Distance comes our way

The era is long gone when public art museums dominated the presentation of world art to us in NZ. There are now many other players competing in this game. Gow Langsford Gallery, as just one example, has a long history of showing significant artists in considerable depth over years. We thought of this commitment yesterday as we waded through hundreds of white balloons in the Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space. Although these balloons were large and white, it is a version of the memorable pink balloon Work number 329 exhibited at Michael Lett on K-Road way back in 2004. 

Indeed the reason we were so familiar with most of the works in Creed’s survey exhibition The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city (the famous venue that first showed Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in 1913) was because he has shown regularly in New Zealand. We even had the opportunity to talk with Martin Creed once when he was in Christchurch to make an installation for Scape in 2006. As we have related before (but hopefully so long ago that no one will remember) we had just purchased his Work number 312: a lamp going on and off. All you receive when you purchase Work 312 is a certificate giving you the right to buy a lamp and have it turn on and off, and when we met Martin we had still to buy a lamp to do the job. We asked him if he’d be interested in having a photograph of our lamp once we had selected it. His reply, ‘that’s very kind of you, but I’m really only interested in the light going on and off.’ Genius.

Images: Martin Creed piece Work number 2497: Half the air in a given space at the Park Avenue Armory in New York city