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Prize Failure: Lies, Deceit and the Turner Prize London is the world capital of State Art. At least this is what those with a financial interest in it being so tell us daily in every paper. There is no way to verify this, but if the media fuss over the recent Frieze Art Fair is anything to go by they seem to be talking not about London as the breeding ground of a profound and vital new art but instead of champagne piss-ups, celebrity razzmatazz and shady Russian hillbillies forking out phone numbers for trash. Personally, I don’t bother with art fairs – I’ve never attended one that was worth the bus fare – but Frieze looked worse than ever, a cross between Hamley’s and the Cirque du Freak. Newspaper coverage suggested it was a designer mall where grown men burned bonuses watched by swan-neckers allowed in to make the frenzy resemble a New Year sale. Having forced its way towards the epicentre of State Art, Frieze can now not be allowed to fail. Even the allegedly hard-up Tate emptied its piggy bank and bought four new toys there in a pre-Christmas spree. Given State Art’s routine misrepresentations of the significance of works without discernible merit, let alone excellence, I wouldn’t personally assume the truth of anything uttered by most of its principal barkers. The ulterior motive for their hype about London is to talk up the scene in order to wring more and more gravy – and therefore greater job security for themselves – from the Government. These hand-outs they then use to fuel further the fire by squandering it on yet more sprawling contemporary art which there’s too little room to show in already overcrowded museums and for which there are anyway no significant audiences anywhere in England except London. That the wealthiest and most bullish contemporary art market in history, one which generates huge dividends for its speculators (50% alone in the past year), should need ever more public cash to fuel its activities defies belief. The entire publicly owned edifice of ‘Challenging Contemporary Art’ should be privatised and the money thus saved pumped into improving what is the disgraceful travesty of education now dispensed in art colleges. I can see no good argument for continued subsidising of so narrow an orthodoxy: an orthodoxy, furthermore, which is so closely – and you’d be a fool not to suspect corruptly – connected to a rigged market in which art is exchanged like junk bonds. The fact that auction houses now either own or have interests in major dealerships adds to the stench emitting from this racket. All the ingredients are convening for a South Sea Bubble. It has always struck me as a telling irony that the firm which invented junk bonds, Michael Milken’s firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, was the first company sponsor of the Turner Prize. Their business model of buy-back guarantees and artificial price hikes is now practised by most leading contemporary art dealers. For all his selfless services to art, Milken, you may recall, got ten years for racketeering and fraud. State Art and the Turner Prize were born around the same moment and are now synonymous, two sides of the same clipped and debased coin. The history of the Turner Prize, currently the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain, provides a potted overview of State Art. This collection is important because it is the very best that State Art can offer and if London is indeed the centre of the global State Art empire this exhibition should be the jewel in the crown. Make no mistake here is the royal flush of State Art, their best hand, the crack cavalry they’d hold in precious reserve to swing the battle as the light fades. There is, however, a startling admission at the heart of this shameless essay in self-congratulation: it is the alarming truth that together, with all their combined staffs, PR machines, purchase grants, nest-featherings for the usual suspects and accumulated millions in taxpayers’ lolly, State Art and the Turner Prize have failed to produce a single masterpiece. In a quarter of a century they’ve not even come within a sniff of one. Think about this: the meat end of three decades and not one great work – not a single piece that rewards viewing for a second time. Indeed, one walks around this trade show wincing at the dull familiarity – one of those, one of those, one of those – of every line on show. What an indictment this is of the State Art movement. Not since the 1280s, when the cream of Italian artists gathered in Assisi to paint so marvellously the ceiling and walls of St Francis’s church and kick off the great tradition of European art, has there been such a barren period as there is now. Think of the equivalent generation a century ago, 1884 – 1907: the mature career of Vincent; the breathtaking late watercolours of Cézanne; the sculpture of