When it
was announced that this year’s Turner Prize would not be taking place in its
usual form, it marked the latest evolution of one of the UK’s most well-known
art awards. The change was done out of necessity, with the award’s usual
accompanying exhibition of the four short-listees cancelled due to the ongoing
Covid-19 pandemic.
Rather
than drop out of view completely, this prompted the decision by this year’s
Turner jury to give ten bursaries of £10,000 to ten long-listed artists rather
than £25,000 to an outright winner and £5,000 apiece to three runners-up.
However
necessary, such a lateral leap nevertheless makes quite a statement, both about
collective action over the cult of individualism, as well as the Turner’s own
chameleon-like tendencies and willingness to move with the times.
This
follows on from the 2019 award, when the four short-listees requested that they
share the award between them rather than sanction a sole winner. This show of
unity between the disparate quartet of Beirut-based sound-led artist Lawrence
Abu Hamdan, British multi-media artist Helen Cammock, Colombian painter Oscar
Murillo and British installationist Tai Shani was a political response as much
as an aesthetic one.
This
spirit of collectivism was in keeping too with Assemble, the design collective
who won the Turner Prize’s 2015 edition, held at Tramway in Glasgow. This was for
Granby Four Streets, an ongoing community design and architecture project based
around the multi-cultural Granby area of Toxteth, aka Liverpool 8.
There is strength
in numbers too in the Turner Bursaries, which highlight an expansive set of
reflections and inquiries on the world today in all its complexity. The
selections made by this year’s Turner jury, chaired by Tate Britain director
Alex Farquharson, are rooted in social and political concerns that go far
beyond any perceived notions of radical chic.
While
there may be no exhibition either physically or online to show off the work of
the ten, profiles of each bursary winner on the Tate webpage gives off the air
of a virtual global village in a radically reimagined state run on self-determination
and power.
With three
of the winners from or based in Scotland, the result feels especially close to
home. This continues the well documented run of Scottish, Scotland-based or
Scotland-trained Turner winners over the decades. This is book-ended thus far
at least by Douglas Gordon in 1996 through to Charlotte Prodger in 2018, taking
in Martin Creed (2001), Simon Starling (2005), Richard Wright (2009), Susan
Philipsz (2010), Martin Boyce (2011) and Duncan Campbell (2014) en route.
This year,
three of the ten Turner Bursary winners are based in Scotland. These are
Edinburgh-based political arts organisation, Arika, Glasgow-based artist and
singer Jamie Crewe, and Alberta Whittle, who lives and works between Barbados,
Scotland and South Africa.
Arika was
founded in 2001, initially to present experimental music festivals in Scotland.
Over the last decade, however, as driven by Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre, Arika
has focused on a series of multi-faceted ‘episodes’ involving lectures, films, discussion
and performance based around particular themes. Arika was awarded a Turner
Bursary for Episode 10: A Means Without End, a five-day programme at Tramway,
Glasgow. As the Tate website describes it, the event explored ‘ideas in maths
and physics as analogies for the desires and struggles of social life and
existence.’
Crewe uses
video, sculpture, drawing and text to explore ‘notions of identity, power,
desire, community and history’ as the Tate website explains it. They were
selected for a Turner Bursary for their ‘sister’ exhibitions at the Grand Union
in Birmingham and the Humber Street Gallery, Hull. Both shows were inspired by
Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness and its prevailing
influence on generations of LGBTQIA+ people.
Whittle’s
work focuses on ‘the experiences of the diaspora’, as the Tate website highlights
it, and ‘incorporates performance, video, photography, collage and sculpture to
look at anti-blackness and the trauma, memory and ecological concerns that
linger in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism.’ Whittle’s Turner Bursary
was awarded following How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth, her exhibition at
Dundee Contemporary Arts that ‘thoughtfully focused on healing, writing and
speech as means of self-liberation.’
From these
projects alone there is a sense of idealism at play, a questioning of the
status quo that reflects some of the wider concerns going on in the world right
now, and which have arguably been amped up by the Covid-19 crisis.
This is
something the Turner has always done, even as many of the artists championed by
the award bite the hand that feeds them. It is this uneasy relationship with
the establishment, both in the art world and its high-profile corporate
sponsors, that has created some of the tensions surrounding the award since its
inception in 1984.
The Turner
Prize, named after pioneering and wilfully singular nineteenth century painter
William Turner, arrived in full public view during an already symbolically
loaded year, with Margaret Thatcher’s free-market glory years in full swing. On
the flipside of this, the society the then Prime Minister claimed didn’t exist was
attempting to fight back against the calculated ideological destruction of
communities that stood in her way.
The
inner-city riots of 1981 had already flared up in economically deprived areas,
including Liverpool 8’s Granby Four Streets neighbourhood. With other pockets
of resistance ongoing, by 1984, the focus was on the Miner’s Strike and a
head-on confrontation between the trade union movement and the Westminster
government.
