From artsMEDIA: A Monthly Magazine of the Arts in Boston, January 1998

The Turner Prize

by Jane D. Marsching

Every fall, England heats up with debates about the Turner Prize, currently on view at London's modern art stronghold, The Tate Museum. For twelve years, the £20,000 Turner Prize has been awarded annually to "a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding 31 May 1997." For the first time, and in direct opposition to last year's all-male list, the four shortlisted artists are women: Angela Bulloch, Christine Borland, Cornelia Parker, and Gillian Wearing. Though the media has made much of that fact, the presence of four women as finalists for Britain's most prestigious art award merely confirms the fact that some of the most interesting and rigorous work being created in Great Britain today is being made by women. There is little or no reference to gender in their works, unlike previous generations of conceptual women artists in Britain, most notable Mary Kelly and Helen Chadwich. Instead these artists privilege a conceptual approach, creating an exhibition that, for all the diversity of media and subject, has a coherent unity.

The history of the Turner Prize is one of the unbuttoning of British art. The stated purpose of the prize is to honor an outstanding British artists, but also "to bring new developments in the visual arts to the attention of people." Since its inception in 1984, another unstated aim of the prize has been to court media attention, at which it has been remarkably successful (past winners have included the controversial artists, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, and Gilbert & George). Many jeering critics dismiss the prize as a publicity stunt by the Tate, perhaps not unjustly, as BBC Channel 4 currently sponsors the prize. Yet, whatever its shortcomings and media hubbub, the prize and its attendant exhibition has London attempting to understand and perhaps even embrace new ways of thinking about and making art. Certainly, the U.S. could do with such a prize not only to support increasingly neglected younger artists, but also to expand debates about art outside of the inner sanctum of the gallery world. The NEA has recently made exactly that complaint about the American art world, perhaps they should think about instigating a national prize for new art. They've ended up instigating endless public discussion of the faults and merits of exactly the artists they wished to censor, why not create an annual institution that uses that debate to educate and enrich both the arts and the public?

Cornelia Parker's presentation included a series of objects echoing Duchamp's readymades, but from a quite peculiar viewpoint. Objects such as a pile of silver shavings gathered from an engraver and called The Negatives of Sound, and an engagement ring drawn out to the length of the circumference of a living room, are instead more like unmades, called by Parker "Avoided Objects." Her interest lies in uncovering cultural, psychological, and poetic residues from objects both extraordinary (as in a microscopic image of grooves in a record owned by Hitler) and ordinary (as in a series of abstract black-and-white photograms of dust gathered from Freud's couch). Like the infinitesimal relics carefully preserved from saint's possessions, such as a bit of a robe, both are indecipherable unless explained and contextualized. Both require imagination to complete the object's power over us; in the case of Parker's work, when we see the transformed art object, we imagine its source. So, the framed drawing of silver wire called Measure Niagara with a teaspoon:: Georgian silver spoon drawn into a wire the height of Niagara Falls makes me think of high tea in nineteenth century British manor houses, American honeymoons at Niagara Falls, and the furious force of the quicksilver water contained at last. Ultimately, it is Parker's mercurial transformations of her objects, whether reconstructing charred remains from a Texas church hit by lightning in a room-size installation or asking the British army to blow up an ordinary potting shed, that instigate the viewer's flights of fantasy.

Christine Borland's work over the last decade has explored how social institutions and norms depersonalize and exploit human lives. Her objects and installations often look like something other than art altogether, perhaps like the work of medical reconstructive surgeons or criminal forensic examiners. One of the pieces exhibited The Dead Touch the Living, 1997, draws parallels between science and racism by researching the history behind a display case filled with death masks and artists renderings of people from various ethnic groups, which she stumbled upon during a visit to an anatomical department of a university in Münster. Though specific records of the heads had been destroyed in a fire, Borland discovered that the medical institute had been an important center for the so-called "racial hygiene" and eugenics of the National Socialist Party in the twenties and thirties. Using an advanced laser technology, Borland rendered them in white plastic and placed them in ordinary display cases. Plain wall labels mark the heads as they were labeled in the anatomical display: "Typical Nordic" or "Borneo Male." While there is nothing particularly outrageous or poetic about this piece, the chilling appropriation of a deadpan museum display and technological means of manufacturing force us to consider how such abomination is perpetuated through our history in ways we don't even realize.

