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| The Turner Prize or A Crisis of Postmodernism Ilze Strazdiņa, Art Critic Turner Prize nominees exhibition 30.09.2008-18.01.2009. Tate Britain | |
| This time around, Britain's annual Turner Prize provoked extreme opinions and unexpectedly divided sentiments among the critics. The prize has already been awarded for 24 years and, as one of the critics noted, "this is the only time during the year when a discussion on modern art makes it to front page headlines". In 2008, this controversy took quite an unexpected turn.
Newspaper columns were full of negative reviews. They were expressed both by art lovers refusing for, the first time in 24 years, to see the exhibition and by art critics, who bandied about expressions like "dead in the water", "a total disgrace", and "both the prize and the jury have run out of ideas". On the other hand, those who were more positively minded, failing to exonerate the art itself, attempted to come up with suggestions for making the prize more interesting by the admission also of nominees over the age of 50.1 What was the reason for the ill-feeling? Looking back to the early days of the prize, its initial mission was clear - during the booming market of the 1980s, to create and to highlight the so-called main-stream canon of contemporary art, and to revive a discussion on "high" art. The nominees at that time included Howard Hodgkin, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg and Richard Long. In the 1990s, against the backdrop of the unexpected upsurge of the YBAs (Young British Artists) - in the heyday of Cool Britannia - the majority of nominees applied the elements of shock and surprise, diverting from the mainstream elite into the popular and the commonplace. Over the past eight years, the popular and the commonplace have still dominated the nominees' works, although already since 2005 the award seemed to have lost its sensational edge. In 2007, to stir up some controversy, the Tate decided to stage the exhibition of the shortlisted artists as well as the award ceremony in Tate Liverpool. This surely can be explained by the then status of Liverpool as the European Capital of Culture, however, there were quite a few critics who, already a year earlier, had sensed a crisis in the situation. What crisis were they talking about? A new generation of British artists is emerging on the scene. The domination of women nominees was refreshing: Runa Islam born in Dhaka, Goshka Macuga from Poland, and Irish-born Cathy Wilkes. The only male to be shortlisted was homegrown Mark Leckey, born near Liverpool. Although the contenders had been living and working in London for several years, the multiethnic shortlist mirrored the international face of British art, and suggested that there was a chance of the prize ending up in a woman's hands for the fourth time.1 However, the award went to Mark Leckey. | |
 Mark Leckey. Felix Gets Broadcasted. Installation. 2007. Publicity photo | |
| Discontented media coverage of the award is nothing new. Many a critic has frowned upon Tracey Emin's unmade bed or Martin Creed's light-bulb, Damien Hirst's shark in formalin, the Chapman Brothers' penises or Mark Wallinger's human in a fauxfur bear suit. The tie that seems to bind these authors and their works, it seems, is the presence of humour or irony so typical of the English. Given the humorous context, it is small wonder that last year's winner is English, male and no other than Mark Leckey, whose works at the Turner Prize exhibition summarised best of all the simulacra of chaotic contemporary life, and the ability to see all that with his tongue in his cheek. Mark Leckey, 44, is a contemporary incarnation of the 19th century flaneur, observing and exploring the darkest corners of modern urban reality, at the same time preserving a distinct sense of personal distance. Leckey as artist was shaped by North England of the 1980s. Therefore the influence on his works of the thriving club scene of the time is not surprising. He is like a DJ mixing original footage with odd bits and pieces of films he has found, to capture suburban dandies in carnivalesque costumes and strange rituals. His works are installations, combining film, sound and performance. Often they act as a commentary on pop culture, which the artist attempts to trans-form with the help of animation, space and objects. | |
 Mark Leckey | |
| Leckey had risen to prominence in the art world already in 1999 with his film "Fiorucci Made me Hardcore", a visual essay on the underground dance culture of the 1970-90s. He was selected for the Turner Prize for his solo exhibitions "Industrial Light & Magic" at Le Consortium in Dijon, and "Resident" at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. The Turner Prize exhibition showcased his video "Model for 7 Windmill Street". In it, the artist has used Jeff Koons' bunny sculpture to mirror the reflections of the whole of Leckey's Wind-mill Street studio. In his work, "Felix Gets Broadcasted" (2007), he features black-and-white footage of the first TV broadcast starring the famous animated character Felix the Cat. The exhibition displayed also the sexy posters from "Resident" and three films from "Cinema in the Round", documenting the artist' s own shows at various temples of contemporary art, such as the Guggenheim and the Tate. Contemplating this eclectic exposition, one cannot but agree with Michael Glover from "The Independent", who characterized Leckey as "a comedian, a trickster, a poser, a funster", but his work as "silly, outrageous, retro", possessing "a pleasing, reckless and no-holds-barred verve". Recklessness seems to have been the quality that the jury has rated the most highly, as the alienated flaneurism and cut & paste postmodern approach is also present in the entries of other nominees. Works by the Polish-born artist Goshka Macuga