Things turn up in the strangest places. Possibly the most “Western museum-like” space I visited in Seoul was the Artsonje Center in Bukchon. Three stories of museum, complete with store (with mystery connecting elevator to basement Indian restaurant), with an entry price of $3 or $1.50 for students.
I actually like some of Martin Creed’s work, aesthetically, but I really have no interest in his conceptualizations. Maybe he’s useful as the missing link between YBA’s and skater art, or as a road sign at the point of the continuum between art and non-art, but although I find his work entertaining, I don’t have any real use for it. Maybe it’s his disinterested titling. Most of his pieces are numbered, which makes the viewer aware that he seems to be constantly producing gestures, and makes the visitor also question the seriousness or meaning sunk, or not sunk, into those gestures.
I like the Work No 220, Don’t Worry neon, but it’s meaningless, and I actually really like the Work No. 610, Sick Piece four-channel video that’s visible in this shot, mainly because I thought it was somehow comically exploitative or what are either Creed’s friends or assistants (does this work require assistance?). Sick Piece might be his best work, and you can buy a DVD in the gift shop so as to enjoy a four-channel barf-a-thon in your own home. Great for parties! YouTube has a tidbit of the film, with “failed induced vomiting”.
Also shown in this and the photo below is Creed’s 2001 Turner Prize winning piece, Work No. 227, Lights Going On and Off. I don’t know if I would enjoy the work in an empty room, but I think it’s more enjoyable (presuming that, on a scale of 1-10, enjoyment of the piece in an empty room was a 1) when it’s exhibited in a room with other works. Despite my desire to despise it, it takes on an interventionist quality, interfering with the museum’s ability to properly light their objects, removing control from the institution. I think I would like it more if it were more aggressively interfering with the works of other artists, and not just Creed’s own work. That’s a bit easy. But I like interfering with things and my nervous system has a built in sympathy for strobe lighting, so that might just be me.
Piles of things in descending order. Does this mean that the bars on my mobile phone are a contemporary art installation? I don’t know. What I do know is that Creed somehow manages to simultaneously lower the bar for effort/craftsmanship/conceptualizing in artmaking, but at the same time his work serves as a slightly disturbing, but not surprising, reminder of the glass ceiling that separates the international museum circuit from the art world the one most of us are living in.
