​/writing​-publications​/art​-after​-property​-article​-in​ -c​-magazine/. Velthuis, O. (2005), Imaginary Economics: Contemporary Artists and the World of Big Money, Rotterdam: nai010 Publisher. Velthuis, O. (2007), Talking Prices Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walravens, N. (2005), L’oeuvre d’art en droit d’auteur, formes et originalité des oeuvres d’art contemporaines, Paris: Economica. Zucchelli, G. (2012), Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio, ed. M. S. Sandulli, Milano: Giuffré Editore.

5

An expression of the essential Martin Creed and the celebration of the ordinary Davide Dal Sasso

Economy of means, immediacy, compositional order and communicative necessity are some of the main traits of Martin Creed’s poetics, of his way to make art. Basic, unadorned, schematic, his works are the result of a pragmatic attitude that aims at involving the viewer through the use of materials, serial structures and activities often based on instructions. All these aspects suggest that two factors in particular are prominent in Creed’s way of making art: expressiveness and attention to the ordinary – two factors that characterize conceptualist artistic practices. Both factors are also fundamental in Creed’s approach, which, precisely by virtue of their centrality, does not neglect the role of either ideas or feelings also declaring his criticism for an art that, being conceptual, would favour the former and not the latter. Indeed, Creed is explicit about this, as one reads for example in his conversation with the curator Tom Eccles: I don’t believe in conceptual art. I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings. I am inside me. I cannot separate what is inside me. . . It’s all a big soup. I can’t separate the head and the heart. I’ve never seen an idea in my life. I might have had one, but I’ve never seen one! I don’t think I really know what an idea is, at least not separate from a feeling. You can’t have ideas without feelings.1

An art that favours, or can be reduced to, ideas is not his aim: for him, along with the feelings, experiences are equally relevant for art. As Creed has made clear several times, he does not believe in conceptual art. So much so that, although he is frequently considered a conceptual artist, he does not consider himself in such a way (see Eccles and Creed 2010: x). For these reasons, his approach seems difficult to classify as conceptualist – especially if we accept the traditional idea that conceptual art has very little to do with feelings and aesthetic experiences.

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So, in which sense can we consider him a conceptualist? In my view, we can consider him in relation to conceptualism precisely because in his works ideas, feelings and their deep relationship are effectively expressed through his works. At the same time, as we shall see, it is possible to understand art as conceptual since it favours expression rather than the mere identification of the works to concepts or ideas. My main reference is precisely the expression, namely the possibility of bringing to light something that would otherwise remain in the background. This is the main issue around which I will elaborate my reading about Creed’s poetics, placing it in a particular theoretical space. My attempt is to develop this reading, posing at its origin the proposal to work in light of a disagreement: between Creed’s reject for the conceptual attitude in art and the theoretical assumption according to which it is supposed that he should be classified as a conceptualist. In order to draw from this disagreement a fruitful philosophical reading, my aim will, on the one hand, be to examine the expressiveness and the central role it plays in Creed’s work. On the other hand, I aim to clarify the extent to which his work can be considered a part of a conceptualist poetics in which expression and attention to the ordinary are of crucial significance. For this purpose, the chapter develops in two directions: in the first four sections, I tackle the themes of expression and expressiveness, and in the following four I examine some conceptualist aspects of Creed’s poetics.

1.  The surplus In art, something always escapes us. This is one of the aspects we have learned to recognize in the course of the long history of the arts and which still stands out, even in the light of the valuable theoretical contributions that have allowed us to make considerable progress in their understanding. Besides the material presence of the works, our experience seems to suggest that there is something else, a surplus that we can know intuitively but do not fully grasp and which we consider essential for something to be a work of art. This extra something belongs to the work, is an essential part of it and is crucial for it to arouse appreciation or rejection, raise questions or doubts, prompt our imaginative and interpretative responses. The surplus is indeed relevant above all from a metaphysical point of view, since it is part of what determines the works of art as works of art. At the same time, it is crucial both in axiological and epistemological terms. What escapes us becomes the object of

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our interest both because we evaluate artworks in relation to it and because we are inclined to speculate and theorize about artworks, maintaining the surplus as an indispensable reference of some kind. Works of art are sophisticated and complex objects. To deal with this complexity in a fruitful way, it may help to employ a metaphor: we could say that works of art are similar to coffers which have been masterfully adorned and carefully sealed. What makes them special, however, is not immediately their possible contents. It is the idea they express, according to which, being locked and having a striking appearance, they must retain something very precious, instead. A content that is one with the container, which, while being intuitive, is not clearly identifiable. In the same way, the aspect of art, which we intuit but remains hidden from view, is what makes it so and special. The activity of the artist in creating the work of art involves making and shaping contents, subjects and references, all of which makes the surplus possible in the work, thus giving to it a value. Usually, just like the coffer, the work of art is also sealed. We look at its features. We interact in some way with its material body. We explore it carefully and realize that there is still something else. Something that escapes us but nonetheless determines its value. Generally speaking, experiences with traditional arts have familiarized us with the idea that the surplus is indispensable for a work to be successful and to have artistic value. So much so that, when considering contemporary works, the suspicion that there is nothing else beyond what we can see is often the reason why someone distrusts and even does not deem them works of art. Often, the refusal to see something as a work of art is due to the fact that some artists work specifically to make ‘coffers’ that are partially open so as to show fragments of human everyday life and the very vitality that pervades artistic creation. The artists who work in this way tend to be those who adopt practices associated with conceptualism. That is to say, they reduce the form of their works to the essential, increasing (arguably) in this way their expressive potential. This approach, in my view, also characterizes the work of Martin Creed, as it appears in his reflections and criticisms about an art that can be called ‘conceptual’. In many of his remarks – for example, also in his statements published at the beginning of this volume – Creed fosters the possibility of thinking about art in terms of expressiveness. Indeed, rather than being considered purely in terms of an art of ideas or concepts, conceptualism might more generally be well understood through the lens of expression. This thesis, in a nutshell, could be summarized as follows: being a conceptualist, the main problem of the artist is

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the task of expressing something as directly as possible, not one of identifying art with concepts. Investigating art in the light of the expressiveness, that is, in accordance with the possibility of conveying something through the works, means addressing both the problem of form and that of expressive content. Ultimately, the latter is the way in which contents can be externalized and conveyed to make them shareable, even partially. Thus, my main aim in these pages will be to clarify why we can consider Creed a conceptualist by paying attention precisely to expressiveness and some aspects of his poetics, namely to his way of organizing the work, to his operational programme.2

2.  Aspects of expression Some simple strokes of pencil or marker on paper (Works Nos. 428, 419). Accumulations of objects of the same type – for example, balloons, tiles, cacti and so on (Works Nos. 370, 330, 587). Stacked, crumpled or simply folded and unfolded sheets of paper (Works Nos. 391, 218, 340); single words made of neon light (Works Nos. 205, 239, 259); boxes, chairs or objects presented in series (Works Nos. 701, 841, 928) and so on. The list goes on. If we wanted to summarize Creed’s work in a few words, we could choose 5 of the 310 terms that the curator Matthew Higgs has listed: ‘accessible’, ‘basic’, ‘clean’, ‘elemental’ and ‘immediate’ (see Higgs 2004). All refer in some way to expression. Accessibility to content has to do with expression, with how it can be externalized and shared through the work by the artist. This way can be more or less basic, clean and elemental. Expressing something in a clear way means making it explicit and immediate. This is the sense in which those terms also concern expression, or, rather, to the possibility that a work has to convey aspects and references, thus manifesting a surplus. That extra something that makes it different from a simple everyday object. In order to introduce the relationship between surplus, form and expression, let us first consider some general aspects of expression. Expression can be understood as kind of externalization, namely the possibility of bringing to light something that lies hidden. The expressiveness of a work of art is partly determined by how it was made and by the materials the artist used to create it. Like a face or a gesture, even in the work of art the contents of expression are deeply related to the physical vehicle that makes it possible. The work is not just

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a material thing. However, what it can express belongs to it precisely because it is first and foremost an aesthetic object, a concrete entity that we can experience through the senses and describe in different ways, and even if it offers us a surplus, it remains one thing (see Ziff 1966). A work can manifest both what is related to its subject and what exceeds its material presence. What escapes us and makes us question ourselves does not depend on the representational scope of the work but on its expressiveness. That a work can replace something else, in the sense that it is a kind of representation, certainly contributes to the way in which it can express something. However, what exceeds the work, that surplus that we can know intuitively, refers above all to its expressiveness. The aesthetic object has a virtual trait which, as Susanne K. Langer recognized, reveals the symbolic nature of the work. It is, in fact, an expressive vehicle, a symbol that expresses the ideas of feeling (see Langer 1950). Precisely for this reason the work can exhibit a ‘living form’, a form which conveys the rhythm, dynamism and complexity of the vitality that pervades it (see Langer 1957, chap. 4). The relationship between form and expression is deeply linked to the materials of the work. In his The Sense of Beauty, George Santayana (1896) wrote that expression essentially concerns the relationship between subject and object; concreteness and materiality are indeed pivotal for the expressiveness of objects. The first trait of the expression is therefore its relational character, a trait that also helps us recognize the importance of materiality for the purposes of expression: we can grasp what an object, or another subject, expresses first of all, according to an interaction between materials. What does it mean, however, that an object, or a material thing (which could also be a work of art), is expressive? In order to begin to reply to this complex question, I suggest we look at some remarks by Dilman W. Gotshalk (1954), who conceived expression in the following way: An expression is a system of factors explicitly suggestive of other factors, and its expressiveness is a function of its suggestiveness of the other factors. It follows from this that we should always say that expressiveness is in the expressive object. It is not imputed to the object by an observer. It is literally in the expressive object.3

If we accept this description, we can answer the question posed earlier by claiming that an object is expressive because it manifests a system of relations between different factors. More precisely, this is because some explicit factors that characterize it enable the externalization of other factors that, we might

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say, are instead implicit. In the light of this description, we can also identify the second trait of the expression: its systemic character. Let us now try to clarify in what terms a particular object, or a work of art, can be expressive. According to Gotshalk, works of art, being objects that arouse our perceptual responses and our attention in close relation to the conferment of value, manifest what he properly considers as aesthetic expression. As he specifies, works of art are aesthetic expressions par excellence insofar as they are complex objects: ‘fine art has been most frequently described as aiming at expression in the sense of aesthetic expression [. . .], namely, at seeking to build a complex object whose function as expressive is uniquely to serve as a terminus of intrinsic perceptual attention’ (Gotshalk 1954: 83). This conception of aesthetic expression allows us to see a third trait of expression, the axiological character of which we must take into account: it is in close relation to our perceptive response and to our appreciation that we will be willing to ascribe to artistic value to an object. The brief survey so far has led us to identify two traits that make up expression in general terms (relational and systemic) and one that belongs to its aesthetic (axiological) dimension. My aim is thus to move from this general overview to examining Creed’s work to show how the centrality of expression is crucial considering it as a conceptualist poetics. As we will see, this effort could lead us in a fruitful direction, although only if one takes into account his scepticism towards an art that can be called ‘conceptual’. This would amount to a position that claims the deep connection between ideas and feelings, since for art both are pivotal (see Eccles and Creed 2010: x)

3.  Vital dynamism Investigating expression in art raises different challenges. One of these challenges relates to the role of representation in the ontology of the work of art. If we ask ourselves what a work of art is, we can try and answer by assigning a role of primary importance precisely to the representational property, explaining its specificities in the works with respect to common objects. However, in so doing we are also faced with a problem that concerns above all the relationship between representation and expression: Can we distinguish them? To answer it might be helpful to refer to Virgil Aldrich’s claim (1963) that although it is difficult to distinguish representation from expression, there are numerous cases in which certain works of art are considered as representations

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and others in which they are not. However, in order to distinguish expression and representation, he observed that works of art are expressive insofar as they are aesthetic objects, that is to say they are first and foremost material entities that are presented in a certain way to a user and, more precisely, they are ‘present for prehensive perception’ (Aldrich 1963: 49).4 Also in this case, expressiveness is therefore indicated by keeping as a first reference the material concreteness of the work. The work of art is an aesthetic object, and this means at least two things: it is an object that can be perceived through the senses, and which arouses our sensitive, emotional and intellectual curiosity. However, the work has its value because it offers much more than its material consistency. Its artistic value is deeply linked to its subjects, references and contents that can more or less be grasped. Their transmission can depend both on the work’s representation and on its expressiveness. But while the former is primarily identifiable with the possibilities of a substitution – X stands for Y – expressiveness is instead strongly linked to the symbolic import of works of art. These elements allow us to draw a first distinction between expression and representation: expression belongs to works because they are essentially vehicles of meaning. It is this aspect of expression that Susanne Langer (1950) chose to focus on, arguing that the close relationship between symbol and expression and the role of representation are the organizing principles of artistic forms.5 Explaining in particular the first relationship (between symbol and expression), she argues that the work of art is a symbol because it is an expressive form of rhythm and dynamism of life. Just for this reason, Langer considered the work of art as a manifestation of the ‘living form’ (Langer 1957: 52), namely a dynamic and rhythmic complex that ‘has characteristics symbolically related to those of life itself ’ (Langer 1957: 54). The possibility of recognizing the expression of this kind of vitality in a work, that is to say a rhythmic complex of vital dynamics, enables us to add to those first three features identified in the previous section that of dynamism. Expression, as a repeated possibility of manifesting something, of externalizing what is originally inside, is naturally dynamic. As for this issue, one point ought to be clarified. It should be noted that dynamic trait does not appear immediately in Langer’s philosophy, since in her studies the main thesis is that works of art are symbols of the ideas of feeling – as it is clear in her first writings (see Langer 1950) and above all in the corpus of her philosophy of art (see Langer 1953). In my short examination of the expression in art, I have not sought to argue that it is closely linked to emotional and sentimental dimension. Rather,

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my intention has been to shed light on its dynamic character, which acquires centrality, thus becoming crucial for art. Through expressiveness – or, if we prefer, precisely because it is a symbol – the work of art projects different aspects of vitality. Therefore, it does not involve emotional and sentimental manifestations alone. A second way of distinguishing expression from representation concerns exactly this aspect: expressiveness is linked to what we can call ‘vital dynamism’.6 As Santayana (1896) wrote, expressiveness is ultimately the evocative force that things have on us that allow us to elaborate on image about what is outside our mind. In other words, as Langer (1957) explains, it is precisely through her or his work that the artist can express her or his experience of life, the flux and dynamics of the continuum of vital activities in which she or he is a part of. The link with vital dynamism also stands out in Creed’s works, which, as will become clearer soon, are conceivable as results of a conceptual practice for this reason too. I think this aspect can be further clarified considering what Noël Carroll (1999) has argued about the expressiveness: it is related to human qualities in general, among which there may be emotional and sentimental ones in their different meanings. Expression, indeed, is identifiable neither solely with communication nor solely with representation, since the expressiveness is a way to made explicit a qualitative dimension. As he writes ‘expression is the manifestation, exhibition, objectification, embodiment, projection, or showing forth of human qualities, or, as they are also called, ‘anthropomorphic properties’ (properties that standardly apply only to human persons)’ (Carroll 1999: 80). Indeed, as Carroll specifies, events, objects, actions, people, places and so on can be represented – or in other words, I can use a certain X to replace one of these elements. Otherwise, the qualities that can be attributed to human beings are expressed (see Carroll 1999: 81). There are two aspects in particular that I would like to bring to the fore here. First, these qualities are expressed if they are manifested by the work of art; that is to say, if they are embodied in it. Second, being relational response-dependent qualities, they can vary from emotional and sentimental spheres to behavioural and relational ones; moreover, they are also manifestations of the rhythm and variability of human operative dynamics – the ways of acting, interacting, producing and so on and so forth. Both these aspects are important to clarify the terms we can preserve the first two traits of expressiveness identified in the previous section. The relational trait is crucial for the relationship with both the aesthetic object and the artistic one – in a nutshell: the first one is an object of perception, which we can experience

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through the senses; the second one is something to which the value of artistry is given, in relation to how it is made (it has certain colours, it does not have a function of practical utility etc.). The systemic trait can instead vary in relation to dynamism because in the artistic object it involves the manifestation of factors that are determined exactly by the dynamics of the human being. The vitality that permeates the work can be manifested according to different degrees of expression, namely in close relation to the artist’s practice. This is an activity that affects the form of the artwork – namely both its abstract structure and its concrete material – and an action that can be accomplished by increasing, as it happens in traditional arts, or reducing the work’s form, thus also affecting its evaluation.

4.  Art and reduction What does it mean to say, the artist’s work can bring about changes that will also affect the evaluation of the work of art? As we said at the beginning of this chapter, works of art are sophisticated and complex objects. Some are like luxurious sealed caskets; others are not completely sealed. Their partial opening is due to the choice of artists to reduce the work to its component materials, to natural or ordinary objects and to human bodies engaged in actions, performances or events. The reduction can be conceived as a way to structurally adapt the work, according to the artist’s poetics, in order to be able to convey, for instance, traces or clues of ideas and/or actions.7 The main trait that characterizes conceptual art is the reductionist one. Conceptual art works are outcomes of a structural adapting which is at the basis of many contemporary artistic practices. When the artists proceed on the basis of reduction, it allows them to make art in a number of ways different to traditional forms of art-making. Artists can reduce a work to a body in action or to an everyday object, to a happening or a meeting among people organized in a certain place or to a simple text written on a surface. However, contrary to what many theorists and critics have thought (e.g. Lippard and Chandler 1968), namely that through conceptual art dematerialization would have been achieved, conceptualist practices still allow for the use of materials. The claim that material entities are important to conceptualism was made by Ermanno Migliorini ([1972] 2014). He argued that conceptual art in fact demonstrates the impossibility of creating works without material entities, a factor that brings into the open two elements in particular: sensitivity and

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practice. Despite their attempts, conceptualists fail to achieve the complete dematerialization of the work: in fact, even if conceptual, it is an aesthetic object because it is perceptible and evaluable;8 and it is also an artistic object since it attests in a clear way (through a reduction) the artist’s practice. Migliorini considers in particular the first conceptual artists including also those artists who work on Earthworks and Land Art.9 Their works have value because they express a concrete manifestation of the artist’s will to make without formal redundancy, without losing any other potential surplus that can be also achieved with the minimum of material. As Migliorini interpreted it, the reductionism that informs conceptualist practices consists in the possibility of decomposing the work from the structure to its elementary components – a procedure that enables artists to reveal their very practice and express ideas and/or actions through their works. Therefore, a work is conceptual not so much because it is made without the material, nor because it shows a concept or proposes a linguistic analysis. Rather, it is conceptual because it manifests what the artist does with a minimum of materials, the vitality that pervades her work, the idea and/or action in its design and operational development, as well as its possible procedural variations. It seems fair to say that since the 1970s, by adopting a reductionist orientation and working on the possibilities given by materials, artists have transformed conceptualist poetics. In this regard, offering an account of the changes taking place in art between 1965 and 1975, curators Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (1995) wrote: [t]he initial phase of Conceptual art can be characterized by its studied dismantling of, and ultimate break with, the Western tradition of modernism. The self-referentiality of Minimalism becomes in Conceptual art a selfexamination of the machinery of a work of art. Numerous new questions are raised thorough this work: what is the function of a work of art? How is its meaning constructed? Where and when does the work exist? Why does it take the form it does? To whom is it addressed?10

Art critic Lucy Lippard effectively captured the potential of this transformation of conceptual art with this remark: ‘[i]f Minimalism formally expresses “less is more”, Conceptual art was about saying more with less’ (Lippard 1995: 27). This sentence sums up well one aspect that we must take into consideration, namely the profound link between form, matter and expression for the success of a work. This link is crucial for two reasons: first, in reducing the work, the artist can intervene as much on the project as on the real plane, that is to say, regarding both form and

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matter, without compromising its expressive potential. Second, being a method of structurally organizing the work – or rather, a structural adaptation procedure – reductionism is based on the introduction of operative variations that help the artist to renew the ways of making art. These variations are matched by new poetic possibilities, insofar as the reception and evaluation of the works are concerned. The reduction that a conceptualist achieves in her or his work allows her or him to preserve its symbolic potential: with the minimum it is possible to express a lot. But what does it mean? As Arthur Danto (1981) remarks, an artist can represent a world (or portions, aspects, references of it) expressing what her or his work is about – endorsing the thesis according to which the work expresses what it is a metaphor of – and by so doing also express herself (see Danto 1981, chap. 7). A conceptual work of art could very well not represent a world but express its vital dynamism in order to make the systemic trait of expression even more evident, just because through few material elements its internal references are nevertheless more effectively conveyed. In other words, we could say that even if the work of conceptual art presents a variation of its representational import – and, in agreement with Danto, also a metaphorical one – it can, however, also favour a consolidation of the expressive relationship precisely thanks to the reduction it originates from. Reduction is crucial because it determines a variation of the representational and the expressive import of the work. By adopting the reductionist approach, the conceptualist achieves two results. On the one hand, she introduces operative variations that allow her to produce art in different ways from the traditional ones: instead of fullness, appearances and redundancy, it favours emptiness, processes and operational order. On the other hand, this operative approach determines changes both on the level of the experience of the work and on that of its evaluation. Therefore, what at first appears as an emptying, or a dangerous impoverishment of the work, if considered in the light of the evolutions of conceptualist poetics, can be understood as an important and positive development. The surplus is preserved even if the materiality of the work is reduced to a minimum. Its expressiveness is strengthened precisely because the artist works according to an economy of means.

5.  The sense of basic The economy of means and the use of materials, ordinary objects and serial structures, together with the implementation of activities often based on

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instructions, are decisive for Creed’s poetics. A way of making art that aims primarily at involving users by making them reflect on life and on themselves and at the same time be ‘entertained or have a good time’ (Hecht and Creed 2008). For the artist to achieve this outcome, her or his work is reduced to a minimum, stripped as far as possible of any formal frills. This seems to be an assumption Creed also shares, who has stated at different times his need ‘to be as direct as possible’ (Eccles and Creed 2010: xiv) in his relationship with people. I hope my work is open to people to come in and use it. I hope to, try to, let it go out into the world at large, away from me, and if it succeeds it’s because other people make it succeed by using it for whatever purpose: food for thought or to entertain themselves for a few minutes.11

To better grasp the sense of the relational need that drives Creed’s operational approach, we can focus in particular on one of those five words singled out from the long list of Higgs 2004, namely the word ‘basic’. The basics are the first elements, the foundations. In art, we can consider the basics as the principles according to which the artist develops her or his work and as the practical implementation modes that make it possible. On the one hand, the basics are instructions; on the other, they are translated into practice. Foundations may vary in relation to each art kind. In painting, it will be about those ways of working that include, among others, the use of brushes in applying colours and the elaboration of images; in photography or in cinema, it will be about knowing how to work with light and on the relationship between presence and absence of bodies, on the composition of a scene, and so on. In conceptualist practices, it is a matter of working on expressive potentialities. In particular, in Creed’s poetics the basics are the elements that are brought to the fore precisely by his work that is marked by a reductionist approach, in agreement with the description of conceptual art that I have drawn in the previous section. This approach allows the artist to undress the work and express more clearly the same basis of artistry, namely of human making that pervades it. The collection of objects of the same kind (Work No. 370), the composition of geometric structures (Works Nos. 391, 571) and the introduction of variants of a ‘theme’ within a series (Works Nos. 495, 496) help grasp the basics of these works of Creed. That is to say, structure, seriality and variation, which essentially count as signs of human laboriousness. These examples would already be sufficient to recognize the influence of reductionist disposition on Creed’s oeuvre and therefore also to consider him a conceptualist. However, tracing this path is not as simple as it seems. On several

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occasions, Creed has expressed his distrust both towards an art that can be called ‘conceptual’ and for the possibility of being considered a conceptualist. But I believe that it is precisely in the light of this disagreement that it is possible to find the space within which to recognize his relationship with conceptualism, as deeply related to expressiveness. What is basic in Creed’s work is what can make manifest a living dimension in which ideas and feelings are made to interact together or, more precisely, in which their profound link comes to the fore. So much so that continuing the conversation, urged by curator Tom Eccles, who in mentioning the rejection of emotions referred to conceptual art, Creed explained this relationship as follows: I want to feel better. I work because of feelings. Ideas might help me to get through bad feelings or to reach better feelings. But feelings are at the top and the bottom. Ideas are employed in the service of feelings. Maybe ideas are a way of dealing with feelings, coping with them, or hiding from them. But it feels like feeling come first, I think.12

However, if these statements lead us to maintain that the basics in Creed’s poetics rest on the link between ideas and feelings – which he intends to preserve and in which the latter dominate over the former – the same statements do not allow us to consider him a conceptualist. This is because, indeed, both in the traditional meaning and in that still accepted today, conceptual art would have little to do with feelings.

