Eye Candy Friday: anyone lose a lunch?

Above is a walk through a Martin Creed exhibit in Milan. Martin Creed might easily be considered the Adrian Monk of the art world. I recently listened to a podcast of a talk Martin gave at MoMA earlier this year, where he and his interviewer Pablo Helguera spent a full minute talking about whether they should sit or stand for the discussion. They stood. Then, several minutes later, they sat. the talk is available at Itunes U.He's a peculiar dude by nature, and that nature is cultivated conciously as his working persona. A funny exchange comes toward the end of the MoMa talk when an audience member asks"

"Was there ever a point that you had to de-intellectualize yourself to be like this? I mean were you once, like really, um, sophisticated? "

"Do you think I'm not sophisticated? "

"Kind of. I don't know if your feelings are sophisticated, but your literal thought process is really casual, which comes across as not sophisticated."

"I dunno. I think all that you hearing are my words, not my thoughts. "

"Did you use to be more cerebral?"

"Did I use to be more cerebral? No no, I've always been equally cerebral. "

The aspects underlying Martin's work are becoming more relevant to my reflections on my own work. I've posted a bit previously on Creed's music.
Here's a little number called Words (I think):

This Weekend Last Weeken

Second Saturday is coming up, and I'll be posting info bit by bit on the shows that will be opening this weekend.

We missed Thomas Doyle's opening at Go North last weekend we were at the Martin Creed opening at Bard's Hessel Museum.

Later that evening, we watched Martin rock the Speigel Tent to a house made up largely of Super Seniors. There was an amusing trio of Golden Girls sitting together that seemed particularly incredulous about the performance. We were laughing as we watched them laugh in disbelief at what they were listening to. The scene reminded me of my favorite Citibank commercial with two older women on a couch channeling hillbilly male voices talking about motorbikes. "Sheeoot, them bikes sound good coz they free!"
Toward the end, one poor woman of the three seemed to be suffering badly from a headache, but the other two continued laughing, with the one in the center even singing along to the final song of the set in which Martin counts from 1 to 100 (I don't know the title of the piece.)

Martin and his two band mates kicked off the encore with a piece in which he counts from 101 to 200. I find that Martin's music crystallizes many of the elements in his work in a way that doesn't happen so readily for me in the "things" he makes.

The performance was loud and fun. I wish I had taken photos.

The July 12 edition of the NYTimes includes a review of the Creed show by Roberta Smith. There is a slide show of images from the exhibit on the Times website.

Martin Creed's Feelings opens at Bard Hessel Museum, 7.7.07

Martin Creed has taken over the two spaces that make up the CCS Bard/ Hessel Museum building up at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson.

"Feelings", the second exhibit to be installed in the new Hessel Museum consists of essentially two exhibits. The first half, situated in the galleries of Hessel is essentially a Creed-intervention of selections from the Hessel collection which have been installed along with a few Creed pieces. The second part of the exhibit focuses on Creed's work which is arrayed in the CCS galleries, the CCS Library, the front lawn, hallways and cloak room.

The exhibit opens Saturday July 7 with a reception from 5 to 7pm. Martin Creed's band is performing at Bard's SummerScape Speigeltent after the opening at 8:30. Tickets for the performance are $25.

Creed's exhibit extends to Chelsea with "Small Things", an exhibit of two large scale pieces at 508 W 25 St.
Information on the exhibits can be found at the CCS Bard/Hessel website.

Creed's own website, martincreed.com has extensive images of work and samples of his sound pieces and music. I was clued in by Peter Acheson to an interesting interview Martin gave to a New Zealand radio program which is also available on the website.

Itunes has one of Martin Creed's songs in its catalogue. If you search for Martin Creed, you'll also hear a song called "Martin Creed" listed under two different performers; Jonathan Ian and Negative Sock Boy. In the song, the singer claims that Creed is "part of the problem" and he is "as empty as your room with the flickering light."