The wilder shores of tedium
Martin Gayford has a problem: he doesn't care who won the Turner Prize Nobody could like all forms of art, Oscar Wilde once observed, except an auc- tioneer. It is an apercu which annually cheers me up as I trudge round the Turner Prize Exhibition (the 1997 edition of which is on show until 18 January at the Tate Gallery). But seldom has my failure to extract even a smidgen of visual pleasure or interest from the work of the short-listed artists been as total as it was this year. As far as the delight of the eye is concerned, one might as well pay a visit to the nearest bank or branch of the DHSS.
But that, arguably, isn't the point. Or, to be more precise, it isn't either the purpose of a visit to the Turner Prize show, nor the objective of the artists concerned. Pleasure doesn't come into it. The public goes to the TP show, in increasingly large numbers, for the same reason that the public buys most bestsellers, or goes to most blockbuster films: to see what all the fuss is about. On '60 Minutes Silence, 1996, by Gillian Wearing, the Turner Prize winner that basis, attendance is obligatory for those who want to keep up with what's going on.
In recent years, the Turner Prize — ini- tially an unfocused award for anyone around the art world who seemed to deserve a pat on the back — has become a sort of Oscar equivalent for the amorphous group known as Young British Artists (YBAs for short). And if there is one point about which the YBAs are agreed it is that they don't give a damn for the succulent, sensuous relation of one colour to another, the harmony of forms and tones, or any of that old stuff. Indeed, with the exception of one or two painters — and painters seem doomed never to win the TP, this year there isn't even one on the short-list they give the impression of positively dislik- ing all the above.
We are currently at one extreme end of a pendulum swing. Thirty years ago, it was widely thought — and influentially expounded by the American critic Clement Greenberg — that only the relation of one colour to another, one shape to the next counted in art: the purely visual. Fashion- able art — or a prominent strand of it then took the form of stripes or veils of zingy, saturated colour. Now, the aim of these Turner short-listees — who are all women and therefore strictly Young Female British Artists (YFBAs) — seems to be to exclude all those qualities, as far as is humanly possible. From being all form, trendy art has become, as nearly as is tech- nically feasible, all content.
Sometimes the object itself is almost not there at all. Christine Borland produces the most compelling single image of the show, but it consists of the shadow thrown by dust scattered around human bones, after the bones themselves have been removed. Sometimes the aesthetic aspect of the art is Close to nil. Gillian Wearing, for example, who is perhaps the most original of the four, is inspired by fly-on-the-wall televi- sion documentaries. And, indeed, to a casual glance, many of her videos look pretty much like television documentaries. It is only when you look again that you dis- cover that some weird alteration has been wrought on reality.
Wearing's best idea is to create a psycho- logical frisson by having one person lip- synch another person's words. On the television programme that runs continu- ously at the end of the TP exhibition and is always, I find, much more interesting than the exhibition itself — she can be seen filming a boy miming to his mother's assessment of his own character. In her most celebrated effort, adult actors per- form to tapes of children talking about their lives. It is an effective device — leav- ing aside the possibly irrelevant question of whether it's got anything to do with the visual, rather than dramatic arts.
Unfortunately, the two pieces of hers which are actually on show are much less interesting, in fact they are phenomenally dull. In one, actresses playing the part of a mother and daughter alternately cuddle Mass (Colder Darker Matter); 1997 by Cornelia Parker and wrestle — illustrating the blend of love and exasperation which she seems to find noteworthy in the behaviour of parents (Wearing, one guesses, is not one herself). It is probably the fact that this film is played backwards that makes it art.
Her other piece, '60 Minutes Silence', takes dullness to much greater heights, or perhaps that should be depths. It is a pro- jected video of a group of policemen and women, arranged as for a group photo- graph, who twitch and blink in an effort to keep still — until the end, when one police- man shouts. But to say this is dull is, of course, not a criticism. An important cur- rent in contemporary art explores the wilder shores of tedium (interesting art, according to this line, being for the hope- lessly superficial: the American Bruce Nau- mann is the supreme living master of excruciating tedium, and therefore one of the most influential artists alive).
Cornelia Parker produces the prettiest things to look at of the short-listed artists, although competition in that department is not hot. In any case, to understand Parker's point it is always necessary to read the label. An item looking like a skein of doll's hair, for example, turns out to be the bit left over after a vinyl record has been cut — or, as she puts it, solidified negative impressions of sound (and put like that it seems quite interesting). A wound-up length of silver wire is in fact a Georgian tea-spoon drawn out to the exact height of the Niagara Falls (`Measuring Niagara with a Tea-Spoon'). A lump of greyish ash is actually what is left when cocaine is burnt — 'Exhaled Cocaine' — and so on.
One object, 'Mass (Colder Darker Mat- ter)', is really quite fun to look at, a zone of black fragments suspended from the ceil- ing. But the point of this is doubtless that these are the charred remains of a church struck by lightning and subsequently burnt — exhaled religion, so to speak, to go with `Exhaled Cocaine'.
Angela Bulloch's work takes three forms. First, sets of rules she has discovered covering such things as behaviour in the House of Commons or bungy jumping printed on the wall. Second, drawing machines which draw different sorts of zig or zag, depending on how the people in front move. Third, mats that react with sound or light to the way people stand or move. One example of each is on show. Bulloch is, she explains on the film at the end, interested in the systems that control our behaviour — she is, in person, obvious- ly bright, highly articulate and persuasive, as indeed are all these YFBAs (old-fash- ioned painters, on the other hand, often grope for words to explain the intuitive processes of their art). Bulloch's work, as opposed to her explanation, struck me as duller than the policemen, almost frighten- ingly dull.
So, on the Naumann boredom criterion, she deserved to win. Parker, on the other hand, has produced the closest approach to old-fashioned surrealist fun. But Wearing is arguably the most original, as I said before, and in the dematerialised bones Borland has come up with the most memo- rably creepy idea. In the event, as we now know, it was Gillian Wearing. My problem is that I can't bring myself to care.
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