Turner Prize reflects a 'new language'

PARIS: What is a group of Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers doing in London, staring impassively at their unseen observer? And what do they have in common with an ethereal young woman tentatively breaking pieces of china? For an answer, turn to Runa Islam, the Bangladeshi-born artist whose video works - "First Day of Spring," featuring the Dhaka rickshaw riders, and "Be the First to See What You See as You See It," a slow-motion study of smashing porcelain - helped propel her onto the short list for this year's Turner Prize.

Sometimes shocking and controversial, in other years more thought-provoking, the Turner Prize has become not just a barometer of the state and direction of British contemporary art but also a fixture on the social calendar.

Founded in 1984 by a group of contemporary art patrons linked to the Tate gallery, the prize is awarded to an artist under the age of 50, born or working in Britain, whose publicly exhibited work over the past year has seemed especially innovative or important. The winner is selected from a short list of four, chosen by a five-member jury; the first prize is worth £25,000, or about $37,500, and the three runners-up receive £5,000 each.

Past winners have included some of the most notorious enfants terribles of British Art - Gilbert and George in 1986; Damien Hirst in 1995; Chris Ofili, with his elephant dung paintings, in 1998; the transvestite potter Grayson Perry in 2003; Tracy Emin's unmade bed failed to win in 1999.

"In the 1990s, the Turner Prize became like the Grand National, in terms of it being a national event," said Virginia Button, curator of the prize from 1993 to 1998 and author of its regularly updated official history.

The notoriety of the prize wins envious recognition beyond sometimes insular confines of the British art world.

"The Turner Prize goes far beyond an art prize - it has become a national event with a global profile," said Gilles Fuchs, president of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, organizer of the Marcel Duchamp contemporary art prize, in Paris.

This year's jury, led by Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain gallery, included Suzanne Cotter, senior curator and deputy director of the Oxford-based gallery and publisher of the Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of Frieze magazine; Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt; and the architect David Adjaye.

Their short-listed contenders, whose works are on exhibit at the Tate Britain gallery until Jan. 18, included, alongside Islam, two other women - Goshka Macuga, who was born in Poland, and Cathy Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland - and Mark Leckey, a British-born professor of film studies in Frankfurt.

Leckey, the bookmaker's favorite and eventual winner - the jury's verdict was announced on Monday - uses a mix of media in his works including film, sculpture, performance and lecture, referencing fine art, music, clubbing and pop culture. His works on show at the Tate Britain engage their audience with images of cultural icons that include Felix the Cat, Jeff Koon's steely rabbit and the Simpsons.

"There is no hierarchy in his work - anything is up for grabs," said Carolyn Kerr , one of the show's curators.

To a casual observer all four short-listed artists share some fundamental stylistic traits. They work in installation film and multimedia genres. Paint, apparently, is out.

"Art today is no longer about pretty pictures," said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. "The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions."

That approach is perhaps most apparent in Wilkes's work. "Give you all my money" is a collection of found objects with a centerpiece of two stripped down checkout counters surrounded by an assortment of junk: leftover food in bowls; hair clippings, burned wood and other detritus, forming an extended personal iconography echoing Emin's bed. Into this meticulously dysfunctional installation two mannequins bring an abstractedly human counterpoint; one sits on a toilet, naked except for a nurse's hat and the other leans against a counter, her head in bird cage. Both have various domestic bits and pieces hanging by strings from their skulls. The whole work seems to add up to an expression of everyday feminine drudgery.

This year's short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, "the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear."


No less enigmatic, Macuga's has been likened to cultural archeology, in which she constructs histories and explores conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display. In her Tate installation - described as an exploration of the professional and romantic relationships between the World War I artist Paul Nash and the surrealist painter Eileen Agar and the Bauhaus architects and designers Mies Van der Rohe and Lily Reich - she uses photos and archive material from the Tate in a set of photomontages and collages surrounding a minimalist sculpture of glass and steel. Drawings of rain adorn the walls. The relationship between these elements is, indeed, not instantly clear.

Leckey's offering, "Cinema in the Round," is a video of a 40-minute performance art lecture in which the artist talks of his fascination with the life of images on screen, mixing ideas about language and film with shots of filmed objects and images, in a looping exploration of the relation between self and image.

These works are the product of "a seismic shift in the appreciation of the visual arts in Britain," said Button, the historian of the prize. "They are polythemic; they can be appreciated on many different levels." This adds to their richness and complexity, she said. "No contemporary artist would say there is one way of looking at a work," Button said.

Kerr, the curator, agreed. Artists are engaging in a multilayered exploration of their universe, she said, "a sort of collaging in every sense."

"New media are available to artists," Kerr said. "Art is no longer confined to painting and sculpture. Art is taking on a whole new language, about testing and exploring, in a sense growing up, moving on from sensationalist statements to something more thoughtful and thought-provoking."

She added: "British art is heading into a different place. The work requires more attention; it's in a more thoughtful place. It's intriguing, challenging, deeply rooted in aesthetics. We're heading to redefining what it means to be modern - post-post-modernism."


Source: iht.com