Art review: The Turner Prize 2009 Exhibition

Published on Monday 30 November 2009 19:45

TATE BRITAIN, LONDON **

WE ARE suggestible creatures. Exploiting that fact, the Claque in French theatre was a group of people hired to applaud a play and so encourage the rest of the audience to do the same. It was a big success. You can see why. If the audience are applauding, who needs the critic? Canned laughter exploits the same power of suggestibility over judgment. If there is laughter, it must be funny. In the media age the whole nation can be persuaded in an instant to laugh or cry as one, so naturally the Claque works as it always did.

This is especially true in the visual arts. The Turner Prize has always managed to secure television coverage (the winner is announced on Channel 4 on 7 December) and so a small group of artists, dealers, art administrators and subservient critics gives apparent credibility to art that does not deserve it. No doubt this modern Claque is not as cynical as its predecessor. Indeed, its members are notably self-important and self-importance and cynicism don't mix, but the effect is the same.

As one person supports the views of the next, and so on in a closed circle, the whole thing is self-validating and self-referential. From the outside it looks as circular and as self-contained as a fairground carousel, though much less entertaining; grown-up people riding solemnly on painted fairground horses as though they were real and actually going somewhere, not just up and down and round in circles.

But what are the general public to make of this? Responding to its media presence, they approach the Turner Prize with good will. People really are interested in contemporary art. There were folk of all ages in the exhibition when I was there.

It was hushed as a church too, but the silence was neither awe nor reverence. It was sheer bafflement. People want to make sense of what they are seeing, but cannot because there is no sense in it: and no sense is nonsense. The art is wholly self-referential. It is rooted in self. The uniqueness of self is its only authentication. Thus it has no link to shared experience. Here of course the labels play a vital part. They offer a substitute for what the art entirely lacks: communication.

I have often thought you could make a wonderful anthology of art labels. Try this from the blurb for Enrico David in this year's exhibition, for instance. "Despite the expansive texts he (David] often writes to accompany his installations, language, for him, does not clarify meaning." Nonsense by any other name is just as daft. Or take this from the blurb to Lucy Skaer's Black Alphabet which exactly repeats Brancusi's Bird in Space, but 26 times.

"Whereas Brancusi's sculpture was praised as an abstract evocation of flight, Black Alphabet, made from compressed coal dust, remains inert and impenetrable. Through her work, Skaer aims to draw attention to the act of looking itself." That last sentence is quite meaningless and as for describing her work as "inert and impenetrable", my job is done. I need no longer search for words.

Lucy Skaer is from Glasgow and hers is the first work that you meet in the show. As well as the 26 Brancusi Birds standing in a huddle on the floor, she has made a drawing of a whale skeleton out of graphite squiggles. It is quite nice, but unfinished. She has an untidy installation with a chair and several drawings of it. She has also borrowed a whale skeleton and put it behind bars. A whale is impressive, but that doesn't mean the same is true of the art that includes it.

Richard Wright, also from Glasgow, is next. He paints on the walls. The blurb solemnly informs us that he "often distorts our perception of an architectural space, so that solid structures might appear broken up, transparent or fluid". What a meaningless clich, a baroque ceiling might do that, or a tromp l'oeil landscape on the wall, but that's far beyond anything Richard Wright could imagine. He has painted two small red tonsils over the door as you enter and at the other end a very large composition of symmetrical blobs like a Rorschach inkblot in applied gold leaf. It is mildly decorative, gold always is, but the galleries are big and bald and ugly. His work has no impact on them at all.

In Enrico David's installation, there are two Humpty Dumpties on skis and an elongated figure made of stuffed black cloth is draped over a series of screens on a black stage 30 feet long. The artist's detached face appears from time to time. "David's work", we are told, "rarely displays the human body as a unified whole. Instead it is re-crafted to express a lack of fit with the world." Re-crafting the human body seems to put David on an equal footing with the Creator, but we are invited to treat all this with such awe and reverence that should be no surprise.

Roger Hiorns has done some interesting things before, but here he disappoints. His main work is a jet engine ground to dust and piled on the floor. He reminds us that "All matter turns to dust". No doubt, but using a jet engine to make the point scarcely improves on Shakespeare: "Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney sweepers come to dust." Two smaller works are described as made of "plastic and brain matter". Perhaps they are, but the latter is otherwise conspicuously absent in all these shows. They offer us no more than a glimpse into the private workings of a series of really quite undistinguished minds.

So what has gone wrong? Mockery is easy and certainly appropriate, but these banal, private maunderings are offered to us as the apogee of art in our time. After "inert and impenetrable", the most apposite word to describe them is infantile. I choose it with care and not simply to be derogatory. We are invited to treat these artists exactly as though we were indulgent adults watching children playing private, infantile games. There is a complex link between childish games and art, but they are not the same thing at all. Such games are vital for children and are to be encouraged, but these are not children. They are adults. We can rightly expect that their art should have some bearing on our lives, enhance it in some way, beautify it even. Instead, in each case it remains firmly locked in a private world. It is inaccessible to us and, quite meaningless, it fulfills no useful purpose at all.

So who should win next Monday? Should we care? Can objective judgment really be brought to bear on four statements of utter self-absorption? I doubt it, but to try and second-guess the judges and apply what I imagine might be their criteria, of the four, if Lucy Skaer's show is the best-looking, that is largely due to Brancusi and the whale.

Overall it is earnest and pretty conventional, not a recommendation here. Enrico David is perfectly silly. That might qualify him for the prize. It has done so for other artists in the past. Roger Hiorns has a track record, but here he lets himself down. Richard Wright has gold on his side, always a winner, but also he is so completely self-absorbed, so indifferent either to place or to audience, that like Cencrastus the curly snake, he disappears so far up his own backside that those really could be his tonsils over the door.

He is winking at us from behind them. Such perfect subjectivity, unsullied by any reference to the real world and entirely indifferent to it, seems to me to be what the Turner Prize is about and so by its own peculiar criteria he should win.

&#149 The Turner Prize Exhibition is at Tate Britain until 3 January. The winner will be announced at the gallery on 7 December during a live broadcast by Channel 4, www.tate.org.uk

CRITIC'S CHOICE

The New Landscape

Aberdeen Art Gallery, until 23 January

THE New Landscape at Aberdeen Art Gallery is a celebration of the way in which contemporary artists deal with both rural landscape and the urban environment. Artists include Jordan Baseman, Dalziel & Scullion, Boyle Family, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Toby Paterson and Alex Heim and Torsten Lauschmann.

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