Work 850 / Martin Creed/ Tate Britain 2008

The Duveen space in Tate Britain is empty. A heavy stone, neo-classical atrium. The word 'empty' is used in the sloppiest sense, no space is empty. This space is full of connotations, histories, political and social associations, memories of what has happened there before and what might happen in the future. But it is empty of artworks, no sculptures, no paintings, no installations… or so I think.

There is a family of five. Perhaps tourists. They walk casually as though through a piazza, maps in hand. Sound spills into the space from adjacent rooms. I am sat near a pillar towards the south end of the space. I read the information panel about Martin Creed’s new piece Work 850. The work is partly sponsored by Puma, the sportswear manufacturer.

A runner appears round the corner. Explosively cutting through the space. He enters my line of vision of life-size then gets smaller and smaller but never invisible. His shrinking image is accompanied by the rhythm of his feet, starting loud and becoming ever more quiet until inaudible. The runner turns a corner at the end of the space and disappears out of sight. The effect is incredibly cinematic. Statically observing this rapidly moving body is like a quick but steady ‘zoom-out’ shot.

Another runner. The same carving through the space. A palpable expulsion of physical energy. Then another. Eventually I recognize the runner I first saw. They are on a loop. So the notion of an empty space is transformed. The gaps between the runners in the space become a ‘charged negative’. The waiting punctuated by moments of concentrated and directed action. The in-between times do not feel like a nothingness, the inactivity has been filled with expectation, as tightly choreographed as the runners’ action… An equivalent to the drawing exercise in which you sketch the space surrounding space an object, everything but the object, and in doing so reveal it by the shape of its absence.

The sparseness of the scene encourages a greater focused scrutiny of other details. Great attention is paid to the runners: their running style, who has the biggest thighs, the tightest Lycra, their varying combinations of sportswear, who’s running out of breath. The runners can be seen anticipating the erratic movements of the public – there are no cordons demarcating ‘no walk or no run zones’. Some are oblivious, allowing the work to ‘run through them’, or be overtaken, unaware they themselves were any sort of obstruction. Others watch leaning against a wall. Occasionally you hear a runner make a sharp intake of breath. The compact minimalism lies not only in the visual sparseness; but the activity itself, running: the most elemental of physical expression. This is reinforced by the linearity of the work, the runners taking the same programmed course, parallel to the walls, following the schema laid out by the architecture as much as the dictates of the artist.

To lock your gaze on a runner is to simultaneously become hyper-aware of the construction of the space, how it orchestrates your eye through its symmetry and calculatedly draws attention to certain decorative features by aligning itself with the effects of perspective. The rows of squares that pattern the floor (seven per row) are noticed for the first time. I note the lighting and the colours. Aside from the runners and the architecture, the most consistent visual motif is the invigilators; dark-berry-red shirts, black trousers, white ID cards, either on hip or round nick, either still or pacing within a particular zone. They are spot-lit not just by their uniformity but by the contrasting (but equally consistent) tempo of their movement. All has become like music.

Observing the runs, a game of ‘spot the differences’ emerges in me; little similarities are tracked, deviations are counted, all the while metaphors are searched for. While watching I recall a buried memory: I had taken my youngest brother, four years old at the time, to the park, to ride his scooter. We stopped at a path, midway up a hill. He excitedly ran further up the slope to gain momentum, while I sat on a bench and watched. He got on the scooter, full of excitement and glee, then whizzed down, past me, past other pedestrians and couples and dog walkers, I could hear him wailing with excitement, until he was reduced to a dot, and eventually out of sight. It was a happy moment. As he ran up the hill becoming present again – smiling so much, I was moved to tears. Perhaps a delayed reaction to his temporary disappearance. I thought of his childhood rushing by, of the incredible difficulty if not impossibility of retaining moments of time, how (for me) his disappearance did not just prefigure aging, but loss and ultimately death.