UK Edition
Turner prize shortlist is the most 'political' to date
Every shortlist for the Turner, Britain’s biggest art prize, has its particular direction. Two years ago the choice of artists appeared to indicate the “return of sculpture” - or at least three dimensional stuff that was physically present in the gallery. Last year’s was notable for the diversity of the media employed, from painting to filmmaking.
This year we have the most “political” short list to date, as the judges seemed pleased to - rather smugly - acknowledge at this morning’s announcement event. Indeed, reading through the reasons why the various artists have been selected - Charlotte Prodger for the “nuanced way in which she deals with identity politics”, Luke Willis Thompson for addressing “representations of state and police violence” and so on - you’d be forgiven for thinking they’ve been selected for their deftness in parading their liberal left ideological credentials, rather than for their abilities as artists in any traditional sense.
Three are filmmakers, or at least use video/film as part of their “practice” (a word that seems to have replaced “work” in art parlance). The fourth are a collective of architects, designers and journalists, going by the name Forensic Architecture, whose investigations into killings by state agencies around the world are, they maintain, a form of “art practice” - that word again.
I have seen the exhibition for which the group have been nominated (still showing at London’s ICA) and there was so much text on the walls that I began to suspect, before I’d even finished reading the first wall panel, I began to suspect that I was exhibiting signs of long-suppressed dyslexia. To my mind, the sheer density of reading required to get round this show seemed antithetical to what an exhibition is all about. But if you like the idea of immersing yourself in a demanding book on state terrorism spread over the walls of an art gallery, these are the artists for you.
Naeem Mohaiemen, born in London in 1969, but raised in Bangladesh, makes films exploring “post-colonial identity, migration, exile and refuge, through narratives using fiction and social history.” Painfully earnest as that may sound, his film, Tripoli Cancelled, in which a man loses his passport and finds himself confined for a week to a bench in an abandoned airport that has since been turned into a holding bay for political refugees, at least sounds as though it has the potential for some grim humour.
Charlotte Prodger, born in 1974 in Bournemouth, makes films that cover an impressive, but bewildering number of bases. Her film BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan, exploring the many uses of the name of the eponymous Neolithic deity, constitutes - we are told - a new form of self-portraiture, an investigation into the tradition of the artist-film maker from an LBGT perspective and a profound meditation on “what it is to be human.” Is that all?
New Zealander Luke Willis Thompson, born 1988, is another artist attempting to create a new kind of filmed portraiture, focussing on people “fundamentally impacted by police and state brutality”. His Autoportrait, which has also been nominated for this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, consists of a single, silent shot of Diamond Reynolds, an American woman who made a live broadcast on Facebook immediately after the fatal shooting of her partner by police in Minnesota in 2016.
Where Thompson makes his films using old- school 16mm and 35mm stock, Prodger made hers on her iPhone. But then the smart phone is, we were told today by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, the principle medium used by all these artists. On this showing, the phone-led future of art will involve a lot of reading and a great deal of sitting in the dark in silence.
But what was most notable about the announcement event, though, was how little we saw of the artists’ work - surprisingly considering how easy it would have been to show film clips - and how much we were subjected to the advocacy of the judges (critic Oliver Basciano, curator Lisa Le Feuvre and novelist Tom McCarthy).
Much of it consisted of litanies of themes and issues - “traumatic histories of inequality”, “what it means to be in the world” and the like. In this kind of format, , which has become the norm for such events, it is as though the verbiage of the judges has become almost more important than the physical reality of the art itself. Next year, perhaps the Turner will dispense with artists altogether and exhibit the judges as a kind of “gesammtkunstwerk”. It would likely give a more accurate reflection of what the increasingly word-driven art of today is all about.