THE COLLECTION
Martin Creed (British, born 1968)
Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off
- Date:
- 2000
- Medium:
- Electrical timer (frequency five seconds on/five seconds off)
- Dimensions:
- Dimensions variable
- Credit Line:
- Fund for the Twenty-First Century
- MoMA Number:
- 968.2005
- Copyright:
- © 2013 Martin Creed
Out of Time: A Contemporary View
August 30, 2006–April 9, 2007
The content of this work is almost nothing: a gallery with bare walls in which the lights turn on and off in intervals of five seconds. This piece is based on a cycle of repetitive contradictions: each five-second phase is denied by the next. Creed controls the fundamental conditions ofvisibility within the gallery and redirects our attention to the walls that normally act as support and background for art objects. He treats the gallery as a medium to be molded, manipulating the existing lighting to create a new effect. Akin to John Cage's influential 1952 sound piece 4''33"—a four-minute, thirty-three-second composition of silence—Creed's witty, sensorial work subverts the normal spatial and temporal parameters of viewing experience.
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