6.  Room for feelings? Let us try to consider Creed’s poetics in the light of his disagreement and our conception of conceptualist practice as an expressive and symbolic enhancement of art. In the theoretical space that opens on the basis of these two assumptions, we can recognize that a room for feelings is certainly possible. Indeed, according to Creed: Work comes from feelings and goes towards feelings. It is a feeling sandwich, with ideas in the middle. Feelings come up, thoughts go down, and somewhere in the middle they meet. The thoughts and ideas often try to stop the feelings coming up, and they fight with each other, but thoughts always lose. Feelings rise like steam, and you can’t stop them without getting burned!13

If we consider what happened in conceptual practices, particularly since the 1970s, we see that materials do not become obsolete and that the feelings

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haven’t been expunged from the artistic context. As Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (2010) observed, some pieces of conceptual art can indeed engage us in ways quite similar to certain works of traditional art.14 Feelings can still be present in conceptual works in different ways: as expressions of emotions, of human life and of ideas. This last conception rests on Langer’s thesis according to which works of art are symbols that convey ideas of feelings, that is, which present them (see Langer 1957).15 In some cases, conceptual works have this symbolic import; in others they clearly express emotions and vitalism – that is, human feelings and a continuum of mental and physical practices that refer to vital dynamics. In my view, Creed’s work can be considered exactly in the light of this latter conception of the expression, an expressiveness which distinguishes those works that reveal relational and dynamic traits as well as the systemic and axiological ones. Let us try and clarify these aspects by considering one of his works. Work No. 850 was the performance of a runner made in 2008 at Tate Britain in London. Consisting of a person who runs inside the museum, the work shows the relational dimension with the users who in turn express their amazement at the presence of the runner,16 and it is a successful expression of the vital dynamism that pervades it. For this to be possible, the work is reduced to the body of a human being who runs in the museum galleries passing between the people who visit it. Moreover, it allows us to also recognize the systemic trait of expression: the runner expresses because with his run he makes vital dynamism manifest. Precisely because it is basic, the work is accessible, clear, elemental and immediate – this is the sense of reductionism according to which what is basic is not banal. But there is more to it. By recognizing the profound relationship between form, matter and expression, we can better understand Creed’s conception of an art that is, let us say, still the result of a flowering that is both creative and emotional. Idea and feeling are all one in his work. Together they evoke the responses of the user. But why would these aspects make him a conceptualist? Well, because it is precisely the interest in the ordinary, in relationships with people, in the possibility of offering an enjoyable moment which reveals how his conceptual inclination is transposed into the possibility of working on feelings and vitality. This artistic approach, identified in light of the role of expression in Creed’s poetics, now allows us to recognize two reasons that I believe can be useful to consider him a conceptualist. I present each of them in the next two sections.

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7.  The ordinary Certainly, not everybody will be convinced of the reading presented in the previous sections. But let us go back to some of Creed’s works once more. What do the interplay of light and shadow, for example, in a street (Work No. 276), the neon inscription EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT placed in different settings (Works Nos. 203, 560, 851), an accumulation of sheets and paper bags in the corner of a room (Work No. 2704), the images of people vomiting (Work No. 610) and simple pencil marks on paper (Work No. 538) all have in common? At first, one could answer, irony, challenge, provocation, invective and perhaps much more. Looking more closely, I believe that it is precisely that deep link between ideas and feelings in which these latter stand out. Creed’s work is driven by an approach reverberating throughout his works that express the dimensions of the human. During an interview with the artist Maurizio Cattelan, Creed was asked what, according to him, the place of art currently is. Surprisingly perhaps, Creed answered that art is where people are (cf. Cattelan 2005). In a similar vein, when Tom Eccles asked him what kind of artist he was, Creed answered: ‘I think if I had to use one of those words I would call myself an “expressionist”. I think everyone is an expressionist. You give yourself away in everything you do’ (Eccles and Creed 2010: x). As several critics have noted, Creed’s works reveal his materialistic inclination and the relational attitude that guides his practice (see Polit 2004). Moreover, what is decisive in his oeuvre is the impact that his works will have, the effect they can determine. As Katherine Stout specified: ‘[f]or Creed, a work which ultimately leaves nothing in the world but has still had an effect is a perfect achievement. It is what happens in the space between something and nothing that gives us cause for contemplation’ (Stout 2004: 63). But this is possible – it is important to reiterate it – not because the materials have disappeared but rather because of the interaction with them that the users of Creed’s works can grasp what they express. Even if reduced to a minimum, a work that we call ‘conceptual’ can offer much more than it materially is. Although it is the result of a reductionist practice, the conceptual work is a material attestation of the artist’s expressive possibilities. What she or he can express through the material she or he uses does not preclude that the surplus – what we can intuitively know – can be preserved and presented. Something continues to elude us even with conceptual works. Creed seems to confirm this by also reflecting on his work: ‘I think that whatever

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I might put into the work is not necessarily what people might get out of it’ (Hecht and Creed 2008).17 The degree of manifestation of the surplus does not depend on the possibility that a work replaces something else, but on its being a symbol or an expressive vehicle. Rather than representation, surplus is in fact deeply linked to expressiveness. Instead of representation – which is a possible substitution, a postponement to something else – Creed works on presence. Now, if on the one hand what is expressed in his works concerns different implicit references that can be manifested on the basis of the materials he uses, on the other hand they also maintain a continuous link with simplicity, the simplicity of what we already have in our world. The objects and materials he uses exemplify his attention for the ordinary. An interest that opens to new perspectives on the ordinary, just as Stout remarked: Creed’s provocative and witty works challenge our preconceptions and acceptance of the world around us. He does this not by adding anything to these familiar objects, texts or situations, but simply by re-contextualising the mass art and asking us to consider them as we might not otherwise. (Stout 2004: 67)

Figure 9 Martin Creed, Work No. 265, 2001; yellow balloons; multiple parts, each balloon 16 in. / 40.6cm diameter; overall dimensions variable. Installation at Micromuseum, Palermo, Italy, 2001 (detail). Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

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To look, if only for a moment, at the world with fresh eyes means at least two things. On the one hand, one is able to take the right time to interact and better experience the work – simply by making one pause and thus becoming more aware. On the other hand, one is able to grasp a feeling, make an idea one’s own and express it again in accordance with the experience of the work, just as we can see in Work No. 265 (see Figure 9).

8.  The essential In the previous section, I have argued that Creed is a conceptualist for the reason that, in addition to a reductionist inclination, he adopts an approach that allows him to hold ideas and feelings together. Indeed, the economy of means used lets him express vital dynamism as directly as possible. In this way, however, he does not move away from conceptual art but rather contributes to the expansion of its range of poetic proposals that can certainly be based on the union of ideas and feelings. There is, however, another reason for identifying Creed’s work with conceptualism, which also has to do with expressiveness. The most significant results he is able to obtain on this front relate to the work which develops both form and matter. That is to say, his work evolves thanks to the introduction of variants that continually enrich his poetics. My aim in this concluding section is thus to consider the relationship between expressiveness and variability. Let us consider, first and foremost, the form and matter nexus. It refers to a tension that is created in relation to the ontology and metaphysics of the work of art, and we can summarize it as follows: the work is constituted by its material, its form, but also by what exceeds both – its surplus. Since the material is not enough, often the immaterial becomes the main reference, ignoring however that the elusive can be drawn from the graspable. Creed puts it as follows: I think that it’s immateriality which keeps things going. That is, feelings, hope, and desire. Immateriality is what makes me and people do things, and want things, you know. But you can’t control what people think, you can’t control immateriality. What you can control is what you do on your own actions and you can to a certain extent, and if you are making a thing, you can control to a certain extent its shape, size, and the materials from which it’s made, and so on. But always knowing that that thing is just a thing and that value is given to it by people. So, it’s a controlled thing but it works through uncontrollable urges of forces.18

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To offer a different way of looking at things, following Creed’s reflections and considering some of his works, means at least two things: to be able to establish a balance between the formal and the material dimensions and to leave room for the possibilities that variability discloses. A possible balance is achieved, first and foremost, through reductionism. By using an economy of means for his work and presenting elementary materials, streamlined in their outward forms, Creed’s works become expressions of the essential. That is to say, expressions of the dynamics, the complexity and the rhythm that make up life – the vital dynamism. This is how he can open his works to variability. This connection between what we might call the ‘structural balance’ of the work and variability is important because it helps us recognize the second reason for his being a conceptualist. This certainly concerns the expressiveness of his works and, more precisely, the main element that in my view characterizes the poetics of conceptualists: the primacy of the process. The process is also pivotal to Creed: The way that things look comes about as the result of a process of one thing leading to another, and maybe that is the most important thing. You never know what you are going to get out of anything. The result is often a failure in terms of what you might have hoped for. Quite the opposite of a goal being achieved or anything like that. But that is probably true of most things. I think the worst type of work maybe comes when you’ve got some idea of. . . some pre-judgement. . . and so I think the best way to work is to try to be kind of open to whatever may come, to be as open as you can to let things happen while you are working, and not to have some kind of goal in mind. To be hopeless.19

However, as he noted, the process is linked as much to the possibilities that arise from the practices as to its possible recognition in the work: The process is very important. In fact, that is all there really is. For me it is just about trying to make things, trying to do things. I thought that the problem with some of the sculptures, or some of the visual works, that I was making, was that all you saw was the end result. You couldn’t really see what happened. That got me to working more and more on music and film and theatrical works. Where it gets made in front of you while you’re watching or listening.20

For conceptualists, the reductionist approach is decisive to the task of obtaining the primacy of the processes in their works, and thereby to ensuring that they are much more expressive than traditional works. In my view, the same approach is also typical of Creed’s poetics. As Langer noted, ‘[a]rt has its own laws, which

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are laws of expressiveness’ (Langer 1957: 53–4). In Creed’s oeuvre, these laws are crucial to succeed in emphasizing the ordinary, or, more precisely, the vitality that pervades it and that allows us to see art first and foremost as a matter of vital dynamism. This includes the design and creation of works of art and their social sharing, and the search for a meaning of that surplus that differentiates them from other objects. These are some aspects of the profound link between art and life, which makes us look at those who produce it and those who experience it in some way. As Creed put it: ‘I think that art is literally a background to people. People are more important than the things they make. You can’t have them without people’ (Creed and Eccles 2010: xiii).21

Notes 1 Eccles and Creed (2010: x). Original quote: ‘I don’t believe in conceptual art. I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings. I am inside me. I cannot separate what is inside me. . . . It’s all a big soup. I can’t separate the head and the heart. I’ve never seen an idea in my life. I’ve had one, but I’ve never seen one! I don’t think I know what an idea is, at least not separate from a feeling. You can’t have ideas without feelings.’ 2 This acceptation of ‘poetics’ is that Umberto Eco introduced in his study on the open work and that he has specified as a way to structure the work, as ‘an operational program which, from time to time, the artist proposes’ (Eco [1962] 2006: 18; the English translation is mine). 3 Gotshalk (1954: 80). 4 To learn more, see Aldrich (1963: 47–55). 5 For more details, see Langer (1950), section 4. 6 One of the main theses on which Langer’s thought on art rests is that the richness and complexity of life can be expressed by the artist who experiences it. Her or his work can therefore express a subjective reality, namely some aspects of her or his subjective experiences of life, its flow, its dynamic rhythm. This is the sense in which we can consider the vital dynamism that a work may express. 7 This way to consider the reduction in artistic practices resumes and broadens the concept of ‘reductionism’ that the Italian philosopher Ermanno Migliorini introduces in his Conceptual Art (1972). In his view, the reductionism is, first and foremost, a way to reduce the structure of the work in its elementary components – which can be aesthetic or artistic. Sharing this conception, my proposal is thus to consider the reduction as a ‘structural adaptation’. For further information on the original conception of reductionism, see Migliorini [1972] 2014: 23–30; 75–8.

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8 In this regard, it is important to consider what follows. A conceptual work is an aesthetic object even if it is, for instance, a conversation: if there were no people speaking, its experience could not be made; also, even if we have a trace that document it somewhere, we can still experience it through the senses. 9 In particular, among the historical conceptualists, the artists he considers are Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner. For more detail, see Migliorini [1972] 2014, in particular: 37–40; 109–31. 10 Goldstein and Rorimer (1995: 14). 11 Hecht and Creed (2008). Original quote: ‘I hope my work is open to people to come in and use it. I think if I make a work that succeeds, I can let it go into the world and if it succeeds it’s because people make it succeed by using it for whatever purpose: food for thought or to entertain themselves for a few minutes.’ 12 Eccles and Creed (2010: x). 13 Eccles and Creed (2010: x). Original quote: ‘Work comes from feeling and goes towards feelings. It is a feeling sandwich, with ideas in the middle. Feelings come up, thoughts go down, and somewhere in the middle they meet each other. The thoughts and ideas often try to stop feelings coming up, and they fight with each other, but thoughts always lose. Feelings rise like steam, and you can’t stop them without getting burned!’ 14 To learn more, see Goldie and Schellekens (2010), chap. 5. 15 For more details on this conception, see Langer (1957), chap. 8. 16 As can be seen in the various videos that document some public moments of Creed’s work at the Tate Britain in London. See, for instance, Creed (2008). 17 Original quote: ‘I think that whatever I might put into the work is not necessarily what people might get from it.’ 18 Hecht and Creed (2008). 19 Durland and Creed (2004). Original quote: ‘The way that the work looks and the nature of the work is the result of the process, and for me, that is the most important thing in my work, the process. The result is often a failure. Quite the opposite of a goal being achieved or anything like that. . . . But I think that is probably true of most work. I think the worst type of work usually comes from trying, when you’ve got some idea of. . . . I think the best way to work is to be kind of open to whatever may come, to be as open as you can to let things happen while you are working, and not have some kind of goal in mind.’ 20 Sans and Creed (2004). Original quote: ‘For me the process is very important. In fact, the process is all that there is. For me it is just about trying to make things, to do things. The problem with some of the sculptures, or some of the visual works, was that all you saw was the end result.’ 21 I would like to thank Professor Elisabeth Schellekens for her thoughtful comments on this chapter in draft.

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References Aldrich, V. C. (1963), Philosophy of Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Carroll, N. (1999), Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, Abingdon: Routledge. Cattelan, M. (2005), ‘Something to Work for. Martin Creed interviewed by Maurizio Cattelan’, Flash Art, Milan, 38 (242): 110–11. Creed, M. (2008), Martin Creed’s Work No. 850 | TateShot. Available online: https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-U8Fl45​-DFw . Danto, A. C. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durland, C. and M. Creed (2004), ‘Martin Creed: Twenty (More) Questions’, Wrong Times, 1. Available online: http://www​.martincreed​.com​/site​/words​/questions​-by​ -corinna​-durland. Eccles, T. and M. Creed (2010), ‘Interview’, in Martin Creed: Works, x–xvii. London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Eco, U. [1962] (2006), Opera aperta, Milano: Bompiani. Goldie, P. and E. Schellekens (2010), Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?, Abingdon: Routledge. Goldstein, A., and A. Rorimer (eds.) (1995), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gotshalk, D. W. (1954), ‘Aesthetic Expression’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13 (1): 80–5. Hecht, S. and M. Creed (2008), ‘Conversation between Sam Hecht, co-founder of Industrial Facility, and artist Martin Creed’, in ICON International Design Architecture and Culture. Available online: https://www​.iconeye​.com​/component​/k2​/ item​/3865​-conversation​-between​-sam​-hecht- and-martin-creed . Higgs, M. (2004), ‘310 Words for Martin Creed - A Project by Matthew Higgs’, in Martin Creed, Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Kunsthalle of Bern, Switzerland. Langer, S. K. (1950), ‘The Principles of Creation in Art’, The Hudson Review, 2 (4): 515–34. Langer, S. K. (1953), Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Langer, S. K. (1957), Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lippard, L. R. (1995), ‘Escape Attempts’, in A. Goldstein and A. Rorimer (eds.) (1995), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, 17–39, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lippard, L. R. and J. Chandler (1968), ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 1971. New York: E. P. Dutton and co. Migliorini, E. [1972] (2014), Conceptual Art, nuova edizione a c. di D. Dal Sasso, Milano-Udine: Mimesis.

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Polit, P. (2004), ‘Martin Creed’s Things and Words’, in Martin Creed: The Whole World + The Work = The Whole World. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary art Ujazdowski Castle, 2004: 10–11. Sans, J. and M. Creed (2004), ‘Blow and Suck: Martin Creed Interviewed by Jérôme Sans’, Live, Palais the Tokyo / Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2004: 76. Available online: http:// www​.martincreed​.com​/site​/words​/jerome​-sans​-interview. Santayana, G. [1896] (1936), The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stout, K. (2004), ‘Martin Creed’s Things and Words’, in Martin Creed: The Whole World + The Work = The Whole World. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary art Ujazdowski Castle, 2004: 60–7. Ziff, P. (1966), Philosophic Turnings. Essays in Conceptual Appreciation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

6

Martin Creed Conceptual art and more Elisa Caldarola

In this chapter, I put forward a philosophical analysis of some works by Martin Creed. I suggest that all the works under consideration are works of conceptual art as well as of installation art, and that they display significant expressive properties. The chapter is structured as follows: in Section 1, I claim that the works are ontologically similar and that they all appear problematic, because it is not very clear how they should be appreciated as artworks; in Section 2, I argue that the works belong to the genre conceptual art, that they are presented for intellectual appreciation and that this is compatible with the fact that they also have expressive properties; in the third section, I submit that the works also belong to the category installation art and I explain what expressive properties they display. In the conclusion, I remark briefly on the interaction between the intellectual and aesthetic appreciation of Creed’s works.

1.  Problematic works In an empty room, the lights keep switching on and off (The lights going on and off, for example, Works Nos. 127, 160 and 227). In another room, there is a piano: every now and then, its lid and keyboard cover rise and fall producing a loud bang (Work No. 372). Works Nos. 112 and 189 consist of thirty-nine ticking metronomes gathered at a certain place, each of them set at a different tempo (see figure 10). Work No. 1197 took place on 27 July 2012, at 8.12 am, when thousands of people, in hundreds of cities and towns across the UK, started ringing bells of every kind and age repeatedly, stopping three minutes later. Do all these works have anything in common? Prima facie, one is tempted to reply in the negative: they look like a quite heterogeneous group of objects and events.

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Figure 10  Martin Creed, Work No. 189, Thirty-nine metronomes beating time, one at every speed, 1998; mechanical metronomes; 39 parts, each 4.5 in. / 11.5 cm high; overall dimensions variable. Installation at Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, USA, 1999. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

What brings them together (apart from the fact that they are all creations by Martin Creed) seems to be just their simplicity. The lights work is just a room with lights switching on and off. The piano work isn’t a work for piano – and it looks more like a simple prank. The metronomes work merely presents us with a room filled with the noise produced by thirty-nine metronomes, each set at a different tempo. The bells work, finally, brought together many people by asking them to follow some very simple instructions (something like ‘ring a bell of your choice anywhere in the UK on July 27, 2012 between 8.12 and 8.15 am’). A more careful examination reveals, however, a deeper resemblance among the works under consideration. All the works are encountered in the form of machines, or human beings, following instructions for the production of certain events laid out by Creed: the computers regulating the light switching and the piano slamming, the metronomes set to tick at a certain tempo and the crowds instructed to ring bells at a certain time. Creed’s works, then, have sets of instructions performed by machines or human agents and can, in principle, be performed an indefinite number of times (i.e. unless the instructions include a prohibition to repeat the performance or set up a limit to the number of

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performances allowed). This observation allows us to see that these are works for performance, like, for instance, symphonies (which have scores executed by musicians) or theatre plays (which have scripts acted by actors). From a philosophical standpoint, then, it seems likely that the answer to the question ‘What kind of objects are, for instance, Works Nos. 189, 227, 372 and 1197, ontologically speaking?’ will be the same as the answer to the question ‘What kind of objects are Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Virginia Woolf ’s Freshwater: a comedy, ontologically speaking?’ The standard assumption among philosophers is that works like symphonies and theatre plays are abstract objects that have material instantiations, that is, performances (see, for example, Mag Uidhir 2012: 8). Thus, applying the standard view to Creed’s works for performance, we can claim that such works are also abstract objects that have material instantiations, produced by means of following Creed’s instructions. It is tempting to think that, since Creed’s works seem to be ontologically similar to symphonies and theatre plays, perhaps they should also be appreciated qua works of art in ways similar to those in which we appreciate symphonies and theatre plays. Symphonies and theatre plays are appreciated aesthetically, by paying attention to and appreciating for their own sake the higher-level aesthetic properties of their instantiations, grounded in their lower-level perceptual properties: auditory aesthetic properties, in the case of symphonies, and auditory, semantic and visual aesthetic properties, in the case of theatre plays (see Levinson 1992: 6). What instantiates The lights going on and off seem to be events in which the lights go on and off alternately: according to this hypothesis, to appreciate Creed’s work like symphonies and theatre plays we have to pay attention to and appreciate for their own sake the higherlevel aesthetic properties displayed by the alternate lighting and darkening events, grounded in their lower-level perceptual properties. In Work No. 227 (see figure 11), which belongs to Tate’s collection, for instance, events characterized by luminosity and darkness alternate every five seconds. What kind of aesthetic properties emerge from the perceptual properties of such events? Perhaps properties like being boring, or maybe annoying and even exasperating. Creed, however, talks about The lights going on and off – taking it as an example of his works – in a way that might be interpreted as discouraging the embracement of the analogy with the appreciation of symphonies and theatre works. Interviewed by Tom Eccles, he declares: People often say that they like listening to the radio because they can do something else while they’re listening to it. I like that. I would like to make visual work like that. That’s the way I would like to think about a lot of my work. It feels like a relief to go into The lights going on and off, for example. . . . I don’t even have to look

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Figure 11  Martin Creed, Work No. 227, The lights going on and off, 2000; dimensions variable; 5 seconds on / 5 seconds off. Installation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2007. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. anywhere in particular; I can look where I like – the floor or the wall – and it’s over quickly before repeating, so you can see it quickly and get out of there. . . . If I can carry my work around with me – like The lights going on and off – then it can be of real use to me in my life, not just when I am standing in front of it looking at it.1

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Since Creed says that one doesn’t have to look anywhere in particular while experiencing The lights going on and off and that one can carry the work around with oneself without having to stand ‘in front of it looking at it’, the analogy with the aesthetic appreciation of symphonies and theatre plays doesn’t seem entirely appropriate here. As mentioned earlier, aesthetic appreciation of a symphony or theatre play requires that we focus our attention on the objects being experienced. The experience of The lights going on and off described by Creed is instead, as he himself suggests, more akin to that of having the radio play in the background (a symphony, for instance) while one is doing the dishes or driving. It is unlikely that the latter kind of experience of symphonies qualifies as an appropriate aesthetic experience of them, since it seems that it is an experience that does not allow one to focus her attention on the artworks at issue, which instead merely form the background upon which one is busy doing other things. The radio-in-the-background analogy, then, suggests that Creed doesn’t think that focusing on the aesthetic properties of the alternate lighting and darkening events is the right way to appreciate The lights going on and off. Creed, it seems, wants us instead to look at the alternate lighting and darkening events as at something that is happening in the background of something else, in order to appreciate his work. I shall look deeper into this issue in Section 3. For the moment, I would like to show how the radio-in-the-background analogy is capable of illuminating also the other works by Creed under consideration. What I have argued about The lights going on and off applies also to the piano, metronomes and bells works described earlier, I believe (recall that Creed himself observes that he is taking The lights going on and off as an example of his works). Consider the piano work: its lid and keyboard cover fall every now and then, producing a loud bang, and this is all that happens. The sporadic bang, it seems to me, hardly qualifies as a significant event one could seek to focus on to appreciate it aesthetically. Still, one might argue that the aesthetic properties displayed by the sudden bang are something like abruptness and toughness. However, the work can also be regarded in analogy with the experience of a radio playing in the background, and, actually, this better conforms to the description of typical experiences of it: when one enters the room where the piano is installed, one typically doesn’t know what to expect and, if nothing happens, begins scrutinizing the room to check whether there is any work to be experienced there. Then, suddenly, the lid and keyboard cover fall, producing a loud bang. The sound, therefore, isn’t usually one’s focus of attention, while it happens unexpectedly, in the background, while one is seeking to understand whether there is any work at all in the room.​

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As for the metronomes work, what we are presented with is just a quite confusing overlap of sounds, on which it is very difficult to focus our attention. This qualifies more as background noise than as an object of aesthetic appreciation per se. Finally, the bells work can be understood in two ways: either it is a work that was performed many times synchronically or it is a work that was performed only once and whose performance required coordinating the actions of many people across the UK. If the former is true, then several performances of the work, consisting in the ringing of simple bells (doorbells, bike bells, etc.), were quite poor objects of aesthetic appreciation (although some of them, such as the chiming of the Big Ben bell, might have been quite impressive). If the latter is true, then the work could not, in principle, be aesthetically appreciated as a whole – because the people who participated in its execution were scattered around too vast an area. In both cases, it is likely that a large portion of the public merely encountered the work in the form of background sound of the bells while being busy starting their day, since the work was performed between 8.12 and 8.15 am. Apart from the analogy with the sound of a radio playing in the background, suggested by Creed, do we have any philosophical resources that can help us understand better how The lights going on and off and the piano, metronomes and bells works are appropriately appreciated as artworks? In the next section, I shall explore two ways to answer this question.

