Martin Creed - Love to You
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Bell-ringing Turner Prize winner thrashes out 18 miniatures of love and hate mixing minimalism, messthetics and brattish cartoon petulance
This article is from 2012.
It’s de rigeur for Turner Prize winners to play in bands these days, and anyone familiar with Martin Creed’s oeuvre from his 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival show at the Fruitmarket Gallery and accompanying live song-and-dance routine at the Traverse will know what to expect from this most calculated of borderline autistic, OCD auteurs.
To whit, in this pre-Olympic run-up to orchestrating all the bells in the country to ring out for three minutes, Creed thrashes out 18 miniatures of love and hate that fuse the desperate yearning of playwright Sarah Kane and the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca with the DIY messthetics of Swell Maps and the brattish cartoon petulance of Jilted John.
Bookended by ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, which soundtracked the Fruitmarket lift’s rise and fall, ‘Love To You’ is a bumpy, 37-minute ride through the confessional ups and downs of fatal attraction, obsession, rejection, frustration and apparent acceptance. If ‘1234’ and ‘Fuck Off’ strip the concept of a love song to its bare bones and machine-gun it into Billy Childish-style garagebandsubmission, ‘I Can’t Move’ and the title track are prom-night paeans to Creed’s object of desire, girly harmonies and all on an insistently honest heart-to heart in which opposites attract in not-so-perfect symmetry.
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