The Turner Prize has got stuck. It’s a bit like an old gramophone record. The
turntable may be spinning, but we seem to have reached the end of a track.
This prize is the most respected in the contemporary cultural calendar. It
is supposed to showcase all that is most exciting on the forthcoming scene.
But this year’s show looks set to stir little but intense public apathy.
In fact, as you step into the Tate Britain galleries, you hear a noise like a
fluff-clogged record needle that is caught in a scratch. It turns out to be
the sonic accompaniment to Mark Titchner’s all-spinning all-trancing
installation. His How to Change Behaviour is a relatively new piece
of work. But Titchner, the art world’s equivalent of the Hyde Park Corner
soapbox ranter, persists in expounding the problems of our postmodern belief
systems — or lack of them, at least.
His is a characteristically discombobulating contribution, in which a
home-made Doctor Who-style aesthetic meets high tech. Wobbly
Op-Art- style creations set out to hypnotise with their whirling
black-and-white patterns. Video monitors stutter and flash. Ranks of
hand-carved wooden amplifiers are connected to some mysterious lectern. A
crudely carved tree is hung with strange runic symbols. But what do you make
of such wilfully disparate assemblages, of this hotchpotch of hocus-pocus,
science and spiritual bric-a-brac?
You seem to have two choices. Either surrender yourself as Titchner requests.
“Dear Pioneer,” he addresses you in a wall text, “I ask this with love in my
voice. You are invited to contribute to the fulfilment of the object before
you . . .” Or you reach for the accompanying booklet to have a whole lot of
stuff about psionics and sigils explained. Either way you will not be much
the wiser, which, though that may be precisely Titchner’s point (the title
of his kinetic sculpture, Ergo Ergot, parodies Descartes’ famous “cogito
ergo sum”, substituting ergot, a notoriously hallucinogenic fungus)
left me wishing that the art work could at least have a visual point.
Titchner, best known for pasting up billboards and posters emblazoned with a
bewildering variety of scavenged slogans, can be thought-provoking. But his How
to Change Behaviour is as messy as its message.
At least spectators will have something more solid to grab hold of with
Rebecca Warren, whose tactile sculptural pieces are displayed in the next
gallery. Warren has become recognised for her irreverent use of traditional
materials — clay and bronze — to take a conceptual prod at that most prodded
of all creatures, the poor old white male modernist and his lustful,
proprietary gaze.
Now Warren continues to elaborate her series of increasingly burlesque
distortions of Degas’ landmark Little Dancer, moulding and
scooping and pinching and kneading to reduce the poised little modern madam
to what looks more like a lump of squished Plasticine. The sensual solemnity
of such great modernists as August Rodin and Edgar Degas meets the comic
concupiscence of Helmut Newton and Robert Crumb.
It doesn’t make a pretty sight. And its feminist message is tired. But for
those who hope that the Turner Prize will provide them with something
salacious to gossip about, this is the only display that will in any way
provide. The Turner Prize’s traditional shock is pared down to a few
protuberant bosoms and the odd fluffy pompom nipple.
Warren’s work has a visual immediacy, which is more than can be said for the
piece by Phil Collins. His The Return of the Real gives even that
most potentially tedious of cultural productions, the art video, a bad name.
His interminable films are even less riveting than the reality TV programmes
that they set out to question. They offer a platform to reality-show victims
who feel that their lives have been ruined but who, like moths to a flame,
are drawn back to the camera to take an awfully long time to tell us as
much. The irony is emphasised by the installation of a production company’s
fully functional office. They are touting for volunteers to make a British
version of this film.
We are trapped in a relentlessly narrowing loop. And the same might be said of
the Turner Prize. It seems to have nowhere to turn except inwards — if the
Turner, in part, represents the state of the contempary, this year’s
contribution reflects what a drab mess that is. And perhaps this is why
Tomma Abts may be the artist who best captures the contemporary mood.
For almost a decade Abts has been obsessively exploring the same basic format.
She works at an interface so subtle that, set in any more dramatic context,
her hermetic little canvases would too easily be overlooked. She is an
artist for anoraks. And maybe, at the moment, with no big new discoveries to
showcase, this is where the cultural scene is at.
Abts’s pictures — always measuring 48 x 38cm (19 x 15in) — are not abstract
because they are based on nothing in the real world. Rather, they grow
through some painstakingly rigorous process of organic accretion to
construct quasi-geometrical patterns that mimic nothing you know of but are
increasingly intriguing for the way that they work, for the way that they
trap an unsettling sense of movement or play with unexpected visual
illusions and spatial relationships.
These are complicated paintings. And I hope that Abts takes the Turner Prize
this year. This is not because, in a cultural climate that persistently
trumpets the return of painting, it might seem appropriate to recognise it.
It is because her paintings have a lovely sense of inner congruence. They
are impossible to reproduce or describe. They have to be seen. Her work,
quite simply, works visually. That is its point.
Maybe even the Stuckists — that disconsolate band of cultural activists who
faithfully turn out annually to harangue Turner Prize partygoers — might be
appeased if she wins because — when they are not organising mini rallies
against the conceptual or attacking the Tate for its acquisitions policies,
or adding yet more points to their long manifesto — they too are painting,
apparently. “Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists,” they insist.
Unfortunately, artists who do paint aren’t necessarily interesting artists, as
becomes manifest when you pay a visit to a Stuckist show that opens this
week at Spectrum. The Stuckists, following sound historical tradition, take
their name from an insult. It was offered to them by Tracey Emin. She
informed Billy Childish, her former boyfriend — and now also a former
Stuckist — that he was “Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!”
At least Childish had a whimsically impish vision. The movement, stubbornly
persisting without him under the near-cultish leadership of its co-founder
Charles Thomson, seems empty of anything much except some mad desire to get
in front of the flashbulbs. It laments the demise of the figurative
tradition, but all over Britain people are still painting traditional
pictures, as any local art show will quickly attest. The Stuckists seem
disingenuous. What they want is what everyone else wants — which is fame.
That is why they turn up every year to the Turner to stand like rabbits in
the TV lights.
Still, their persistence has paid off. This week they open their first West
End show. The work is formulaic. Each picks on a painter — Egon Schiele or
Toulouse Lautrec, for instance — and restyles his aesthetic in a brash
cartoon format. The Stuckists are indeed stuck — even worse, they are stuck
being Stuckists. At least the Turner Prize is capable of moving on.
The Turner Prize opens today at Tate Britain, SW1 (020-7887 8888). The
Stuckists are at Spectrum London, 77 Great Titchfield St, W1 (020-7428
4949), from October 5
