Don’t DicTate
Turner Prize 2002 Exhibition
30 October 2002 to 5 January 2003
Tate Britain
£3.50 admission
Reviewed by Manny Thain
‘CONCEPTUAL BULLSHIT’ was how this year’s Turner Prize
exhibition was described by Kim Howells, New Labour’s culture minister. This at
least guaranteed front-page coverage for Tate Britain’s annual prize which will
be awarded on 8 December to one of four shortlisted Britain-based contemporary
artists. His statement also ensured that news of a record £14bn deficit in
Britain’s tourist industry, for which Howells has ministerial responsibility,
went largely unreported. But, does he have a point?
Keith Tyson opens the show. He has clearly been busy over
the past twelve months. Tyson is concerned with the big issues: who and what we
are; the nature of the universe; and, what are we doing here?
There is a wall completely covered in paintings and
drawings. These are his ‘research projects’. One is called, Collected Works
1900-1969 – Tyson was born in 1969. Another is called 28 September and features
playing-card aces swirling in the air. That date was when the largest anti-war
demonstration in British history took place, with 400,000 protesting against
Bush and Blair’s plans to attack Iraq. Is the connection intentional or
coincidental? Tyson thrives on that ambiguity.
Now Capacitor is a flashing electronic counter/mirror
designed to keep counting for 75.6 years – the average lifespan of a human
being. A monolithic hexagonal black tower is called The Thinker (after Rodin).
Tyson calls it a ‘comatose God’. There’s a computer inside, we’re told – a
powerful one. But the only hint of activity is two small LED lights on the top
and a faint humming.
Bubble Chambers: 2 Discrete Molecules of Simultaneity is two
similar paintings side by side. They depict molecular structure models with
‘speech bubbles’ describing two events on the same date, some historically
significant, others mundane. Table Top Tales is a sprawling sculpture about the
connection between chance and existence.
This is frenetic activity. Some of the pictures are
graphically interesting and well executed. Tyson’s use of different media keeps
it stimulating. It is a kind of pick’n mix of art, science and fantasy,
conducted by some frenzied alchemist with a great sense of humour.
Once out of that riot of activity, the visitor plunges into
a sublime environment. Liam Gillick could not be more of a contrast. There’s
nothing on the walls, but the whole room is bathed in red, yellow, orange and
blue light, and the colours they create, produced by a perspex and aluminium
ceiling and a combination of natural and artificial light. It recalls the effect
of stained glass windows in churches. Gillick uses colour and structure to alter
and influence environment, using industrially produced materials, and
repetitive, geometric forms.
Down the middle of the room are display cabinets showing
other projects he has been involved in. There are designs for a new traffic
system for the Porsche headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, tinted windows for a
Florida airport, graphic design for a plastic bag.
He writes about what he does, theorising on modern
architecture and design, making some very pertinent points along the way.
Gillick says that it is the large corporations that are putting into practice
modernist principles of architecture. He states that one of the main differences
between their buildings and some of the high-rise housing blocks of the 1960s
and 1970s – built to provide cheap, good-quality housing but often ending in
soulless, alienating, depressing and downright dangerous environments – was that
the latter were constrained by low budgets and bad management. Money was tight,
corners were cut and the materials substandard.
The exhibition space is not conducive to getting across the
nature of Gillick’s work. But he provides much food for thought.
Over a number of years Catherine Yass has worked on a
technique of combining positive and negative photographic transparencies,
displayed on lightboxes, to create colourful, rich and disorienting images. Some
of her past photographs – of psychiatric hospitals, prison cells, kitchens and
toilets – have a haunting feel about them. Still and eerie.
For this exhibition Yass has worked around the differing but
connected themes of flying, falling and drifting. There are three photographs
taken at different exposure times, the camera moving at 40 miles per hour. The
results are blurred images of buildings. A still life of falling.
Flight is a film taken by a camera fixed to a
remote-controlled helicopter. It’s a dizzy experience as rooftops and buildings
tumble and circle into view, looming too close for comfort at times as the film
loops round.
Descent, on the other hand, is a slow, measured, straight
line of a film, taken from a camera as a crane descends from 800 feet to ground
level. This was taken on a construction site in Canary Wharf, East London. It
starts in thick fog and the images form only gradually as the descent
progresses. Yass screens it upside down, so you ascend to the ground. As the
visibility improves, the brain adjusts to the contradictory messages. It is a
drifting feeling, quite relaxing. An antidote to the vertiginous Flight.
The fourth artist is Fiona Banner who concentrates on
language: as a means of communication; as a way of understanding the world; but
also how it sometimes fails to convey thought and emotion.
Arsewoman in Wonderland, a description of the action in a
pornographic film of a similar name, is the piece that has provoked the media’s
consternation this year. It is pasted in layers, like a billboard, bright pink
in bold text. It is visually arresting and you look at it like you would a
picture, not as text, catching glimpses of phrases. Banner has explained her
mixed response to the film – attraction and repulsion. In trying to tackle
social taboos, she found herself confronting her own.
This is not the first time Banner has done this type of
work. In 1997 she produced a 1,000-page book, THE NAM, describing the action in
films about the Vietnam war: Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The
Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. The central point
here was that her and many other people’s understanding of the conflict is
informed by these films, these fictional works.
Nude, is a portrait in words, an attempt to portray a
traditional life drawing, but in words – what Banner describes as a ‘wordscape’.
The words are painted directly onto the wall. As the writing descends the lines
and words begin to merge, becoming denser – an impression of gravity and the
darkness of shadows.
This is a room full of puns. There are ‘punctuation
sculptures’ in bronze painted black, which punctuate the gallery space. Forever
n Ever is a silk screen print of punctuation. You know that feeling when you
can’t find the words? In others, the writing’s on the wall.
I don’t agree with Kim Howells. Firstly, his comments do not
accurately describe this exhibition, which shows a wide range of media:
painting, sculpture, photography, film, writing and architecture. Secondly, his
outburst implies that only figurative, naturalistic art is viable. Conceptual
art, and much modern art, aims to engage the audience. People are encouraged to
think about it and draw their own conclusions. The last person to dictate what
is good or bad art is some establishment Big Brother politician.
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