Random selection
Irritation, fury, boredom: it's Turner Prize time again. Martin Gayford reports Afew years ago I remember telling an art dealer friend that I really hated a cer- tain work of contemporary art. 'That's a good sign,' he replied. 'It suggests there's something here' — and of course he was right. Violent opposition to anything or anyone — resistance as psychoanalysts might call it — may be a sign of a certain secret interest. In art, as in life, that can be the prelude to a love affair. It is a point worth mentioning as the Turner Prize comes round each year.
Equally, it is true, irritation and fury may lead to nothing but further outrage. And indifference, bemusement and boredom — aesthetic emotions quite often aroused by short-listees for the TP — don't augur well in any field. Still, if one casts an eye back through history, it can't be denied that this award — with which the word 'controver- sial' goes as inevitably as 'farcical' with pres- idential election — has frequently proved its point. The winners of the early years — Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert & George, Tony Cragg, Richard Long — are now veritable pillars of the artistic establishment. While those of the early to mid Nineties — Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, for example — are fast attaining that position.
The feelings of bemusement and hostility that new work may well arouse — even, or especially, in people who care a lot about art — are perfectly natural. The shock of the new is an outdated phrase, partly because little in contemporary art is truly new; but we still have to deal with the bewilderment caused by an unexpected twist on the familiar (a feeling not unlike discovering one step more or less on a staircase). Anything truly original is likely to force you to rearrange your responses, and that, for most of us, is an uncomfort- able procedure.
A different friend of mine recently made the pilgrimage to Marfa, Texas, to inspect the huge assembly of the works there by the minimalist Donald Judd, all taking the form of shiny metal boxes. He was moved and exalted by the beauty of these boxes, and pleased with himself for being so — after all, boxes as art is a fairly tough proposition to digest. Then he realised that Judd, now deceased, is virtually an old master, almost as distant in time from young artists of today as Delacroix from Cezanne. And my friend is someone who spends his life talk- ing and writing about art. These things take a while to settle down.
So what of this year's Turner Prize? As usual, I wandered through Tate Britain ini- tially puzzled as to how the jury had come up with just this selection. Leaving aside all questions of merit, why do certain figures extremely famous in the sphere of tabloid- outraging, Saatchi-pleasing contemporary art never make it onto the short list. Why don't the Chapman brothers feature, for instance, or Sarah Lucas, or Jenny Saville?
There appear to be a few constants. Gen- erally, there is at least one person on the short list that nobody except the jury has ever heard of, and also someone — possi- bly the same — who is nominated for an exhibition in Omsk or Valparaiso, or some- where that few among the rest of us got to.
Sometimes there seems to be a political gesture involved. A year or two back there was an all-female short list. This time, fol- lowing the new Tate rule that we shouldn't be nationalistic about art, three out of four work in London but come from overseas (one Dutch, one Japanese, one German). Perhaps the truth is that, like many things arranged by committee, the Turner Prize is a bit random.
On my second walk through, I found myself warming a bit to two of the contes- tants — Glenn Brown and Michael Raedecker, who are both painters and therefore artists I am temperamentally prejudiced in favour of. Both, however, are disconcerting. Brown in the past I have found positively annoying. A while ago he took a painting by Frank Auerbach, an artist I admire, and reproduced its corru- gated impasto in a calculatedly glossy, flat and smarmy manner, so as to look like a bad reproduction that had been retouched with an air-brush. This, though quite a technical feat (achieved with tiny brushes), struck me as altogether too parasitical and post-modern.
But there you are, wrong again. His work has moved on and developed, taking a form in which pictures by Dall and Rembrandt mutate and merge with antiquated science fiction illustrations. He also produces sculp- tures that resemble the hairy ball that, according to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, some peoples conceive the truth to be, but in Technicolor. Whether you like Brown's work or not, it's now clear that something quirky and original is going on in it.
Michael Raedecker's painting has a touch of Auerbach too. In this case, it's a resemblance to those early landscapes of Auerbach's in which a mundane north Lon- don street scene seems to have been trans- muted into some quite different material
viscous river-bottom mud, for example. Raedecker's landscapes and interiors, exe- cuted in thick mat greyish paint, are a bit like that, with the addition of bits of embroidery, giving the pictures the look of something nasty you might encounter in a craft fair. So Raedecker's work is plentiful- ly odd too, but original. Tamoko Takahashi produces extremelY messy installations made up of such things as old computer monitors and broken hiefi equipment garnered from skips and junk sales — the one in the Tate looks like a lumber room that has been hit by a cyclone which are apparently put together with great care. I have little to say about her, except that she belongs to an international school of extremtly messy installation artists, about whom I have little to say.
Wolfgang Tillmans is a photograPher
who has been attracting a lot of attention of late (he has a room in Apocalypse at the Royal Academy). He snaps stray moments of everyday life — a sunset, someone's bot- tom in the bath, the beach — in a way cal- culated to suggest the haphazard beauties of life and happiness. These are then stuck up on the walls of a gallery in a fashion similar to posters in a student room. It sounds better than it is, I find, although some of the photographs are nice enough.
Personally, I'd give the money to one of the painters, probably Brown. But long years of Turner Prize experience suggest that it usually goes to the person I'd least want to give it to — which indicted that Tillmans should romp in. As it turned out he did.
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