Martin Creed, what's the point of it?

Years ago, I discovered Creed at Southampton Art Gallery: he filled one room with stuff from the museum warehouse, another with balloons (by the time I got there largely deflated) and there were scrunched up bits of paper. The photos in the catalogue made it all look beautiful. On day release from a nineteenth-century theme park I found it bracing.

His big show at the Hayward felt like a series of little challenges: What do you make of this then? Does this mean anything to you? Does this do anything to you? What's the point of it? An art of non-commital, perhaps. In the Martin Creed A-Z leaflet we learn 'what something might mean to someone is unknown' (Ambiguity), 'I don't believe in conceptual art. I don't know what it is' (Conceptual art: but then, is this just another concept?), 'I find it difficult to make judgements, to decide that one thing is more important than the other. So what I try and do is to choose without having to make decisions' (Decisions).

Is there any positive principle at work in  all this evasiveness? The artist does think that art is primarily and essentially a vehicle for the conveyance of feeling, which is reassuringly traditional. My overall sensation was initially of a kind of enervating cleverness, repetition (in which he finds 'comfort and reliability') and a love of surfaces and systems - but then I realised this felt need for order and pattern is something I could respond to. It's why I can't get enough of Glass, Reich, Nyman I suppose.  What else is at work in the functionless brick wall, the whole wall decorations, the pile of boxes and other readymades? A ghost of the classical order, space and simplicity which mediated modernity eschews? I liked, in a liquid ephemeral way, the car, the film of the two dogs, the series of colour prints. I felt sorry for the attendant having to bash away at the piano. There's always the feeling that there's a a club of clever people who 'get it' while you don't. But then I thought perhaps the key is to be less rather than more intellectual. Some of the comments by Creed are winningly and affectingly simple: 'everything that everyone does is always an expression. Whether you're answering a phone in a call centre or making a piece of sculpture which is going to be exhibited in an art gallery, it's creative. People express themselves in everything they do' (Expressionism). Amen. Maybe. Doesn't that extinguish something richer in the idea of 'creative'? Mould a piece of blu-tack and stick it on the wall. Just for the fun and the mystery of it. Go on. That's the spirit (Spiritual).