Bypassing the thinking process

Art came to the people when a number of pink balloons from Martin Creed's exhibition escaped into K Road. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

When visiting British art star Martin Creed gave a lecture last Thursday, it was always going to be interesting. The sense of occasion was highlighted by two large vases of flowers and a pot-plant, which adorned the stage of the usually drab Auckland Art Gallery auditorium.

Creed fumbles with a microphone, nervously paces the stage and ums and ahs a lot about what he might talk about. After a few minutes of not saying much about trying to say something about what he is thinking, he decides to put on an acoustic guitar and kicks over the flower pot. He then launches into a song about feeling blue, feeling orange, feeling green, feeling purple.

When the song ends, he resumes pacing and hesitantly tries to talk about talking, claiming to have a fear of not being liked by an audience. Someone should have told him he had clearly won that battle the night before, judging by the enthusiastic responses from anyone unexpectedly encountering the large pink balloons bobbing around K Rd after escaping his exhibition opening at Michael Lett.

Creed is notorious for works such as a piece of Blu-tack pressed against a wall, or bare galleries with the lights turning on and off, a work that won the Turner Prize in 2001.

In interview-mode at his hotel, he is more relaxed and chatty. It is the day the winner of the Walters Prize is to be announced, so Creed is recalling the pressure of being a nominee for the controversy-prone Turner Prize.

"I think I can learn more about myself and my work by being in a sort of panic situation," he says. "If I'm going to show my work to my mum, I'm probably going to be pretty sure that it'll get a good reaction. If I'm going to show my work to half the people in Britain because they read about it in tabloid newspapers, then I get more scared about it."

Having the attention of the British tabloids was nothing new for Creed. "I often find tabloid coverage much more intelligent than so-called quality newspaper coverage. It becomes a form of entertainment.

"I don't think that's bad. All writing is creative writing and often in tabloids, writers seem to understand that better than a lot of quality newspaper writers, who pretend that it's about truth, which it isn't. It's about making up words and putting them in a line."

Winning the Turner encouraged Creed and gave other people confidence in his work, as if it had been validated by an institutional stamp of approval.

"I think it made me more relaxed about trying new things. It was like I'd done my exams and got an A and I could leave school and go out into the world, where exams don't matter."

Creed gets so anxious about his relationship with his audience because they are a vital part of what he does.

"I don't make art, I just make stupid things. People make art if it works for them. And art is something that happens in the combination between people and things. But I don't make that. I just make my little objects or my songs, or whatever they are."

Creed is in New Zealand because he also has work in the SCAPE Biennial in Christchurch for which he has planted a row of trees, a minimal intervention that is a lot harder to notice outside a gallery.

"One of the reasons I'm interested in doing things outside is because I think all spaces are equal," he says. "Art galleries are just theatres for showing art. They are theatres in which the audience is not seated but freely moving, and usually the work is static and the audience can move around it.

"I suppose, my gallery works are theatrical productions. The piece I make might just be an object but you cannot separate the object from the environment it is in. And the only chance it has of coming alive is with an audience of people.

"I cannot separate a painting from the wall that it's on and I cannot separate what I am seeing from how I'm feeling. And I can't separate how I am thinking from what I want, and so on, so it's all a big soup."

At the Auckland Art Gallery Creed has mired himself in the kind of mental soup that he says slows him down so much; making a performance from thinking of words to use to tell us about thinking about making things.

To further demonstrate his point he shows a film he has completed, Sick Film, which features 10 young people making themselves vomit on to an empty, white studio set. Creed says it is a convulsive act that bypasses the thinking process. "I want to make work like a vomit," he says.

Creed also circumvents the creative process by performing with his band. "It was because of what I saw as a feeling in some visual works or sculptures, that they were just the bit left over at the end," he says of his motivation to start writing music.

"The important part of working, for me, was the whole trying - the whole process from start to end, including the end product. I thought in a song I could take people through the process, live, from the moment before the music started until it just ended."

Making music has also brought a new perspective to his visual works. "The lights going on and off, especially now looking back, was an attempt to make visual work that is more like music. It's temporal and it makes itself."

Like the pink balloons invading the city, music also interacts with its environment in a pervasive way, a characteristic that also suits Creed.

"When you are experiencing music, unless you're listening on headphones, it's in the whole room. And so the lights going on and off - the whole room is being illuminated or cast into darkness. And also you are part of it in exactly the same way. Just like if you're listening to a band, it doesn't matter where you look, you can always hear the music."

* Work No 329: Half the air in a given space, by Martin Creed at Michael Lett, 478 K Rd, to November 11. www.martincreed.com