The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Self-disgust has been a constant in my life’
‘Maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t won the Turner,” says the 50-year-old British artist Martin Creed, referring to his notorious victory in 2001, when he scooped the UK’s top art prize with
Work No227: The lights going on and off. As its title suggests (Creed numbers all his artworks sequentially), this consisted of nothing but an empty gallery, with the lights going on and off, every five seconds, in an endless loop.
“I’m really competitive,” he continues. “But if I hadn’t won, I might have learned more.” He laughs. “Because it only encouraged me.”
Some people may share
Creed’s regret. For sceptics of contemporary art, he is a bit of a bête noire. Past works include a blob of Blu Tack pressed against a wall, a blank sheet of white paper crumpled into a ball and galleries filled with balloons.
“I do like being naughty,”
Creed concedes. “As a child, I loved switching lights on and off to annoy people – when my mum was on the toilet, that kind of thing. That’s partly what I was doing in the Turner Prize.”
Yet, given Creed’s reputation as art’s court jester, the man I meet in the run-up to his new solo show at London’s Hauser & Wirth gallery defies expectations.
Admittedly, Creed – a streak of a man, like a living Giacometti statue – is dressed in what could pass for full motley: a moth-eaten Christian Dior suit, covered with paint, as well as an unusual neck-warmer, of his own design, featuring multicoloured stripes. The look is part artist, part clown, part spiritual guru. But he comes across as the opposite of a wind-up merchant.
Speaking in a Glaswegian brogue – born in Wakefield in 1968, he grew up in Scotland, where his silversmith father taught at
Glasgow’s School of Art – Creed is sincere, affable, and ceaselessly anxious. Throughout our interview, he clutches a bottle of hand sanitiser, which he keeps spraying, even though the room is spotlessly clean. Does he suffer from OCD? “Oh, aye, very much,” he replies, before revealing that he used to be “addicted” to wet wipes. “I often feel dirty,” he explains, “and I became a prisoner of carrying them around.”
Creed is remarkably candid about his fears and insecurities. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever met an artist so willing to talk about his feelings. “Disgust with myself has been a constant thing in my life,” he continues, sounding surprisingly cheerful about it. What, specifically, does he find so revolting, I wonder? “Everything,” he replies. “I go to the toilet. I sweat.”
His revulsion with bodily functions accounts for some of his best-known work, including a series of short films from 2006 in which people enter a brightly lit white space before vomiting or defecating on a pristine floor.
Hair is something else that
Creed finds repellent. The fact it’s always growing, beyond our control? “Aye,” he replies. “I’ve got a moustache now. I go between thinking it’s great or the worst thing ever.” Drinking a cappuccino, he says, tends to persuade him of the latter.
As it happens, hair will be a big part of Creed’s new exhibition. He’ll premiere a five-minute-long video called Difficult Thoughts, in which he repeatedly sticks his wiry grey mop of hair into hedges around London.
It plays on his notion that hair offers “a great metaphor for thoughts or feelings” (“It keeps coming, you don’t choose your hair,” he explains, “and you don’t choose your feelings, they just come up”), as well as an observation that the world has “hair” of its own – “in the form of hedges, obviously,” he says, with an ironic smile.
Connecting these two ideas in a video may sound like another irritating stunt. Yet, during our conversation, which Creed films
(“I document everything”), it becomes clear that he doesn’t set out to shock. Rather, “bad feelings” motivate him to work. We are all at the “mercy” of our feelings, “like being a prisoner of some weird captor,” explains Creed, who, for the past decade, has been in a relationship with the psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, with whom he lives in south London for half the week. He spends the other half at his old flat in the Barbican, which doubles up as a “studio-type space”, and owns a house on Alicudi, a volcanic island north of Sicily – the legacy of an earlier relationship with an Italian woman.
The curious thing about Creed’s art is that, if you didn’t know about his vulnerable mental state, you’d never guess it. Typically his work is funny, in an absurdist, deadpan way, and not at all angst-ridden. “Just being serious would be a narrow life,” Creed tells me. “So, having a laugh, taking the p---: it’s all part of the work.”
He doesn’t have a conventional studio. “I tried,” he says. “But I always felt very self-conscious whenever I went there.” But given the nature of his ideas-driven work, which encompasses video, painting, works on paper, neon, sculpture, and performance
(for Work No. 850, he instructed runners to sprint through Tate Britain’s neoclassical Duveen Galleries every 30 seconds) Creed can work pretty much anywhere, so long as he can record voice memos on his iPhone.
Many of these relate to his parallel career as a musician – he still regularly performs gigs either solo or accompanied by a band. And music is an important part of his art, too. In 2012, he invited people across the UK to mark the start of the London Olympics by ringing a bell, no matter how large or small, “as quickly and loudly as possible for three minutes”. Even Big Ben joined in.
His new show will feature live performances by classically trained singers, dressed in “wearable artworks” designed by Creed. He rummages around in a suitcase before producing a pair of misshapen trousers made from charcoal felt, and a strange bonnet-like hat, bristling with black buttons. The exhibition will also include a new series of bronze sculptures, cast from pieces of toast spread with peanut butter.
“I love peanut butter on toast,” says Creed, who was inspired to make them after spending time on a retreat last year at a Buddhist monastery in France. Aside from getting up every morning at 5am, the thing he remembers most is that, at breakfast, the monks would wolf down pots of Skippy peanut butter. “They’d have almost a whole jar on one piece of bread,” he recalls. “And I just thought, ‘I’ve got to make peanutbutter sculptures.’ I’ve been working on them for a year.”
Creed wanted to display them “like religious artefacts, in candlelight”. But the test looked terrible – the gallery resembled, as he puts it, a “bad Hallowe’en party”.
Still, experiments like this help inure him to hostility towards his art. “If people say, ‘That’s s---!’, I think, ‘Well, yeah, it is s---, right!’” Another chuckle. “Aye, I used the word ‘artist’ a minute ago, but I don’t know what an ‘artist’ is. I mean, this is an art gallery, and this stuff gets called ‘art’, but other people do things that don’t get called art, and they’re just as creative. Everyone is creative, you know.” What’s so provocative about that?
‘I’ve got a moustache now. I go between thinking it’s great or the worst thing ever’
is at Hauser & Wirth, London W1, Nov 30 until Feb 9; hauserwirth.com