2.  Works of conceptual art In the first part of this section, I compare Creed’s view of his works with Sol LeWitt’s view of conceptual art and argue that LeWitt can help us understand that Creed’s works belong to the category conceptual art, although the analogy between his view and Creed’s one has some limits. In the second part of the section, I introduce Julian Dodd’s view of conceptual art and argue that it is better suited than LeWitt’s to explain why Creed’s works qualify as conceptual art. There probably is an affinity between what Creed says about The lights going on and off and similar works and the view of conceptual art famously sketched out by Sol LeWitt, according to which, in conceptual art, ‘the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt 1967: 79). The reason why Creed says that it’s not relevant to look anywhere in particular while experiencing The lights going on and off might be that what we see (or not see) isn’t the most important aspect of the work; and the reason why he says that we can carry the work around with ourselves might be that what really matters about the work is

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an idea – presumably, the idea of having a room where the lights keep going on and off fast, rhythmically, in a loop. LeWitt also claims: When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.2

This can further illuminate the workings of The lights going on and off: first, ‘the planning and decisions’ for Creed’s work were indeed ‘made beforehand’, when the artist set up the machine regulating the switching of the lights. Second, the fact that a machine – that is, something that lacks ‘the skill of the artist as a craftsman’ – is responsible for the execution of the work in terms of its physical manifestation testifies that ‘the execution is a perfunctory affair’. Similar considerations apply to the other works by Creed under scrutiny. Although the piano and metronomes works provide us with something to see and hear, there is very little to listen to or visually analyse there – and this might be because what really matters about such works are the idea of having a room with a piano that produces a bang from time to time and that of having a room with thirtynine metronomes set at a different tempo ticking at the same time. Furthermore, both works were planned beforehand by the artist and are executed by machines lacking ‘the skill of the artist as a craftsman’. As for the bells work, as already observed, depending on what exactly we consider an appropriate performance of it, we can either conclude that many of its performances were quite poor objects of aesthetic appreciation or that the work could not, in principle, be aesthetically appreciated as a whole. Perhaps, then, what really matters about this work is the idea of having many people ring bells at the very same time across the UK.3 Although LeWitt’s understanding of conceptual art can help us comprehend Creed’s works, there are, however, other aspects of such conception that stand in stark contrast with how Creed sees his own artworks. On the one hand, LeWitt writes: It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer from perceiving this art.4

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On the other hand, Creed says: I don’t believe in conceptual art . . . I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings. . . I don’t know what an idea is, at least not separate from a feeling. You can’t have ideas without feelings. . . [in my work] ideas are employed in the service of feelings. Maybe ideas are a way of dealing with feelings, coping with them, or hiding from them. But it feels like feelings come first, I think. Work comes from feelings and goes towards feelings. It is a feeling sandwich, with ideas in the middle.5

In the remaining part of this section, I shall look deeper into LeWitt’s view and then argue that Creed’s works are better understood through the lens of the account of conceptual art recently sketched out by Julian Dodd, which can accommodate better than LeWitt’s view Creed’s remarks about the link between ideas and feelings. LeWitt’s writings are such that it is easy to read into them a widespread view of conceptual art, that of the so-called dematerialization of the artwork (a term introduced by Lippard 1973). Following Dodd (2016: 245), I define the dematerialization view as the view that works of conceptual art are not works in a physical medium and that therefore they are neither physical particulars nor types of physical particulars. For a work of art to be in a certain medium means, roughly, that it is through that medium that the creator of the work articulated her artistic statement and that, therefore, the public should focus on (certain) properties of such medium in order to appreciate the work properly (see Davies 2005; Irvin and Dodd 2017: 380). For instance, the mediums of pictorial art are colours and marks on a two-dimensional surface, and the mediums of sculpture are materials such as marble, wood, chalk and so on. Those who argue that works of conceptual art are not works in a physical medium usually claim that the medium of conceptual art are, instead, concepts or ideas (see, for example, Goldie and Schellekens 2010: 24, 33; Lopes 2014: ch.10). Now, LeWitt’s statements that in conceptual art ‘the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’, that ‘it is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator’ and that conceptual art is ‘usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman’ can be paraphrased as follows: when appreciating works of conceptual art, one should focus on the ideas conveyed by such works, expect to be engaged by the works in a purely intellectual way, and disregard any perceptual aspect of the object(s)/event(s) one is confronted with when encountering such works that might display their makers’ virtuosity as craftsmen. It is evident, then, that such statements can be interpreted as implying the view that the medium of works of conceptual art are ideas.

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When Creed says that he does not believe in conceptual art and that he cannot separate ideas from feelings, I suggest that he might be trying to distance his art from conceptual art as conceived by LeWitt (who writes that conceptual art should do without producing an ‘emotional kick’ in the public) and by the supporters of the dematerialization view. As we have seen, holding the dematerialization view means holding that the medium of works of conceptual art are ideas, and not physical objects or events. According to the dematerialization view, in particular, to appreciate works of conceptual art we should not focus on the kinds of physical properties we usually seem to focus on while appreciating, for instance, paintings, sculptures and musical works, that is, on higher-order aesthetic properties, among which expressive properties (e.g. joyfulness, sadness and desperateness) often play a key role – to put it in Creed’s terms, according to the dematerialization view, works of conceptual art should be capable of separating ideas from feelings. Now, as Dodd argues, the dematerialization view can be replaced by an alternative, possibly more intuitive, view of conceptual art, because Whilst it is true that we appreciate the Mona Lisa and an instance of LHOOQ differently (the former by contemplating and coming to understand the aesthetic appeal of its sensory appearance, the latter by coming to understand the work’s intellectual content), this does nothing to undermine the intuitive thought that in both cases the focus of our appreciation is a physical object. . . The salient difference between the way in which we experience traditional and conceptual works lies in the nature of the appreciative experiences they afford, not in the nature of what is experienced.6

Contra the dematerialization view, Dodd argues that works of conceptual art are works in physical media (i.e. they are physical particulars or types of physical particulars) and that what distinguishes works of conceptual art from nonconceptual works is that we are supposed to appreciate them exclusively from an intellectual standpoint. More specifically, Dodd observes that ‘a work’s sensory appearance only matters insofar as it successfully embodies the artist’s conception’ (2016: 243) and considers the case of a work (Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, 1969) whose appreciation ‘requires us to grasp certain of its properties that it can only have . . . if physically embodied’ (2016: 251). An expressive property such as the work’s eeriness, for instance – Dodd explains – can only be grasped if the work is executed (the execution requires that the artist follow random unknowns in the street). According to Dodd, then, works of conceptual art can have aesthetic properties (such as expressive ones) that are relevant to their appreciation as conceptual art, but such properties matter to the appreciation of the works only

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insofar as they contribute to embodying the ‘idea’ (the content presented to intellectual appreciation) that the creator of the work wanted to convey through it. It seems to me that Dodd’s view is more intuitive than the dematerialization view, because it shows that, medium-wise, conceptual art is continuous with nonconceptual art, although it is to be appreciated exclusively from an intellectual viewpoint – a form of appreciation we bestow also to non-conceptual art (for instance, to literature), albeit not exclusively. Moreover, since Dodd does not hold that the medium of conceptual art are concepts or ideas, he does not have to explain what ideas are exactly – an explanation that would be all but unproblematic. A further advantage of Dodd’s view is that it allows to reconcile Creed’s statement that he cannot ‘separate ideas from feelings’ in his works with the claim that such works belong to the category conceptual art. Creed’s words, I suggest, imply that his works have expressive properties. Since Dodd, unlike LeWitt, claims that works of conceptual art can have expressive properties, his view offers a way to understand Creed’s works as works of conceptual art that, nevertheless, have expressive properties. There remains to explain, however, how we should identify the relevant expressive properties in Creed’s works. This will be the topic of the next section.

3.  Works of installation art In this section, I begin by explaining that, according to Dodd, conceptual art is an art genre, to which works in different art forms can belong. Then, I show that works belonging to a certain genre can also belong to other art genres. Further, I argue that we have reasons to claim that Creed’s works, besides being works of conceptual art, also belong to the category installation art, because the expressive properties they display are better understood as properties of works of installation art. Finally, I explain that the category installation art can be understood both as an art genre and as an art form and that, in both cases, my hypothesis about Creed’s works holds. If, as Dodd argues, works of conceptual art are works in physical media, and if we wish to categorize as conceptual art works as ontologically diverse as, for instance, Creed’s The lights going on and off (a type of events with physical instantiations, presumably), Duchamp’s LHOOQ (a physical particular) and LeWitt’s wall drawings (types of pictorial works), then it follows that works of conceptual art are works in a variety of physical media.

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Basing his argument on this kind of observation, Dodd argues that the category conceptual art refers to an art genre, rather than to an art form. On the one hand, he explains: art forms are kinds that explain why works are in the media that they are in: that is, why some technologies and not others are used in the works’ production . . . [and] it is because art forms have this explanatory role that we should expect works of the same art form to have the same ontological nature. It is a work’s being a painting that explains why its creator used the media that she did: she chose the said media precisely to realize the properties of the art form. It follows from this that all paintings will employ the same media; and so, as a consequence of this, it will be reasonable to expect all paintings to have the same ontological nature.7

On the other hand, he clarifies, inspired by Catharine Abell’s (2015) understanding of genres: assigning a work to a genre tells us, not why its creator employed certain artistic technologies and not others, but something about the purpose with which it was made and in terms of which it is to be appreciated and evaluated. So, for example, if a play or film is a comedy, it has been produced with the aim of being found funny, and if it fails to elicit such amusement, then this counts as an artistic defect in it. . . This difference between art forms and genres is reflected in the different ways in which they are related to media. . . the art form to which an artwork belongs determines the media with which it was produced, and so it is prima facie plausible to expect works in the same art form to employ the same media and, hence, have the same ontological nature. The analogous thesis does not hold for works of the same genre. Some genres can be cross-media . . .: novels and films can be noirs; films, plays, and graphic novels can be tragedies; sculptures, musicals, and happenings can be examples of feminist art; and so on. Consequently, when it comes to cross-media genres, there is simply no prima facie reason to expect all artworks within the genre to share the same ontology. Indeed, we have every reason to expect examples of such a genre to be ontologically diverse.8

Given their diverse ontology – Dodd suggests (2016: 258) – works of conceptual art are likely to be works in different art forms, belonging to the same genre, which he defines as follows: The characteristic purpose of conceptual artworks would seem to be that of affording us intellectual, rather than aesthetic, interest.9

According to Dodd’s view, then, if a work belongs to the genre conceptual art, it is a work that has the purpose of affording us intellectual interest, as opposed

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to aesthetic interest. Note that, in principle, a work that belongs to a certain art genre could belong, at the same time, to one or more other art genres. Consider, for instance, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, which belongs both to the genre dystopia (since it describes a world where human clones are a thing) and to the genre Bildungsroman (since it’s the story of the education of a clone, Kathy H.). It might be the case, then, that a work of conceptual art belongs to one or more other art genres. The hypothesis I shall explore in what follows is that the view of conceptual art suggested by Dodd can help us understand how to identify the relevant expressive properties in Creed’s works. The reason, as I shall show, is that understanding Creed’s works under the lens of more than just one art category – as Dodd’s account allows us to do – helps us casting light on the relevant expressive properties of such works. To begin considering what other art categories might help us understand Creed’s work, I suggest to go back to Creed’s remark that such works should be experienced similarly to a radio playing in the background while we are busy doing other things (see Section 1). When the radio is playing in the background in a certain setting, it is likely that the ambience in such setting will change, depending on the character of what is being played. Just consider the difference between entering a music-free bar and entering the same bar while lounge music is playing in the background: what, in the former case, might appear as a nondescript environment, in the latter case might appear more pleasant, cosy or even exotic. Now, my hypothesis is that something similar happens with Creed’s works. Considering the change in lighting or the sounds of the piano, metronomes and bells as something happening in the background of something else, I argue, requires that we enter the rooms where such events take place – just like we would enter a bar – and focus on how such events change the ambience of the room – just like we would notice how the ambience of the bar is changed when lounge music starts playing in the background. An appropriate experience of Creed’s works, then, is not merely focused on the events taking place, while it is focused on such events as taking place in certain environments that are experienced by the public from within – as confirmed by the fact that Creed talks about ‘going into’ and ‘getting out of ’ The lights going on and off, when taking it as an example of some of his works (see Eccles and Creed 2014: xiii).​ In The lights going on and off, similarly to music playing in the background, the alternate states of brightness and darkness change the ambience of the room, which acquires a dramatic, anxiety-inducing character. This is an expressive property that can be aesthetically appreciated, and which is grounded in the lower-order perceptual properties of the room (its being alternately bright

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and dark). To grasp such expressive property, it is not relevant to focus on the lights-switching events themselves, while it is necessary to focus on how such events impact the room where the lights are going on and off – an effect best experienced from within the room itself. The piano work can be understood similarly. We are not supposed to focus on the piano’s lid and keyboard cover banging as such, while we should concentrate on how such event impacts the ambience of the room where the piano is installed – a change that we can notice if we experience the room from within. First, when we enter the room, we look around to understand what we should focus our attention on and then, unexpectedly, we are startled by an unforeseen bang. This confers to our experience of the room a mysterious, or perhaps even grotesque, character. Similar considerations apply to the metronomes work. The overlapping sounds of the metronomes arouse in us a mere experience of noise. However, if we consider the change of ambience provoked by such noise in the room where the work is installed, while experiencing it from within, we can notice that the room acquires a chaotic, maddening character, and that it conveys, even, a sense of danger. Again, we can apply the same framework to the bells work. While the many sounds of the ringing bells were, in several cases, aesthetically unremarkable, and, in general, not perceivable as a whole, the changes that such sounds provoked in the ambiences of the various locations where people heard the bells ringing were probably quite remarkable, and most likely conferred a quite festive character to the scene. Now, I would like to submit that the development of the analogy with environments where some music is playing in the background amounts to understanding Creed’s works as works of installation art. To my knowledge, philosophical work on the definition of installation art is still lacking, and, in particular, it has not yet been clarified whether we should consider this category an art genre (like comedy or tragedy, for instance) or an art form (like theatre or painting, for instance). Still, thanks to currently available accounts of installation art, we can put together a working definition of the category that will suffice for present purposes: various scholars have stressed that in installation art the region of space where the object/s or event/s constituting or instantiating a work is/are collocated is integral to the display of the work (see, for instance, Reiss 1999; Bishop 2005; Rebentisch 2012) and argued that ‘the spectator is in some way regarded as integral to the completion of the work’ (Reiss 1999: xiii). In particular, Bishop (2005) has argued that to appreciate works of installation art, we need to focus on the complex experience aroused in us by an installation environment, as a whole. Finally, the appreciative experience of works of installation art can be understood as an aesthetic experience, as Rebentisch (2012) has shown.

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This characterization of installation art gives us reason to claim that Creed’s works belong to such category: in Creed’s works, as I have argued, the spaces of installation (various rooms or locations across the UK) are integral to the display, and the works are properly experienced by spectators collocated within the spaces of installation, spectators who experience the light changes and sound changes in such spaces from within and who thereby complete such spaces and, consequently, the works themselves. Earlier I claimed that Creed’s works are abstract objects that have material instantiations; to be more precise, what exactly constitutes an instantiation of such works are events (the going on and off of the lights, the slamming of the piano, the ticking of the metronomes, the ringing of the bells), performed in certain spaces (various rooms and various locations across the UK), by following Creed’s instructions.10 Finally, and most importantly, we need to look at Creed’s works as at works of installation art in order to grasp their expressive properties: as I have argued, the relevant expressive properties are not simply grounded in the events taking place, while they are grounded in such events plus the spaces where they occur – spaces whose ambience is modified by the happening of such events. It seems that, at least prima facie, installation art can be construed both as an art genre and as an art form. On the one hand, adopting a normative conception of genres such as that suggested by Dodd (2016) on the basis of Abell (2015), it can be claimed that installation art is the genre of works that have the goal of arousing aesthetic experiences of installed objects and the spaces where they are installed, taken as a unitary whole. To construe installation art as an art form, on the other hand, it can be argued, following Lopes (2014: ch.7), that works of installation art have distinctive, hybrid, media, which include not only the media of works in various traditional art forms (such as sculpture, music and painting) but also the physical spaces where objects in such media are installed. Assessing which is the best hypothesis requires careful scrutiny and is not a task that can be accomplished here. However, for the sake of my argument, we don’t need to establish whether installation art is an art genre or an art form, because arguing that Creed’s works are not only works of conceptual art but also works of installation art is compatible with constructing installation art both as a genre and as an art form. This is because, as I have explained, on the one hand, according to Dodd, conceptual art is an art genre to which works in different art forms can belong (thereby also works belonging to the art form installation art, if we so wish to understand such category) and, on the other hand, works belonging to a certain genre (e.g. conceptual art) can also belong to other genres (e.g. installation art – if we so wish to understand such category).

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4. Conclusion To conclude, I would like to point out that the proposal I have put forward opens a further question: how, if at all, does our intellectual appreciation of Creed’s works qua works of conceptual art interact with our aesthetic appreciation of them as works of installation art and vice versa? There is no room for exploring this issue here, so I shall limit myself to give an example of how such interaction could work. On the one hand, our intellectual appreciation of the idea of having the lights going on and off in a room could be enhanced by our aesthetic appreciation of, for example, the dramatic character of the environment we find ourselves immersed in, because appreciating that The lights going on and off is dramatic could allow us to detect analogies between the idea of having the lights going on and off and ideas concerning other things going on and off, so to speak, in an equally dramatic way – such as, for instance, ideas about the constantly alternating birth and death events in the human and animal world. On the other hand, our aesthetic appreciation of the expressive properties of The lights going on and off could perhaps be enhanced by our intellectual appreciation of the idea of having the lights going on and off in a room, in that our awareness that the scene we are immersed in is merely meant to convey an idea would confer a de-personalizing, cold and frightening undertone to the whole scene, thereby widening the array of expressive properties of the work.

Notes 1 Eccles and Creed (2014: xiii). 2 LeWitt (1967: 79). 3 Another reason to consider Creed’s works as works of conceptual art might be given by the observation that, in some cases, what we have are not just different instantiations of the same work, but different (multiply instantiable) works that look alike (in the case of The lights going on and off, for instance, Works Nos 127, 160 and 227). That different works can look alike might suggest that what matters about such works is not their physical appearance, but the idea they convey – an idea that it might be worth exploring time and again. 4 LeWitt (1967: 79). 5 Eccles and Creed (2014: x). 6 Dodd (2016: 250), my italics. 7 Dodd (2016: 256–7). 8 Dodd (2016: 257–8).

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9 Dodd (2017: 11) – referring to Goldie and Schellekens (2010: 112); see also Dodd (2016: 258). 10 My characterization of the ontology of installation artworks is slightly simplified for the sake of clarity. For a more articulated proposal, see Sherri Irvin (2012).

References Abell, C. (2015), ‘Genre, Interpretation and Evaluation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 115 (1): 25–40. Bishop, C. (2005), Installation Art: A Critical History, London: Tate Publishers. Davies, D. (2005), ‘Medium in Art’, in J. Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, 181–91, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dodd, J. (2016), ‘The Ontology of Conceptual Art. Against the Idea Idea’, in J. Dodd (ed.), Art, Mind, Narrative. Themes from the Work of Peter Goldie, 241–60, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dodd, J. (2017), ‘What 4′33′’ Is’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, DOI:10.1080/00048 402.2017.1408664. Eccles, T. and M. Creed (2014), ‘Interview’, in Martin Creed: Works, x–xvii, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Goldie, P. and E. Schellekens (2010), Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? Abingdon: Routledge. Irvin, S. (2012), ‘Installation Art and Performance: A Shared Ontology’, in C. Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects, 242–62, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvin, S. and J. Dodd (2017), ‘In Advance of the Broken Theory: Philosophy and Contemporary Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 75 (4): 375–86. Levinson, J. (1992), ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure’, reprinted in J. Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics, 3–10, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. LeWitt, S. (1967), ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum, 5 (10): 9–83. Lippard, L. (1973), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lopes, D. (2014), Beyond Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mag Uidhir, C. (2012), ‘Introduction: Art, Metaphysics, and The Paradox of Standards’, in C. Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects, 1–26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rebentisch, J. (2012), Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. D. Hendrickson and G. Jackson, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Reiss, J. (1999), From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Boston: MIT Press.

