Running is exhibitionist

Today I’d like to look at minimalist sculptor/installation artist Martin Creed’s newest work at Tate Britain, Work No. 850, which is only display until mid-November, for my (unfortunately nonexistent) readers across the Pond. Here’s how the Tate people are pitching it:

Work No. 850 centres on a simple idea: that a person will run as fast as they can every thirty seconds through the gallery. Each run is followed by an equivalent pause, like a musical rest, during which the grand Neoclassical gallery is empty.

This work celebrates physicality and the human spirit. Creed has instructed the runners to sprint as if their lives depended on it. Bringing together people from different backgrounds from all over London, Work No. 850 presents the beauty of human movement in its purest form, a recurring yet infinitely variable line drawn between two points.

I tend to feel skittish about any art that “celebrates the human spirit,” a phrase that, in my experience, tends to be attached to Lifetime movies about hospitalized children with leukemia bonding with gruff, initially unwilling father figures. But I’ll forgive it here because (a) the above paragraph was written by ad people, who usually have about as much literary creativity as a mayonnaise-covered doorknob (pace Salmon Rushdie) and (b) Martin Creed’s previous minimalist works are nothing if not quietly ironic and self-depreciating, positioned against poisonous, tiresome, overpaid artists that bombastically declare their works as important and clever. Some examples of Creed’s ouevre: Work No.79 1993, “some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall,” or Work No. 88 ‘a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball’, or Work No. 81, which are read as “attempts to short-circuit the visually overloaded, choice saturated culture in which we live.” I like that. I like what he does with trees and dogs. And I like that he might see the same potential in having someone burn tracks across the gallery floor in Pumas. (Everyone wears Pumas and listens to Dizzee Rascal while jogging morosely through light rain in Britain, right? And jumpers? Clarification: not that kind of jumper, but this kind.)

I also like how Work No. 850 invites a slew of interpretations, all jostling for position and rubbing elbows. Is it a clever comment on the Ritalin-era attention spans of many gallery-goers, who are ushered through galleries in “correct” ways, seeing all the greatest hits and having them interpreted for them via droll earphone commentary before booking it to the gift shop to buy umbrellas covered in gigantic, grotesque versions of Van Gogh’s tortured visage, or egg-shaped dinette sets? An attempt to freak out elderly Welsh visitors? A play on the concepts of chance, distraction, meaning, and movement in contemporary art? A knowing, corrective gesture to the fact that museum-browsing is often a class- and race-coded activity, just like running? Yet another iteration in artistic control over the body, where runners are allowed no agency in their act, and in fact are made employees of the Tate for the duration of the exhibit? Why aren’t non-runners being solicited for the event–are only Grecian physiques permissible (this is, after all, taking place in the neoclassical gallery)? A final step in the long-heralded postmodern collapse between spectator and artwork? (Creed is actively seeking volunteers to be runners in the exhibit.) Is he receiving messy, under-the-table-at-some-swanky-Soho-Asian-Fusion-micro-gastronomy-restaurant handjobs from the organizing committee of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games? Or is it (my favorite) an acknowledgment of the fact that a primary motivator for going to an art museum in the first place is to gawk at other museum-goers and judge (time) them? What do you think? Please turn in your blue books at the end of the period.

Once again, the exhibit runs (zing!) until November, so if anyone’s feeling philanthropic enough to buy me a first class seat on British Airways to participate in the show, that’d be great. I promise I won’t swill too much gin on the flight. Just enough to make the phone calls, kraut-drama, and grading go away.

That said, I’ma go sleep under my study carrel at the library and hope that nobody from the custodial staff comes along and accidentally runs a swiffer into my face. It’s been a long week.

“14-metre white neon installation by artist Martin Creed. A site-specific work applied to the pediment of the Orphan’s Asylum, East London, built in 1826: a derelict fragment of a once much larger building. Known as ‘the portico project,’ the installation was initiated and curated by Inrid Swenson at The Pier Trust. Intended as a temporary installation between March and June 1999, its run was extended another six months due to public affection and support.”
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Reno HS track on Tuesday night after long academic slog during the day, including taking notes for three hours about Pohatan-British relations during the first third of the seventeenth century. Am gradually developing carpal tunnel syndrome, along with a host of other physical/mental ailments, both real and imagined. I’ve been trying to figure out which writer’s imagination /book my current reality most resembles, and right now it’s a strange mixture of Hubert Selby Jr., Mr. Holland’s Opus-gone-horribly-awry, Ken Kesey, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and Beckett’s “What Where.”

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 6 x 2 mile repeats. No.

Total Mileage to Date: 495.

Days remaining to Denver: 30.

ps. whoever put a burned copy of brooke waggoner’s ep, fresh pair of eyes, in my TA mailbox this morning, with a note attached reading “hey cameron! I would like to live in your iTunes! heart, the CD”–you, whoever, you are (and i’m hoping you’re scarlett johansson), i’m officially your he-slave. for life. even if prof. mardock is right and you’re an undergraduate stalker and you want to turn me into your porcelain doll using a bathtub full of bleach. i’d almost be ok with that after listening to this once. i mean, just peep the lyrics to “So-So”:

“Oh, why here it’s so-so
but it is no, no Colorado
I miss my home and the cocoa
I wanna go home...

He helped me unload my piano
And then I played him oh a favorite concerto
He yelled profundo while I played allegro
And then he tip-tap-toed through my accelerando.”