Mind the crap…
Cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit? Annual farce and ongoing national joke? Yes it's Turner Prize time again – exhibiting from Tuesday at the Tate Britain – and you can put your mortgage on politician Kim Howells, art critic Brian Sewell and controversial art group the Stuckists being less than impressed with this year’s nominees. It was ever thus. Yet despite all the bleating and carping – itself whiningly predictable to the point of tedium – my biggest complaint with this year’s selection isn’t the artists or even their work, it’s glorified press officer Mariella Fostrup somehow inveigling herself onto the judging panel (after previously whoring her way through the Booker Prize and British Film Awards). As a result all sensible bets are off and I’ll need a few stiff ones from this year’s sponsors Gordon’s to steady myself when the winner is announced on December 7.
Half the fun of the Turner Prize lies in the acres of newsprint it annually chews up – be it for the art itself, its critics, or for some tragic misdemeanour at the award ceremony itself. It’s a gas. And before looking at this year’s fresh-faced contenders there’s no harm in taking a swift trip down memory lane of my five favourite past Turner controversies…
1. BILL & JIM FLASH THE CASH
A year after dumping a dead sheep at the Brit Awards after-party, pop pranksters Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the KLF entered the Turner fray with their Anti-Turner Prize for the “worst artist in Britain”, awarded to real 1993-winner Rachel Whiteread. A bit of a damp squib as art pranks go (the reluctant sculptor accepted the dosh but gave it to charity), it’s resonant, as it presaged their trip to the remote Scottish island of Jura for the self-explanatory ‘action’ K Foundation Burn A Million Quid, something Drummond himself has rued in recent years. It was the first of many alternative Turner awards including Trevor Prideaux’s Turnip Prize, the Stuckists’ Real Turner Prize and posh boy foodie Tom Parker Bowles’ Alternative Turner Prize.
2. MAD TRACEY FROM MARGATE
Two years before she was shortlisted for the Turner in 1999, a positively refreshed Tracey Emin achieved her first real infamy in a Channel 4 debate on the awards, insulting her fellow guests and mumbling that “no real people” would be watching. Emin hit the headlines again for her widely derided Turner installation, My Bed, after artists, Yuan Chi and Jian Jun Xi jumped onto it, stripped to their underwear and had a pillow fight, calling it Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed. She didn’t win (though had the last laugh with Charles Saatchi snapping it up for a paltry £150,000), that was Steve McQueen for a short celluloid Buster Keaton pastiche a million miles removed from last year’s bracing Bobby Sands biopic Hunger.
3. MAD MADGE FROM MICHIGAN
2001 was a bit of a rum year in all respects. Winner Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On And Off was just that, prompting at least one egg-based protest, but overshadowed by judge Madonna’s legs-in-mouth speech at the ceremony: “At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right-on motherfuckers!” Be prepared to die for Madge all over again by clicking here.
4. MAD FIONA FROM MERSEYSIDE
In 2002 the media’s unswerving gaze was trained on Fiona Banner whose wall-size text piece, the delicately titled Arsewoman In Wonderland, described a pornographic film in detail. The Guardian memorably invited Britain’s self-styled biggest porn star, Ben Dover, for his considered views. “I think it’s clever,” he said, after a long perusal. “It’s very cynical. Porn attracts publicity, everybody knows that.” But when asked if Dover thought it was art he was much more damning? “Art? It’s basically shite. I think the best that can be said for it is that you can probably read it and have a good wank.”
5. BROTHERLY LOVE
Another sleazegate followed next year when The Chapman Brothers unveiled two new works anachronistically titled Sex and Death (pictured above). Sex showed three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree in a heightened state of decay, but was well trumped by its companion piece. On the face it, just two blow-up dolls placed on top of each other in the 69 position, Death was carefully painted to disguise that it was cast in bronze. Great attention to detail and all that, but wearyingly puerile and still no win for the tiresome les enfants terrible.
THIS YEAR’S MODELS
While 2008 was generally regarded as a bit of a low in the Prize’s chequered history – a case of arch pretension overriding craft – 2009 is a brighter beast with far less emphasis on the conceptual, not that the Stuckists are so easily appeased: “The nominees are someone with a chemistry set, a Habitat designer, a maker of insipid patterns, and an illustrator for John Lewis card department.” Judge for yourself with this small preview of their Turner exhibits…
ENRICO DAVID
One for the traditionalists, figurative painter David is obsessed with questions of gender and sexuality, using imagery gleaned from Commedia dell'arte that bridge the worlds between art and fashion. Surprisingly elegant, his use of vivid backgrounds renders his work both perverse and provocative.
The nailed-on favourite, last year ‘modern alchemist’ Hiorns transformed a condemned bedsit in south London into a magical cave of copper sulphate crystals for Seizure (see top of post). Another solo show at Corvi-Mora consisted of just one work – a jumbo jet engine ground down into powder. The sculptor uses an array on non-traditional materials from soap bubbles and fire to detergent and perfume.
Glasgow-based conceptualist (she once hid butterfly pupae in criminal courts in the hope that they would hatch during a trial) whose drawing roots are increasingly realised through sculpture. Her 2006 installation Solid Ground: Liquid To Solid In 85 Years won fulsome praise for being “a sort of three-dimensional version of a Rorschach test”.
RICHARD WRIGHT
Not the ball-fumbling Ipswich goalkeeper, but an abstract painter that, like the late Sol LeWitt, specialises in making intricate, mathematically precise webs of geometrical patterns to make site-specific paintings. Think baroque volutes, geometric minimalism and Islamic decoration.
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