I’ve often heard artists talk about how making art for them is not optional, it’s essential. Life-saving, even. I was thinking about that this week as I was watching an interview with one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists, Martin Creed. As well as making videos, he's a musician, he paints, creates installations, uses lights and neon, and makes stuff.
The first question he was asked in the interview was ‘what do you do?’ I found his response really interesting. Instead of saying ‘I’m an artist’, Creed said,
I try to live my life in the world that I find myself in. And I spend most of my time trying to help myself to feel better because most of the time I don’t feel so good.
What he does every day, he says, is ‘to try and find excitement and beautiful things and people’ as a coping mechanism for the way he feels — and it’s an endless quest. The interview is one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever heard for the meaning of the phrase ‘art is life’. As Creed understands it, there is no separating line between what he creates and anything else he does in his day. Other people might call what he does ‘art’ but he’s not sure what ‘art’ actually is. ‘Art is what people collectively think it is’, he says. ‘It’s really hard to pin down, like love or magic’.
I know what he means. Readers who have followed me since the early days of The Gallery Companion will know that Creed is one of my favourite artists. I think it’s because I see a relatable struggle for something in everything he creates. That’s the connecting thread that runs through his diverse body of work. His art is his thoughts and feelings, boiled down to a basic something. What that ‘something’ is I haven’t been able to express clearly until now, but I’ve felt it when I’ve seen his work and it has made sense to me in that fleeting moment.
Take Work No: 3071: Peanut Butter on Toast from 2018, for example. The 'toast' is made of patinated bronze, the peanut butter is covered in gold leaf. He's used the traditional materials of classical sculpture to represent a slice of bread. He has made something so ordinary, so pedestrian, such an everyday thing for so many people, into a valuable sculpture and put it on a pedestal. It’s a bog-standard breakfast, but also I can’t think of anything more delicious.
It’s the simplicity of his ideas that gets me. This particular work is funny and a bit bonkers, and yet there’s a profoundness in it. Creed said his inspiration for Peanut Butter on Toast came from the time he once stayed in a Buddhist monastery. The monks would line up for breakfast and devour jars of peanut butter, spreading it thickly on toast. Creed said, "Everything that they’ve given up — greed — or that they were trying to give up, was all in that peanut butter.” It’s a representation of humans being human.
