Turner Prize 2007
As has been widely reported across the UK press, the Tate awarded its annual £25,000 Turner Prize at a ceremony in Liverpool on Monday. From a shortlist of four artists – Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger – the jury selected Wallinger as the 23rd recipient of the prize, awarded for the best exhibition by a British or UK-based artist in the 12 months preceding the May nominations.
Wallinger was nominated on the basis of State Britain (2007), shown at Tate Britain earlier this year – a painstakingly fabricated replica of peace campaigner Brian Haw’s wall of banners and placards which stood outside the Houses of Parliament, London in protest against the Iraq War – yet he will undoubtedly be remembered in the British popular imagination as ‘the one dressed in a bear suit’, a reference to the work exhibited in the Turner Prize show at Tate Liverpool entitled Sleeper (2005); a video depicting Wallinger roaming the deserted Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at night in full bear costume.
As with fellow nominee Mike Nelson, this year was the second time Wallinger had been shortlisted. It’s interesting to note that he was first put forward in 1995; the year Damien Hirst took the award for his iconic ‘spot’ paintings and vitrine sculpture Mother and Child Divided (1993). The mood of British culture was significantly different that year to the way it is in 2007: 1995 was the year Tony Blair’s New Labour was in the ascendant and a stultified, scandal-wracked Conservative party were on the way out; the year Britpop blared from radios, rock stars drank champagne at 10 Downing Street and the glossy magazines were full of glamorous Young British Artists behaving badly at the vanguard of Cool Britannia. Twelve years on, and New Labour warhorse Gordon Brown is now Prime Minister, leading his bruised and battered party through the fallout of the Iraq War and other overseas adventures. The country frets about climate change, possible recession, ‘the war on terror’ and racial and religious prejudice. Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse now fill the airwaves, yet seem less avatars of good time sunny pop and soul than the soundtrack to a nation gritting teeth and hoping for the best. Damien and Tracey – still held in much of the UK mainstream media as being representative of all contemporary art – seem like survivors of another era. In light of such change, it could be argued that Wallinger’s work has much more cultural currency in this decade than Hirst’s. What does awarding the Turner Prize for such an explicitly political piece of work as State Britain say about what we want from contemporary art in the UK today?
Dan Fox
Responses
Added by Matt_Hartson,
The tabloid’s memory is certainly selective when it comes to the Turner. The brief furore Langlands & Bell (nominated in 2004) caused with their work about Bin Laden is largely forgotten, as is the fact that it was official war artist Steve McQueen, and not Tracey Emin, that won in 1999. The prize fundamentally lacks the ability to set any agendas - the mainstream press expends its energy wondering ‘is this art?’ (rarely asking ‘is this good?’) while it is largely ignored by ‘serious’ critics (in print, at least).
Much was made of State Britain’s transgressiveness, Wallinger’s claim that half of the installation is placed within the controversial exclusion zone that bans ‘unauthorized protests’ within a kilometre of Parliament Square. How is the work affected by Waldemar Januszczak’s suggestion, boringly reiterated by the Stuckists, that the zone doesn’t bisect the Duveen Galleries at all, but actually ends 300 yards short of Tate Britain? If this is the case, State Britain certainly isn’t literally transgressive. Turner judges praised Wallinger’s ‘bold political statement’, but is it so bold? Is the representation of an explicitly political event also political by default? Without wishing to deviate into questions of why contemporary art (and theatre) is almost exclusively leftist, I see Wallinger’s victory as little more than tokenistic concession: if we want politics in our art, it is disappointing that it must be this literal. Is a fabricated protest in a public institution inherently more political and timely than, say, lights going on and off?
