Martin Firrell (born 4 April 1963)Creative Review, "One to Watch". London: Centaur Publishing, 2005, Vol. 25, Issue 1, p. 18. is a British public artist. Firrell is known for text-based public artworks on billboards around the world. He uses public art to campaign for greater social equality.
He is one of a trio of artists, with Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, notable for socially engaged public art practice where text is foundational and central to that practice.
His texts address LGBT+ equality, the women's movement, feminism and gender equality; and universal human rights. The artist's aim is "to make the world more humane".
Firrell's billboards often resemble advertising because he redeploys advertising's techniques to achieve artistic-activist ends. Firrell has made more artworks expressly for the billboard medium than any other living artist. This wholesale colonisation of advertising’s oldest and boldest format represents a shift in Fine Art's centre of gravity and makes Firrell a particularly apposite artist for the 21st century. His work has been summarised as "art as debate".
Early life and education
Firrell was born in Paris, France, unexpectedly, on the pavement outside 71 Champs-Élysées. He was educated in the UK, but left school unofficially at 14 because he "had no more use for it". He educated himself during his absence from school by walking and reading in the Norfolk countryside. He read early 20th-century literature and refers to the works of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, together with the French writer Marguerite Duras (with whom he shares his birthday and a high degree of political sympathy), as important influences on his later development.
A passage in Anaïs Nin's novel The Four Chambered Heart set Firrell on the path of socially engaged public works. The novel's protagonist concedes that literature fails to prepare us for, or guide us through, the calamities or challenges of life, and is therefore worthless. "My purpose is to campaign in some way for change, using my works as a medium for catalysing debate. If you can raise debate, eventually change will follow."
Firrell sets out to remedy Nin's "worthlessness" of words by using language to raise questions about society, relevant to the vast majority of people and freely available in public space.
Firrell trained originally as an advertising copywriter and draws on that experience to shape and place in public space slogans like Protest is liberty's ally.
Formative works Lucid Between Bouts of Sanity is an artist's manifesto written between 1995 and 1996 and distributed at the Literaturnoye Kafe (Saint Petersburg), Russia and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London UK.
The text is divided into four sections examining the reductive nature of action, the structural flaws inherent in language, the consequent difficulty of meaning anything accurately to anyone, and the possibility of using a constrained and reduced language to find a new expressive accuracy and power. Although brief, the manifesto is a meticulous, structured review of the expressive means available to any artist whose work is to be founded principally on language. "I felt it must be possible to describe the limits within which all language must operate and so designate a clearly defined space for my own experimentation."
Firrell turned cartwheels on the Pont des Arts in Paris on 4 April 1998. This early performance work was intended as an expression of the artist's desire to 'upkeel' the world. Cartwheel, Pont des Arts, Paris was the artist's first work conceived expressly for public space. It was photographed by the artist's confidante, concert pianist Yekaterina Lebedeva.
The first of Firrell's graphic works created for public space was a series of 14 postcards, 148mm x 104mm, printed on various stocks. 13 texts are presented where most postcards more usually show a picture, and one postcard carries the photographic image of the artist cartwheeling on the Pont des Arts. The postcard texts, presented on the 'picture' face of each card, were expected to take on a public life of their own as they passed through the postal system. Considered collectively, the postcards explore the possibility of being more deeply implicated in the lives of others or as the artist put it, 'I wanted to ask if it were possible to operate at a level deeper than friendship alone, to find interactions that challenged the conventions of mere sociability and offered new depths of value and meaning.'
In the early part of the 21st Century, Firrell experimented with fly-posting in London's Soho descriptions of love and its subsequent loss. These were the first artworks created by the artist in the poster format, the first to occupy space more usually associated with commercial messaging, and the first works intended as public art. The form and orientation of the posters mimics fly-posting favoured by the music industry. The texts are influenced by the work of French novelist Marguerite Duras. The incidents described are autobiographical. Firrell was appointed London Cultural Ambassador for the now defunct International Herald Tribune curating the newspaper's first London Arts Season in 2005, titled "Breathless…" after Jean-Luc Godard's nouvelle vague film of the same title.
1996-2001
First billboards
Celebrate Difference, was the first work made by the artist for display on a commercial digital billboard, and the first of the artist's works displayed by media owner Clear Channel UK (now Bauer Media Outdoor). The work appeared on one site, an early, experimental installation on the outside of 1 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7NA with a daily audience of 250,000 people. Celebrate Difference is a digital animation of b&w images of the artist, two drag queens embracing, and a glitter ball. Text panels punctuate the images calling for acceptance of, and engagement with, what is 'other'. Both the artist's interest in the subject matter and support from media owner Clear Channel/Bauer Media Outdoor have endured.