to some extent bear quite a strong resemblance to those by Mark Leckey. Macuga, how-ever, does not make fun of, or ridicule anything, but assembles and remixes objects, things and mutual relations. Macuga's sculptural space is an intellectually-based curatorial concept, in which the works and ideas of other artists are juxtaposed with various objects, collections and contextual literature. Goshka Macuga, like the prize winner of 2004 Jeremy Deller, is representative of the position met so frequently these days where an artist acts simultaneously as curator, collector, storyteller and producer. Often quoting from actual collections, Macuga exploits them with her vivid poetic approach. Her works enable everything to be seen in a different light. Goshka Macuga was nominated for the Turner Prize for her contribution to the 5th Berlin Bienniale. Three large-scale installations - Haus der Frau 1, Haus der Frau 2 and Deutsches Volk - deutsche Arbeit (all 2008) - were displayed in the garden pavilion of Berlin‘s Neue Nationalgallerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe. The central idea for the works was inspired by the life of Lilly Reich (1885-1947), van der Rohe‘s lifelong companion and partner. Reich was a groundbreaker for new trends in interior, textile and exhibition design, and in 1920s she was the first female member of the Deutscher Werbund, the council of German artists, architects, designers and industrialists. Reich and Mies van der Rohe collaborated in creating the layout for several expositions of German design and applied art of the time, their esthetical concepts responding to the ideas of the day. Through inviting several modern designers and textile artists to contribute to the creation of the works, she has attempted to reveal the aesthetic and ethical relations of the partnership between Mies van Rohe and Reich. At the Turner Prize exhibition, outside their original context, those minimal forms of modernist expositions function as cold metal and glass structures, which for the contemporary viewer sooner resemble bicycle stands in urban space, and, unsupported by a certain intellectual baggage, may remain unnoticed and incomprehensible. Goshka's attempt to throw contemporary light on this interpretation of the ideas of modernism and the apolitical concept seems to be the best presentation of the neutral point of view practiced by the artist herself, which, regretfully, leaves the audience similarly indifferent and disinterested. Runa Islam, the only artist working in video and film among the 2008 nominees, was accused of the same coolness and impersonality. Runa, born in Bangladesh and educated at the Rijksacademie in Holland, had already turned to the analysis of the point of view and cinematic language in her early works. I made my personal acquaintance with Runa whilst working on the exhibition "000zerozerozero" in 1999. After a visit to Runa's studio, I chose to include in the exhibition, beside a portrait of a stunningly beautiful blonde, also the small Exit sign light box which Runa had inscribed EXILE. This is one of the few objects in the collection of her works, but to me, however, reveals in the best way the artist's differing point of view. The Turner Prize exhibition showcased three works by Runa Islam. "Cinematography" (2007) is a film with finely crafted scenography, in which Islam skilfully operates with cinematic equipment. "First Day of Spring" (2005) is her first piece shot in Bangladesh. In the focus of the camera there are rickshaw pullers resting. Like in her other recent works, Islam has chosen one visual motif as a point of departure, entwined with numerous visual and conceptual allusions, combining analytical and experimental moments in order to create captivating footage without beginning or end. The piece "Be the First to See What You See As You See It", exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale, portrays whiteness of a hypnotic beauty. Whiteness in a woman, in Chinese porcelain, and ... at the moment of shattering. The slow movement of the camera flows from one teapot to the other, from the saucer to the cup and then back again to the face of the white-clad woman. Slowly the china objects of a very English teatime are pushed off their stands to smash on the floor, and equally slowly and poetically we can follow the moment of breaking into pieces and the tinkling sounds as the china hits the concrete floor. Similarly the installations by Irish-born Cathy Wilkes also speak about female identity and sexuality, but unlike the aloof Islam, Wilkes puts all of herself into her works. Her installations often feature shop mannequins or their parts with various readymade objects attached. For the Turner Prize, she had created a new room-sized installation. There were supermarket conveyor belts, toilet bowls, the remains of tinned food, dummies, baby buggies and horseshoes. All those and countless other everyday objects, neatly arranged, had created a kind of crazy "shop-home-shop" feeling. Rich humour and a feministic view characterise Wilkes's outline of an over-rich and deeply-felt reality. So crazy, and at the same time so familiar. Whilst viewing the Turner Prize exhibition, it should be admitted, if talking about a crisis, that the only thing that comes to one's mind is the critics' opposition to the essentiality of contemporary postmodern art. The entries of all the contestants are saturated with the intellectual and emotional debate present and ongoing in almost all prominent art exhibitions and galleries. There is no shock here, but neither can it be found in daily life any longer. Shock has become routine. Everything has already been said, all that remains is to review, to reread and to reanalyse. Is a new modernism possible at all any more?! /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
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