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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rachel Wells
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This paper argues that Tate’s exhibition schedule in 2008 prompted a comparison between the work of Santiago Sierra and that of Martin Creed, and that this comparison yields a productive reading of both artists’ oeuvres. Despite the ostensible disparity between the artists’ concerns – Sierra’s political engagement and presentation of inequality contrasting with Creed’s humour and interest in the barely-existent – nevertheless there are striking formal similarities between their work. This has led to critical reaction to each referring to the same text, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in order to celebrate oppositional tendencies of heavy seriousness and lightweight humour. I trace this motif of weight in Sierra’s work, and lightness in Creed’s, and through it argue that both artists’ work should be read in terms of their interest in the legacies of Minimalism and Institutional Critique in conjunction with issues of responsibility and guilt. I suggest that by comparing Sierra and Creed’s work, the subtleties of their attitudes towards the relationship between ignorance and responsibility become evident: while Sierra’s work refutes his viewers’ use of ignorance as an escape from culpability within a socio-economic setting, Creed’s accepts his own existential uncertainty as a means of coping with artistic responsibility.
Author(s): Wells R
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Unpublished
Conference Name: History of Art Ashmolean Research Seminar Series, University of Oxford.
Year of Conference: 2009
Series Editor(s): Series organised by Dr Alastair Wright (History of Art, University of Oxford) and Dr Catherine Whistler (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
