Tom Lubbock: This year's Turner Prize foursome share common ground
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
Getty
Wall markings by Richard Wright from the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain
More pictures of the work
The job of the Turner Prize jury isn’t just to come up with four lively and upcoming artists. They’ve also got to come up with four reasonably distinct ones. These artists will appear in a show together for three months, and a stream of visitors will be invited to compare them. It’s important that they are able to tell the difference between the entries.
This year’s foursome is Roger Hiorns, Enrico David, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright (I give them in the order of William Hill’s odds, starting with the favourite). If you didn’t know their work already – or even if you did – you might find hard to tell where one part of the exhibition stopped and the next started.
There’s plenty of common ground. There are wall markings (Skaer, Wright); there are liquid shapes (Wright, Hiorns); there are powdered materials (Hiorns, Skaer). There are points at which three of these four could almost be the same artist. Still, this doesn’t mean that the odd-man-out is the best.
The odd-man-odd is Enrico David, and his work is a bit silly. It’s a sort of punch-and-judy psychodrama, a romp in a perverse shop window. You have a tableau made of miscellaneous effigies. There are propped up canvases with cartoony characters, banging drums, showing their bums. There’s a stuffed black cloth figure, his limbs stretched out and droopy. There are papier-maché puppets like humpty-dumpties on rocking-chair legs. It’s rude. It’s crazy. It’s quite inventive. But there could be more of this stuff, or less of it, and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Lucy Skaer’s work: what’s it about? Do I care enough to do the homework? There’s always some background thinking, tenuously connected to a curious exhibit. There’s a group of 26 replicas of that modernist classic, Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, but made from coal dust and resin. Pretty...but why? There’s the huge real skull of a sperm whale hidden inside a chamber, and glimpsed only through vertical slits. Startling...but why? I know I could read it up. I feel sure she’s got an interesting mind. I’m not sure it’s the mind of an artist.
Roger Hiorns does surprising things with surprising materials. His main piece here almost fills his allotted space: it’s a swirling sea or landscape, made of finely powdered stuff, poured onto the floor, in various rippling tones of grey. It lies there messy and fragile at your feet, or it would do. But (inevitably) Tate has surrounded it with a floor barrier to keep the public’s feet back, and its essential sense of risk is lost. Still, this spread of dust is beautiful and spectacular.
Hiorns’ art also puts its faith in what you might call the hidden ingredient. You’re asked to be excited by what something is made of, and by its associations, even though you could never tell just from looking. What is this grey powder? Check the label. “Atomised passenger aircraft engine”. What? Was there a momentary flinch when you thought it was actually passenger that had been atomised? But no, this dust is only the engine of a passenger aircraft, finely ground down. So what, though? It could be any kind of metal, ground down. Some connotation of plane crash? Don’t try and give us the willies.
Richard Wright has the longest odds, and I fear he won’t be much of a favourite with the public. His art is precise and laconic. But stand still for a while. Wait for his room to empty (it probably will). Involve. Wright takes a bare room and animates its space with tactical wall markings.
He fills one wall here with a vast, centred, symmetrical design. It’s painted in gold leaf. It’s enormously elaborate and detailed, with connotations of baroque ornament, rocker tattoos, oil patterns floated on water. On the opposite wall, high up above the doorway, there is a pair of small red explosive insignia. And between them, between this large complex field of gold and this small shot of red, the empty space of the gallery is held and balanced. Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about this work – except that it seems to be in perfect focus, and I kept going back.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
The Aesthetic Perspective
Having vacillated at the ugly end of the aesthetic spectrum for several years, this crop of Turner Prize entrants seem to have got their act together, at least as far as slickness is concerned. There is a precision to this year’s exhibition which finds its zenith in Lucy Skaer’s Black Alphabet – twenty-six skittles whittled from coal dust – and in Roger Hiorns’ particles from a combusted aeroplane engine neatly sprinkled on the floor. Even Enrico David’s surrealist fragments – from a Peter Andre look-alike to a Duchampian drumkit – are meticulously executed. Ironically enough, the work that most seems to be striving for beauty in the Kantian sense – Richard Wright’s filigree gold-leaf wall drawing – is so scarred by an unevenness in the plasterboard beneath as to disrupt its integrity. Integrity – now there’s a concept when exhibiting at Tate Britain; could the gold leaf perhaps have been attempting a comment on this? If so, shame about the faultline.
The Entourage’s Perspective
In each of the galleries, placed far less discreetly than any of the artworks, hovered the dealers representing these precious charges. Unabashed by degree show reticence, they occupied the appropriate space, fielding questions and boosting sales, leaving their artists free to roam the Duveen bar. The Janus-faced Fat Controller from Cabinet Gallery was there and adjacent Scots transgressed only slightly into each other’s territory. In this regard, Hiorns came out on top, with Artangel and Frieze attracted into his orbit and a cast of colourful characters confessing to joining him for dinner. Richard Wright, meanwhile, encircled by sycophantic black-clad wraiths en route to Shoreditch, will no doubt benefit from the presence of his long-standing friend, Charles Esche, on the jury. But it was Lucy Skaer who treated the situation with the most dignity, opting for Pizza Express on Millbank with her parents and close friends.
The Audience’s Perspective
Those not immediately enmeshed with any of the exhibiting artists were nonetheless expected to take sides. Had it not been for the Eva Rothschild sculptures obstructing easy passage through the bar area, it would have been possible to imagine a re-enactment of Mike Reid’s Runaround as everyone sprinted to the appropriate corner when the music stopped. A literal equivalent was provided in the form of four grey badges with each of the artists’ names spelled out across them in white writing. The gauche pinned their favourites to their lapels, while the more circumspect toyed with their chosen ones in their pockets. Other hierarchies emerged too, encoded in the warmth of an embrace or in the furtive glance in search of prestigious company. Presiding over the sharp exodus expected of his guests, Nicholas Serota stood like an extra from the MI6 building across the river.
The Political Perspective
Even without delving into the murky underworld of institutional critique, a number of contradictions force themselves to the surface of this exhibition to demand attention. A consideration of the artists’ means of production best illustrates this. Without wishing to fetishise the artisan, Richard Wright spent the best part of the two-week installation period tracing his delicate gold design on an uneven wall, while Enrico David’s sculptures look hand-made. In-keeping with the contemporary trend for assisted production, Roger Hiorns had help atomising his engine, but it is Lucy Skaer’s Leonora (Death) that troubles most in this regard. An elliptical drawing made up of tight spirals, this represents hundreds of hours of alienated labour by a hand other than the artist’s own, raising pertinent socio-economic questions about the creation of this work. But this is only the tip of a discussion about value in relation to the art world that is as gargantuan as the sperm whale whose skull Skaer allows us to glimpse behind a screen. Perhaps, in the end, it is this partial view of a leviathan that serves as the best metaphor.
I, for one, think Skaer is a thoughtful and engaging artist.