Martin Creed: Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space
Orange County Museum of Art
Newport Beach, CA
By Chris Hoff
Recently I was listening to the Art Angle podcast interview of Joshua Citarella, facilitator of the burgeoning online platform Do Not Research. In this wide-ranging conversation Citarella forecasts a total atomization of the art world where everything resembles Tik Tok and predicts the fall of institutions and museums. He argues that this fall of institutions will be brought about by the move to produce more and more immersive content for the various social media platforms. He calls it the Museum of Ice Creamification of programming, programming absent of discourse mediation and curation. If you want a sneak peek of what I imagine Citarella is referencing and what this social media friendly content might look like, Martin Creed’s Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space, now on view at the Orange County Museum of Art is a solid example and captures all of Citarella’s argument nicely.
Made up of hundreds of large yellow balloons tucked away and staked on top of each other in a back hallway and corner of the museum, Creed’s Half the air in a given space is described as an inversion of art and space, the balloons representing the intangible, half the air in the space. The exhibit invites you to move and wander through the piles of balloons with no real destination. Most participants stop often to take selfies and pics of friends peering from behind a wall of balloons. The wall text declares that this work explores the relationship between sculpture and architecture, which means it doesn’t really know what it does. I’ve always entered this sort of ‘fun’ or immersive art, art that that engages with playful, imaginative, and often humorous approaches with curiosity. When these work, which is very rare, they can be enchanting (think Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project). More often though, these works fail and come off as just another Instagram moment at the Museum of Ice Cream, as Citarella predicts. Creed’s piece is reminiscent of any ball pit in any amusement park, USA. Judging by the number of children playing in the space, it probably contains as many germs as any ball pit in any amusement park.
Currently only located in a side hallway and corner of OCMA. I left wondering how much longer until these sorts of exhibits eventually creep into the main galleries.
