Martin Creed
Work No. 2325, 2015

Installation with eight multi color neon lights, DMX controller, light program, white cables
22.5 x 179.5 x 6 cm (neon)
148 x 179.5 x 50 cm (overall dimensions)
 
 
A feeling of ambivalence permeates the core of Martin Creed’s practice, arising from his renunciation of assumed artistic authority in favor of strategies that exploit uncertainty as their modus operandi. Works including his 1995 Work No. 127: The lights going on and off (a precursor to his 2001 Turner Prize winning Work No. 227: The lights going on and off) and Work No. 132: A door opening and closing and a light going on and off (1995) deliver a childlike humor, the kind of glee generated by minor acts of playful provocation. But in their steady and perpetual flux between two opposed states, they also embody a mode of indecision that questions the capacity of fixed representations to truthfully approximate what Creed frequently refers to as life’s soup of thoughts, feelings and things. Inasmuch as he permits this mode to determine the form and operation of the work, indecision becomes a defiant and purposive form of artistic principle. 
 
This inclination for ambiguity appears vibrantly in the WHATEVER statement of Work No. 2325. Also operating in a state of constant flux through a controlled mechanism which programs the work to throb in an array of blue, pink, yellow, green, red, purple and orange light from left to right, its single-word-form enables a range of interpretations or responses. Its common iteration as an isolated expression conveys a laidback attitude, but other usages carry feelings of indifference, uncertainty, anarchy, or anger. 
 
The containment of positive and negative meanings is a common feature of Creed’s neon works, which originated with Work No. 203: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. Commissioned in 1999 as a public installation for the Clapton Portico in Hackney, east London, it was the first of what became an ongoing series of neon text works, most notably including Work No. 232: the whole world + the work = the whole world (2000) and Work No. 252: DON’T WORRY (2005).^[1] Insofar as Creed identifies his work as more expressionist than conceptual, the neon works can be read as derived from feeling, where feelings are understood as unfixed. He says: “I was drawn to neon when I realized I could make it go on and off, because it was a way of saying something and then not saying it… A way of using words and then taking them back by switching words on and off.”^[2] Emerging from this position, Work No. 2325 places the viewer into a space where the experience of art as live becomes exaggerated, and Creed’s minimal presentation of words and things enables them to be taken both for whatever they are, or whatever they might be. –Elsa Gray
 

^[1] Debra Lennard, “Work No. 203: Everything Is Going To Be Alright.” April 2014. Available at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/creed-work-no-203-everything-is-going-to-be-alright-t12799
^[2] Quoted in Fiona MacDonald, “Martin Creed’s no run of the mill artist.” 30 June 2008. Available at https://metro.co.uk/2008/06/30/martin-creeds-no-run-of-the-mill-artist-227899/

Martin Creed (born 21 October 1968) is a British artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for exhibitions during the preceding year, with the jury praising his audacity for exhibiting a single installation, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, in the Turner Prize show. Creed lives and works in London.

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