Until 16th November London’s Tate Gallery will not be simply a museum, but also an original racing circuit put on by English artist Martin Creed. It is not a photographic exhibition nor a film production, and it does not involve manikins or robots in mimic fixity, but rather men in flesh and bone, from every walk of life, recruited by means of a public notice to  sprint at regular intervals and whisk away through the restrained corridors of the London museum. Indeed, the prestigious “track”, every thirty seconds, is beaten by about fifty hundred-metre sprinters running wildly along the 90 metres of perimeter of the Duveen Galleries. Thus, during the spectators’ ecstasy, between a landscape by Turner and the Preraffaellites’ elegance, an actual speed race takes place.
The installation in motion entitled ”Work N. 850”, at first impact certainly has the intent to celebrate the power and aesthetic beauty of the body in motion, cult of physicality and rhythm, to stress how even sport has its artistic valence, as confirmed by the curators of the work Katharine Stout and Sophie O’Brien.
A more thorough analysis, which goes beyond the veil of appearance, reveals how Work N.850 implies a less trivial message in which the star of English art brings into question the cultural system, now routed into the vision of museum visits as a peaceful pause of meditation and a smooth break from our frantic lives. Why not shake up a bit this system by introducing some orderly and rhythmic disorder, with athletes that have to sprint as if suddenly their lives depended on it?
It is not the first time that Creed has put on a race in unusual contexts, achieving a result that is a synthesis of rigour and humour: back in 2005, at the Trussardi Foundation a man had been hired to run around the museum until he was worn out; in 2007, he had induced the collaborators of the Centre for Curatorial Studies in New York to sprint every 10 minutes racing through the rooms of the centre.
Creed explains the origin of such a work: “The idea developed from a visit to the catacombs of the Capuchins in Palermo. We arrived very late, it was almost closing time and we only had five minutes to see that place. So I had to go round almost running. I remember that my friends and I had to run as fast as we could desperately looking to the right and to the left at all those lifeless bodies hanging from the walls in their best clothes, trying to seize all the good aspects of that vision. After all, I found out in that moment that it was a nice way to visit the crypt. A delirious race makes you enjoy in an alternative way a visit to the museum. It is not necessary to stop too long in front of the displayed works, the important thing is to find the right elective affinity with the works that inspire you most. Besides, it leaves you time for other things”.  And the artist, who leads a busy life travelling between London and the Aeolian Islands, where he works, continues: “I like running. I like to see people running. Running represents the opposite of staying still. If you think of death as a situation of total immobility and of movement as a sign of life, then running as fast as you can is the greatest sign of life. Therefore, running fast is the opposite of death. It is an example of vitality”.
The irreverent Creed was consecrated promise of English art in 2001, when he won the Turner Prize with a work entitled “Work N.227, The lights going on and off”  where a lamp lit up and went off with intermittence. His works, entitled with numerical figures where number 1 has never existed for non-hierarchy, are feelings, thoughts, wishes, impulses, rhythms translated with the use of an everyday language, a trivial lexicon, of apparent communicative immediacy but which actually encloses a subtle irony and a complex analysis of contemporaneity. 
And now, with regard to the scathing artist’s last invention, it comes natural to wonder what will be, at the end, the award to be won by the speedy athletes of this unusual race. Well, besides a remuneration of 10 pounds per hour and obviously a more sculptured body, a visit of the Tate Gallery obviously in record times. (translated by Giorgina Arcuri)