Degas and Rodin, the graphics of Lautrec, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ... and that was only in France. Now move to 1984 to 2007, with all the advantages of an institutionalised avant-garde – more money, more galleries, more fairs and international jamborees, a deluge of media coverage, more lavish publications, more certificated artists than ever before ... and not a single masterpiece can they muster for all that cash and waffle. Stunts and stylistic tics in abundance, yes, but not one work of indisputable visual greatness that one might relish re-visiting. This decades-wide desert is the true legacy of all those self-important socialites in State Art who trill their own accomplishments. For the foreseeable future expect nothing from State Art but mediocrity. Yet we are urged daily to believe that this is a golden age. Is it really so unreasonable to expect the exceptional from so glittering and spoilt a generation? The other great lie this retrospective exposes is that contemporary art is popular. Serota himself is the original author of this often repeated whopper. The truth is that without the crowds of foreigners at Tate Modern, State Art would have been dead and stuffed years ago because there is no wide public support for it. Its only defence of its biased activities relies entirely on growing attendance at Tate Modern, for which there is conveniently no independent verification and which it illogically interprets as support for State Art. I recently visited the Turner Prize retrospective on a Thursday and a Saturday some weeks apart. On both occasions only a handful had been prepared to pay the £11 admission to see it. Seriously outnumbered by the store detectives protecting the assorted brands one felt uncomfortably conspicuous. On both occasions, and for the same exorbitant fee, the Millais exhibition downstairs was pulsing with attentive viewers. State Art is not popular and it never will be. There is no audience for it and yet its salaried apostles lie to the opposite effect every time they speak publicly. As an outsider it must be easy to fall prey to these lies and to confuse pictures of pop stars swigging cocktails at vernissages with the wider popularity of the work they are supposedly celebrating. This is a shrewd marketing trick which so far has worked. Both State Art and the Turner Prize reward what the movement’s High Priests call – their preferred epithets – ‘challenging’, ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘innovative’. And this leads to another Big Lie. The Turner Prize retrospective clearly demonstrates that these labels never meant anything. We are told that this ‘Challenging Contemporary Art’ constantly pushes at boundaries introducing the fresh and innovative, but last year’s victor, Tomma Abts, won for abstract paintings which could have been painted any time since 1955. Meanwhile, Jeremy Deller’s flow diagram is closely related to a Beuys blackboard and Croesus Hirst’s pickled Friesians are not materially different from millions of preserved specimens in the Natural History Museum. The point here is that this Turner Prize material was never genuinely challenging or innovative even when it was made, let alone now when familiarity caused by its constant advertisement has rendered us blind to it. One quickly realises from this that State Art is not judged against a known recipe of published ‘challenging’ or ‘innovative’ criteria. Perversely, a reverse dishonest process applies. Work is selected as worthy by some strange masonic ritual of twitches and winks (and probably baksheesh). At this point the approved medal-words are applied to it. State Art operates entirely on the principle of arbitrary judgements by a small number of individuals. The rest of us look on in astonishment and wonder how such patently negligible work can generate such excitement. Each of the 22 winners since 1984 is represented by a work either featured in their original show or stylistically akin to it. The playlist is a rollcall of merchandise at the Christie’s superstore: Hirst’s spots and picklings, Creed’s on-off light, Whiteread’s slabs of consommé and dripping, Ofili’s dung kitsch, Gilbert and George’s turds, Gormley’s casts, Tillman’s pitiful student photography, Hodgkin’s swipes and frames, Morley’s cartoons, Perry’s urns... Deacon, Cragg, Long, Kapoor ... you can picture it exactly. You know this show already and you know exactly the feeling of unsatisfied hunger you’ll experience looking at it all, yet again. