Martin Creed operates in binary. Everything is either one thing or another. Like his Turner Prize-winning installation ‘Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off’: it’s just some lights, you know, going on, and then off. You can read all the nauseating waffle you want into that, but really, it’s just a light going on and off. And that’s a good thing. His art is at its best when it does one thing simply, dumbly, directly, when you look at it and get the punchline, when he cuts through the bullshit and just does.
His work is like a bunch of puns, or dirty limericks. In this constantly shifting show, art gets put up and taken off the wall right in front of you, performers sing, lights dim, films flash on and sculptures dance.
There’s some great stuff here. A sock on a wire dances jauntily; a pair of removable concrete boots – them you sleep with the fishes in – lie waiting for a victim; a performer sings Creed’s little jeu de mots aphorisms, toying with words and meaning, simply and brilliantly. These are all direct, obvious works that smack you round the head a bit. They surprise you and ask you to think about ideas a little.
The rest is less good. A lot less good. The walls are lined with sub-mediocre drawings and paintings. They’re full of jokes that aren’t funny and observations that aren’t interesting. They’re puns without humour. The tapestries on display are boring, and the collages of weather symbols and road signage aren’t a quarter as clever as they think they are.
Like I said, he’s a binary artist. He’s either really good or really shit, and there’s plenty of both on display here.