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The logical and the phenomenological in Martin Creed’s chairs Gregory Minissale

Martin Creed’s Work No. 997 (2009) consists of a stack of five chairs. The largest at the bottom is a modern lounge chair of black leather, and placed upon this is a comfortable armchair with wooden legs and armrests upholstered in grey fabric; next is a smaller, grey leather chair one might find in an office; on this is placed a wooden café or dining chair; and, finally, highest on the stack is a child’s chair made of laminated wood and steel. The placement of the chairs in this order is neat and attractive, and even humorous, suggesting acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders with the largest and strongest at the bottom carrying the weight of all the others. The child’s chair at the top suggests that the scale is not just to do with different sizes or load-bearing structures but also triggers memories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears featuring Daddy chair, Mummy chair and Baby chair, often illustrated as a selection of different chairs in the children’s storybooks (see Figure 12). Stacking chairs suggests that their ordinary use as equipment, which we associate with the body sitting, has been put into reserve, yet the stacking does not stop there, seen as a whole – as a stack – Work No. 997 is part of a series of stacks of other chairs, tables and everyday objects, a practice that the artist is famous for pursuing relentlessly. The habitual response to chairs as comfortable supports is put into question by the gallery context which suggests understanding the chairs in terms of order, symmetry, rhythm, alternation and visual complexity, which are all formal characteristics we associate with sculptures or paintings. The colours selected also suggest rhythmic variation: black and silver for the base, grey and pine for the second chair, black and grey for the third, the return of pine for the fourth, and silver and grey for the top chair. Seen from this formal and analytical perspective, the legs also point to a rhythmic structure

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Figure 12  Martin Creed, Work No. 997, 2009; chairs; 83.5 x 30 x 28.3 in. / 212 x 76 x 72cm. © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Andrew Smart, AC Cooper LTD.

where a spiral can be imaginatively traced from base to apex by joining up the tips or feet of the legs. This kind of aesthetic exercise is based on an analytical engagement with formal principles, geometry, spatial arrangement as well as a sense of rhythm, and places Creed in a broadly modernist tradition which was also concerned with these aspects. Curator Massimiliano Gioni lists the key names in this modernist tradition in which Creed’s work can be situated: ‘Carl Andre, Samuel Beckett, Lenny Bruce, John Cage, Johnny Cash, Devo, Donald Judd, Bobby Fisher, Sol LeWitt, Piero Manzoni, Bruce Nauman, Sex Pistols, Frank Stella, Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein’ (Gioni 2010: xxiii). One of the things that many of these examples have in common is sequential arrangements featuring mechanical repeats or inductive steps. The artist Sol LeWitt suggested that ‘[i]rrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically’ (LeWitt 1969) and declared that ‘the system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can’t be understood without

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understanding the system. It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance’ (LeWitt 2003). And this is something that Carl Andre demonstrated with his bricks lined up one after another on the gallery floor, just as Warhol endlessly repeated images of soup tins and celebrity portraits, electric chairs and Brillo boxes. Samuel Beckett and John Cage’s repeats and intervals are well known.1

1.  Logical categories Central to Creed’s artistic practice of collecting various sets of objects and putting them into stacks, or parading them into neat queues, are processes of categorization and classification. As we have already suggested with Gioni’s list of names, categorization is a form of selection in the sense that one draws out some feature that is common to a number of items while discarding others for the sake of creating the category. Thus, categorization is also about exclusion. However, it is also possible to make different kinds of categories out of the same finite members of a group, depending on the feature or features used for the purpose of categorization. Thus, dishes, forks, plates, knives, bowls, wineglasses, tumblers, jug and spoons could all be grouped under dinnerware or in different subgroups: cutlery, crockery, glassware, China, silver or junk. Interestingly cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch (1999) suggests that there is a hierarchy in categorization involving superordinate, subordinate and basic groupings (see Table 1). Rosch’s hypothesis is that basic-level objects are the most inclusive level of classification at which objects have a number of attributes in common. There are fewer attributes for the superordinate category and more for the basic level. Rosch writes: ‘objects may be first seen or recognised as members of their basic category, and [. . .] only with the aid of additional processing can they be identified as members of their superordinate or subordinate category’ (Rosch 1999: 195). Importantly, for contexts and situations that constrain categorization: ‘it seems likely that, in the absence of a specified context, subjects assume what they Table 1  Levels of Categorization (on the Left) and Examples of Each (on the Right) Superordinate Subordinate Basic

Furniture Chair Kitchen chair

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consider the normal context or situation for occurrence of that object’ (Rosch 1999: 202). Subtly and rapidly, even the mention of a concrete concept (a spoon) in a sentence or depicted in a painting can prime the situational context (or concept) in which that object is usually associated. Or in the other direction, mention of context such as a kitchen can initiate thoughts about the objects appropriately found in that context such as crockery. This is perhaps what happens when we use a situational context (a gallery) to understand an object inside the gallery, but of course Creed’s chairs do not seem to fit the context. There is an unremarkable way in which Work No. 997 can be seen as just ‘furniture’, and then, of course, as chairs generally, and next as particular kinds of chairs as cultural products with specific uses and associations. The key phrase here is ‘may be seen’. The suggestion is that the work is understood through this kind of automatic categorization. However, the work seems to embody this implicit ordering process, almost as if it is isolating it as a demonstration of a fundamental categorizing process. We can’t be sure if Creed’s Work No. 997 is simply the product of a deep-rooted and possibly obsessive ordering of objects or whether his stacking is meant to parody this obsession. It seems important that knowledge of the superordinate/subordinate/basic-level structure does not just abstract away from the ordinariness of the chairs but allows us to return to this quotidian aspect. Creed’s Work No. 997 seems to encourage instability where we are switching from one category level to another. If we identify the chairs as basic, we would think of ordinary situations they are found in and perhaps imagine sitting in them, which is engaging with the chair as equipment or tool use. At the level of the subordinate, we might think more generally about chairs without specific situational examples, and at the superordinate level we might think about the concept of furniture and how it relates to design, art or sculpture, which are other superordinate categories. The basic level tends to invite phenomenological aspects: we imagine sitting, feeling or using the chair. If we think abstractly about furniture, this could lead to considerations about structure, formal principles and arrangement. What seems remarkable is that the hierarchical categorical structure is imagined to be something that we can explore with our eyes, move around and touch rather than be accessible only as a mental construct or diagram. Creed’s Work No. 997 references various other chairs in art. One of the most prominent examples is Joseph Kosuth’s One and three chairs, 1965, which consists of an ordinary wooden chair, a photograph of this chair, which sets up a visual correspondence, and also an excerpt from a dictionary explaining what

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a chair is. As opposed to Creed’s vertical stacking of chairs, Kosuth’s artwork is arranged horizontally at the same level as we might see paintings arranged at an exhibition. Both artists’ works are collections of objects: Creed’s are all chairs of different sizes and types, and Kosuth’s we understand as different ways of signifying the same chair. In the Kosuth work, the actual chair is the ‘before’, the photograph the ‘after’, and we are chasing the meaning of the text to be afforded us in anticipation of our having read the dictionary definition. Thus, Kosuth’s work seems unfolded and distributed, while Creed’s Work No. 997 suggests that all the chairs are folded up like Russian dolls, trying to huddle ever closer into the same spatiotemporal coordinates in a vertical stack. This compression of levels or layers continues seemingly ad infinitum with the layers compacted into the laminate wood. The vertical thrust of the stack pointing up to an apex of sorts also comes tumbling down. Analogical thought (ana = (up); logue = word) may also be seen as cataloguing (katalogue = kata (down); logue = word). This kind of bi-directional set up, where categorical thought arises in ordered steps analogically, struggles with a possible descent into parts and particularities, which can either be catalogued or left to fall into disarray. Adding an interesting perspective on this view, Creed asserts in an interview with Tom Eccles that ‘[f]eelings come up, thoughts go down, and somewhere in the middle they meet. The thoughts and ideas often try to stop the feelings coming up, and they fight with each other, but thoughts always lose’ (Creed and Eccles 2010: x).2 This quote is of central importance for understanding the tension produced by many of Creed’s works which lies in a struggle between logical thought, responsible for arranging or classifying objects in an ordered manner, and feelings and sensations which emerge spontaneously from memories of situations associated with particular chairs. Creed’s work is thus open to these two apparently contradictory stresses: analytical logic and the contingencies of phenomenology, and I will pursue this distinction in greater detail in the following pages. On the side of logic, in addition to the categorical structures that appear to organize Creed’s many different artworks, many commentators have pointed to the artist’s references to Wittgenstein. His Work No 143, 1997 (sheets of paper), and Work No. 232 (a neon sign) both spell out ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’ based on ‘the world is all that is the case’ in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, where the philosopher asserts that the absolute constituents of reality can be thought by a process of logical analysis. On this view the world consists of logical atoms which cannot be broken down further. The chairs could be understood simply as logical atoms, legs, backs, seats, armrests and nothing

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more.3 Yet the later Wittgenstein rejects these ideas in Philosophical Investigations §65–71, where he famously shows the impossibility of establishing an absolute definition for the concept ‘game’: §66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean boardgames, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. . . For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. §67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way. And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

So, if we understand Work No. 997 through the earlier Wittgenstein, we might see the chairs as sharing common features, ‘logical atoms’. This is associated with the classical view that concepts denote particular collections of features across cases, which the later Wittgenstein rejects and suggests is better understood as family resemblances.4 However, a close inspection of Work No. 997 reveals many differences. For example, the bottom chair does not have four legs but has fused legs, all of the backs are distinct from each other and they are all made of different materials. It is not entirely inconceivable that Creed, with his welldocumented interest in Wittgenstein, is attempting his own kind of language game selecting them for their differences: kitchen chair, lounge chair, Daddy chair, Mummy chair, Baby chair, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s chairs and chairs with leather, cotton or metal. So where, exactly, is the core set of features, the logical atom that carries across the different cases?5

2. Phenomenology Although many of Creed’s works appear to be organized into logical and systemic arrangements which suggest underlying categorical knowledge, the artist is fond of throwing a spanner in the works. In Creed, on the one hand, there is a system of piling and stacking, seriality and logical sequence, and, on the other hand, the sequences are experienced as rhythmic sensations. Creed himself points this out. Many artworks for him have multiple parts that are ‘kind of rhythmic: they’re like collections of single parts, or similar single bits repeated’ [. . .] ‘[t]he

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experience of looking at things is always a kinetic one because you’re alive, your heart’s beating, you’re moving around’ (Eccles and Creed 2010: xiv, xvi). According to Gioni, ‘The metronome is the fundamental metaphor for Creed’s work: sound, negation of sound, repetition of sound. Sound, silence, sound, silence . . .’ (Gioni 2010: xx). Creed’s work is ‘menacing, merciless . . . incessantly repeating the guillotine’s rhythm’ (Gioni 2010: xxi).6 Creed tends to arrange an encounter between logical structure, which it is tempting to associate with analytical philosophy and inductive steps and rhythmic sensations. Gioni mentions that ‘monks and smokers know very well, the repetition of gestures is seratoninergic, it generates a sense of wellbeing. Rhythm and pleasure are closely interconnected’ (Gioni 2010: xxi). So, whereas the logic of linear repeats and series is associated with emotionless, machine-like, disembodied computationalism, Creed’s use of ordinary objects brings us back down to the embodied, emotional and rhythmic aspects of lived experience suggested by repeat forms. In the first case, we count and measure and, in the second, we just ‘feel’ the rhythm suggested by the arrangement. Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, which encourages a detached examination of objects, and phenomenal qualities that break down this detachment when the chairs are viewed as comfortable or homely. These two tendencies can be more precisely described by appealing to Martin Heidegger’s well-known series of distinctions between ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘readiness-to-hand’. For Heidegger, Vorhandenheit, ‘presence-at-hand’, describes an attitude to objects and things which is largely analytical, theoretical and detached. If a tool is broken or is singled out from its systematic interconnectedness with tools and objects in the world, inspected for its design and object attributes (as we would for works of art), it is revealed as present-at-hand. In this case, we become aware of it as an object, it becomes an object of critical inspection, we are trying to put it back again into a neat system where everything has its place. In contrast, Zuhandenheit, ‘readinessto-hand, handiness’ signifies our drifting into ordinary tool use where the object disappears into the totality of affordances, categories and situational types that extend and support this seamless interaction with the world through a body fitting into its contours. Heidegger understands Zuhandenheit to be a fundamental and dominant form of being in the sense that we adopt this mode of thought and behaviour in our everyday, automatic and commonplace situatedness in and contact with the world’s arrangement of objects. In Creed’s Work No. 997, the chairs are quite ordinary, ready for sitting on, or if viewed from the attitude of Zuhandenheit, readiness-to-hand, they simply are chairs put

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into a stack for storage ready for use at a later stage. However, this understanding is also dependent on the situation the chairs are in: they are ordinary in a community hall, office or attic but here they are placed in a gallery, and this causes the alternative, Vorhandenheit, ‘presence-at-hand’, to emerge because we no longer view them as things meant for ordinary use. Psychology explains that the habitual process of object identification is to use our spatial and sensorimotor systems so that we may sit or imagine sitting in a chair. The object is immediately identified with an appropriate action towards it which is automatic. But in a gallery, isolated and displayed in a prominent place, the chairs are presented as works of art, ready-mades, and they are placed into a nicely arranged stack. Ready-mades offer us the chance to defamiliarize objects as products, things to be exploited, touchstones of place and identity, materiality and value, work and play. They may cause us to mistrust our eyes and our rational and habitual understandings of reality. The ready-made allows us to see an object as an anomaly and, in the reverse direction, to see the anomalous in the everyday. This is a kind of alienation from ordinary time and objects (a ‘time out’) and an alienation from product identification, property, assets and tools. Seen as ready-mades, the chairs are withdrawn from the system of categories which names them and gives them a role and function. Thus, this setting aside, this withdrawal of the object from the system may also allow for an estrangement from the system which we insert ourselves into automatically.7 I have suggested two ways to possibly explore Work No. 997: through a general or categorical approach and the particular and phenomenal engagement, one tends to appear while the other disappears. Heidegger characterizes this as a double movement of revealing and concealing in the emergence of truth. This double movement is where a world opens up, and an aesthetic value, or systematic analysis, comes forth, while at the same time the earth, the materiality of something particular, becomes a background hum.8 Heidegger sees the double movement of revealing-concealing occurring at the same time, just as when we turn away, we also turn towards something else, or when an object is revealed, some part of it is also occluded. But Heidegger will not leave it there as a smooth mechanism, particularly because artworks create different ways in which this dual movement occurs. There is another level of complexity that must be acknowledged. In viewing art, Heidegger is also at pains to describe how this dual movement creates a deeper ‘rift’ in which there is ‘strife’. The character of this strife has a particular figure, shape or gestalt, depending on the artwork and how it is arranged to reveal this strife:

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The strife that is brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work means: truth’s being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the fitting or joining of the shining of truth.9

An artwork, such as Creed’s Work No. 997, can arrange a rift (a ‘rift-design’) where the strife between earth (concealing) and world (unconcealing) takes on a character, figure or structure which shines forth as self-evident. It could be a spiral that appears to go up (unconcealing the superordinate while concealing the basic level) and down (concealing the superordinate which revealing the work’s basic level features). It is difficult to keep in mind the extraordinary vision of a spiral if we simply fixate on one chair alone attending to its peculiar material features. Each artwork in its own way, with its own qualities, opens a rift in which a struggle emerges between the analytical (formal and aesthetic categories) and the ‘down-to-earth’. But the strife – or instability – itself may be deemed beautiful in the way in which it emerges in the artwork. In this way, cognitive mastery associated with categorizing can be relaxed in favour of a pragmatic and phenomenal abundance. A good summation of Heidegger on this point is Iain Thomson: If, instead of trying to obtain a kind of cognitive mastery over art through aesthetics . . . we simply allow ourselves to experience what is happening within a great work of art, then Heidegger thinks we will be able to encounter the ‘essential strife’ in which the true work of art paradoxically ‘rests’ and finds its ‘repose’. When we encounter the ‘movement’ that paradoxically rests in the masterful ‘composure’ of a great artwork, moreover, what we discover therein is an ‘instability’ that underlies the entire intelligible order, an ontological tension (between revealing and concealing, emerging and withdrawing) which can never be permanently stabilized and thus remains even in what is ‘mastered’.10

Thomson associates cognitive mastery with the present-at-hand, which Heidegger thinks takes us away from fitting neatly and ergonomically into the world of objects. This is the mastery science pursues, as well as forms of logical positivism, which beholds objects analytically, placing them into larger systems of classification. But the ready-to-hand occurs where the object – as an object – is destabilized and blended into the flow of daily activity. An engagement with Creed’s Work No. 997 may be characterized as this kind of instability; it can be understood as a peculiar artistic arrangement cleverly poised between the appearance of a lackadaisical stacking – the everyday – and a skilful placement

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in terms of aesthetic chromatic balances, sizes, age groups, period styles and situational types in an imaginary spiral. It could be a ready-to-hand beauty, a ‘thereness’, or a beauty that is present-at-hand in its portrait of ordinariness and effortlessness. It could be the staging of a philosophical problem which, however, withdraws and disappears into ordinary usage. This seems to create an aesthetic of struggle between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand. It may be accompanied by the uncertainty generated by the impulse to sink into a chair while feeling awkward about sitting on a work of art or a philosophical problem. In conclusion, I believe that Creed’s choice, organization and placement of objects provide an intellectual challenge about their suitability in the category of art, and this initiates detached, analytical thought. But it is also possible for this to subside for feelings of familiarity where phenomenal responses and memories arise in regard to ‘ordinary’ objects. An important third option is that we can understand these ordinary objects as beautiful things in themselves which the artist has set aside for us to think about rather than overlook. I have suggested that the duality of analytical logic detached from the artwork in contrast with feeling one’s way into the artwork can be scrutinized in three ways: through Rosch’s psychology, through Wittgenstein and, thirdly, through Heidegger. Rosch’s superordinate and subordinate levels are associated with the detached, analytical thought required for thinking about whether ordinary objects qualify for these levels. However, with the inclusive and not-too-choosy, basic category, a familiar chair sparks various kinds of involuntary thoughts about situations associated with it. In the second example, Wittgenstein’s earlier thought from in Tractatus suggests that analytical philosophy can reduce things in the world to logical atoms where we would see a core set of simple features found across the different instances of chairs. His later, more pragmatic, philosophy outlines the nonessentialist understanding of family resemblances and language games, and admits that context (such as an art gallery) can change the selection of features to arrive at different meanings and experiential qualities depending on ordinary language use and context. Finally, Heidegger outlines a distinction between logical analytical and detached thought, which arises from considering objects with a special presentto-hand engagement, opposed to the ready-to-hand attachment to objects felt as extensions of the body in a skilled task. It is Heidegger who shows us a possible way to think about how these dualisms affect each other. He identifies a ‘worldly’ analytical thought, associated with cognitive and aesthetic mastery, that struggles with an immersive and spontaneous, down-to-earth experience. I

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would like to suggest that Creed’s oeuvre allows us to ponder and enjoy how this dynamic struggle emerges as a work of art.

Notes 1 The popular music mentioned is also repetitive or recursive. Meanwhile, Piero Manzoni’s ‘achromes’ featured repetitive shapes and forms glued onto canvases all in white, and Frank Stella was known for his bright, hard-edged bands of colour piled on each other in bright rainbow stacks. Lawrence Weiner, a conceptual artist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher, both listed their logical propositions one after another in their respective works using methods of logical induction, which have a kind of iterative or recursive rhythm of their own. 2 Original quote: ‘[f]eelings come up, thoughts go down, and somewhere in the middle they meet each other. The thoughts and ideas often try to stop the feelings coming up, and they fight with each other, but thoughts always lose.’ 3 But even the armrests, legs, backs and seats are subject to further atomization: an armrest in one context can be something else in another context. 4 Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs already elegantly dealt with aspects of this same problem: the different representations of the chair all point to the ‘same’ chair which we read as having irreducible features but none of the representations have the same features. We can see the photograph as the same chair, even though it is a black-and-white photograph of the (brown) chair. It is interesting that Wittgenstein pointed out how we pragmatically and phenomenally ignore literal differences in viewing photographs. In his Remarks on Colour, he mentions how it is possible to see someone having ‘blonde’ hair in a black-and-white photograph and not grey hair. This example shows how viewers can skip or suppress the literal or actual features of an image to infer that the hair is blonde from other features. Kosuth’s work seems to halt the easy drift into this kind of ‘seeing as’, and even, perhaps, allows us to reflect on what this is. 5 It is interesting that the alternation of materials, leather and metal, wood and metal, leather and wood, et cetera are reminiscent of the logic of genetic inheritance. 6 Compare this will the other artists that Gioni compares with Creed: Warhol remarked, ‘I like boring things. . . . I like things to be exactly the same over and over again. . . . I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel’ (Warhol in Michelson 2002: 72). Cage wrote, also in a manner relevant to our consideration of Martin Creed’s Work No. 99, ‘in Zen they say, if something is boring after 2 minutes try it for 4. If still boring,

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Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed try it for 8, 16, 32, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting’ (Westgeest 1997: 80). This estrangement from the system can work in several ways: it could be determined by a refusal to see the chairs as a work of art because they are ordinary objects strangely put on a pedestal in museum or gallery, or, in the other direction, we may view some ordinary objects in our lives through the lens of art, as works of art, in terms of design or arrangement or as subjects worthy of being photographed. In both cases, the object and the situation it is found in are dissonant and require creative thought and effort to resolve. This reading for Creed’s work is indebted to the Iain Thomson’s interpretation of Heidegger’s treatment of Van Gogh’s painting of old shoes (2011). Thomson convincingly suggests that the earthy background in this painting contains halfformed figures emerging from the earth of the paint, as do the shoes themselves, and that this emergence is both a kind of equipmental consciousness (ready-tohand) with the more present-at-hand associated with the thematic involvement of consciousness with an aesthetic object (art, the painting). Heidegger (2002: 38). Thomson (2011: 76–7).

References Eccles, T. and M. Creed (2010), ‘Interview’, in Martin Creed: Works, x–xvii. London: Thames & Hudson. Gioni, M. (2010), ‘The System of Objects’, in Martin Creed: Works, xx–xxiv. London: Thames & Hudson. Heidegger, M. [1950] (2002), Off the Beaten Track, ed, and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeWitt, S. (1969), ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, in 0–9. New York, no. 5, January 1969, 3–5. LeWitt, S. (2003), ‘Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow’, Interview in Bombmagazine​.or​g. Available online: https://bombmagazine​.org​/articles​/sol​-lewitt/. Michelson, A. (ed.) (2002), Andy Warhol, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rosch, E. (1999), ‘Principles of Categorization’, in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds), Concepts: Core Readings, 189–206. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thomson, I. D. (2011), Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westgeest, H. (1997), Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art Between East And West. London: Reaktion Books. Wittgenstein, L. [1953] (2001), Philosophical Investigations, London: Blackwell Publishing.