With such explicitly
ideological conflicts ongoing, to those outside its bubble, the Turner looked
like so much top-range art-wankery co-opted by Loadsamoney sponsors and the new
breed of wheeler-dealer spivs. Such eternal contradictions between art and
commerce made their mark in different ways. While the lack of a commercial
sponsor caused the cancellation of the 1990 award, the ever-expanding art
market made household names of the Sensation generation, whose profile in the
late 1990s chimed with New Labour’s Cool Britannia project.
It was such
tensions that prompted The K Foundation, the duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill
Drummond, to name 1993 Turner winner Rachel Whiteread as the worst artist of
the year. Whiteread was given this shortly after being awarded the Turner for House,
a concrete cast of the interior of an East London Victorian terrace. With Cauty
and Drummond yet to define their own anti-career by burning a million quid on
Jura a year burn their million quid in an action on Jura a year later, they doubled
Whiteread’s money, presenting her with £40,000 alongside what was then a
£20,000 Turner win. Perhaps with portents of the current attempts to
democratise the art world, Whiteread donated £30,000 of her K Foundation winnings
to artists in financial need, and the other £10,000 to housing charity,
Shelter.
Other
protests have come from the Stuckists, who at the 2000 awards, won by German
photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, dressed as clowns, and described the Turner as
an ‘ongoing national joke’ and ‘a state-funded advertising agency for Charles
Saatchi’. In 2002, the Turner, won that year by Keith Tyson, was derided by
then culture minister Kim Howells as “cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit”.
Support for Howells came from the unlikely bedfellows of Prince Charles and Banksy,
the latter of whom stencilled ‘Mind the crap’ on the steps of the Tate.
This era
was best summed up in the lyrics of If I Had Possession Over Pancake Day, a
song on Half Man Half Biscuit’s 2002 album, Cammel Laird Social Club.
‘Outside Goldsmiths’ coughing up
blood / Turner Prize Judge gasps “Christ, that’s good / Leave it as it is,
it’ll get first place / We’ll call it A Full Shift at the Coalface / Oh, well,
you’re neither a Stuckist or a YBA / And you’re no longer a miner as of today’
Beyond
such Turner-baiting, look at some of the names of the winners and nominees in
the Turner’s early years, and a set of provocateurs kicking against the pricks
in a similar fashion to The K Foundation emerge. Gilbert and George and Richard
Long were on the list the first year, won by Malcolm Morley. Ian Hamilton
Finlay was there the following year, when it was won by Howard Hodgkin. In 1986,
conceptualist collective Art & Language and the most painterly of film-makers
Derek Jarman featured on a list won this time by Gilbert and George.
Perhaps it
was partly the presence of such an individual-minded awkward squad that helped
prompt what became an annual tabloid bunfight, whereby the Turner winners were
mocked, satirised and yah-booed with epithets of cartoonishly indignant
shock-horror outrage not seen since the filth and the fury of punk rock. This
was done with full ‘70s club-comic style guffawing at what constituted art
beyond the familiarity of an off-the-peg print from Woolworth’s assorted
correspondents imagined hung on most people’s walls.
This
reductively knee-jerk, lowest-common-denominator response was as tied in with
the Thatcherite approach to culture as was closing the factories. With no
attempt to engage with the complexities of what was on show, or how the work
engaged with the world beyond the gallery, the Turner became a sideshow that
allowed its opponents to fulminate at how tax-payers’ hard-earned cash was
being wasted.
The Turner
arguably got its own back on this in 2004 when the prize was awarded to Jeremy
Deller. Deller’s exhibition at Tate Britain included documentation of The
Battle of Orgreave (2001), his large-scale re-enactment of the confrontation
between striking miners and police that took place in June 1984 in a South Yorkshire
coking plant, when it looked part of a very real English civil war.
If such headline-making
glory days are over for the Turner, the move also perhaps signals how things
have changed both in the creation and perception of contemporary art, and how the
award itself continues to shape-shift. Contemporary art is more embedded into mainstream
culture than we sometimes like to let on, and that is only partly to do with
the generations of art stars who’ve put it on the map over the last century. As
the recipients of this year’s Tate Bursaries make clear in very different ways,
their work and that by their peers is a recognisable part of everyday discourse,
and indeed everyday living.
At the
same time, those given this year’s Tate Bursaries are a reflection, not so much
of how we live now, but of something to aspire to in the big bad world beyond.
Unlike the 1980s when the Turner was founded, that sense of aspiration is
towards a potentially more harmonious, forward-thinking goal than flying solo.
If anything,
then, the work produced by the ten recipients of the Turner Bursaries, like the
joint winners of 2019 and the collective approach of Assemble in 2017, are
following in a tradition of the Turner’s own making, which, perhaps, has this
year come of age.
All this
comes at a particularly tumultuous moment in history which has had a seismic
effect on everything, including the Turner. That moment will pass, as will the
spotlight on the winners of the Turner Bursaries. That won’t make the artists
or their work go away or be any less worthwhile, but a new wave will be along
any minute, who will be scrutinised and championed by different juries and
panels with different sets of criteria and concerns, and so it goes.
What
happens beyond it in the world art is made from and the responses to the
Covid-19 pandemic that result remains to be seen. In the meantime, like the ten
recipients of the Turner Bursaries, who categorically aren’t in competition
with each other, until things get brighter, one can only share the love.
ends
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