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the indescribably tedious videos by Wearing, McQueen and Gordon – no one with a life could be arsed to sit through more than a few minutes of this pretentiousness. Nothing happens – at least with Tarkovsky there’s the drive of a poetic eye. I’ll guarantee that any film by Douglas Gordon will put you under faster than a belt of Night Nurse. And all you need to know about Wearing’s hour-long caper is that it comprises a team of actors dressed as policemen, ranged as if for a rugby squad photograph, trying to keep still for an hour and not succeeding. That’s it. It is a comment on ... something ... mortality rates in Swaziland maybe. Or perhaps that’s McQueen. Or someone else. Make it up for yourself, your own take won’t be more ridiculous than the official ‘challenge’, which is, incidentally, that “Gillian Wearing is fascinated by people”. Well I never. It probably took a dozen Curators of Interpretation three months to come up with that nugget. Nothing here needed to be seen again. This is Me-Art with no life outside Me, no common language with which to seduce and communicate. In the free-for-all grab that is State Art, the art got lost in a sea of individualism, private fad and calculated jockeying for position. It is as though a novelist had chosen to write in a language of his own devising knowing readers would have to guess at its style and meaning. State Art loses because, having nailed its colours to a Me-Me-Look-At-Me, no-belief mast, it makes history, functional objects and life beyond look so much more absorbing. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the featured sculpture, some of which, requiring half an acre, has spilled out into the Duveen galleries. The future will look back with astonishment that this stuff could have held so many in thrall let alone scooped important prizes. Richard Deacon was one of a suspicious sequence of Lisson Gallery winners of the Turner; in fact, for one period this gallery seemed to have a near-monopoly on the prize. Thus did State Art and the Turner evolve hand-in-glove with a select number of commercial galleries who cleverly exploited the availability of public money for the promotion of their artists. Deacon was a Tate Trustee from 1992 to 1997. He is represented here by For Those Who Have Ears, four freestanding loops of laminated wood with the Cascamite oozing out. Inevitably, there are no known criteria for evaluating this loping contraption as art. “Judge any sculpture by its own terms”, bewildered students are told by college tutors. The problem is that I was never any the wiser for this advice because I never knew where to find these ‘own terms’. And having had the misfortune of hearing Deacon talk about sculpture – when not a lucid sentence passed his lips in half an hour – you’ll be none the wiser either if you ask him. The qualities of For Those Who Have Ears were obvious to the Tate though, who acquired it two years before Deacon won the Turner – there are now, by the way, a mere 31 other works by Deacon in the national stash – 5 of these were donated in the year he began his trusteeship and 13 of them purchased in the year his tenure ended. According to the Tate this piece concerns “Deacon’s interest in the way eyes, ears and mouths channel our perception of the world”. Having unfortunately dropped Gibberish at primary school I’m still none the wiser. For Those Who Have Ears reminded me of a similar loose mesh of material I saw recently at a marvellous air museum in Elvington, Yorkshire. An ancient museum instructor, whose brother had been lost over Germany in a Halifax which had taken off from the adjacent runway, spotted me examining a skeleton frame of spot-welded metal on the floor of a restoration workshop. It resembled the low, ground-hugging open mattresses shown in Arts Council galleries in the 1970s and ’80s. He asked if I knew what it was before divulging that it formed the fuselage of a Wellington bomber, the plane ‘sculpted’ of course by Neville Barnes Wallis. How heavy did I think it was, he asked. It looked as if one man might drag it in snatches across the floor. He then lifted it clear of the ground with two fingers. Made of aluminium sections, it was frighteningly flimsy. It had been retrieved from a crash site. Tony Cragg’s five pointed towers of chucks, cogs and gears fails to live for the same reason Deacon’s work bombs. Piled up by size, they are not as well-made or as evocative as real things. They can’t compete, for example, with the bared mechanics of manifolds and gears in the National Railway Museum or the stripped engines in the wonderful new Flight museum at Duxford near Cambridge, which opened in July. Wherever you look State Art fails the life test. Being artless, it is bland by comparison with the streets. The Turner retrospective is the last place I’d recommend anyone visit to experience art. Our streets and historical and science museums are better places for beautiful objects and startling new ways of seeing. Life, design and industry have usurped a role surrendered by State Art, whose lies and failings are rumbled in the Turner Prize retrospective more transparently than ever before. David Lee | |||||
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