4 stars 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 eighteen 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 sound-tracked the Fruitmarket lift’s rise and fall, Love To You is a bumpy thirty-seven minute and nine second 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 garage-band submission, ‘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. The List, June 2012 ends
Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
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