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Which ‘Martin Creed’? Or switching from insignificance to significance Clive Cazeaux

Introduction Martin Creed and philosophy. Where does one begin? Who is Martin Creed? How does one decide what the name ‘Martin Creed’ should refer to? I ask because the name can refer to different things. In the context of art, it is often the case that when an artist’s name is uttered, it can be used either to refer to the artist as a person or to the body of work that the artist has produced; in the latter case, the name is functioning as a ‘whole for part’ metonym in that it is not the person as a whole that is referred to, only the work that they have created. There is also a third possibility: the name refers neither to the artist nor to their work, but to ‘Martin Creed’ as an institutional phenomenon: a series of institutional forces, manifest as career-advancing contacts, curatorial decisions, commissions, gallery exhibitions, reviews in newspapers and art magazines, catalogues, books, media interviews and artworld prizes, that nurture and sustain a phenomenon referred to as ‘Martin Creed’.1 These questions are driven not just by a purely philosophical interest in the ambiguities of reference that can occur in the artworld. There are two other reasons, also philosophical, but originating specifically from textual and artistic material that is linked to the name ‘Martin Creed’. They are (i) a distinction drawn in a text by Creed and (ii) a property that emerges from Creed’s artworks when they are gathered together in a book or a retrospective exhibition. With (i), in the ‘Foreword’ to the book Martin Creed: Works, published in 2010, Creed declares his aversion to the idea of producing a book that surveys his work (see Eccles and Creed 2010). The reason for his aversion is that the process of creating the book forces him to confront the opposition between a soft and a hard world:2

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The more I write to make things clear, the more difficult it becomes to see. The words form a curtain obscuring my view. The blobby world of thoughts and feelings is not defined, but the world in words is too defined: they are a certain shape. I don’t want to be pinned down. I’m not running out of things to say, but running into things to say. They are obstacles. Words are hard, but the world is soft.3

Creed is ‘running into things to say’ because verbal description, as he sees it, assigns a hardness to a world that is otherwise ‘soft’. The process of compiling a book brings with it the need to determine meaning with a specificity that does not occur in the artist’s life. The second reason behind the question ‘what does the name “Martin Creed” refer to?’ is (ii) a property that emerges from his artworks when they are gathered together in a book or a retrospective exhibition. His artworks involve some of the slightest, most insignificant gestures possible extracted from the flow of everyday life and solidified into artworks, such as a sheet of A4 paper screwed into a ball (Work No. 88), a room in which the lights are going on and off (Work Nos. 127, 160 and 227), and a film of someone defecating (Work No. 660). What normally passes as unnoticed and unremarkable – so ordinary and unremarkable that it cannot even be named or nominalized as ‘a thing’, ‘an event’ or ‘an episode’, because that would, in line with the sentiment expressed by Creed above, give it a solidity and a prominence that are at odds with its usual, overlooked status – is selected, extracted from the flow of events, and made an object of attention in an art gallery. The insignificant is made significant. Through a series of artworks, the name ‘Martin Creed’ leads us to a position where the concept of what counts as an object of attention cannot be taken for granted. We find ourselves in a context where any ordinarily overlooked detail can be elevated and transformed into an object for close, careful consideration. It is the property in some of Creed’s works of prompting one to make the most insignificant detail prominent as an object that gives additional weight to the question of ‘Which “Martin Creed” is meant?’. Where does one begin? Every detail in the range of phenomena open to public view that might bear the name ‘Martin Creed’ – institutional phenomenon, artworks, or artist – is in principle capable of presenting a variety of details and qualities, in such a way that any initial thought that we are dealing with ‘this’ suddenly multiplies to become ‘this’, and ‘this also’, and ‘this too’, and ‘this as well’, and ‘what about this?’. As a result, the prospect of making a start, of announcing that ‘I am exploring this’ seems challenging, to say the least. Whichever facet of ‘Martin Creed’ I decide to make

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the centre of my study is, within a matter of seconds, going to multiply and become an array of other facets. This chapter is a demonstration of how philosophy can come to terms with the fine-grained questioning and highly attentive looking one is invited to adopt when one perceives over time a sheet of A4 paper screwed into a ball, or spends time in a room in which the lights are going on and off. A particular ‘Martin Creed’ is identified, and the reason for the choice is shown to be a result of the transition from insignificance to significance that occurs in the artist’s work. The importance of the transition for a philosophical interpretation of selected artworks, and for debate on the aesthetics of conceptual art, is also established.

1.  Complications created by approaching ‘Martin Creed’ philosophically In attempting to determine which Martin Creed is meant, not all of the factors that determine the identity will come from the properties that might be associated with ‘Martin Creed’. There is my interest as well that has to be acknowledged. I am not approaching ‘Martin Creed’ as an innocent bystander, someone who brings with them no predetermining interests whatsoever, and who is therefore completely open to whatever elements constitute the ‘Martin Creed’ that will be the subject for discussion. Rather, I am a philosopher who is approaching Martin Creed with a particular philosophical interest in mind, and this is going to act as a filter, helping to determine which of the many features that surround Creed and his work are made prominent as the subject for discussion. Approaching Martin Creed the artist with a predetermined set of interests is not a problem. But the idea that one might approach his artworks with a predetermined set of interests is a sensitive issue in philosophical aesthetics. Ever since Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, there has been the understanding that aesthetic judgements, including those judgements that seek to respond to or to interpret works of art, are disinterested. This means that the judgements are not motivated by a cognitive or instrumental reason, where details are sought in order to meet an objective, but because the artwork expresses, in Kant’s terms, an ‘aesthetic idea’: ‘a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (Kant 1987: 314). An aesthetic idea, Kant continues:

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quicken[s] the mind by opening up for it a view into an immense realm of kindred presentations. Fine art does this . . . [through the objects and attributes which make up an artwork giving] the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to these objects, though in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression.4

The notion that Kant is working against here is the determination given by a concept or a single linguistic expression. This is a reference to the central principle of his philosophy that experience acquires its ordered, continuous, meaningful nature by being shaped or determined by concepts. I know this is a door in front of me because, unconsciously, the concept ‘door’ is active in shaping the sensations I receive from the object. Cognitive or instrumental judgements are determinate in that they employ concepts to determine the nature of the object being studied. Aesthetic judgements are different. Their precise nature is a subject of ongoing philosophical discussion.5 I shall concentrate on Kant’s definition, not just for the reason of conciseness, but because it is helpful for my study. For Kant, an aesthetic judgement is a subjective statement in which no concept is exercised determinatively; there is no fixing the identity or nature of something. Yet the judgement nevertheless makes a claim to everyone’s agreement, that is, it seems as if it is objective, by drawing upon a state of conceptual free play in which ‘the imagination [is given] a momentum [that] makes it think more in response to’ the object before it (cf. Kant 1987: 315). One form aesthetic judgement can take is a subject–predicate expression, as in ‘This painting is stunning’, where the mind is moved to look for a word to express the subjective pleasure it takes in viewing the work, and, in so doing, also appears to make an objective claim about the work. Another form of aesthetic judgement can be a series of statements that shows the mind (in the words of Kant) ‘think[ing] more in response to [the artwork], though in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression’ (Kant 1987). These might be judgements that respond to physical properties in a work, expressing the qualities they present, the meanings they suggest or the effect they have on the viewer, for example, thoughts or comments about the sense of movement created by the interplay of line and shape in one of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract compositions. Again, they will be subjective but appear to make an objective claim about the work, and will occur as more than one judgement because they arise from sustained, enjoyable reflection on a work, rather than an attempt to sum up its impact or meaning in a single sentence.

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The danger of approaching artworks with determinate concepts, and, therefore, determinative judgements in mind, is that these concepts predetermine my perception of the works, and I am not open to their aesthetic ideas, that is, their power to stimulate a wide range of observations and thoughts. I am walking into the gallery looking for certain things, certain properties, and how they can feed my enquiry, rather than waiting for an indeterminate play of concepts to arise from looking at and reflecting upon the works. Examples of the kinds of philosophical enquiry that could be conducted into Martin Creed or his works, together with the determinate concepts they introduce, could be the following: ‘How can something as ordinary and unremarkable as a light going on and off (referring to Work Nos. 127, 160 and 227: The lights going on and off) be classed as “art”?’ – which would rely upon the concept of ‘art’, the criteria for what counts as a work of art, and other concepts, such as ‘ready-made’, ‘theory’ and ‘artworld’, that are brought in to address the notion that, now, after the readymade, any object can be considered art. Other philosophical questions might be the following: ‘Are we right to be viewing Creed’s output as art after his own declaration that he does not make works of art, only “stupid things”? (Pissarro 2014: 123). Can something that is supposedly “stupid” and “unthinking” still possess aesthetic or artistic qualities?’ The concepts at work here are who or what decides whether something is classed as art, the kind of properties that might fall under something that is considered stupid or to be lacking in thought, and how they might compare with what are recognized to be aesthetic or artistic qualities. Both examples present serious philosophical questions, but they also show how such questions are primarily interested in what belongs to or falls under one concept or another, and how the works are approached purely with a view to determining how they might be regarded in relation to one concept another; for example, ‘Are they art?’ ‘Are they stupid?’ I don’t intend to make the ‘Is it art?’ question the focus of this chapter since it is has been extensively debated from the 1960s onwards within philosophical aesthetics. To indicate briefly where I stand: I am sympathetic to Danto’s claim, from his 1964 essay ‘The Artworld’, that ‘to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld’ (Danto 1964: 580). By maintaining that art is not something that the eye alone can identify, and that it needs input from theory, Danto adopts a position that is very close to the Kantian idea that an object’s identity is a matter of the concepts that surround it. If it is accepted that artistic theory includes metaphor as a principle of art, in which one object is described or presented as another that is conceptually remote from it, then

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we have a theory of art that can accommodate any object on the grounds that, in an art setting, it can be enjoyed through the metaphorical play of concepts that encourages us to interpret it as something else.6 I accept a crumpled piece of paper or something as equally unremarkable as a light going on and off as art, because I take it to be part of the conceptual art tradition of presenting ready-mades or unremarkable objects that trigger a process of conceptual free play through their ordinariness or out-of-place-ness demanding conceptual reappraisal in terms of novel, possible meanings and perceptions. While the status of a crumpled piece of paper as art might be accepted, there is also the question of precisely how philosophy should approach art if it wants to be certain that it is addressing the work as art, as a phenomenon that asks us to suspend everyday cognitive judgement in the interests of a manifestation of ‘thinking more’ that goes beyond conventional understanding. Interestingly, ‘thinking more’ is the phrase introduced by Kant as part of his exposition of art’s expression of aesthetic ideas, yet ‘thinking more’ could also be regarded as the job of a philosopher. This turns the question of how philosophy should approach art into the question of how a philosophical ‘thinking more’ might get to grips with an aesthetic ‘thinking more’. Once again, there is the matter of whether a philosophical ‘thinking more’ might be a determinatively interested ‘thinking more’ that does not embrace fully the aesthetic ‘thinking more’. But before that, there is the issue of whether ‘philosophically thinking more’ and ‘aesthetically thinking more’ can be clearly distinguished from one another. If we are to address how one form of thinking comes to terms with another, we need to know how to tell them apart, how to tell which properties belong to which kind of ‘thinking more’. The idea that this might be a matter of simply identifying contrasting properties in two well-defined areas of intellectual practice, and then looking at how they interact, does not remain secure for very long. There is the suggestion within philosophy that art should become more like philosophy. Arthur Danto, writing on art after the ready-made, argues that art needs to acquire ‘an atmosphere of artistic theory’ if it wants to thrive in an environment where its nature is no longer determined by its material form.7 Running in the opposite direction, from philosophy to art, Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that philosophy should acknowledge its status as a form of art. The philosopher, Nietzsche declares, must become an artist whose method of working is metaphor in order to grasp the ‘essence of things’ which, for Nietzsche, is a series of metaphorical transformations between domains (see Nietzsche 1979).8 Once one begins to examine the relation between aesthetic and philosophical thinking, it becomes

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apparent that the two draw upon each another in ways that make regarding them as distinct subjects problematic. As far as answering the question at the start of the previous paragraph is concerned – how should philosophy confront art if it wants to be certain that it is approaching the work as art? – one can only conclude that it would involve an exploration of what is meant by ‘thinking more’, where the study is mindful of how any attempt to identify a form of thinking that is either purely aesthetic or purely philosophical will inevitably draw upon ideas or processes that are commonly associated with its opposite. The idea of approaching Martin Creed’s artworks with a predetermined interest was introduced in the hope that it might help with the project of identifying which ‘Martin Creed’ is meant. However, the idea of approaching Martin Creed’s artworks with a predetermined interest, rather than narrowing my range of options, only complicates proceedings by raising the problem of a partial, interested perception of the works and by raising the question of how philosophy should confront art if it wants to be certain that it is approaching the work as art, when it is difficult to distinguish artistic from philosophical thinking.

2.  Switching from insignificance to significance There is one move that could be made that would indicate a way forward: to take the state of being uncertain about the identity of ‘Martin Creed’ as the de facto identity of ‘Martin Creed’. The entity that has become increasingly elusive through the introduction of an ever-growing number of complexities, I am proposing, is the scope of possibility created by the thought that any number of formerly insignificant, overlooked items can become significant. The idea that a name customarily applied to a person or a collection of artworks is given to a scope of possibility, I admit, does seem odd. But perhaps it seems less odd once it is remembered that is precisely such a scope of possibility that may occupy the thoughts of an individual who is responsible for exhibiting crumpled paper, pressed Blu-Tack, and a film of someone defecating. In saying ‘this is the “Martin Creed” that is intended’, I am simply giving an ‘any object can be significant’level response to a question that is asked of an artist or set of works or artworld phenomenon that presents us with the possibility of any number of formerly insignificant items becoming significant. Let us turn our attention to this idea of the scope of possibility to see what it offers as an object of study. In the transition from insignificant to significant,

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two things happen. I shall use Work No. 88: A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1995) as an example. Firstly, I stop on my walk through the gallery and study the crumpled piece of paper for a length of time much longer than if I were throwing a piece of paper away. In gazing at the crumpled paper for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, different features begin to stand out. I observe its many facets and creases and start to make observations that ordinarily would not get made because I am not in the habit of studying crumpled pieces of paper. The distribution of folds, crevices and uncreased surfaces is uneven. I enjoy the play of the light and dark and the different shapes that the folds, crevices and uncreased surfaces make. Part of the crumpled ball is in shadow, but there are folds that catch the light, creating lines and other shapes in white against different tones of grey. The variety of shapes goes beyond a vocabulary of ‘fold’, ‘crease’, ‘crevice’ and ‘hollow’, and I am intrigued that something so seemingly insignificant can evade description. The shadow of the ball is darker than the ball itself, because the ball’s angled surfaces are able to reflect more light, and although there is a roughly round shape to the shadow, it fades away with a smoothness that is at odds with the folds and angles of the ball. It is as if the shadow has a grace or elegance that the crumpled paper lacks, and I am taken with the irony that, on this occasion, the shadow may be nearer perfection than the ball, for according to one key figure in the philosophy of art (Plato), shadows are one step further away from perfection than their objects (see Figure 13).

Figure 13  Martin Creed, Work No. 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, 1995; A4 paper; approximately 2 in. / 5.1 cm diameter. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

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These observations don’t go anywhere; they don’t serve any purpose, other than to explore the variety of perceptions and interpretations that are opened up by the artwork. In this regard, they conform to the tradition of disinterested, aesthetic judgement: perceptual interest in an object not because of any cognitive or instrumental reason, where details are sought in order to meet an objective, but because it stimulates the presentation of ideas or perceptions (or judgements, in Kantian terms) that are not ordinarily associated with the object, that is, they are not determinate concepts. A crumpled piece of paper becomes a territory occupied by gullies and ridges that guide my eye, and filled with a variety of shapes that exceeds my capacity for description. A large component of the work’s aesthetic force is gained from viewing the familiar through an unfamiliar lens, including the surprise and delight one experiences in realizing that the familiar can be appreciated in new, remote and seemingly alien terms. Here, with the crumpled paper, the unfamiliarity comes from taking the insignificant and placing it in a situation where it can be studied in detail, at length, over time, leading to judgements that go beyond a customary description of paper. A second consequence of making something significant can be the formation of a question along the following lines: if a crumpled piece of paper is capable of generating the sequence of descriptions just given, then what kind of perceptions might other ordinary objects and situations, those not selected by Creed, be capable of sustaining? This is a response that can apply to other works by Creed where the principal gesture is to elevate the insignificant, such as some Blu-Tack rolled into a ball and pressed against a wall (Work No. 79), a doorstop installed so a door can open only forty-five degrees (Work No. 115) and two dogs walking, sitting or sleeping in a gallery space (Work No. 591). Because the items selected by Creed are so ordinary and insignificant, the process they stimulate of finding a wide range of previously unconsidered properties in those items can easily transfer to other customarily overlooked objects and events. Once one has been lured into a state where one is attending slowly and carefully to insignificant objects, one can choose to remain in that state and attend to other insignificant objects in order to discover the kind of conceptual free play that they might generate. From looking at the crumpled paper, I look at the gallery’s concrete floor, and immediately become aware of its many grey tones, the perceptual play the tones stimulate as I try to group them according to whether they are light or dark grey, the reflections from the gallery lights, the flecks and ripples in the floor’s surface that become visible as the light reflections fade from white to grey, the weight of my body that now feels as if its concentrated in my feet pressing

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against the floor, and the light but slightly echo-laden ‘patting’ sound my shoes make against the concrete as I walk on to the next exhibit. The floor now seems more than a floor. The transition from insignificance to significance is important, therefore, not just because it creates an openness to unconventional perceptions that is in keeping with aesthetic judgement, but because it highlights the moment when something becomes an object of attention. It is the movement from a state of not holding any attention or meaning to a state of having a sign or a concept attached to it, so that it enters the network of signs that constitutes meaningful thought. What is so special about this, other than admitting that any and every portion of reality is capable of being the subject of aesthetic judgement? ‘Becoming an object of attention’ is itself important because it emphasizes the fact that being an object of attention involves becoming an object of attention, and by becoming an object of attention, it raises the question of the kinds of way in which it becomes an object – the question, that is, of which concepts or signs are applied to it. Being an object of attention is not a constant, universal property of any and every portion of reality but the result of an action whereby a figure–ground relation is introduced; one thing is made to stand out against a background of other, unattended things. And in being made to stand out, it will stand out in certain ways; because it is now an object of attention, the attentiveness will be filled by awareness of one or more qualities, for example, the play of light and dark, the shapes made by folds and crevices, the grace in a shadow. Two aspects of the insignificance–significance transition deserve to be highlighted. (1) Becoming an object of attention, or coming into significance, might seem an unremarkable process to call attention to, but it is central to the art-making process as Creed describes it. Moreover, the attention I have paid to object formation takes issue with the art-making process as he describes it. To enter into significance is, literally, to join the realm of signs, to become part of a network of signification, to become an object that is now reflected upon. This joining the realm of signs will not be entirely smooth or frictionless. As noted earlier, there is the matter of how an object of attention becomes an object. That is, there remains the question of which concepts might be applied to draw the object out as an object, and which signs give it a meaning or an association. Sometimes this won’t be easy. Recall my encounter with Work No. 88, the crumpled ball of paper, and the realization that its variety of shapes went beyond a vocabulary of ‘fold’, ‘crease’, ‘crevice’ and ‘hollow’. Becoming an object of attention will involve conceptual organization and signification, which means being subjected to these processes and the shaping they exert as part of their operation.

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In his account of compiling the book Martin Creed: Works, Creed contrasts a ‘blobby world of thoughts and feelings [that] is not defined’ with ‘the world in words [that] is too defined . . . [because words] are a certain shape’ (Creed 2010: viii). Recognition is clearly being given to the process of definition that occurs from undefined thoughts and feelings (that might be prior to or not attached to works) to the ‘hard’ and ‘pinned down’ verbal commentary on works required by the production of a book. But I think Creed’s account can be questioned. The process of definition, I think, starts not with verbal commentary, as Creed suggests, but with the initial passage into significance, that is, the first coming into being of an object of attention. This action may only be brief, such as looking at a mark on my desk, but it is nevertheless a moment when something takes shape as an object and stands out from an otherwise undifferentiated flow of experience. It is likely that not all such observations will go on to become artworks, if only because the making and documentation processes will involve much more time and effort than brief aesthetic enjoyment of an intentional object (although it is not inconceivable that an artwork could be based around an attempt to record, capture or describe each and every object of attention as it arose). In summary, focusing on the insignificance–significance transition brings to light object formation as the start of the definition process and indicates how definition begins earlier in the transition from blobby thoughts to final, defined artworks than Creed thinks. (2) The second respect in which my focusing on the insignificance– significance transition can be recognized as yielding a result, is its contribution to the debate on the aesthetics of conceptual art. This is the work, initiated by Elisabeth Schellekens and Diarmuid Costello, to show that it is possible to claim an aesthetic for conceptual art, despite statements by its practitioners to the effect that they are rejecting aesthetic values in favour of wholly conceptual or mental effects (see Schellekens 2007: 71–91; and Costello 2007: 92–116). The emphasis on conceptual effects can still be regarded as possessing an aesthetic, Costello asserts, in terms of Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas and the role they play in art’s capacity to stimulate ideas within the imagination of the viewer (Costello 2007: 103). What I have done is demonstrate how we can understand the artworks produced by Creed that involve insignificant or overlooked objects within the frame of Kantian aesthetics. Recalling again my perception of Work No. 88, I observed that the distribution of folds, crevices and uncreased surfaces within the crumpled ball of paper was uneven, and enjoyed the play of light and dark, and the different shapes that the folds, crevices and uncreased surfaces made.

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Looking at the crumpled paper prompted me to look at the gallery’s concrete floor. In doing so, I became aware of its many grey tones, and the perceptual play stimulated by the tones as I tried to group them according to whether they were light or dark grey. The key action here is that, by putting the insignificant on display, my awareness is suddenly overtaken by an array of observations and ideas connected to the object and its environment, in keeping with Kant’s assertion that artworks give ‘the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to these objects, though in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression’ (Kant 1987: 315). A possible objection to my Kantian reading of Creed’s work is that the process of stimulation I am focusing upon is identified by Kant as a response to the expression of an aesthetic idea by an artwork, yet the works from Creed that I have addressed can hardly be thought of as expressing aesthetic ideas. Kant defines an ‘aesthetic idea’ as ‘a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (Kant 1987: 314). The examples given by Kant have analogy or metaphor as their basis, for example, ‘Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws’ as an aesthetic idea that expresses ‘the mighty king of heaven’ and a peacock as an expression of ‘heaven’s stately queen’ (Kant 1987: 315). With an idea in which there is an interplay between concepts of ‘eagle’ and ‘king’, or ‘peacock’ and ‘queen’, one can readily grasp how it functions as ‘a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no [determinate] concept, can be adequate’. However, when one is simply exhibiting a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, a doorstop installed so a door can open only forty-five degrees, or a room in which the lights are going on and off, how can it be claimed that these actions express aesthetic ideas? A defining feature of an aesthetic idea is that ‘no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no [determinate] concept, can be adequate’. But surely these are works where determinate concepts are adequate, that is to say, they are objects whose nature can be determined or captured adequately in one determinate concept or statement: that is, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball is just ‘a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball’ and so on. In reply, it is worth noting that we should be clear about what we mean by an ‘aesthetic idea’. Given Kant’s analogical or metaphorical examples, it is easy to assume that an aesthetic idea has to be a poetic idea. But if we keep in mind his definition of an aesthetic idea – ‘a presentation of the imagination which

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prompts much thought, but to which no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (Kant 1987: 314) – I would argue that ‘the transition from insignificance to significance’ is an aesthetic idea. It is not a conventionally poetic idea, but, as I described earlier, it includes the entry of a formerly insignificant object into the realm of signification and, therefore, into a realm where thought is prompted to reflect on the various concepts that might apply to the object, and where thought does not settle on a single, determinate concept because the object accommodates a variety of different perceptions and brings the realization that other, surrounding, otherwise overlooked details can continue the process. To adapt a phrase I used earlier, the transition from insignificance to significance is an aesthetic idea in that it creates a scope of possibility as we reflect on the possible concepts that come into play when we attend to a small portion of the world that previously passes unnoticed. Further support for this reading comes from the passage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant declares that fine art expresses aesthetic ideas through its objects giving ‘the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to these objects . . . than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression’ (Kant 1987: 315). This, I submit, is what happens when, for example, the gallery’s concrete floor becomes a perceptual play of grey tones, reflections from the gallery lights, patterns that become visible as the light reflections fade from white to grey, and a series of counter-pressures as I feel my feet pressing against the floor.

