TURNER ROUND and BEND ‘ER OVER

Amanda Gets Behind The Turner Exhibition

Anyone clicking into this article will already know what The Turner Prize for Contemporary British Art actually is, so I shan’t go into a detailed explanation of this well-hyped competition. Suffice it to say that The Turner Prize has always courted controversy in both the art world and the popular media. And quite rightly. Most of the feted artists are derivative conceptualists playing with the sort of ‘shock tactics’ we first saw in the ‘60s. With this in mind, I visited the Turner Exhibition with more than a pinch of cynicism – a cynicism which was not misplaced. Three of the four finalists were rubbish. Truly. One was remarkable. Truly.

In the interest of good Art journalism, I’ll give you a run-down of the three duff ones before I wax lyrically and with genuine love about the fourth.

FIONA BANNER

Installation at Tate Britain 2002
© Tate Photography, Courtesy the artist and
Frith Street Gallery, London.

Although Banner’s work is not aesthetically unpleasant, she answers no questions which haven’t already been answered – and far more brilliantly – by the Conceptualists of the 1960s. Evidently, her work is all about ‘the word’, and not about image, and whilst some of it is not unattractive, it seems to somewhat miss the point. The Turner Prize is given to accomplishment in the visual arts. The Booker Prize is given to writers. ‘The Word as Art’ as a concept has already been so, so ‘done’ that I was genuinely surprised to find an artist who relies so heavily upon it as a  finalist for The Turner Prize.

Obviously, as Banner uses the word ‘cunt’ in her œuvre, she is clearly a strong contender. I am so bored with ‘shock tactics’ as a means of eliciting an emotional response to a visual stimuli – yet it seems I am  quite alone in this train of thought. Many people at the exhibition were observed pointing to ‘the C word’ and giggling, with one couple I spoke to saying how very ‘powerful’ they thought it was. And who said we were desensitised to swearing? (Pffft.)

LIAM GILLICK

Coats of Asbestos Spangled with Mica 2002
Anodized aluminium framework, Perspex
panels and display case
© Tate Photography, Courtesy Corvi - Mora,
London, © The artist.

If I alert you all to the fact that one of Gillick’s pieces is entitled; Coats of Asbestos Spangled With Mica, I think you’ll understand why I don’t like it. A dark, gloomy room found Gillick’s installation hanging from the ceiling; blocks of coloured asbestos. Does the name ‘Carl Andre’ ring any bells?  Does ‘Minimalism’?  Basically, Gillick is rehashing what others did (and to great effect) thirty years ago, and I was stunned to find such an obvious reworking of Andre’s use of spatial blocks in such blatant imitation and hailed as ‘exciting’.

In fairness to Gillick, his intent is to design  architectural environments whereby interiors elicit an emotional response from the inhabitant. Fair enough. However, The Turner Prize is for contemporary Art – not design – and Gillick’s work belongs (in my opinion, at least) to another genre entirely.

CATHERINE YASS

Hema Malini 2001
Ilfochrome transparency, lightbox
Courtesy aspreyjacques, London.

In short, Yass’s piece is the video footage taken by an upside down camera on a crane moving slowly down a building. And yes – this has been done before. And in the 1970s. (It also made me feel a bit nauseous, and that’s not a good thing.)

Clearly, ‘new’ isn’t important anymore. And in all honesty, how could it be? How can artists find something ‘new’ when everything has already been done – in every medium – in every genre. I have no problem with the above artists borrowing from their Conceptual predecessors; it is the fact that they borrow with no irony – with no emotion – with no awareness - which unsettles me. I came away from their work feeling as if the sudden slurry of popular interest in contemporary art has allowed for artists to rehash old ideas in the knowledge that the layman will not know who Carl Andre is, will not know about Conceptual Art of the 1960s. This is not to denigrate Banner, Gillick and Yass; they make no pretence of doing something ‘new’ (and as we’ve already decided, it’s impossible to do something new), however, they seem to have nothing to say in their embrace of the past – no new ‘twist’ – no new meaning.

KEITH TYSON

Installation at Venice Biennale 2001
Mixed media
Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery

Keith Tyson also borrows from the past. He perhaps borrows more from the past than the others. His fusion of Art and Science of course recalls Duchamp and Ernst, and upon first glance, his myriad of disparate images seem directly drawn from Schnabel, Clemente and the other Post-Modernist painters who saturated the market in the 1980s. Yet Tyson has taken the intentionally ‘meaningless’ form of Post-Modernist painting and done something utterly incredible with it; he has given it meaning.

In short, he – and he alone amongst the Turner finalists – has found something new. His installation piece, Selected Studio Drawings, is comprised of fifty or more painted ‘sketches’, each utterly individual, and yet coming together as a profound ‘whole’, the viewer left to do the work, the viewer left to extrapolate the meaning. Had Clemente or Schabel done similar, there would have been no meaning. With Tyson, there is – and in spades. His playful fusion of art with science and philosophy lends his work a profundity which is genuinely rare to find in contemporary art. Tyson has something to say – and he says it with paint. (Where has he been for the past twenty years? Paint?!)

      
Two of Tyson's Studio Drawings.

Selected Studio Drawings truly engages the viewer; there is no way one can give the piece a fleeting glance. It is a maze, a storybook, the narrative slowly taking form as the eye moves from a design for an electronic dinosaur to a painting of a tree, a wall, an anatomical cross section – all rendered with boundless good humour, boundless good will.

Bubble Chambers: 2 Discrete Modules sees Tyson working with a far more polished handling. From a distance, the paintings seem to be nothing more than pop art renderings of atomic explosions, chroma and structure worked in a style which directly recall Wayne Thibaut. It is only upon closer examination that we realise that the lines of energy are actually phrases – each painted in a different ‘font’ – a different colour. When we read the phrases, Tyson’s work begins to make sense.

And so on and so forth. Incidents’. Hundreds of ‘incidents’. Incidents dating back to a man-less pre-history to a dropped kebab in a London take-away. It is these painted ‘incidents’ which go forth to make-up the canvas. It is these little ‘incidents’ which go forth to make-up life, the universe…and everything, the profundity of Tyson’s message suddenly hitting you straight between the eyes and making you feel all emotional!

It was very interesting to observe the visitors at The Turner Exhibition; they sailed through the rooms occupied by Banner, Gillick and Yass, and yet they stayed with the Tyson paintings. They had to.  In a era when nobody has time, Tyson’s work not only requires it – but demands it.  There is no other way to make sense of it. You have to engage with it – and for a very long time. And people are glad to give his work the time it needs, glad to lose themselves in the joyous, melancholy, funny, profound and brilliantly painted microcosm he has created – a microcosm of a world far greater than the one in which we live, yet a world in which we all play our own, little – and yet utterly essential – part.

Profundity aside, Tyson’s work looks great, and whist he borrows generously from both Post-Modernism of the ‘80s and – further back – Dadaism (there was something almost Heartfield-esque about some of his Studio Drawings), he does it with an absolute awareness, paying affectionate homage to those artists of the ‘20s – and then the ‘80s – who sent out the message that ‘life has no meaning’.

Keith Tyson says it does.

The Turner Exhibition runs until January 5^th, 2003, at The Tate Britain. Tickets £3:50 (no concessions.)