Like all protests, Haw’s is intensely partisan; the 40-metre-long miscellany of objects that Wallinger took all those months to fabricate is oblivious to the intracacies of the conflict it is engaged with. While one strength of the work was the way in which Wallinger created a physical snapshot of the protest’s organic growth, I think that he may have forgotten that the Haw’s mission began in 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq. Our motivations, like those of Brian Haw, change. Politics is complex, but State Britain has the one-dimensional shock value of a Banksy (who donated a piece to the protest); one placard depicts a crucified Haw, suffering for our sins. The work lacks the intelligence required of politicized art - it is closer to a hagiography of the left (photographs of the artist happily posing with Haw accompanied news of the Turner announcement). As Wallinger’s piece in Muenster this year shows, his work is more successful when subtle and well-researched.
Added by tom_morton,
I noted with interest a recent, erroneous story in the Guardian Newspaper, claiming that a bear suit-clad Mark Wallinger joined day time TV presenter Fern Britton on stage at the British Comedy Awards, where she introduced the artist - pace the detention of teacher Gillian Gibbons in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear after Islam’s Seal of the Prophets - as ‘Muhammad’. As the newspaper’s subsequent correction stated, Wallinger in fact ‘did not attend the event in a bear suit or indeed at all’.
Leaving aside complaints about Guardian journalist Rachel Williams’ substitution of fantasy for research, what’s fascinating about this is the assumption that Wallinger would, the moment his Turner cheque was banked, suddenly be willing to appear at an awards dinner as a living punchline to a weak gag by the former presenter of Ready Steady Cook. Perhaps what accounts for this is, as Dan writes above, the mainstream British media’s belief that ‘Damien and Tracey’ are ‘representative of all contemporary art’. A vague memory of Hirst collaborating with Keith Allen on Fat Les’ 1998 unofficial World Cup single Vindaloo, or of Emin’s appearance in a 2001 episode of BBC 2’s topical comedy quiz show Have I Got News For You might make a non-specialist more likely to believe that Wallinger would happily mug along with Britton at a cheesy award ceremony, but I doubt Williams or the Guardian subs would have failed to check the veracity of a claim that, say, 2007 Man Booker winner Anne Enright is appearing alongside the Chuckle Brothers as Widow Twanky in their upcoming production of Aladdin at Preston’s prestigious Guildhall.
Far more so than the tabloids, it is the news pages of broadsheet newspapers (although not, in the Guardian‘s case at least, their reviews pages),that are responsible for perpetuating the notion of contemporary artists as glamorous purveyors of more or less ‘shocking’ one-liners. Just as even the most cursory listen to Radio 1 indicates that there’s more to contemporary rock music than Oasis’ ongoing trudge towards becoming an Oasis covers band, so 5 minutes spent browsing Tate’s website reveals that - hey! - it’s not the 1990s anymore. Despite this, and despite, it seems, the new set of cultural and political paradigms explored in Wallingers’ State Britain there remains a corner of some Guardianista’s minds that remains forever Cool Britannia.
Added by jonathan_griffin,
I disagree with Matt Hartson’s suggestion that State Britain is one-dimensional and unintelligent. For me, what makes the piece rich, complex and relevant is its implicit acknowledgement of its subject’s complications and inadequacies. Wallinger has always been as fascinated by outsiders and eccentrics as he has been in cultural generalities. State Britain is more biography than hagiography; a portrait of a deeply troubled man whose protest may have less to do with global politics than his placards suggest.
While Haw’s assemblage of objects may be ‘oblivious to the intricacies of the conflict it is engaged with’, Wallinger’s is definitely not. In fact I would argue that it is the subject of politics – rather than its content – that is being held up for examination here. The imperfect mechanisms and motivations for dissent and the diverse arenas in which these are played out are the real subject of the work, and for me, Wallinger seems to acknowledge the inherent contradictions in his appropriation of Haw’s case. The issue of the black line that supposedly marks the border of the exclusion zone should perhaps not be read so literally. The question is one of symbolic boundaries, of which State Britain manages successfully to keep a foot planted on either side.
Added by TonyFlock,
The Turner Prize is on the ball with contemporary art culture, as exemplified in the boldest works of art in recent history. With, I think, two entries from the Turner prize.
