Process art as an aesthetic alternative: Martin Creed’s Glasgow connection

The present chapter examines Creed’s early career, particularly the artistic connection to his hometown as well as his peculiar conception of creativeness, for which Douglas Gordon emerges as an influential point of reference. This link to Glasgow has been widely overlooked by critics so far, who rather analyse Creed from a London-centred perspective. Hence, the principal aim of this chapter is to broaden the research scope and possibly detect some strains of early philosophical reasoning and artistic ontogenesis that gradually shaped Creed’s early production. My investigation covers roughly a decade from the late 1980s – Creed’s art school years in London – to the end of the century, shortly before his Turner Prize victory, and makes use of a variety of sources from this period, including exhibition catalogues and specialized magazines, reviews and interviews, a rich art-historical bibliography as well as artist papers. The aim is thus to track Creed’s career progress in relation to his Glasgow connections, and several of Creed’s works will be analysed in connection with his contemporaries, particularly his friend and 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon, as well as in relation to its aesthetic outcome and philosophical consequences. The analysis will draw a few conclusions on the philosophical and procedural reasons that led Creed and many of his Glaswegian peers to similar aesthetic solutions.