3. Conclusion My quest to identify ‘Martin Creed’ has not really been about trying to fix the identity of a ‘Martin Creed’. Instead, it has been a demonstration of how a kind of looking prompted by artworks can be developed philosophically and then turned back on them, in a manner which shows how that kind of looking can be elaborated and defended in aesthetic and philosophical terms. At one point, the question of the distinction between aesthetic and philosophical thinking was raised. I like to think that this study has been an example of how the two are mutually entangled. The idea of the transition from insignificant to significant, prompted by Creed’s artworks, has become the main object of philosophical discussion, as well as a concept that has affected my thinking on the process of becoming an object, conceived of as a previously unattended item entering the realm of signs and concepts.

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The kind of looking explored might best be described as ‘a coming to terms’. The first part of the chapter examined the question of whether the range of possible objects and phenomena covered by ‘Martin Creed’ could be narrowed by adopting a set of concepts at the outset, that is, presetting the terms of the enquiry. This was rejected because it either only promised to provide a limited or partial view of Creed’s artworks or left us with the task of having to distinguish aesthetic thinking from philosophical thinking. In the face of the many possibilities created by the transition from insignificant to significant, the step was taken in the second part of the chapter to identify the ‘Martin Creed’ of interest as the scope of possibility created by the thought that any number of insignificant items could become significant. The step essentially took the question that led to so many possible objects and made it the object of study. Turning the question of ‘coming to terms with’ Creed into an object meant that, instead of struggling to come to terms with Creed, we focused on the process of coming to terms, that is, the process whereby something formerly insignificant does actually come to terms, that is, acquires concepts or signs as it becomes an object of attention. Rather than being overwhelmed by the scope of possibility, it could now be seen to be a feature of the various observations that could be made in response to formerly insignificant objects. This move enabled two claims to be made. Firstly, following Creed’s location of his art-making and writing practices within a soft-to-hard ontology, I argued that the definition or ‘hardening’ process (using ‘hardening’ as a metaphor, on the grounds that an object of attention need not necessarily be a physical object) in fact starts much earlier with overlooked items being made prominent as objects of attention. Secondly, the move allowed my study of the insignificance–significance transition to contribute to the debate on whether or not conceptual art has an aesthetic. The various observations that were made in response to Creed’s Work No. 88, I argued, could be considered in relation to Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement. Attentive, prolonged perception of the crumpled paper produced a number of descriptions, in keeping with Kant’s assertion that fine art gives ‘the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to’ artworks than can be contained within a single sentence (Kant 1987). Furthermore, I asserted that the transition from insignificance to significance could be regarded as an aesthetic idea. Although an aesthetic idea is customarily taken to be a poetic idea, or an idea that involves a metaphor-like collision of concepts, an aesthetic idea’s capacity ‘to prompt much thought’ to which no single concept is adequate can also be understood as an occasion in which something ordinarily overlooked

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becomes an object of attention, and where a play of concepts ensues as formerly unattended properties come to light, with the commonly ignored status of the object stirring the play through its unfamiliar features requiring a number of concepts to be considered. On this basis, Creed’s conceptual art has an aesthetic in Kantian terms in the sense that its presentation of slight, overlooked objects and gestures invites periods of attention in which a minute detail has to find its place within a range of possible concepts and, in so doing, opens on to a series of perceptions that, in turn, begin attending to other, surrounding trivialities. The wider implications of this study, I think, head in two directions. The first is the question of how philosophy should approach art if both are understood as forms of ‘thinking more’, mindful of the fact that each subject includes within its history ideas drawn from the other. This study has been fortunate in that the artworks that were studied resulted in so many possibilities being presented that the outcome was a state of not-knowing, since any insignificant detail could become significant. I say ‘fortunate’ because it meant that I could take the step of turning to the process whereby concepts are applied and, more importantly, to the question of which concepts are applied. Admittedly, this was in terms of Kant’s critical philosophy, which could be classed as a philosophical bias, but it is the philosophy that introduces the model of concepts organizing sensory intuition and, in so doing, ushers in the notion that sensory intuition can pose a challenge to conceptualization, requiring a range of concepts to be considered. This, I would argue, encourages recognition of the contingency with which concepts are applied, and therefore an attentiveness to any bias that might be smuggled in by relying uncritically upon established subject vocabulary. The second direction is with regard to how Kantian aesthetics might advance not just the theory but also the appreciation of conceptual art that gives exhibition space to what is considered ordinary or unremarkable. In addition to Martin Creed, this could include artists such as Doris Salcedo, whose sculptures and installations are created from domestic materials and everyday objects that are ‘imbued with the patina of use’,9 and Tino Sehgal, whose works ‘consist purely of live encounters between people and demonstrate a keen sensitivity to their institutional context’.10 I have already acknowledged Danto’s claim that the ready-made requires supplementation from art theoretical sources, including metaphor, in order to transfigure the ordinary into the poetic. But whereas this position relies upon the introduction of a theoretical framework or the creation of a metaphor as a result of an object being transplanted from its home location, my study has shown that attending to the smallest, unremarkable detail creates

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a state of being in which what is normally unconceptualized draws upon a range of concepts that gives the object a variety of meanings and prompts attention to be given to surrounding details. The value of such an experience, as a period of art appreciation, is that it affects one’s sense of what can count as a meaningful experience and brings recognition of the capacity of attention to exercise a microscopic power in finding a network of meanings and observations in the minute. The question remains as to what form these elaborate interpretations of insignificant details might take. Perhaps they could be given as orated observations accompanied by relevant sections of the environment spot-lit or highlighted in some way. Or perhaps observations triggered by a light going on and off in a room could be written on the walls of the room, to cover as much of the walls’ surfaces as possible.

Notes 1 Acknowledgement of this aspect is motivated by the following: (1) the recognition of the fact that artists’ careers are the products of an artworld that is constituted by institutions that seek their own prosperity through discussing, displaying or selling artworks; (2) the importance that philosophers Arthur Danto and George Dickie attach to the artworld as a network of theoretical and institutional interests that determines what is accepted as a work of art, now that, after the advent of the ready-made and conceptual art, any object or event can, in principle, become a work of art. Thus, as an ‘institutional phenomenon’, ‘Martin Creed’ could be taken to refer to that part of the network of theoretical and institutional interests that has nurtured and continues to sustain the activities of the person Martin Creed and the objects that are identified as his artworks. See Danto (1964) and Dickie (1974). 2 See Creed (2010: vi–viii). 3 Creed (2010: viii). 4 Creed (2010: 315). 5 For a review of the different theories of aesthetic judgement that exist within philosophy, see Zangwill (2014). 6 Art theory does include metaphor as a principle of art: for example, although Kant doesn’t use the word ‘metaphor’, he offers the metaphor of ‘Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws’ for God as an example of an aesthetic idea, and Danto introduces it to explain how a non-artistic representation, such as a diagram, can become art through being transformed (or ‘transfigured’, to adopt Danto’s terminology) into a metaphor for perception as a ‘schematized structure’. See Kant (1987: 315), and Danto (1981: 172).

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7 Danto (1964: 580). Anticipating Danto’s move, in 1820, is the idealist metaphysics of G.W.F Hegel, in which it is predicted that art transforms itself into philosophy as a part of the progression whereby human consciousness comes to realize that physical reality and mind are one and the same thing. The progression, Hegel asserts, involves consciousness recognizing that the ideas it finds in physical art point towards their own expression and advancement in the ideas that can be found in philosophy. See Hegel (1975: 1–90). 8 Reality, for Nietzsche, is a series of metaphorical transformations between domains which the artist is best equipped to express: ‘a painter’, he writes, ‘without hands who wished to express in song the picture before [their] mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world’ (Nietzsche 1979: 86–7). 9 Author unknown, ‘Doris Salcedo’, White Cube. Available online: http://whitecube​ .com​/artists​/doris​_salcedo/ (accessed 18 April 2018). 10 Author unknown, ‘Tino Sehgal – nominated; Turner Prize 2013’, Tate. Available online: http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/whats- on/ot​her-v​enue/​exhib​ition​/turn​er-pr​ize-2​ 013/t​urner​-priz​e-201​3-art​ists-​tino-​sehga​l (accessed 18 April 2018).

References Costello, D. (2007), ‘Kant after LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art’, in P. Goldie and E. Schellekens (eds), Philosophy and Conceptual Art, 92–115, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Creed, M. (2010), ‘Foreword’, in Martin Creed: Works, vi–viii, London: Thames and Hudson. Danto, A. C. (1964), ‘The Artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61 (19): 571–84. Danto, A. C. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Dickie, G. (1974), ‘What is Art? An Institutional Analysis’, in Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, 19–52, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Eccles, T. and M. Creed (2010), ‘Interview’, in Martin Creed: Works, x–xvii. London: Thames & Hudson. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975), ‘Introduction’, in T. M. Knox (trans.), Hegel’s Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Original work published 1820. Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. Numbers refer to the pagination of the original Akadamie edition, included in the margins of the translation. Original work published 1790. Pissarro, J. (2014), ‘The Innumerable Martin Creed’, in Martin Creed (ed.), What’s the Point of It?, 121–8. London: Hayward Publishing.

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Nietzsche, F. (1979), ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, 79–91, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Original work written in 1873. Schellekens, E. (2007), ‘The Aesthetic Value of Ideas’, in P. Goldie and E. Schellekens (eds), Philosophy and Conceptual Art, 71–91, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zangwill, N. (2014), ‘Aesthetic Judgment’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (fall 2014, edition). Available online: https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/ archives​/fall2014​/entries​/aesthetic​-judgment/ (accessed 13 April 2018).

9

Process art as an aesthetic alternative Martin Creed’s Glasgow connection Diego Mantoan

1.  Hardly a mere aesthetic resemblance Some two years before he won the Turner Prize in 2001, commentators in the British press were describing Martin Creed as being something of a loner within the UK art scene, being miles apart from the Young British Art (YBA) frenzy that dominated the 1990s. Critics didn’t beat around the bush: ‘Creed is like Lent after the carnival of young British art. [. . .] It’s disconcerting to encounter his work after a decade of British art that has been fixated on intimations of morality and gobbets of autobiography’ (Jones 1999). Although informed by a conceptual aura and deeply rooted in a minimalist framework, which both emerged in the 1990s as the common ground for a new generation of artists, Creed’s works didn’t meet the standard of sensationalism, hedonism and drive towards pop culture that characterized many of his contemporaries, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin (Stallabrass 2006b: 107). Still today, critics set him apart from the overall ‘immodesty of British contemporary art’ (Sawyer 2010), almost like a lone ranger who took a ‘different path, eschewing the glossy party scene’ (Corner 2011). This recurring refrain certainly feeds the myth of Creed’s separation from the YBAs and of his supposed artistic isolation, but nonetheless misses the broader picture. Indeed, such a description omits the influences and bonds that shaped his early career production. Looking back at the 1990s, one can hardly disregard the aesthetic resemblance of Creed’s works with those of several contemporaries whom he encountered along the way. One may, for example, think of the colour samples applied on a wall by Douglas Gordon for The Living Room (1989) series or the stack of wooden blankets piled up by Christine Borland and entitled

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A Lifetime of Love (1993). At an artistic and procedural level, Creed’s oeuvre seems particularly consistent with the kind of lyrical conceptualism of Douglas Gordon, or the minimalist strategies of Jonathan Monk, or again the social interventions of Roderick Buchanan. One point of intersection may be found already in the geographical provenance of all the aforementioned artists, since they were all raised in Glasgow. The present chapter argues that such resemblance is by no means a curious coincidence, but rather the result of an attunement with Glaswegian peers. The aim is further to demonstrate a deep creative bond with the kind of art practised in the Clydeside area from the late 1980s onwards. In order to do so, the following paragraphs examine Creed’s early career, particularly the artistic connection to his hometown as well as his peculiar conception of creativeness, for which Douglas Gordon emerges as an influential point of reference. This link to Glasgow has been widely overlooked by critics so far, who rather analyse Creed from a London-centred perspective. Hence, the principal aim of this chapter is to broaden the research scope and possibly detect some strains of early philosophical reasoning and artistic ontogenesis that gradually shaped Creed’s early production. My investigation covers roughly a decade from the late 1980s – Creed’s art school years in London – to the end of the century, shortly before his Turner Prize victory, and makes use of a variety of sources from this period, including exhibition catalogues and specialized magazines, reviews and interviews, a rich art-historical bibliography as well as artist papers. The aim is thus to track Creed’s career progress in relation to his Glasgow connections, and several of Creed’s works will be compared to those of his contemporaries, particularly his friend and 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon, as well as in relation to its aesthetic outcome and philosophical consequences. The analysis will draw a few conclusions on the philosophical and procedural reasons that led Creed and many of his Glaswegian peers to similar aesthetic solutions.

2.  A Glaswegian enclave The Scottishness of Martin Creed is very prominent. He was born in Wakefield, England, in 1968, but was brought up in a little town northeast of Glasgow, which durably affected his accent and accounts for his ‘conversation littered with “ayes” and “wees”’ (Corner 2011). However, it is not merely a question of appearance; quite the contrary, Creed’s upbringing and cultural background shaped his persona and art understanding in a deep way. He is earnest about

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attributing his differences – particularly towards English contemporary art – to a peculiar Scottish mind-set that informs his creativity: ‘because it’s like everyone in Scotland is like me’. He finds that people are more impressed by him when he’s not in Scotland. ‘Back home, if I say something, people look at me blankly, like, “Yes, of course, why would you bother to say that?” Whereas the English would be like, “Brilliant! I love your lugubrious sense of humour.”’1

Given the scope and relevance of his Scottishness, as Creed himself asserts, it is curious how critics and art historians seem to have overlooked this aspect of the artist’s persona. Although he moved to London aged eighteen, to study at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1986 and 1990, the cultural milieu he sought out there remained strikingly Glaswegian, for instance in his artistic relationships with both Douglas Gordon and Bruce McLean. Although London was at the heart of British art scene, the city hardly offered promising conditions for the majority of art students and graduates at the time: almost unaffordable living costs, high numbers of aspiring artists and a very competitive professional milieu (Muir 2011: 27). Recalling his period at the Slade, where he arrived in 1988 for a master’s degree after a bachelor’s diploma at Glasgow School of Art, Gordon gives a dire account of London. He preferred Glasgow – ‘fewer arseholes’ – and found himself ‘marooned in Crouch End in north London, barely able to buy a Travelcard – [while] other students were being dropped off in chauffeurdriven cars’ (Beckett 1996: 19). Solidarity among the few Scottish students and teachers at the Slade and around town emerged as a lifesaver; the true reference point was the supervisor of painting classes, Bruce McLean, a Glasgow-born painter and performance artist who had studied together with Gilbert & George at Central St. Martin’s in London in the 1960s. McLean would reveal himself as being very open to non-traditional techniques in painting classes as well as supportive for networking, particularly helping Scottish students like Gordon and Creed to connect with well-established compatriots in the London art scene such as artist and curator Alan Johnston (Mantoan 2015: 138–9). Another inspiring teacher at the painting department was the Florida-born Susan Hiller, who had actively participated in the rise of both minimalism and conceptual art in the previous decades, later committing to ethnographic performances and multimedia installations as experienced during her participation in the artistcollective Fluxus (Foster 2003). Hiller encouraged her students to set aside or go beyond traditional painting techniques and instead make use of a variety of media in order to engage with the surrounding environment, the aim being

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that of inducing them to create complex installations. Hence, it comes as no surprise to learn that Martin Creed experienced an inner turmoil as a student at the painting department, which led him eventually to break free from painting and concentrate instead on what could perhaps be thought of as the essence of a painting: that is to say, an object which is suspended before our eyes in some way and which captures our attention. Creed describes his artistic transformation as follows: I was doing paintings at art school and I er . . . I thought: why am I doing this? And to that I thought, well, the only reason I’m doing these paintings is because I’m in a painting department at art school, you know. So I thought, okay, I won’t, I’ll try, I won’t, I won’t do that . . . I’ll just try to make a thing, not a painting. I’ll try to make something without deciding beforehand what I’m going to make, and, er, um. So I thought all right, but I don’t know what to do. What can I do? And where would I put it? So I thought all right I’m going to try and make something for people to look at. . . And I thought well if something’s on the wall, you know, it’s easy for people to look at. So that was the first decision I made, to try to make something for a wall, and I was happy with that decision.2

Creed’s discomfort with painting paved the way for a series of solutions he has developed since in different forms throughout his career (Sawyer 2010). At least three strains among his artworks spring from his worries back at the Slade: first, those centred on attachment; second, those, which simultaneously protrude and intrude the wall; and, finally, those designed to be an integral part of the wall. ‘[T]he minimum a painting has to do is hang on the wall. It has do defy gravity,’ Creed once observed (Leader 2010: xxxvi),3 so he began to work with the materials of mere attachment – such as brackets (Works Nos. 5, 6, 7, 52 and 53) and sticky tape (Works Nos. 67, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81 and 86), Blu-Tack (Work No. 79) – dragging them out of the invisible and turning them into final elements of the composition (see Figure 14). Thinking of what to hang or place in the world, Creed developed a bellshaped brass object he used to attach on doors, tables and walls (Works Nos. 23 and 69). This object had absolutely no purpose and rather existed as mere solid form. Creed played with its utter lack of meaning and portrayed the solid in different contexts that suggested a particular use, such as in a dishwasher or on a Christmas tree (Works Nos. 23, 37 and 43). His protrusion–intrusion pieces emerged precisely from such experiments: ‘I thought, why does it have to stick out from the wall, why can’t it go in to the wall as well?’ (Eccles and Creed 2010: xi). For an intervention at the Slade in 1989, he fixed two bells on a wall

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Figure 14  Martin Creed, Work No. 79, Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall, 1993; Blu-Tack; approximately 1 in. / 2.5cm diameter. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021.

and came up with a solution that virtually nullified the object and, hence, his artistic action: the shapes were used to protrude and intrude opposing walls in a corridor, thus creating a positive–negative or masculine–feminine tension between them and inside the space (Works Nos. 19 and 21). This topic later evolved into a question of connection between parts that allow exchange or could give birth to something new – like sexual intercourse (Works Nos. 636 and 730) – or, on the contrary, connect two corresponding joints and smooth out differences (Works Nos. 84 and 89) (Leader 2010: xxxvii). In the latter regard, a clear tendency towards annulment already manifests itself in Creed’s procedure, which would become a principal trait of his personal philosophy, since he simultaneously encourages his works to make and cancel themselves out: I find it a lot easier if it negates itself at the same time as pushing itself forward – it makes me feel better, less worried about it – so there’s an equal positive and negative which adds up to nothing, but at the same time of course that is something too, cos you went through the process, you did a wee dance. (Buck 2000: 111)4

The last step of this process was to nullify the object, which led to protrusions that were integrated in the surface and became part of the wall itself (Works Nos. 83 and 102), as if they had existed prior to his intervention: I thought, well, I don’t know what materials I could use, I don’t mind, like, there’s . . . I couldn’t find any reason to use one particular material rather than another one. So I just tried to make something using what was there, using the actual surface of the wall.5

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The kind of minimal interventions designed by Creed seem rather at odds with the uncanny and provocative works by peers such as Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, and hence quite different from London’s leading YBAs. However, he found considerable support in Douglas Gordon: besides a common cultural background, the two Glaswegians shared a love for ephemeral artworks and music, which was rather uncommon for art students in London (Mantoan 2015: 139). They developed a close friendship and supported each other at the start of their career, exchanging connections and inviting each other to group shows. Usually a champion of understatement and very casual about his points of reference in interviews, Creed would instead stress the relevance of his relationship to Gordon: ‘He was really important to me. He put my work in one of my first ever shows, which led to other things. He was very generous and looked out for other people’ (Corner 2011).6 Gordon was deeply immersed in public art, contextual engagement, visual democracy, performance art and conceptualism, since back at Glasgow School of Art he had been trained by David Harding at the newly conceived Environmental Art Department, where students were not bound to a particular technique (Harding 1995: 16; Mantoan 2015: 83–111). Among his course mates were future Turner Prize nominees Christine Borland, Martin Boyce, Richard Wright and Nathan Coley. They soon proved particularly resourceful engaging in the production of artworks for non-institutional spaces and taking over the leadership of the town’s artistrun Transmission gallery, which soon became an agent of artistic change and international connection for Scotland (Lowndes 2010: 117–39; Richardson 2011: 133–56). Transmission took off in new premises in the summer of 1989 following a series of durational performances and environmental installations with everyday objects by Douglas Gordon and Craig Richardson, which showcased the young Glaswegians’ procedural concerns inclined towards conceptual art and minimalism (Fortnum 2007: 11). Out of this background, Gordon presented a text piece for his graduate show at the Slade in 1990 that may well have made a big impression on Creed, who was graduating the same year. Entitled Meaning and Location (1990), the work consists of a biblical quote, repeated twice with distorted punctuation, applied on the edge of the circular opening on the ceiling of the Octagon Room at London University College: ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.’7 The simple act of shifting the comma causes a disruption in meaning, thereby addressing issues dependent on the ambiguity of language and its signifiers, which can further be distorted by minimal interventions.8

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3.  The Starkmann debut Martin Creed and Douglas Gordon bonded over such a drive towards minimal interventions and procedural concerns, creating a lifelong artistic friendship and creative cross-influence. After finishing art school, Gordon involved Creed into several group shows, such as Outta Here in 1992 at Transmission in Glasgow, where Creed installed a brass bell onto the entrance door in place of the lock (Work No. 69). Gordon was further instrumental in inviting fellow Glaswegians – Creed included – to the exhibition Wonderful Life at Lisson Gallery in London, which was the first group show hosted by influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail and entirely centred on young British artists (Mantoan 2015: 282). For his part, Creed introduced Gordon to the London art collector Bernhard Starkmann, owner of a distributing company of academic books, who was keen on commissioning cutting-edge works by rising artists for display in his company headquarters. The idea was to use striking pieces, which would ‘render the boardroom useless for commercial purposes or knock the visitors’ room to bits’ (Windsor 1998). Early pieces by Joseph Beuys, Carl Andre, Richard Long and Wolfgang Laib count among the remarkable, if inaccessible, items in his collection, which can only be viewed by guests of the company. In the 1990s, he devoted his energies to London art school graduates, allowing them to create site-specific installations in the Starkmann headquarters. Creed’s debut came as early as 1992 with a shelved vitrine showcasing three pairs of bell-shaped objects (Work No. 47). That same year, Creed developed another project for Starkmann: one of his most fecund works that bore all the hallmarks of his process-based approach to art, at the same time making an ironical reference to minimalist aesthetics. Experimenting with means of attachment, the artist began to overlap as many one-inch square pieces of masking tape that were necessary to form a one-inch high stack (Work No. 67). This work didn’t start as a self-conscious minimalist project but, rather, emphasized the process and simply ended up looking like a minimalist sculpture: ‘If anything, this work began as an attempt to make something, if not nothing’ (Lederman 1995: 38). A series of limited and unlimited multiples would naturally spring from this process, leading Creed to create various multiples for different occasions, as well as in different materials and sizes: again one-inch squares of masking tape (Works Nos. 74 and 75), 2.5 cm Magic Tape (Work No. 77) and Elastoplast (Works Nos. 78 and 86). When piling up various materials, Creed is not necessarily creating anything in particular – or rather, he is creating no particular thing out of something that

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was already there, such that he is not really adding anything new to the world. He would later return to this layering process throughout his career, for instance, stacking plywood (Works Nos. 387 and 571), drawing lines with a pen marker (Work No. 607), stratifying wool strips (Work No. 1683) and piling up bricks and mortar (Work No. 1812). When it came down to the spatial installation of the masking tape cubes, Creed was unable to choose between left and right; hence, he situated his work in the exact centre of a wall: ‘It’s a way of not having to decide’ (Leader 2010: xxxix). Following this pattern, in 1993 Creed created an unlimited series of masking tape cubes for the Starkmann headquarters placing them at the centre of every wall in various rooms (Work No. 81). Installing the piece forced the artist to enhance his peculiar ability to position his things/nothings finding their exact place in the world, rather than searching for an aesthetically pleasing placement (Jaray 2010: xxxv). In contrast with minimalism, he wasn’t looking for a pure form set in an aseptic environment, but was keeping decisions to a minimum, such that the work would make itself and yet add nothing new to the world: I think it is broadly true that in my work – at least in the look of it – much of it is what you could call ‘minimalistic’, but that isn’t for want of trying to make it the opposite. [Laughs] Because basically the work ends up the way it does through the process. You can’t really help it.9

Indeed, his masking tape cubes attract the attention to something placed on the wall, while really just wanting to make the beholder aware of the centre of that wall without adding anything concrete (Jones 1999). Work No. 81 for the Starkmann building is nothing as interior design, an ascetic art in the pursuit of lessness (O’Reilly 2010: xlii). Creed applied the same process-driven scheme to another commission for the collector’s company: he was asked for a contribution in the spring 1993 issue of Books for Industry and Research, which is the catalogue of all academic publications distributed by Starkmann Ltd and mailed to prospective buyers (Lederman 1995: 38). Creed located all sentences or texts written in italics and had each middle word/words printed in bold types (Work No. 82).10 Once again, Creed’s intervention is minimal: he simply sets the basic rules of this creation. This process is not ephemeral but, rather, highlights something already existing and enhances our receptive awareness of the outer world. The result is an underlying grid to anchor our vision and orient our perception in a necessarily chaotic existence, which is exactly what rules – be they customary or supposedly natural – should provide: ‘If you can fix a rule or boundary then you can rest easy; because if it is a good rule or a good formula, it will work in any given situation’ (Eccles and Creed 2010: xii).

