| bory on Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:23:44 +0100 (CET) |
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| [Nettime-ro] For your attention |
bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it. ------- Note from bory: Turner Prize se intoarce!!! ------- To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk States of decay Maggoty corpses, rotting apples, dying flowers... the Turner prize show has never been so full of life, says Adrian Searle Adrian Searle Tuesday October 28 2003 The Guardian · Picture gallery This year's Turner prize show has got the lot: inflatable sex doll fellatio shock, man-running-across-bridge political cartoon metaphor opportunity, eau-de-vie art hiccup, innocent childhood shattered in transvestite pottery outrage. The predictable affectations of horror are already being expressed. But this year's exhibition is one of the best Turner displays I have seen. There is an air of calm and seriousness, almost a terseness about the show - however volatile some of the subject matter and content, especially in the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman and transvestite artist Grayson Perry. There is wariness as well as triumphalism in the air. All the artists here have grown up with the Turner prize, and know well the kinds of unseemly scrutiny their works will have to bear. Perhaps, too, they don't care about the prize quite so much as contenders from previous years, and have been more relaxed about their installations. Pulling out all the stops can feel like desperation. There may be less work here, but there is also a lot to think about. On one screen in Willie Doherty's two-screen 2002 film installation, Re-Run - his only work in the show - a man is perpetually running towards something. On the other, he is running away. He's getting nowhere. A Confucian might tell us that life is a bridge, warning us not to build a house on it. An equally wise old Freudian would say that running away from something is always a flight towards something else. I don't envy this year's Turner judges. They can run, but they can't hide. Doherty's nightmare nocturnal run across the Craigavon Bridge, which spans the river dividing the Protestant and Catholic communities in Derry, is itself a kind of deja vu: both of an earlier pair of photographs shot on the same bridge, and of Doherty's first shot at the Turner prize in 1994, the year Antony Gormley won. Then, he exhibited another two-screen video, The Only Good One Is a Dead One, that dealt, ambiguously, with the mindsets of assassin and victim, terrorist and target. It was an unforgettable work, laden with a sense of paranoia, of inextricable mental knots and double binds. Even the title of Doherty's Re-Run recognises the continuity between his earlier work and the present. His art also recognises that, although the sectarian violence has now died down, the conditions which gave rise to it - both specifically in Ireland and elsewhere in the world - have not gone away. Nor shall they, one might add. Somewhere, a man is always running. The man's run across the bridge at night, in a series of tightly edited, looped tracking shots and close-ups, is reminiscent of the cinema chase scene. Watching makes your heart beat faster. Its lack of an ending or resolution keeps you on the brink. Runner and spectator are equally trapped in the loop: a genre loop or a cinematic cliche as much as a real-life nightmare, depending how you want to look at it. The Turner prize is not meant to be judged on the work in the exhibition alone. Doherty's 2002 mid-career survey at the Irish Museum of Modern Art showed just how focused his work has always been. If he didn't always mine the same territory, wasn't always picking over the same subjects, he could be accused of inconsistency. It isn't a case of having new ideas - after all, how many key ideas, how many subjects can an artist have? There are other deja vus, other harmonies in this year's show; although they are accidental, they say something about the moment, our time and place. Anya Gallaccio includes a very lifelike bronze tree and bronze twigs in her display. The Chapman brothers also have a bronze-cast tree in their show, and a pair of bronze sex dolls. In one of their reworkings of Goya's Disasters of War etchings, they have turned a hanged man, dangling from a branch, into a teddy bear. Another hanged teddy bear, again slung from a tree stump, adorns the lid of one of Perry's glazed earthenware pots - a nod to the Chapmans. For a long time the Chapman brothers were best known for their mannequin figures of young girls and boys, with obscene penis-noses and vulva-faces. Perry's pots are also decorated with highly sexualised - and sexually ambiguous - images of little girls and boys. But where the Chapmans have a kind of rumbustiousness, Perry's work is as often filled with anger and bitterness. This extends even to his sometimes humorous gags about the art world. On one of his pots, among the peacocks and foliage and Etruscan horsemen, the names of big international museums and collectors flit by. Another pot is decorated with what he calls Boring Cool People. All this sits ill with his pictures of knife-wielding, hammer-clutching, smoking infant girls, and boys in drag, and his nasty suburbs and urban woodlands, where murdered babies are found under the trees and abusive parental insults hang in the air: "Ungrateful little sod," we read, and, "It never did me any harm." All this, in a scene borrowed from Brueghel. Should we be comparing the artists in the Turner prize with one another, or with the larger world of the unselected and the ineligible - a world of the over-50s, foreign artists working abroad and the dead? Comparisons may be odious, but the Chapman's artistic language is not as developed or as subtle - or even as obscene at times - as Robert Gober's or Hans Bellmer's. The pottery police complain that Perry doesn't throw his pots, and one doesn't