I fell in love with a conceptual artist, and it was totally meaningless - interview with Miriam Elia

I fell in love with a conceptual artist, and it was totally meaningless - interview with Miriam Elia

01 December, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys discusses laughter, conceptualism and dating Martin Creed with artist and comedian Miriam Elia.

“I might warn you, I can contradict myself.” What a brilliant way to kick off an interview! I'm in the wood-panelled blandeur of a generic Islington pub, talking to live-wire comedian/artist/writer Miriam Elia. Or rather, she's talking rings around me – flitting from subject to subject and back, picking up snippets of what I say and running them round in increasingly baffling/enlightening circles. We discuss all manner of things – from conceptual art to Big Brother, via childhood, religion, Dadaism, Father Ted, Quentin Blake and the Arts Council's definition of art. And laughing! What a laugh she has – from giggle to shriek to cackle to barely suppressed whoop. It's an impressive repertoire.

But to the reason we're here: Miriam has a potentially headline-grabbing three-day solo show this December at the Nave, just up the road in Islington. The exhibition – curated by the brilliant Sarah Maple – revisits the breakdown of Miriam's relationship with equally loved and loathed conceptual artist Martin Creed, who, you may recall, won the Turner Prize back in 2001 for an empty room in which the lights went on and off every now and again.

Entitled, in full, I fell in love with a conceptual artist, and it was totally meaningless, the show's centrepiece is a lightbox with a text piece written in the style of those 'real life' confessionals in women's weekly magazines, in which Miriam completely skewers both Creed's work and the man himself. It's a genuinely hilarious and quite brilliant piercing of the pompous nonsense that surrounds much conceptual art. But, Miriam insists, despite initial appearances, she continues to admire both Creed  (“he's bonkers, but he's amazing”) and his work. 

“Obviously I deeply respect him,” she says, “because he changed me completely.” But... “Well, there's also another part of me that's like, 'What are you doing?!' 'What the fuck is going on here?' 'I need to challenge this.' 'I need to rip the piss out of this,'” She laughs loudly. “Because I think there's something wrong. My problem with Martin is that what started off as a humorous conceptual joke, that was more on a par with Reeves and Mortimer or Duchamp, became part of this psychotherapy culture of total introversion.”

This is the heart of Miriam's view on contemporary art, and culture more generally: a lamentation of the cult of the personality which she traces back to the Romantics (“rich kids that take crack”) and the state we have today, whereby the artist (in the form of biography, back-story, waffling press-release, emotional psychobabble) is more important than the work.

As you'd expect from a comedian though, she's quick to see the irony. Because the very work that explores this concept is in the form of an intensely autobiographical confessional. “The paradox,” she explains, “was that I had to go through that same process myself, but I'm laughing at it too.”

So your work also involved a lot of intense emotions? “Yeah! God yeah!” Miriam laughs. “It's really, like, raaaaaaaargh! Haha ha.” This doesn't really come across in writing, but Miriam later explains what she means. Her relationship with Creed should be understood in relation to her parents' overwhelming hatred for conceptual art. So by falling in love with him, as she puts it, “suddenly everything was questioned, including the artistic values of my parents – and their own hatred, and their own prejudice, and their all, like, 'this is just a stupid joke'. So I created this piece of work and I showed my mum, and she was like, 'Well there you go Miriam, you got him! The BASTARD!'”

Manic cackle...

“And it sort of does that on one level,” I suggest.

“Of course it does! I'm not going to deny that – I own him, man! It's like Pan Am!”

I literally have no idea what she means by Pan Am.

Anyway, this response of the parents touches on one of the most interesting aspects of Miriam's work – the relationship between comedy and art. Rejected by the Arts Council (they don't fund 'comedy' apparently) and finding it increasingly difficult to be accepted by the comedy world, Miriam finds herself navigating a sort of fine line between the two. “Martin once said to me,” she says, “that the difference between your work and mine is that you have to make people laugh, and I have to make people think.”

But her work, like that of Sarah Maple's incidentally, does both. And in doing so it exposes the fact (that we all knew) that to some extent at least conceptual art is a hollow joke, and its professed seriousness is simply an attempt to justify both its pomposity and its strange ideas around ownership. Miriam's work seeks to put this hierarchy into question. “Why is this joke worth £3.2 million,” she asks, “and this one is in Jongleurs on a Saturday night?”

Art, therefore, despite protestations to the contrary – we both laugh at po-faced artist statements that contain phrases like “my work contains an element of humour” – is fundamentally afraid of its own potentially laughable, non-serious status. It is, as Miriam, points out, “sort of empty” and frequently afraid that we might all suddenly realise this. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing: “It's empty, but full of meaning...” – meaning that comes, for Miriam at least, from what the viewer brings to the viewing experience.

So will the worlds of comedy and art ever embrace each other? “At the moment you have one industry parodying the other, and the other is parodying it back,” she says. Between these two mirrors is a sort of void, a void occupied by work like 'I fell in love with a conceptual artist...' Or as Miriam puts it: “A projection onto nothingness is kind of at the centre.”

But then she whoops with laughter again: “the work, the coverage, the responses – it's all just more words about nothing, isn't it?” Just a load of empty words, and here's a few hundred more, right here.


I fell in love with a conceptual artist, and it was totally meaningless. is at The Nave from 9th to 11th December 2011.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Tom Jeffreys