It’s a bit early in the morning to watch a woman awkwardly attempting to shit on the floor. The special occasion is “Work No. 660,” a five-minute film by the artist Martin Creed. It showcases an unnamed participant squatting in an all-white studio, clearly embarrassed at the task she has been assigned. It’s one of the many viscerally disturbing inclusions in “The Back Door,” a survey on view at the Park Avenue Armory through August 7. The paltry scatological output of ”660” is joined by other moments from the Creedian canon alternating among the prurient, the absurd, and the literally sick-making. For one film, the artist trains his lens on a woman’s nipple, rendering it suddenly strange, a fleshy terrain of whorls and bumps. In another, we see a man from behind, wearing nothing but an unfortunate lower-back tattoo; Creed zooms the camera in on his hairy ass crack over and over again. (Consider it a reboot of Yoko Ono’s ode to butts from the ‘60s). Other short videos in the artist’s oeuvre tackle forced puking, slow-motion violence set against floral arrangements, and the inanity of national boundaries (“Border control,” he sings over footage of various customs and immigration checkpoints. “Border con. A bore.”)Creed is known as an eccentric. It’s a pose he has eagerly cultivated, in that his public persona — displayed during artist talks, for instance, or in interviews with magazines — is essentially performative. During the press preview for “The Back Door,” he winced and stammered and contorted his lanky frame into uncomfortable postures, like an eight-year-old in desperate need of a piss. He’s prone to talking about art in very broad, democratic terms (unlike sports, he assures us, it doesn’t have an end goal) and sweeping generalizations (“Life is very stupid”). Because of all this, as exhibition co-curator Tom Eccles noted, Creed is often wrongly saddled with a reputation for making art that is “dumb.”Clearly, though, it takes a certain kind of genius to finagle a body of work this oddly cohesive, strange, thrilling, and often frustrating. “The Back Door” shows a wide swath of Creed’s catalog (everything is titled by number). He’s the sort of artist best experienced in a survey context, since individual works seen on their lonesome — sheets of crumpled paper, lights switched on and off, et cetera — can be underwhelming, if not aggressively bland, to the uninitiated. His painting output is anti-virtuosic, ranging from amateur-hour portraits to clunky, monochromatic ziggurat shapes against white grounds. He records and performs music, either solo or with a band, that is often maddeningly repetitive — the phrase “fuck off” repeated, recycled, rehashed — or uncomfortably sentimental. (During the preview he trotted out a new song about being a young boy at night, worried about where your mom is. It’s not hard to imagine Creed as a kind of bizarro Raffi for 30-something man-children, and I mean that as a compliment, with myself very much included.) Creed also makes films and stages installations. In “The Back Door” there are sculptures that mainly delight in organizing and stacking various examples of similar stuff, like chairs or empty electronics boxes. And he does readymades (a series of cactuses set on a ledge); kinetic work (a player piano that just opens and slams shut its own top; a tall black curtain that opens and closes, endlessly); wall paintings (some black diagonal slashings, like cartoonish Daniel Burens, framing the Armory’s fusty canvases); and crowd pleasers (a room filled with giant white balloons that you can navigate, achieving a sort of weird, womb-like peace as it gradually absorbs you). Given his willingness to be earnest, his restlessness, his painterly dilettantism, and his frequent reliance on music, Creed would likely get along just fine with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Although he can come across as almost pathologically ill at ease and underprepared, the artist is clearly not lacking in confidence. The Armory’s largest space is its drill hall, which actually earns the overused adjective cavernous. Instead of cluttering it with whimsies, Creed has installed a single huge projection of a new work: a music-video-slick film that primarily shows people opening their mouths to reveal various undefined junk inside. Intermittently, the film stops, and the hall is left completely dark. A loading door at the back of the room cranks open, briefly revealing a rectangular view of Lexington Avenue’s urban bustle. It’s a literalized slice of life, a view of the street as a readymade in its own right. Simple? You better believe it. But dumb? Not quite. Creed once again proves himself one of our finest, and wisest, idiots.
↧