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Interestingly, Douglas Gordon came up with a similar process-driven work for the Starkmann multiples project of 1993, which was mailed out in a similar manner to Creed’s Work No. 82.11 Gordon presented Letter No. 8, which consists of a brief text sent out to a mailing list of art world individuals admonishing them with an unsettling sentence: ‘Nothing can be hidden forever.’ At Starkmann’s, Gordon displayed one framed letter with the list of addresses and a wall text with the same sentence (Lederman 1995: 38). Since 1991, Gordon developed the habit of sending ambiguous or disturbing sentences in letters and faxes – Creed among the addressees – thus exploiting a paramount strategy associated with conceptual art. Indeed, during the 1960s the art dealer Seth Siegelaub made extensive use of direct mail on the occasion of exhibitions of artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, initially as an advertising strategy and then increasingly as a means for artistic creativity (Alberro 2003: 12). In Gordon’s case, the letters draw a clear parallel to On Kawara’s I am still alive (1973 onwards) telegram series, in which the Japanese artist sent out the sentence ‘I am still alive’ to people he knew from wherever he found himself in the world (Verzotti 2006: 15). Gordon’s letters stir a direct response from the reader and attempt a factual connection, while Creed’s bold type entries in the catalogues are meant as an inadvertent encounter and rather set a structural pattern to join bits of perception. At the time, Starkmann purchased another process-based work by Gordon, which may be reconnected to the instruction pieces that Creed developed shortly after. Indeed, Starkmann asked for a copy of 24 Hour Psycho (1993) that was fitted into the Tramway Gallery in Glasgow at Gordon’s first-ever solo show: the artist darkened the main exhibition hall and projected Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) on a suspended screen in the middle of the room and set the movie on slow motion, in order to last twenty-four hours showing a still frame after another. This interference on the image flow subverts the film convention and highlights the fact that people relate cinematic time to real time, while it is but an optical stratagem that projects twenty-four still frames per second (Spector 1997: 70). Furthermore, Gordon exposes the subtle ambiguity of slow motion, which lays at the crossroads of a proper de-constructivist scientific analysis and the kind of bedroom obsession teenagers have with their favourite music videos or porn movies. The choice of this particular Hitchcock film derives in fact from its plot: it is a thriller movie about a peeping maniac, where the time factor is vital in order to render an atmosphere of terror and expectancy. Slowing down Psycho thus has a double effect: on the one hand, the narrative flow is destroyed, opening up the possibility for spectators to bring their own memories into

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play; on the other hand, the movie is set apart in a series of still frames adding monumentality to an iconic movie in film history (Morgan 1993: 7–8). The final result of this appropriation and modification process is both a de-constructivist analysis and an iconoclastic gesture firmly grounded in the shared imagery of popular culture (Fricke 1998: 29– 30). Gordon’s intervention limits itself to an idea – slowing down a movie and transferring the cinematic experience to the gallery space – that can be operated solely through a set of instructions: Gordon is neither Psycho’s director nor does he own the movie’s copyrights; hence, his piece doesn’t add anything to the world and rather functions as a sort of timeready-made (Obrist 1996: 168–9). In order to buy the work, Starkmann himself suggested issuing detailed instructions for installing the piece and execute the slow motion vision of Psycho (Mantoan 2015: 276). When an idea or procedure is transferred by means of written instructions, this documentary information constitutes the artwork (Alberro 2003: 74). As a consequence, in the case of both Creed’s and Gordon’s works for Starkmann, anyone purchasing the instructions can claim ownership over the final artwork, although the piece needs to be reproduced or set in place by the owner.

4.  Symbiotic procedures and aesthetic cross-fertilization In addition to their projects for the Starkmann collection in 1993, there are plenty of other works that show a clear procedural and aesthetic resemblance between Creed and Gordon, something which bears testimony to an ongoing discussion and comparison among the two artist friends. Indeed, throughout the 1990s there seems to be a consistent parallelism in the creations of the two Glaswegians, which involves at least four strains of works: those consisting of minimal interventions on a given environment, those summed up as mere instructions, others presented as text pieces and, lastly, those generating an immersive experience by means of light alterations. Further parallels could be drawn with musical works and performances, since both artists are still active as musicians and frequently make use of music in their works. However, the aforementioned four categories should suffice to analyse similarities and discrepancies between Creed and Gordon, eventually leading to a distinct Scottish way of understanding process art, though each of them with distinct personal features. The rest of this section will examine each of these four categories in turn.

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4.1  Minimal alterations As regards the first category, both Creed and Gordon have been active early in their career with minimal alterations of their surroundings. In general, the aim of such interventions was to enhance the viewer’s perception as well as produce a heightened awareness of the environment’s spatial form and temporal dimension. The result is often awkward, humorous, at times slightly gruesome and definitely un-minimal. Creed’s bell-shaped brass protrusion is frustrating, when positioned in place of the door lock, as he did, for instance, at Transmission gallery in 1992 (Work No. 69). Two years later at Rhizome Gallery in Amsterdam, he installed a cubic stack of tiles built on top of one of the existing tiles of the gallery bathroom floor (Work No. 100), between the water closet and the washbasin, which tripped up unsuspecting visitors and still makes an ironic comment on Carl Andre’s tiled carpets. Creed allows here the minor to become major, further reminding us that in real life it is the inconsequential that dominates (Buck 2000: 110). Concerning Gordon’s minimal interventions, he was keen on piercing walls and ceilings of existing buildings as early as 1989. He did so at the Smith Biennial in Stirling [Rotting from the inside out, 1989], where he removed a circular segment of a wall in the Smith Museum simply to reveal a portion of the underlying bricks, which again he pierced through in several points, while adding a text piece underneath the wall opening which spelt in capital letters, ‘ROTTING FROM THE INSIDE OUT’ (Lowndes 2010: 119). That same year he pierced the ceiling of a disused bunker in the yard of the abandoned Weser industries in Bremen adding the text piece ‘JETZTZEIT 1946’ (Now Time, 1989), which again was a minimal alteration of a given space that referred to the shattered past of its location (Mantoan 2015: 142). While Gordon’s works scratch the surface of a given space, in order to respond directly to its temporal flow, Creed’s protuberances rather appear to alter the perceptive conditions of a specific environment, challenging its spatial coherence.

4.2  Instruction pieces The second category of works that joins Creed’s to Gordon’s refers to instruction pieces, which are those consisting of mere documentary information, be they written down as texts or as sheet music.12 Gordon issued his first instructions for a so-called telephone piece performed in Rome for a small group show with Martin Boyce at Cafè Picasso in 1992 (Instructions No. 1, 1992). The artist asked the curator to make recurrent phone calls to complete strangers

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in a bar, utter the sentence ‘You can’t hide your love forever’ and then immediately hang up. Unaware of their involvement in an artistic situation, the receiver might experience the call as a disturbance into their private lives that exposed their feelings, such that the piece resulted in an alteration of the receiver’s psychological state (Moisdon-Trembley 1996: 120). The subsequent telephone piece devised for Galleria Gió Marconi in Milan spelt a similarly unsettling sentence: ‘I won’t breathe a word (to anyone)’ [Instruction No. 2, 1992]. In both cases, Gordon left caller and receiver free to construct any possible interpretation, since the instructions just provided the setting for a communication to take place by bringing the moment of art consumption into the private lives of unknowing people (Lawson 1995: 62). Creed’s first set of instructions was issued shortly afterwards in 1994 and referred to as ‘Packet of Blu-Tack’ (Work No. 91), which was the development of an earlier attachment piece with Blu-Tack kneaded balls depressed against the wall (Work No. 79). Indeed, the instructions describe the process for everyone to compose the installation step by step, although being both precise and open-ended, because they leave enough room for the receiver’s personal interpretation as would be expected to happen with a food recipe or with a sheet music (Buck 2000: 110). The artist’s musical background soon also expressed itself through a series of instructions presented in the form of sheet music or musical instructions, issued in 1994, to be performed by anyone, whenever and wherever: a single key of the piano – middle C – played mezzo forte or mezzo piano (Work No. 101); a descending and ascending chromatic scale played over the entire keyboard alternating one second of sound and one of silence (Work No. 105); several compositions for guitar, bass and drums, which basically play and alternate different rhythms (Works Nos. 107, 108, 109, 110 and 111), thus foreshadowing the artist’s metronome pieces. Recurring to sheet music, Creed’s instructions tend to regulate dimensional perception and prove to be more precise than Gordon’s, which instead resemble a theatre script and are centred on psychological perception. That said, both artists allow for the autonomy of the works’ executors: I think I’ve often consciously tried to make my work more like music. [. . .] It’s like music in the sense that there is a score or there are instructions, which enable you to make the work wherever you like, but means that it will always be different according to the circumstances and the way it is done. [. . .] That’s great, because it’s like having a nice experience and then being able to take it away with you.13

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4.3  Text pieces As far as text pieces are concerned, the previous paragraph described how Gordon developed an early habit of having words or sentences attached to a surface, sent out via mail or spoken over the phone.14 In 1992, he came up with a neon sign titled Faust 1224–1237, referring to a precise passage in Goethe’s masterpiece, when Dr Faust is about to encounter Mephistopheles while translating the ambiguous verses 1224–1237 from John’s Gospel (‘In the beginning was the word’, which Faust changes into ‘In the beginning was action’). Creed would produce a text piece later on, in 1996, when he devised the famous sentence that sums up his artistic belief: ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’ (Work No. 143). In 1999 he then resorted to a neon sign installed over the Clapton Portico of a former orphanage in East London, stating: ‘EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT’ (Work No. 203). The text selected by Creed is an oblique comment on the location’s history, which was home to the London Orphan Asylum from 1825 until relocation after a typhoid epidemic (Lennard 2014). Contrary to his previous works, this is one of the first times Creed appears to refer directly to the social and historical background of the installation site, thus stirring a puzzled pleasure or upsetting unease in the spectators, who need to determine the statement’s meaning by themselves (Jones 1999). Creed would later use neon to illuminate several other random words and phrases including ‘LOVE’ (Work No. 651), ‘FRIENDS’ (Work No. 671) and ‘DON’T WORRY’ (Work No. 890). Although very minimal, these works seem to draw Creed much closer to Gordon’s psychological ambiguity, since words necessarily emanate a variety of meanings and feelings that depend upon the receiver’s personal history and state of mind (see Figure 15).

4.4  Immersive experiences There is one final category which draws on an almost definitive procedural as well as aesthetic parallel between Creed and Gordon in their foundational years. However, this category is not represented by a body of works, but rather by one specific contribution that consists in the simple alteration of environmental light conditions, in order to achieve an immersive experience. Back in 1992–3, when Gordon was devising the first installation of 24 Hour Psycho, he blacked out the entire room both as a solution to tackle an otherwise difficult exhibition space and as a way to immerse spectators in a psychologically charged environment (Fagen 1999: 80). From then on, he would resort very often to such an aesthetic

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Figure 15  Martin Creed, Work No. 651, LOVE, 2007; pink neon; 6 in. / 15.2cm high. Credit: © Martin Creed. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.

stratagem. Once in particular he came up with an environmental installation that achieved to influence the viewers by merely alternating the presence or absence of light in a room. 30 Seconds Text (1996) consists of a black-painted room with a lightbulb hanging in the centre of the room and controlled by a timer: the viewer is invited to enter and read a white-lettered text on the wall, the lights going on and off every thirty seconds (Brown 2004: 60–3).15 The text described a cruel scientific experiment conducted by a certain Dr Baurieux in Montpellier around 1905, who repeatedly attempted to talk with newly decapitated human heads in order to measure the time lapse between beheading and death: on average, the severed heads still reacted for thirty seconds. Hence, Gordon’s light bulb goes on and off at regular intervals counting those thirty seconds that separate life from death, present from past, on from off. Curiously, Creed had applied a similar environmental procedure and the exact same time lapse of thirty seconds in 1995 at Cubitt Gallery in London for the earliest version of The lights going on and off (Work No. 127): on or off, light or darkness, positive or negative are at the heart of Creed’s renowned installation, which in a later version formed part of the exhibition which earned him the Turner Prize. Although the contents are slightly different from Gordon’s work, its basic structure, the kind of minimal

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alteration, the potential for immersiveness and even the aesthetic outline resemble each other closely – even the time lapse: But it was kind of an experiment in trying to make something you don’t have to look at. [. . .] I was trying to make something that used the whole room and that wasn’t made of any materials. [. . .] The lights going on and off was an attempt to try to make something that makes itself in front of you as you watch it – just like a piece of music as you listen to it. I was trying to make a sculpture more like a piece of music. The first one I made was the 30-second one. It was a minute split in half.16

5.  Process art, the Scottish way This overview given earlier of Creed’s early career, and the thought processes which informed many of his first creations, set in the context of his art school acquaintances and of his initial moves in the UK artworld, has been intended to clear the field for an examination of two of the long-lasting biases which have haunted discussions of the artist’s work ever since, being on the one hand minimalism and on the other hand conceptualism. At times, he is defined as a minimal artist or a conceptual artist, though both definitions hardly appear consistent with Creed’s experiments and reference points in the relevant period. As regards the former, the artist himself commented: I don’t strive for minimalism. It’s not what I want. It’s just that I end up with a black & white thing because I can’t choose a colour, or I end up with an empty room because I don’t believe in anything enough to put all my faith in it and place it in the middle of a room and say ‘Hey, look at this’. Because doing an exhibition is like that, like saying ‘Hey, look at this, isn’t it great!’17

Concerning the latter, Creed objects vehemently to being labelled a conceptual artist (Durland 2004) pointing at the impossibility of separating ideas from the sensible world, as well as the notion of envisioning an idea by itself: I don’t believe in conceptual art (sighs/laughs). I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings. [. . .] I’ve never seen an idea in my life. I might have had one, but I’ve never seen one! I don’t think I really know what an idea is, at least not separate from a feeling.18

The comparison with Douglas Gordon – who instead employs a conceptual vocabulary with due self-awareness (Fortnum 2012: 11) – is revealing of

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Creed’s distance from the tradition of conceptualism. Indeed, while Gordon’s procedure starts with an idea that will take its shape along the creative process, Creed rather takes the path of subsequent trials and errors to make enough decisions to come up with something that satisfies him (Eccles and Creed 2010: xi). Furthermore, Gordon appears to drag the spectators into an aesthetic experience that could unsettle their perception. Creed instead strives for a sort of Kantian Zweckförmigkeit, an outcome, so to speak, which stands for itself and presents itself to viewers as the one and only possible ordered solution to a given problem, as if it was the product of natural necessity (Leader 2010: xl). Despite the differences, the two artists are connected over the importance they attribute to procedural concerns over the final outcome: the process becomes the main drive of their creative activity and completely supersedes the problem of giving a definitive meaning to artworks. For this very reason, it is sufficient for both to make the smallest alteration of environmental conditions – without adding any object or even anything new to the world – in order to achieve a deep impression on our perceptive capability. Finally, Creed and Gordon both stress the relevance of immersiveness as the true aim of artistic experience: the viewer might even fail to notice his or her involvement in art, when getting an unexpected phone call or finding the door lock substituted with a protrusive brass bell. Nevertheless, the spectators won’t fail to have an aesthetic experience, one that affects the parameters and preconceptions, which govern the way they perceive the world and by means of which they try to understand it. Hence, the resemblance between Creed and Gordon cannot be a curious coincidence: it rather is the result of constant exchange and debates, cross-influences and cross-referencing between two Glaswegian peers cast away in London. It all appears to spring from a close friendship and an attunement firmly grounded in a communal art education, as well as in their mutual Scottish background. Not to mention their very un-English sense of humour.

Notes 1 Sawyer (2010). Original quote: ‘everyone in Scotland is like me.’ 2 Creed (2014: 84). Original quote: ‘the way that this came about was I was doing paintings at art school and I er . . . I thought the only reason I’m doing these paintings is because I’m in a painting department at art school, you know. So I thought, okay, I won’t, I’ll try, I won’t, I won’t do that. . . . I’ll just try to make a thing, not a painting. I’ll try to make something without deciding beforehand what

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5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

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I’m going to make, and, er, um. So I thought all right, but I don’t know what to do. What can I do? And where would I put it? So I thought all right I’m going to try and make something for people to look at. And I thought if something’s on the wall, you know, it’s easy for people to look at. So that was the first decision I made, to try to make something for a wall, and I was happy with that decision.’ Original quote: ‘The minimum a work can do is hang on a wall.’ Original quote: ‘I find it a lot easier if it negates itself at the same time as pushing itself forward – so there’s an equal positive and negative which adds up to nothing, but at the same time is something too.’ Creed (2014: 84). Original quote: ‘And I thought well I don’t know what materials I could use, I don’t mind, like, there’s . . . I couldn’t find any reason to use one particular material rather than another. So I tried just to make something using the actual surface of the wall.’ Original quote: ‘He was really important to me. He curated me in one of my first shows, which led to other things. He really looks out for other artists.’ The sentence is taken from St Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus Christ on the cross spoke to the Good Thief. Gordon’s work had also a precise connection to its location, as it was put on the edge of the ceiling skylight of the university lobby that gives sight to the central dome of the building and to the enormous library of the upper floor. Indeed, University College London was one of the first an oldest lay institutions for higher education in the city and religious books and theological treatises were banned from the library, a circumstance that had not changed at the time of the 1990 graduate exhibition. Gordon’s critical intervention highlighted the incoherence of a supposedly free institution, which relied on censorship (Mantoan 2015: 147). Durland (2004). Original quote: ‘Because basically the work ends up the way it does through the process.’ Most curiously, the piece has not been included in the catalogue raisonné of the artist, since page 82 is in fact missing. See Creed and Gioni (2010: 81–3). For Letters, compare: Martin Creed, Work No. 233 (Fuck off) (2000); digital print on paper (26 × 21 centimetres); Tate collection; and Douglas Gordon, Letter (Number 14) (1994); letter and wall text, typeface Bembo, green opaque (dim. var.); letter sent from Glasgow, 25 April. For instruction pieces, compare: Martin Creed, Work No. 111 (High) (1995); Piece for guitar, bass and drums; and Douglas Gordon, Instruction (Number 1) (1992); phone call and wall text, typeface Bembo, green opaque (dim. Var.); issued for Café Picasso in Rome (1992). Eccles/Creed (2010: xiii). For Text Pieces, compare: Martin Creed, Work No. 143b (The whole world + the work = the whole world) (1998); billboard (3 × 6 metres); installation at Farringdon Road in London (1998); and Douglas Gordon, Meaning and Location (1990); wall

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16 17

18

Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed text for ceiling, typeface Palatino, black opaque (dim. var.); installation view at the Octagon of the Slade School of Art in London (1990). Gordon first installed this piece at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville of Paris in 1996, on the occasion of the group show life/live curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and then again at Venice Biennale in 1997, which earned him the prize for the best young artist. The work is actually the fragment of a bigger installation titled . . . head (1996) and originally made for Uppsala castle in Sweden. Eccles and Creed (2010: xv). Durland (2004). Original quote: ‘I don’t strive for minimalism. It’s not what I am striving for or seeking. It’s just that I end up with a white thing because I can’t decide what colour to use, or I end up with an empty room because I don’t believe in anything enough to put all my faith in it and place it in the middle of the room.’ Eccles and Creed (2010: x). Original quote: ‘I don’t believe in conceptual art (sighs/ laughs). I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings. [. . .] I’ve never seen an idea in my life (laughs). I’ve had one, but I’ve never seen one! I don’t think I know what an idea is, at least not separate from a feeling.’

References Alberro, A. (2003), Conceptual Art and the Policy of Publicity, Boston: MIT Press. Beckett, A. (1996), ‘Is There Life after the Dead Cow?’, The Independent, 27 October: 18–22. Brown, K. (2004), DG: Douglas Gordon, London: Tate Publishing. Buck, L. (2000), ‘Martin Creed’, Artforum, 38 (6/2): 110–11. Corner, L. (2011), ‘Dancing with Creed’, Evening Standard, 16 June. Available online: https://www​.standard​.co​.uk​/lifestyle​/esmagazine​/dancing​-with​-martin​-creed​ -6412135​.html (accessed 7 January 2018). Creed, M. (2014), ‘Psychoanalysis and Artistic Process’, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 65 (2): 79–87. Creed, M. and M. Gioni (2010), Martin Creed: Works, London: Thames and Hudson. Durland, C. (2004), ‘Martin Creed: Twenty (More) Questions’, The Wrong Times, 1. Eccles, T. and M. Creed (2010), ‘Interview’, in M. Creed and M. Gioni (eds), Martin Creed Works, x–xvii, London: Thames and Hudson. Fagen, G. (1999), ‘The Exact Vague History’, in D. Gordon (ed.) (2000), Déjà-vu: Questions & Answers, 21–126, Paris: MARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Fortnum, R. (2007), Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words, London: I.B. Tauris. Foster, A. (2003), Susan Hiller, London: Tate Publishing.

