Martin Creed, the artist who ”doesn’t make art” because the world is already too cluttered with the stuff, won the Turner Prize on Sunday and immediately set the glitterati guessing.
Having made his name by crumpling bits of paper, would this 33-year-old son of Yorkshire now scrunch up the cheque? (For the record, the cheque went smoothly into the breast pocket of his Crombie coat and stayed there.)
Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off, an empty room in which the lights do just that, is the most minimal work ever to win the £20 000 prize, so minimal in fact that many of those who have seen it were unaware it was anything more than dodgy wiring.
But the judges, who included the Tate supremo Sir Nicholas Serota, loved it for its daring and for driving some traditionalists to apoplexy. On Sunday night a group of Stuckists — angry at the way painters have been sidelined by the prize — rose to the bait and gathered outside flashing their torches on and off in protest.
Fittingly, it was the pop star Madonna, the queen of three-minute culture, who was on hand at Tate Britain to present the prize to Creed, who has his own band Owada — a punk outfit whose numbers like Nothing can last a whole five seconds.
In true superstar style, she upstaged him, giving Channel 4, which was broadcasting the ceremony live, kittens by declaring, ”I want to support any artist who not only has something to say but the balls to say it … At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right on motherfuckers!” The man with his finger on the bleep did not get there in time.
Creed — warned by the singer that your ”20 grand won’t go far in this city” — responded to chants of ”switch off the lights” with a typically minimal ”thank you”.
The prize, the most prestigious bauble in the art world, is a virtual passport to the riches and recognition Creed claims he ”can’t be bothered with”.
His brand of cheap and cheeky DIY art — which as well as crumpling pieces of paper also extends to sticking bits of Blu-Tack to gallery walls — has made him a hero to many art students, who admire his lack of pretension and the questions he poses about what art is.
He is also not worried about how easy it is to ape him. ”It’s true, anyone can do it … It’s just I’m better than anyone else at it.”
The judges clearly thought so too, ”unanimously” awarding him the prize, which has shot artists like Damien Hirst to stardom, after five hours of deliberations. In a brief statement, they said they ”admired his audacity in presenting a single work in the exhibition and noted its strength, rigour, wit and sensitivity to the site. Coming out of the tradition of minimal and conceptual art, his work is engaging, wide-ranging and fresh.”
Born in Wakefield of Quaker parents, but brought up in Scotland, he now lives on the remote Mediterranean island of Alicudi, the furthest of the volcanic Aeolian archipelago from the Sicilian mainland, where donkeys are the chief form of transport out of season. It is not thought that the island’s haphazard electricity supply was an inspiration for his prize-winning piece.
Creed — long admired by Serota — was shortlisted for a series of exhibitions including Martin Creed Works at the Southampton City Art Gallery and Art Now at Tate Britain, where his neon sign The whole world + the work = the whole world was emblazoned over its neo-classical entrance. So popular was a second of his temporary neon signs — Everything is going to be alright — on an arch in Clapton, east London, that local people campaigned to keep it. Another — Don’t Worry — hit a chord with patients at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital.
Creed, who has no studio, is a believer in the power of mystery and dislikes trying to explain his work. ”I try every time to make something afresh as if I’d never made anything before, from zero, from the point at which nothing has been made.”
Trained at the Slade School of Art, he is fascinated by the idea of nothingness and creating simple yet direct works, as befits his Quaker upbringing. ”I feel I’ve been talking too much about the work because sometimes I hear myself saying things I’ve said before and I don’t like that.”
Despite the hullabaloo over The Lights Going On and Off, Creed was not the early favourite. Many felt photographer Richard Billingham was overdue for the prize. The film-maker Isaac Julien made the early running with his two shorts The Long Road to Mazatlan and Vagabondia. The insiders’ bet, however, was Mike Nelson and his grandly titled The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent, a slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker for a series of lovingly recreated storerooms and subterranean cubby holes.