Gillian Wearing's presentation includes two videotape projections in empty rooms. Sacha and Mum, 1996, shows a typical British mother engaged with her white underwear clad daughter in a narrative of love and violence, in which the mother alternately embraces and then hits or restrains the daughter. Shot in black-and-white and screened in reverse, which one doesn't' realize until reading about the piece in the catalog, the piece has an unsettling feeling of documentary reality, made even more perplexing by its utter banality. It is its darkness that makes it stand out from the other artists in this exhibition. Even Borland's school teacher's look at the horror of Nazi eugenics doesn't come close to the unwelcome familiarity of this ordinary mother in her house dress slapping about her helpless daughter. This ordinariness made unfamiliar is a hallmark of Wearing's work. Since her graduation in 1990 from the foremost British art school of the last two decades, Goldsmiths College, Wearing has often worked with anonymous people she finds through placing ads in newspapers or stopping people cold on the street.

In her second piece at the Tate exhibition, 60 Minutes Silence, 1996, Wearing asked twenty-six members of the Metropolitan Police Force to sit still for her in a blank white room for one hour. At first the piece appears to be an enormous and dull portrait photograph of the kind seen on precinct walls, but out of the corner of your eye you notice a twitch, and then another, until finally you realize that the piece is a real time video. Though few viewers bothered to stay for more than several minutes, the hardier of us were rewarded at the end of the tape by the cathartic yell of one officer as he is finally allowed to move from his pose and everyone walks away. What is really unnerving about this piece is how these authority figures are held by the artist for an apparently endless time. Those who typically control us are themselves controlled by the artist's tightly restrictive parameters. The viewer's relationship to these uniformed officers is subtly altered, till one isn't sure who is in charge and who is not.

On a completely different note, Angela Bulloch's sculptural works make use of hidden technologies to emit incomprehensible noises, turn oversize light bulbs on and off seemingly at random, scatter about furnishings and decor that blend ordinary institutional and child playroom aesthetics, and draw on the wall in response to the movement of unwitting viewers in the installation. These pieces aren't about their appearance, histories, narratives, or formal properties, but rather about their framing conditions, the physical siting of the work and how we experience the installation. By privileging unexpected results and randomizing elements, her pieces often end up being more frustrating than fun or provocative. The mixed-media installation, Superstructure with Satellites, created for this exhibition, looks like a child's playroom equipped with brightly colored, immense beanbag chairs that emit sounds when you sit in them. The unfamiliar noise grates on your nerves though, and you have no desire to rest in those comfortable chairs. Of all the artists in the Turner Prize shortlist, Bulloch seems most typical of the young British artist phenomenon that has been touted in the international art world for the past few years, most notably embodied by Damien Hirst, infamous for his sliced and pickled sheep. This group of artists depend upon shock tactics and media courting to deflate the British art world's affection for history and genre distinctions. Leaving aside the merits of individual works, the movement has a vigor that echoes that of Warhol's factory era, though its promise has not been proven. Bulloch's dependence upon discomfort, irritation, and shock embodies what so many people dislike about this group of young artists, without Hirst's uncanny examination of larger human issues of death and sexuality that make his work hard to dismiss.

The prize was presented to Gillian Wearing on December 2, 1997, in a much publicized BBC Channel 4 program. I must admit that while my money was on Gillian Wearing, my heart was with Cornelia Parker. Wearing's work has been all over the art world in the last year; she deserved the prize for effort and profile alone. The series of videos that she has shown in the last year alone have shown an impressive progression of her ideas from engaging with anonymous public people to hiring actors, from examining behavior in public spaces to decoding the inner world of personal relationships, and expanding her presentation from faux documentary to many other representational strategies.

On the other hand, while some have criticized Parker's objects for a one-liner quality, her imaginative uncovering of the unconscious realm of matter made her a favorite amongst Londoners. One current project she is working on in collaboration with NASA is to send a meteor back out into space. What delicious hubris, with an equally rigorous conceptualism. This is not just a flirtation with poetic resonances for the sake of themselves, but instead a sustained investigation into the underpinnings of human, social, and galactic life. Parker revels in transformations both destructive and creative. Every time she destroys an object, she then lovingly resuscitates it in an act of symbolic rebirth, making its secret life come alive. Perhaps it is exactly her precarious dance between the acts of destruction and recreation that the judges had difficulty fully supporting. To do so would be to align themselves with the larger forces of physics and metaphysics that Parker ultimately pursues, instead of the relatively safe cocoon of contemporary art.