Client: Sketch
Art/design: Martin Creed
Curator: Victoria Brooks
Size: 144 sq m
Completion time: 12 months
Photography: Gareth Gardner
However highly they value their own work, few interior designers or architects would describe what they do for a living as art. Design, it is often held, fulfils a function, while art should exist for its own sake. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, ‘All art is quite useless’.
So can a fully functioning restaurant interior – essentially a collection of chairs, tables, cutlery, lighting and decoration – be art? The answer, according to artist Martin Creed, is yes. A new work by the Turner Prize winner has turned a dining room at London restaurant Sketch into a functioning restaurant-cum-art installation in which everything, from the zigzag marble floor to the cutlery, plays a unique part.
Founded in 2002 by restaurateurs Mourad Mazouz and Pierre Gagnaire, Sketch has always had an artistic side and has hosted regular exhibitions of moving image art, including shows by Carsten Nicolai, John Baldessari and Jonas. As a celebration of the restaurant’s 10th anniversary, the owners decided to refurbish its Gallery dining room and, this being Sketch, they decided to ask an artist. Creed’s project is the first of a planned long-term programme of artist-designed restaurants for the venue, though Victoria Brooks, the curator of the project, is tight-lipped about who will follow him.
Creed, whose past work includes the Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227, an empty room in which the lights are periodically switched on and off, is the perfect choice for a project of this kind. He works across media, including painting, installation and performance, meaning he is just as comfortable using found objects such as chairs and tables as creating original paintings.
‘About four years ago we started thinking about which artists we’d like to work with, and Martin’s name kept coming up because he works so playfully with public space and deals with non-gallery, social spaces in his work,’ says Brooks. At Sketch, Creed has made this diversity a central part of the work. The floor, for example, contains no less than 96 kinds of marble (because he ‘couldn’t decide which one I liked best’), and all the furniture and tableware – every chair, table, light, glass and plate – has been painstakingly selected so that no single item is duplicated. Even your knife and fork will be from different sets.
The project began with Work No. 1347, the zigzag marble floor, but Creed soon became interested in the entire space, painting each wall with its own pattern including a giant red cross and a pattern of yellow diamonds. Eighteen existing paintings by the artist, including his 2011 series of four canvasses Work No. 1100, also adorn the walls. But it is Work No. 1343, comprising more than a thousand different items of furniture, cutlery, glassware, lamps, chairs and tables, that is most beguiling. ‘It’s about Martin wanting to have the whole world in the space – to have every extreme, from things you might remember from your gran’s house when you were little to really high-end design,’ says Brooks. You are just as likely to find yourself sitting on a Philippe Starck Kartell Masters Chair as a second-hand sofa or old school chair.
Sourcing so many unique items was by far the greatest challenge Brooks and her team faced in curating the work. ‘We sourced the items everywhere from flea markets to high-end design showrooms,’ says Brooks, ‘and we would send through huge lists of what we were buying to Martin for approval. Obviously it was difficult to avoid doubling up on items, but we also had to make sure there was a balance of high end and high street, and new and second-hand.’
Given the sheer variety of colours and materials, it’s surprising how coherent the space feels. Choosing mismatching glasses and chairs is nothing new in a restaurant interior, but the fact that every single item is unique has the paradoxical effect of making nothing seem out of place.
As Brooks says, Creed’s treatment of the room also works on the level of interior design. ‘I think it works as a design treatment, but if you want to spend a bit more time thinking about it then I think it will surprise you and make you think more deeply about what you’re seeing,’ she says. ‘Objects make you behave in different ways, and so if you get a different knife put in your hand it’s a different weight and that makes you behave differently.’
To Creed, making artwork for a restaurant is apparently no different from making work in a gallery. ‘I think the idea that everywhere is special relates to the way I like doing work in all sorts of different spaces,’ he has said of the project, ‘whether it’s in the toilets or in the Tate. One isn’t better than the other. Just because something is in the Tate doesn’t mean it’s good.’