need to think of the great artist-ceramicists - Lucio Fontana, Picasso, Thomas Schütte - to see how little adventure there is in Perry's coil-pots, though their full round shapes are satisfying enough. In Perry's art, it is all in the decoration and the drawing. As a draughtsman he has been compared to the English caricaturists Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray. In fact his real strength is as an illustrator, and a rather conservative one at that, stylistically speaking. As a transvestite artist it isn't a case of how fetching he is in a frock, or how outspoken he is; it is that the French artist Pierre Molinier was so much more dangerous, more formally interesting in what he did with his self-transformations and in his onanistic photographic fantasies. You really could never have had Molinier (1900-76) as a Turner contender, even if he were alive or eligible. He was one of those artists so extreme as to be almost beyond the pale, even now. It is over a decade since the Chapmans reinterpreted Goya's Disasters of War etchings as a table-top battle scene, using model soldiers, plastic figurines and toy monsters. Earlier this year, they reworked an entire suite of the Goya etchings by hand, adding cartoonish, monstrous faces to the figures. These now line the walls of the Chapmans' Turner prize exhibition. I don't feel they add anything to Goya. In fact, the silly monster faces and grinning skulls seem to slip off the Goyas. Goya shrugs them off. In 1994, they made a life-size polychrome version of one of the most awful of Goya etchings: plate 39 of Los Desastres, entitled "Great feat! With dead men!" The Chapmans' polychrome sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead, had the porn squad nipping down to the Victoria Miro Gallery in London to check the obscenity when it was first shown in 1994. They have now revisited the work, as though the mutilated figures and body parts hung and impaled on the tree had been rotting in the Spanish sun for a month. Most of the flesh has now dropped off. A ribcage boils with maggots and buzzes with flies. A bloated foot points to the sun. The wildlife have taken over: flies, spiders, lizards, mice, rats, snails, worms and centipedes crawl everywhere. It's a zoo out there. It all reminds me of George Frampton's 1912 Peter Pan sculpture in Kensington Gardens. Look at the sweet little mouse in the bole of the tree! The bat in the crack in the bark! The frog shagging the rat down among the half-buried skulls, the raven perched on the branch! It is called Sex, and as the Chapmans are dutiful students of Georges Bataille, there must, surely, also be a sculpture hereabouts called Death. Death, in which inflatable sex dolls get down to a spot of soixante-neuf on an inflatable beach lilo, is as lightweight an idea as the dolls themselves, except all that weightless, shiny plastic is actually bronze. For the real hot air, read the Tate guide's interpretation of this work: "This act represents an end in itself... without reproductive consequences, a visual manifestation of the Chapmans' desire to produce a series of works to 'be consumed and then forgotten'." The bronze, and the price tag, militate against this kind of forgetting. The sex dolls might look like they are made from cheap vinyl, and the tree and bestiary in Sex from plastic, but they are painted bronze. So, too, is the heavily pruned, winter apple tree in Anya Gallaccio's exhibition. Decay and permanence are also shared themes. Gallaccio's tree is festooned with real apples, which will rot and fill the gallery with a cidery scent over the next two months. Rotting is just a kind of transformation, as the Chapmans will tell you. Her wall of 1,600 cut red gerberas will also wither and decay, behind glass on the wall. She has also had a litre and a half of apple eau-de-vie distilled and bottled; the straw-coloured liquor is displayed on a shelf. Over in another corner, three bronze-cast twigs festooned with red glass berries lean against the wall. I have always liked Gallaccio's work. Her Turner show comes perhaps too soon after her exhibition a few yards away in Tate Britain's Duveen Gallery, and at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. The current installation feels tighter and more melancholic. There is an inevitable air of tragedy in her show. As a poetic metaphor it is very unoriginal - even, as in Doherty's work, a kind of cliche. So few artists have anything useful to say about our relation to nature any more, although it is a very British preoccupation. But Gallaccio's beautiful and sparse installation, in particular those bronze ilex twigs with their twinkling glass berries, is more reminiscent of Italian arte povera than any supposed British tradition. Wistful and wan, theselittle twigs are the most touching and most ephemeral work in the show. I find them almost heartbreaking. Oddly, so is the Chapmans' Death, in its pantomime futility. There is, for once, a kind of coherence to this year's show, and a perhaps fitting air not of the usual artistic desperation, but of ordinary human pain. Which is perhaps not so ordinary at all. But who should win? This is a mug's question, as I am about to discover as a selector and judge on next year's Turner panel. I'd like to see Doherty get the prize - not for his second chance, but for his indomitable seriousness, even though Re-Run is not Doherty at his best. The hot money will be on the Chapmans, in many ways deservedly, and perhaps inevitably. They'll certainly be taking the most flak over the next month. · The Turner prize 2003 is at Tate Britain, London SW1, until January 11. Details: 020-7887 8888. The winner will be announced on December 7. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited _______________________________________________ Nettime-ro mailing list [email protected] http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ro --> arhiva: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/