Turner Prize Rubbish

Last week the 2007 Turner Prize was awarded to Mark Wallinger. The work that Wallinger submitted to the Turner Prize Exhibition at Tate Liverpool was a film of himself dressed up in a bear costume, wandering around at night in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Apparently though, 'everyone agrees' that he really won the Turner Prize for another work: 'State Britain', a faithful replica of yet another 'work' by anti-war demonstrator Brian Haw. Eh? So why didn't Brian Haw get the prize?

It's because Brian Haw isn't an artist and his 'work' wasn't actually a piece of art. It was (before it was removed by the police) a collection of battered posters, placards, banners, flags, crosses, teddy bears, and images of war victims, all gathered together since 2001 outside the British parliament in protest at sanctions and the invasion of Iraq.

In awarding the 2007 Turner Prize to Wallinger, the judges announced that his installation "demonstrates art's unique ability to engage with contemporary political issues" and managed to "communicate an unpalatable political truth." Quite why this should be so is unclear, as the piece wasn't on display at Liverpool (perhaps I've misunderstood the rules of the competition) and in any case it isn't art. Like another Turner Prize winner ("Brit Art" upstart Damien Hirst who won in 1995), Mark Wallinger is essentially a model-maker.

To say that art is unique as a means of engaging with contemporary issues is rubbish. Books, newspapers, television, and the internet do it all the time. And it was Brian Haw who engaged and "communicated an unpalatable political truth." The Tate simply used Wallinger's model to hi-jack someone else's message. The only good thing one might say about this stunt is that it drew more attention to the real thing.

Introducing the prizegiving, the Tate's Director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said words to the effect that the Turner Prize is the world's most important award for the visual arts. If that were true, the visual arts would be dead, which of course they are not. Unfortunately the word 'art' has come to mean anything we want it to and encompasses 'artistic statements' and other gimmicks that demonstrate little or no creativity or skill whatsoever. And to many of the galleries, dealers, critics, collectors, and other hangers-on who think of themselves as the art establishment, art is anything that makes them money.

Public expressions of outrage

The Tate Gallery (which now calls part of itself Tate Britain) receives many letters expressing outrage at the selection to be exhibited for each year's Turner Prize, a large number of which come from people who haven't seen the works they are complaining about. It's certainly true that seeing a work in the flesh can bring to life something that seems ludicrous when viewed on TV. A case in point is the work of Richard Long, the only artist to be shortlisted for the Prize four times and who finally won the award in 1989. Some time in the 1980's I saw for myself a large circle he made with muddy hand prints in the corner of a wall at the Tate, and I found it quite beautiful.

One of the most absurd Turner Prize awards occured in 1993 when Rachel Whiteread's winning entry was a concrete cast of the inside of a house with the outer walls removed. Titled 'House', it was thankfully destroyed the year after. A hideous monolith like this is considered a work of art (at least by some) only because the model-maker says it is. But from time to time, something worthwhile slips through to victory, as was the case with aforementioned Richard Long, and the painter Howard Hodgkin who won in 1985.

The Tate Gallery's pile of bricks

As an aside, the 'Pile of Bricks' is the popular name for some building materials the Tate Gallery bought from Carl Andre in 1972. Andre's so-called minimalist sculpture ('Equivalent VIII') consists of 120 firebricks placed on the floor in a rectangular formation. The Pile isn't always on display. It can be dismantled for storage, but each time it's put on display again the bricks aren't assembled in any particular order, so even if it was a work of art, it isn't really the work originally purchased. The Tate Gallery never recorded the order and orientation in which Andre first arranged them.

The Turner Prize is firmly associated with such 'Conceptual Art'. This is a branch of the visual arts in which an idea takes precedence over the aesthetics and craftsmanship traditionally associated with the great media handed down to us through the centuries (notably drawing, painting, and sculpture). A conceptual artist making an installation or presenting an objet trouvé is not required to demonstrate any skill, except (i) skill in coming up with a gimmick no-one else has thought of before and (ii) skill in self-promotion.

According to some commentators, the 'idea' behind Mark Wallinger's roaming bear suit in the German National Gallery was to symbolise disguise-wearing spies infiltrating Berlin during World War II, but perhaps this is wishful thinking, as Wallinger himself said that "I just pictured what might happen if it was illuminated and a single figure or a creature was moving about nocturnally… an exercise in maintaining the attention of the curious."

Turner's [Tracey's] unmade bed

When an artist called Tracey hit on the concept of her unmade bed 'graphically illustrating' the "whole human life-cycle in the place where most of us spend our most significant moments" and felt it should win an award for artistic merit, she decided to send it in for the 1999 Turner Prize. Lo, Serota and his arty cronies shortlisted 'My Bed' into the top four entries, undeterred by the fact that this applies to most people's beds. Ah, but wait. Of course. No-one else had thought of it before. The Turner Prize sponsors would love it and Charles Saatchi might like to buy Tracey.co.uk's unmade bed for £150,000.

If anyone supposes this is typical of the age in which we live, with fashion-driven monetization as the primary dictator of taste and what rises to public prominence, they need only to look at film, photography, literature, and to a lesser extent architecture, to see that art is not dead. Or perhaps consider the fact that the influential Saatchi Gallery, which throughout the 1990's and early 2000's promoted rubbish of the sort referred to in this article, finally shifted direction in 2005 with a major exhibition titled 'The Triumph of Painting'.

But it's a silly title for an art exhibition; almost as if the 'triumph' has only just been discovered. A 'Triumph of Painting' has been over at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square since some time during the 19th century, and in hundreds of other great art galleries throughout the world, including the Tate Gallery itself. In this context, the Turner Prize with its pickled sharks, unmade beds, and wandering bears is nothing more than a bit of media fun.

Posted Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 12:52. Comments welcome.