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Fricke, H. (1998), ‘Introduction: Confusion in Noir’, in D. Gordon, (ed.) (2000), Déjà-vu: Questions & Answers, 13–32, Paris: MARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Harding, D. (1995), ‘Another History. Memories and Vagaries: The Development of Social Art Practices in Scotland from the 60s to the 90s’, in M. Dickson (ed.), Art with People, 16–26, Sunderland: AN Publications. Jaray, T. (2010), ‘Somethings’, in M. Creed and M. Gioni (eds.), Martin Creed: Works, xxxv, London: Thames and Hudson. Jones, J. (1999), ‘What’s So Minimal About 15 000 Balloons?’, The Observer, 14 March. Available online: https://static1​.squarespace​.com​/static​/550​95cc​2e4b​0b6b​aebd8203a​ /t​/5565a836e4b083995c 141756/1432725558131/creed​+observer​.​pdf (accessed 7 January 2018). Leader, D. (2010), ‘Forms of Attachment’, in M. Creed and M. Gioni (eds), Martin Creed: Works, xxxvi–xli, London: Thames and Hudson. Lederman, E. (1995), ‘Unlimited Works at Starkmann Limited’, Art Monthly, 185 (4): 38. Lennard, D. (2014), ‘Martin Creed: Work No. 203: Everything Is Going To Be Alright’, Tate, April. Available online: http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/art​/artworks​/creed- work-​no-20​ 3-eve​rythi​ng-is​-goin​g-to-​be-al​right​-t127​99 (accessed 7 January 2018). Lowndes, S. (2010), Social Sculpture: The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene, Glasgow: Lutah Press. Mantoan, D. (2015), The Road to Parnassus: Artist Strategies in Contemporary Art, Wilmington: Vernon Press. Moisdon-Trembley, S. (1996), ‘Attraction–Répulsion’, in D. Gordon (ed.) (2000), Déjà-vu: questions & answers, 111–30, Paris: MARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Morgan, S. (1993), 24 Hour Psycho: Hitchcok’s Tomb, Glasgow: Tramway. Muir, G. (2011), Lucky Kunst. The rise and Fall of Young British Art, London: Artum Press. O'Reilly, J. (2010), ‘The Title + The Text =’, in M. Creed and M. Gioni (ed.), Martin Creed: Works, xlii. London: Thames and Hudson. Obrist, H.U. (1996), ‘(P)ars pro toto’, in D. Gordon (ed.) (2000), Déjà-vu: Questions & Answers, 143–76, Paris: MARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Richardson, C. (2011), Scottish Art since 1960: Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Sawyer, M. (2010), ‘Martin Creed: People Know What’s Fake and What’s Not’, The Guardian, 18 June. Available online: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​ /2010​/jul​/18​/martin- creed-interview-miranda-sawyer (accessed 7 January 2018). Spector, N. (1997), ‘This Is All True and Contradictory, If Not Hysterical’, in D. Gordon (ed.) (2000), Déjà-vu: Questions & Answers, 49–84, Paris: MARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Stallabrass, J. (2006), High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, London: Verso.

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Verzotti, G. (2006), ‘Douglas Gordon’, in M. D’Argenzio and G. Verzotti (ed), Pretty Much Every Word Written, Spoken, Heard, Overheard From 1989..., 15–20, Milano: Skira Editore. Windsor, J. (1998), ‘Pinstripe Medicis’, The Independent, 29 May. Available online: http://www​.independent​.co​.uk​/life​-style​/pinstripe​-medicis​-1156965​.html (accessed 7 January 2018).

Index of Names and Works 24 Hour Psycho (Gordon)  159, 163 A 36” X 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OR PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL (Weiner)  49 A Lifetime of Love (Borland)  152 A sheet of paper crumpled into a ball (Work No. 88)  14, 18, 28, 50, 57, 70, 73, 134, 140, 142, 143, 146 A Square Removal From A Rug In Use (Weiner)  49 Abell, Catharine  115, 118 Acconci, Vito  113 Alberro, Alexander  78 n.16, 17, 159, 160 Aldrich, Virgil  88, 89, 101 n.4 Alexander, Gregory S.  79 n.36 Andre, Carl  67, 122, 123, 157, 161 Asher, Michael  49 Auxier, Randall E.  41 n.4 Bande à part (Godard)  17 Barry, Robert  24 n.1, 102 n.9 Becker, Howard, S.  38, 42 n.24 Beckett, Andy  153 Beckett, Samuel  122, 123 Benjamin, Walter  64, 68, 70 Berktold, Florian  78 n.21 Beuys, Joseph  63, 157 Binkley, Timothy  10 Bishop, Claire  117 Borges, Jorge Luis  10–11 Borland, Christine  151, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre  38, 42 n.23 Boxes (Work No. 916)  70, 71 Boyce, Martin  156, 161 Brillo Boxes (Warhol)  9, 123 Broccoli prints (Work No. 1000)  27, 28, 31, 33 Brown, Katrina M.  164 Brown, Trisha  33

Bruce, Lenny  122 Buchanan, Roderick  152 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D.  70, 78 n.18 Buck, Louisa  79 n.24, 155, 161, 162 Bukowski, Charles  41 n.10 Buren, Daniel  59 n.8, 78 n.22, 80 n.41 Byrne, David  22 Cage, John  122, 123, 131 n.6 Caldarola, Elisa  4, 5 Carpenter, Megan  77 n.8 Carroll, Noël  90 Cash, Johnny  122 Cassam, Quassim  54, 55, 60 nn.17, 18, 21 Cattelan, Maurizio  97 Cazeaux, Clive  5 Cézanne, Paul  11 Chairs (Work No. 997)  5, 121, 122, 124–9, 132 n.7 Chandler, John  91 Chapman, Dinos  20, 24 n.1, 156 Chapman, Jake  20, 24 n.1, 156 Chiong, Kathryn  59 n.9 Clapton Portico  47, 163 Coles, Alex  49, 59 n.7 Coley, Nathan  156 Coombes, Chris  20, 22, 24 n.7 Corner, Leslie  151, 152, 156 Costello, Diarmuid  4, 143 Cravat  11, 16 Cubitt Gallery  164 Currie, Gregory  10, 21 Dal Sasso, Davide  4 Danto, Arthur, C.  3, 9–12, 16, 20, 21, 41 n.4, 93, 137, 138, 147, 148 nn.1, 6, 149 n.7 David, Jacques-Louis  17 Davies, David  3, 10, 12, 21, 112 Devo  122 Dickie, George  10, 41 n.4, 148 n.1

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Dodd, Julian  110, 112–16, 118, 119 nn.6–8, 120 n.9 Donati, Alessandra  4, 65–6, 68–9, 75–6, 76 nn.1, 5, 77 n.9, 78 nn.17, 23, 79 nn.24, 25, 29, 31, 33, 37, 80 n.41 Don’t worry (Work No. 890)  163 Duchamp, Marcel  63, 114 Durland, Corinna  14, 24 nn.4, 6, 10, 102 n.19, 165, 167 n.9, 168 n.17 Dutton, Denis  21 Dylan, Bob  46, 59 n.2 Eccles, Tom  6 n.1, 41 nn.8, 13, 83, 88, 94, 95, 97, 101, 101 n.1, 102 nn.12, 13, 107, 116, 119 nn.1, 5, 125, 127, 133, 154, 158, 166, 167 n.13, 168 nn.16, 18 Eco, Umberto  101 n.2 Elgin, Catherine Z.  11, 60 n.13 Emin, Tracey  24 n.1, 151 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT (Work No. 203)  47, 48, 59 n.4, 97, 163 Fagen, Graham  163 Farrenc, Louise  107 Feelings (Work No. 287)  34 Fenzel, Cristin  66 Fer, Briony  35, 41 n.15 Fisher, Bobby  122 Fleury, Sylvie  16 For elevator and choir (Work No. 409)  15 Fortnum, Rebecca  156, 165 Foster, Alicia  153 Frankfurt, Harry  41 n.17 Freshwater: a comedy (Woolf)  107 Fricke, Harald  160 Fried, Michael  42 n.25 Friedman, Tom  16 Friends (Work No. 671)  163 Gaiger, Jason  60 nn.12, 21 Galleria Giò Marconi  162 Gambaro, Antonio  74 Gilbert & George  67, 153 Gioni, Massimiliano  29–31, 36–8, 40, 41 nn.2, 3, 42 n.20, 122, 123, 127, 131 n.6, 167 n.10

Glasgow School of Art  153, 156 Godard, Jean-Luc  17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  163 Goldie, Peter  41 n.6, 96, 102 n.14, 112, 120 n.9 Goldstein, Ann  92, 102 n.10 González-Torres, Félix  35, 80 n.38 Goodman, Nelson  11, 68 Gordon, Douglas  6, 151–3, 156, 157, 159–66, 167 nn.8, 11, 12, 14, 168 n.15 Gotshalk, Dilman, W.  87, 88, 101 n.3 Goya, Francisco  24 n.1 Grampp, William D.  72, 79 n.27 Greer, Germaine  37, 41 n.1, 42 n.22 Guillemert, Aline  58 n.1 Haacke, Hans  49, 59 n.8 Half the air in a given space (Work No. 200)  14 Half the air in a given space (Work No. 210, detail)  74, 75, 79 n.35 Harding, David  156 Hauser & Wirth  51, 78 n.21 Hayward Gallery  27, 76 n.3 Hecht, Sam  94, 98, 102 nn.11, 18 Hegel, Georg W. F.  149 n.7 Heidegger, Martin  127–30, 132 nn.8, 9 Heinich, Nathalie  69 Hetcher, Steven  77 n.8 Hick, Darren H.  41 n.7 Higgs, Matthew  86, 94 Hiller, Susan  153 Hirschhorn, Thomas  79 n.25 Hirst, Damien  20, 24 n.1, 27, 151, 156 Hitchcock, Alfred  159 Horowitz, Noah  79 n.27 Huebler, Douglas  102 n.9 Ickowicz, Judith  80 n.41 Ikon Gallery  15 Irvin, Sherri  112, 120 n.10 Ishiguro, Kazuo  116 Jaray, Tess  39, 40, 42 n.26, 158 Johnston, Alan  153 Jones, Jonathan  17, 151, 158, 163 Judd, Donald  16, 20, 122

Index of Names and Works K. E. Gover  3, 41 n.7 Kandinsky, Wassily  136 Kant, Immanuel  135–8, 141, 143–7, 148 n.6, 166 Kawara, On  159 Kee, Joan  79 n.24 Klein, Yves  63, 80 n.41 Koons, Jeff  16, 28 Kosuth, Joseph  102 n.9, 124, 125, 131 n.4, 159 Kwall, Roberta R.  41 n.9 Laib, Wolfgang  157 Langer, Susanne, K.  87, 89, 90, 96, 100, 101, 101 nn.5, 6, 102 n.15 Lawson, Thomas  162 Leader, Darian  37, 38, 41 n.1, 42 n.21, 51, 154, 155, 158, 166 Lederman, Erika  157–9 Lennard, Debra  163 Levinson, Jerrold  10, 107 Lewis, Edwin H.  41 n.4 LeWitt, Sol  16, 32, 33, 41 n.5, 78 n.16, 80 n.38, 110–14, 119 nn.2, 4, 122, 123 LHOOQ (Duchamp)  113, 114 The light going on and off (Work Nos. 127, 227)  5, 6, 13, 14, 18, 28, 37, 40, 57, 66, 74, 77 n.10, 105–10, 114, 116, 118, 119, 119 n.3, 134, 137, 144, 148, 164, 165 Lindsay, Jack  42 n.29 Lippard, Lucy R.  70, 78 n.18, 91, 92, 112 Lisson Gallery  157 The Living Room (Gordon)  151 Livingston, Paisley  41 n.7 Logsdail, Nicholas  157 London University College  156, 167 n.8 Long, Richard  67, 157 Lopes, Dominic McIver  112, 118 Louvre Museum  17 Love (Work No. 651)  163, 164 Lowndes, Sarah  156, 161 Lucasfilm v Ainsworth (sentence)  67, 77 n.14 Lydiate, Henry  77 n.14 McClean, Daniel  68, 75, 78 nn.17, 19, 79 n.24

173

McLean, Bruce  153 McLeod, Kembrew  69 Mag Uidhir, Christy  41 n.7, 107 Mantoan, Diego  5, 153, 156, 157, 160, 167 n.8 Manzoni, Piero  41 n.14, 122, 131 n.1 Markellou, Marina  67 Meyer, Emily  69 Michelson, Annette  131 n.6 Migliorini, Ermanno  91, 92, 101 n.7, 102 n.9 Minissale, Gregory  5 Moisdon-Trembley, Stéphanie  162 Monk, Jonathan  152 Morgan, Stuart  160 Morley, Paul  22 Muir, Gregor  153 Mulligan, Kevin  53–6, 60 n.16 Musil, Robert  52–6, 60 nn.14, 15, 16 Nauman, Bruce  122 Never let me go (Ishiguro)  116 Nietzsche, Friedrich  138, 149 n.8 Oath of the Horatii (David)  17 Obrist, Hans Ulrich  160, 168 n.15 One and three chairs (Kosuth)  124, 131 n.4 Oracle  54 O’Reilly, John  158 Palma, Giuseppe  79 n.34 Picasso, Pablo  11, 16 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges)  10 Pignatari, Olivier  65 Pirri Valentini, Anna  4, 76 n.1 Pissarro, Joachim  37, 40, 41 nn.1, 18, 42 nn.22, 27, 137 Plato  56, 140 Polit, Pawel  97 Projansky, Bob  78 n.24 Psycho (Hitchcock)  159, 160 Rebentisch, Juliane  117 Reiss, Julie, H.  117 Removal Paintings (Weiner)  49 Rhizome Gallery  161 Richardson, Craig  156

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Index of Names and Works

Richter, Gerhard  46, 58 n.1 Rigamonti, Cyrill P.  41 n.11 Rorimer, Anne  92, 102 n.10 Rosch, Eleanor  123, 124, 130 Runners (Work No. 850)  2, 15, 17, 18, 47, 48, 59 n.6, 67, 76 n.2, 77 n.15, 96 Ryman, Robert  60 n.11 Salcedo, Doris  147, 149 n.9 Sans, Jérôme  24 nn.8, 9, 102 n.20 Santayana, George  87, 90 Sawyer, Miranda  151, 154, 166 n.1 Schellekens, Elisabeth  41 n.6, 96, 102 nn.14, 21, 112, 120 n.9, 143 The Scotsman steps (Work No. 1059)  31, 32 Scott, Carrie  18 Sehgal, Tino  147, 149 n.10 Serota, Nicholas  13 Sex Pistols  122 Shiner, Larry  41 n.3 Siegelaub, Seth  78 n.24, 159 Slade Academy  39 Slade School of Fine Art  49, 153, 154, 156, 168 n.14 Smith, Roberta  16, 19, 20, 22 Smith Museum  161 Socrates  54, 56 Spector, Nancy  159 Stallabrass, Julian  151 Stapleton, Jaime  78 n.17 Starkmann, Bernhard  157, 160 Starkmann Ltd.  18, 157–9 Stella, Frank  60 n.11, 122, 131 n.1 Stout, Katharine  97, 98 Sturgis, Alexander  41 n.3 Symphony No. 3 (Farrenc)  107 Talking Heads  122 Tate Britain  13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 24 n.3, 47, 77 n.10, 96, 102 n.16 Tate Modern  67 Things (Work No. 285)  70, 72 Thomson, Charles  13 Thomson, Iain D.  129, 132 nn.8, 10

Tomkins, Calvin  42 n.28 Tramway Gallery  159 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto)  10 Turner, William  17 Turner Prize  1, 13, 14, 17, 22, 28, 37, 57, 66, 77 n.10, 149 n.10, 151, 152, 156, 164 Tuymans, Luc  24 n.1 Über die Dummheit (Musil)  52 Van Gogh, Vincent  132 n.8 Van Haaften-Schick, Lauren  79 n.36 Velthuis, Olav  79 n.27 Venice Biennale  168 n.15 Verzotti, Giorgio  159 Vo, Dahn  42 n.28 Walravens, Nadia  65, 67 Warhol, Andy  24 n.2, 32, 63, 122, 123, 131 n.6 Weiner, Lawrence  48, 49, 51, 57, 59 nn.7, 8, 9, 10, 60 n.11, 102 n.9, 122, 131 n.1, 159 Wells, Rachel  34, 36, 41 n.12 Westgeest, Helen  132 n.6 The whole world + the work = the whole world (Work No. 232)  15, 17, 60 n.20, 125, 163, (Work No. 143b) 167 n.14 Windsor, John  157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  5, 122, 125, 126, 130, 131 nn.1, 4 Wolfe, Tom  12, 13, 20 Wollheim, Richard  21 Woolf, Virginia  107 Wright, Richard  156 Yellow Balloons (Work No. 265)  99 Young British Art  12, 151, 156, 157 Younis, Reef  24 n.5 Zangwill, Nick  148 n.5 Ziff, Paul  87 Zucchelli, Claudio  79 n.34

Thematic Index Abstract Expressionism  11, 12, 32 abstract expressionist  11, 33 abstract object  107, 118 aesthetic enjoyment  143 aesthetic idea  135, 137, 138, 143–6, 148 n.6 aesthetic judgement  135, 136, 140–42, 146, 148 n.5 aesthetic object  87, 89, 90, 92, 101 n.7, 102 n.8, 132 n.8 aesthetic properties  107, 109, 113 aesthetics  135, 137, 143, 147 aesthetic value  30, 128, 143 appreciation  2, 5, 10, 12, 21, 38, 54, 84, 88, 105, 107, 109–11, 113–14, 119, 147 art form  114–15, 117–18, 138 artistic value  12, 85, 88–9 art-making  2, 3, 28, 34–6, 91, 142, 146 artworld  5, 9–13, 16, 19, 20, 23, 38, 40, 41 n.4, 45, 133, 137, 139, 148 n.1, 165 artwordly properties  12, 13, 16, 19–21, 23 attention  3, 5, 21, 31, 34, 37, 49, 56, 83, 84, 88, 98, 107, 109, 110, 117, 134, 139, 142–3, 146–8, 154, 158 authenticity  4, 41, 63–6, 68–76, 76 nn.1, 4, 78 n.22, 80 n.40 balloons  3, 14, 28, 33, 64, 74, 79 n.35, 86 cognitive value  53, 54 collection (approach)  2, 67, 94, 125, 126, 139 conceptual art  4, 5, 19, 22, 24 n.4, 66, 69, 70, 78 nn.16, 17, 19, 83–5, 88, 91–6, 99, 101 nn.1, 7, 105, 110–16, 118, 119, 135, 138, 143, 146, 147, 148 n.1, 153, 156, 159, 165, 168 n.18 conceptualism  2, 4, 20, 70, 84, 85, 91, 95, 99, 152, 156, 165, 166 conceptualist (approach)  1, 2, 4, 16, 19, 24 n.4, 33, 35, 66–8, 78 n.19, 83–6, 88, 90–6, 99, 100, 102 nn.8, 9

contemporary art  2–4, 9, 29–32, 35, 37, 38, 40, 58, 63, 64, 151, 153 contemporary art theory  12, 19 creativity  12, 47, 64, 67, 153, 159 cultural value  40, 64 disinterested aesthetic judgement  135, 141 economic value  72, 79 n.27 everyday life  2, 3, 85, 127–9, 134 everyday materials  38, 64 everyday objects  4, 6, 13, 23, 27–9, 36, 64, 86, 91, 121, 147, 156 experience  3, 5, 51, 83–5, 87, 90, 93, 99, 101, 102 n.8, 109, 110, 113, 116–18, 126, 127, 129, 130, 141, 143, 148, 153, 160, 162, 163, 166 expression  18, 33–6, 63, 65–7, 76 n.6, 77 n.6, 83–91, 93, 96, 100, 126, 138, 144, 148 n.7 expressiveness  3, 4, 35, 36, 83–7, 89, 90, 93–101 expressive properties  5, 105, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119 failure  20, 24 n.10, 46, 57, 100, 102 n.19 failure of intelligence  53–5, 60 n.15 feelings  5, 6, 19, 34, 35, 53, 83, 84, 87–9, 95–7, 99, 101 n.1, 102 n.13, 112–14, 124, 125, 130, 131 n.2, 134, 143, 162, 163, 165, 168 n.18 Fluxus  63, 153 form  6, 16, 18, 34, 40, 45, 65, 66, 68, 85–7, 89, 91, 92, 96, 99, 100, 106, 109, 127, 131 n.1, 138, 154, 158, 161 gestalt  128, 129 idea  1, 2, 4, 19, 20, 22, 24 n.10, 30, 32, 35, 36, 46, 51, 59 n.2, 63, 65, 66, 68–70, 72, 74, 78 n.16, 79 n.35,

176

Thematic Index

83–5, 87–9, 91, 92, 95–7, 99, 100, 101 n.1, 102 nn.13, 19, 110–12, 114, 119, 125, 131 n.2, 135, 137–9, 140, 144–6, 148 n.6, 149 n.7, 160, 165, 166, 168 n.18 immateriality  2, 70, 99 installation  1, 4, 5, 14, 18, 27, 64, 65, 67–70, 74, 76, 76 n.1, 79 n.35, 117, 118, 120 n.10, 147, 153, 154, 156–8, 162–4 installation art  105, 114, 117–19 instructions  13–15, 18, 32, 33, 65, 68, 83, 94, 106, 107, 118, 159–62, 167 n.12 labour  3, 29–35, 39, 40, 41 nn.3, 10 meaning  2, 5, 10, 16, 30, 33, 36–9, 60 n.13, 69, 89, 90, 92, 95, 101, 125, 130, 131 n.6, 134, 136, 138, 142, 148, 154, 156, 163, 166, 167 n.14 medium  1–3, 22, 33, 38, 40, 76 n.6, 77 n.6, 112–14, 153 metaphor  9, 34, 36, 40, 93, 127, 137, 138, 144, 146, 147, 148 n.6, 149 n.8 method  31, 68, 93, 131 n.1 minimalism  2, 15, 16, 19, 20, 24 n.6, 42 n.25, 65, 70, 92, 153, 156, 158, 165, 168 n.17 minimalist (approach)  22, 151, 152, 157, 158, 161 music  1, 15, 20, 22, 39, 46, 59 n.2, 64, 65, 68, 76 n.6, 100, 107, 113, 116–18, 131 n.1, 156, 159–62, 165 ordered (approach)  5, 57, 83, 93, 121, 124, 125, 166 outsider  12, 20, 23 painting  1, 11, 16–18, 27, 28, 31, 46, 49–51, 58, 59 n.10, 60 n.11, 63, 64, 67, 70, 94, 113, 115, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 132 n.8, 136, 153, 154, 166 n.2

performance  1–3, 6, 9, 21–3, 29, 91, 96, 106, 107, 110, 153, 156, 160 philosophical problems  30, 51, 107, 110, 126, 130, 137–9, 145 philosophical questions  17–19, 117, 126, 145, 152 process  2–5, 19–21, 24 nn.8, 10, 29, 33, 51, 59 n.9, 64–7, 69, 72, 77 n.7, 93, 100, 102 nn.19, 20, 111, 123–5, 128, 133, 134, 138, 139, 141–7, 151, 155, 157–60, 162, 165, 166, 167 n.9 ready-made  12, 35, 41 n.4, 65, 128, 137, 138, 147, 148 n.1, 160 repetition  5, 16, 46, 57, 127 rhythm  5, 87, 89, 90, 100, 101 n.6, 111, 121, 122, 126, 127, 131 n.1, 162 series  37, 49, 51, 73, 86, 94, 121, 126, 127, 133, 134, 136, 151, 154, 156, 158–60, 162 significance  5, 17, 23, 30, 31, 39, 43, 84, 133, 134, 139–47 simplicity  2, 3, 22, 27, 39, 98, 106 sound  33, 37, 52, 109, 110, 116–18, 127, 142, 162 stupidity  4, 13, 45, 46, 48, 51–6, 58, 60 nn.13, 21, 137 techniques  1, 16, 31, 63, 69, 153, 156 things  2–4, 9–12, 18, 19, 22, 35–7, 39, 45–8, 50, 52, 55, 57, 58, 59 n.2, 67, 90, 100, 101, 102 nn.19, 20, 127, 128, 130, 131 n.6, 137, 138, 149 n.8, 158 value  2, 9, 20, 23, 29, 40, 45, 47, 53–8, 68, 69, 72, 80 n.40, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 99, 128, 148 words  15, 22, 28, 33, 41 n.13, 47, 86, 94, 97, 114, 134, 143, 158, 163 workless  27, 29, 30, 36, 40

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