Martin Creed: Down Over Up
Nicola McCartney, Monday, 23rd August 2010
‘Down Over Up’ is Martin Creed’s latest exhibition, held at The Fruitmarket Gallery (until 31 October) as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Exploring notions of increment, scale, variables and order, Creed sets up an exhibition of new works that focus on the movement of going up and down through the stacking and layering of various objects in order of size, from Lego to chairs: ‘Everything is like a kind of little experiment in trying to make enough decisions to be able to come up with something I am happy with,’ he says.
Unfortunately for Creed, ‘Down Over Up’ feels just like that; nothing more than an exploration in self control and an attempt to make sense of the material world around him with self-imposed experimental parameters, such as the number of marker pens in a pack, which left me asking, why should we care? The newly-commissioned works would have been far more interesting had it felt, at some point, that they had verged on being out of control or if his experiments were less polite and explored scale and distribution beyond areas that feel all too familiar. The result is an exhibition of repetition. Though some of these produce interesting patterns and are exquisitely presented, such as his broccoli print paintings, I fear that Creed’s career has also become repetitive. His centrepiece, Work No. 1061, 2010, is a staircase on which the tread of each step sounds a single note on a musical scale that echoes his singing lift, first exhibited at Hauser & Wirth in 2005, also on show in this exhibition.
It must be said, however, that Creed’s dry and linear approach always helps to draw attention to the formal qualities of his unpretentious materials and their relation to each other, which we might otherwise take for granted; I did enjoy comparing a series of cacti to a stack of Lego (see above). This also generated a sense of ironic movement between the pieces, which is the success of his better known piece Work No. 850, consisting of people running a relay through the Tate’s Duveen Galleries, and Work No. 227, hisTurner Prize winning arrangement of lights going on and off. ‘Down Over Up’ may not be Creed’s most innovative showcase of work but it is still worth a visit for a ride in the singing lift or a walk up the musical stairs, and his choice of materials provides something to engage everyone.
‘Down Over Up’ is at The Fruitmarket Galley, Edinburgh, until 31 October 2010.
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