Never Fall For Someone with a Body To Diet For appeared on the same digital site, addressing in particular gay culture's emphasis on youth and physical perfection (the site was situated in the main tourist thoroughfare of London's Leicester Square adjacent to the LGBT+ district of Soho). The artwork suggests it is more rewarding to look beyond surface attributes and embrace the embodied, flawed, feeling totality of another human being.
The One Irreducible Truth About Humanity Is Diversity paraphrases the findings of the American researcher into human sexuality, Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey noted that difference in human sexual responses was the one universal constant. Variousness was the only thing that could be said, with any certainty, to apply to all human sexual experience. In paraphrasing Kinsey, the artist implies that ‘normality’ in the human being is variance, and societal pressure to conform to what is considered ‘normal’ is a socially-inflicted and needless hardship. The artwork's text is backed by strong vertical lines which both obscure and reveal the artist's letterforms. These uniform verticals evoke the rigid social structures that were questioned and partly dismantled by Kinsey's research.
2001-2005
Repurposed systems
Between 2003 and 2004, Firrell experimented with repurposing existing information systems. A Stronger Self was commissioned by Selfridges for the plasma screens recently installed throughout the London department store. Eleven short video sequences were screened continuously for six weeks from 1 February 2003. Texts explored the principles of self-possession, self-knowledge, and the relationship between self and other. Texts were combined with symbols of self including the artist's fingerprints and iris scans, images of Lord Krishna, Saraswati, lotus flowers, and cake. Early time-based works like this one were created using the now defunct Adobe Flash software, which raises a new set of challenges in relation to the restoration and conservation of works like this one and its contemporaries.
I Would Have Given Anything for Your Call was devised for the Samsung neon that once constituted a significant part of the advertising signs in Piccadilly Circus, London UK. The text, designed for the digital scroller above the Samsung neon logo, evokes the heightened receptiveness of new lovers to small joys or hurts.
Firrell repurposed the display monitor system at Liverpool Street station, London UK, in the same year. The standard security message was accompanied by an existential 'security message' about the burden of loneliness. It is not uncommon for railway stations to be regarded as anonymous spaces, teeming with people but simultaneously insulating people from one another. A Subterranean Sadness addresses this shared feeling of dissociation and the concomitant human desire for connection, not isolation.
Firrell reprogrammed the cash register system at Border's Books so that every Borders' till receipt carried a public art message about the societal importance of contemporary writing. In Paula, Michael and Bob, the added text conveys the idea that written culture is uniquely placed to reflect, and bring into awareness, the spirt of the times. Paula Yates came to prominence in the 1980s as co-presenter (with Jools Holland) of the Channel 4 pop music programme The Tube. Firrell's artwork was at once modest in ambition, requiring no additional resources for its execution, but broad in scope bringing many thousands of public art texts into circulation. Sufficient copies of the texts were distributed to qualify the artwork for the best-seller lists had it been a work of fiction rather than a freely distributed work of public art.
2003-2004
Projections
Firrell was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper in 2006 to propose an original work for the paper, responding to a contemporary news item. Firrell proposed a large-scale projection onto Parliament of the text, When the World's Run by Fools It's the Duty of Intelligence To Disobey as a comment on the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 - a piece of UK legislation that was well-intentioned but with serious consequences for free speech in its originally proposed form. The artwork published by The Guardian was an artist's impression but was mistaken by most readers for a realised artwork. Many commissions followed on the basis that Firrell, who had never created an outdoor projection at the time, was an expert in the medium. Firrell did not correct this impression, but went on to make large-scale digital projections for the Guards Chapel, Household Division of the British Army, the National Gallery in London, the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Tate Britain, and St Paul's Cathedral.
The Question Mark Inside was commissioned by Dean and Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral. It was the first large-scale public artwork in the cathedral's history. Firrell served as Public Artist in Residence 2007-8, marking the 300th anniversary of the topping-out of Sir Christopher Wren's architectural masterpiece in 2008.
The Question Mark Inside posed the simple question, 'What makes life meaningful and purposeful?' and invited responses from the public during the anniversary year. Firrell investigated belief, non-belief and the politics of both positions in conversation with the clergy at St Paul's, novelist Howard Jacobson, humanist philosopher A C Grayling, and columnist Caitlin Moran. The resulting texts, from the domestic to the sexual to the sublime, were projected onto the exterior of the cathedral dome, the West Front at Ludgate Hill, and the interior of the Whispering Gallery.