Martin Creed: What's the point of it?

Following a perilous incident with some rotating neon letters, Garageland reviewer Mary-Claire Wilson explores Martin Creed's decisively indecisive oeuvre at Hayward Gallery.

Work No. 1092 MOTHERS, 2011

Martin Creed is infamous for winning the 2001 Turner Prize with his Work No. 227 the lights going on and off, the deadpan title of which, as ever with Creed, says it all. 

What’s the point of it? is the first major survey of his art and spans his most minimal moments as well as his extravagant room-sized installations. Creed’s slanted and playful take on what can be placed in a gallery and called art will always be challenging. This is because Creed refuses to make decisions. From this radical stance, nothing can be ruled out, which makes anything possible. His material might be Blu-tack or broccoli. He might paint without looking, or make a sculpture out of toilet paper. He embraces duality and ambiguity. This is the inspiration for his work, its challenge and its reward.

Robert Welch's Viewing Form at Bath Contemporary

Resplendent on Bath’s ever-so-quaint Gay Street, Bath Contemporary is showing an exhibition of Robert Welch’s paintings. Travis Riley potters along to the gallery at tourist pace to find out more.

Creek

The gallery spaces of Bath Contemporary, two quirkily shaped, narrow rooms, one with dado rail and ceiling cornice and the other with skylight, very much fit in with the Bath aesthetic. The paintings hung on the walls provide immediate contrast, firmly rooted in a more urban environment, the predominant tone is grey and they are filled with simple, hard-edged forms.

Public Desire For Public Art

On the mean art-littered streets of Chicago, Victoria Yates finds herself questioning the state of public art closer to home. 

It all started with a sculpture; a bright red bird in the heart of Chicago’s granite business core. The unknowing pedestrian gazing up at a thick thigh girder could be forgiven for seeing the shadow of a War of the Worlds Martian looming at 53 feet. The alien is in fact 50 tons of Alexander Calder’s Flamingo. The blunt, burning red, nicknamed ‘Calder red,’ was chosen to offset the black and steel surrounds of federal buildings. And it succeeds. In a starkly slushy Chicago winter, the square feels like that old punch line, what’s black, white and red all over?