Work No. 850

British-based conceptual artist Martin Creed produced a work for the Tate Britain in 2008 called Work No. 850. The work consists of athletes running through the gallery at timed intervals. Of his work, Martin Creed says:

Running fast is like the exact opposite of death. It’s an example of aliveness.

I think there’s nothing more minimal than impermanent, temporal work that discards the material, and has no physical consequences on the space where it is installed. And what a better medium to achieve this than performance art?

  1. Maarten
    07.09.10 16:43

    I think this is a very original idea, but I’d be afraid to consider ‘minimal’ exchangeable or closely related with ‘impermanence’.

  2. Adrian
    07.09.10 23:47

    Hi Maarten,

    I agree. Impermanence is not synonymous with minimalism, but I think it can be part of it. Performance art has the potential to be minimalist, but it is true that it can also be highly involved. I think a lot of Martin Creed’s work is minimalist, including his Turner prize work, which involved clearing the gallery and having the lights turn off and on over 5 second intervals. I think he has a good understanding of minimalism, even though we all consider him a conceptual artist.

    My definition of minimalism is close to John Pawson’s:

    “The minimum could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction. This is the quality that an object has when every component, every detail, and every junction has been reduced or condensed to the essentials. It is the result of the omission of the inessentials.”

    This is why I think the Reductive Art genre is closely tied to minimalism, because at the centre of both is the principle to reduce and simplify. However, my biggest problem with minimalism is that it can be looked at as a philosophy, in which case everything can be considered minimalist, as long as it’s reduced to essentials, or it can just mean that something has to pertain to a minimalist aesthetic to be considered minimalist. To me, a work of art has to be both for me to consider it minimalist.

    With this work, most of the gallery is empty, and the performers are doing a single action. It is not involved or dramatized, but raw and honest. So I would say the action is minimalist, and the execution of it on a whole is as well.