Artist Martin Creed has always used music and we are very excited to host him playing at Cafe Oto soon. Here’s a couple of key bits from excellent interview where he discusses art and music:

Music has a key place in your practice. You just released the single “Thinking/Not Thinking” and you’ve been with your band since the mid-90s.

The band used to be called Owada, but then I stopped and started to do things on my own, although I still work with the same bass player so the band is very similar. The drummer has just changed over the years.

Have you always felt music was part of your work as an artist?

I’ve always thought it was the same thing. I started doing music exactly because of a problem I saw in the visual works I was making — that problem being that with visual works, what people see is the bit leftover at the end, after you’ve finished working. The work is like the sediment at the bottom of the glass, not like drinking the wine. Whereas when you are listening to a piece of music, you are listening to it being made. I thought that music offered a possibility to do something closer to what I was trying to do with the sculptures.

When you collaborate with people, like you did with a ballet company in 2009, do you set up rules?

I don’t really collaborate with people in that sense. I have, in the past, tried things like writing a song with someone else and I’ve got into terrible trouble with myself about it. I prefer to try to do things myself, and then if it’s shit, it’s my shit. I’d rather die by my own sword. But on the other hand, I really like working with people, like musicians, dancers, and the people helping me paint. And everyone affects the work. It’s the same with curators, galleries, museum directors, and collectors. If they commission a work, that might give you the confidence to make a work that you wouldn’t have otherwise made. In private, I might like to think that I’m sort of an independent free-thinker that does what he wants, but I think I’m more swimming around in a sea full of other people who are pushing and pulling me — and that helps me just as much as it might hinder me.

In his article “Feel Good,” published in Catalogue magazine, David Barrett argues that you injected a continental joie de vivre into conceptual art. Do you agree with his definition?

That sounds very nice to me. But I would prefer to be called an expressionist than a conceptual artist. That would be a more accurate description.

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