A R T S & C U LT U R E

The Turner Prize Shortlist

The Turner Prize Shortlist

BY PDRaiG BElton

this page: Crane by Hilary lloyd opposite page: no Reflections by martin Boyce

42

Oasis Magazine

one has to feel sorry for tabloids, inhabiting a parallel universe lacking a turner Prize. the sun would be bereft of the headline, inspired by Karla Blacks polythene art, how to bag a turner prize. the Daily mail plumps for the more elegantly polysyllabic, suspended ball of plastic is favourite to win prize. it is where the clowns of the art world annually descend. (note for libel lawyers: this is not a term of abuse. the anti-turner Prize stuckists, interesting sorts like Charles thomson, annually rock up to picket, clad in variations on Watteaus Pierrot.) this year it is a short-list of fourtwo painters, two sculptorsdescending without precedent from london to the provinces, to tyne and Wear and the nine-year old Baltic Centre for Contemporary art, in Englands obscure colony called the north. next year they go to Belfast, and a different north (and colony). one almost sniffs a theme: half this years short-list, and the preceding two years victors, derive from Glasgow (which is northern to excess). not only the turner, but British art itself is on a journey away from london, and the Young British artists familiar territory of Goldsmith and warehouses converted to galleries in the East End. Glaswegian is the new shoreditch. significantly, none of this years short-list ventured for university to london. selected on the 5th of may, they shall joust until the 5th of December, in exhibition at the Baltic centre from the 21st of october. For such a solid fixture of the British artistic and journalistic calendar, its all quite new: the turner only dates to 1984, missing a beat in 1990 due to a bankrupt sponsor, but along the way contriving to launch Damien Hirst, Gilbert & [sic] George, anish Kapoor and antony Gormley to public view. its controversial, most visible feature, the shortlist, was dropped in 1986; which turned out more controversial still, and it has since grown to part of the institution, and the fun it provides. the contestants, then. Karla Blacks sculpture is one of tactile, domestic materials, forged for particular site through some form of physical struggle, and then afterward destroyed. nail varnish, Vaseline and body lotion all figure in her studio in industrial quantities, resulting in an artistry of psychological vulnerability: it has been described as if she began making herself up for a saturday night, but found herself painting instead. Her fellow Glaswegian sculptor Martin Boyce is the previously best-known of this quartet: he represented scotland in the 2009 Venice Biennale, with a melancholic dreamscape of upturned dustbins, rusty tables and castaway benches; as if one landscape had blown through another, like the convergence of ancient Venice with the comments and emendations deposited by modernist architect Carlo scarpa. the tate own four of his works. Brooding, masculine, they often quote the modernist design history from which they emerge: but with an elegiac quality, reflecting on the unrealised opportunities

and intentions of jol and jan martels concrete cubist trees in Pariss 1925 Exposition des arts Dcoratifs. an observer mused Boyces version were playground climbing frames designed to poke a childs eye out. to these two sculptors, there is a complementing pair devoted to the image. the autobiographical urban landscapist George Shaw, recasting the tile Hill council estate of his youth in the sheen of Humbrol enamel, might well prove the first naturalist painter to figure on a turner shortlist. Humbrol being the paint of model kits and youth, the sheen is a twofold gloss: the glow you see only on nocturnal walks home unaccompanied, a repository of hinted personal imports, and a gesture away from the strictly representational to suggest both remembrance and the overlooked or mysterious at play in the quotidian. the hinted thrill of peril, fundamentally adolescent, crumbles in adult gaze supplying darker undertones. Hilary Lloyd, in her installations, relishes the foregrounding of kit: projectors and monitors which seem to form part of the work itself, suggesting variant modes of seeing. quieting and fragmenting the corporeal form with which her work repeatedly begins, the mechanical often for her becomes, fetishised and appreciated for its sculptural qualities, a simulacrum for human identity. a different direction wholly was her studio #2 (2009), displayed at the Frieze art Fair in 2009, wherein four video projections each displayed a meticulously wrought study of reflected light, suggesting the op-art of Vasarly, or a hallucinogenic. the immediacy achieved by shaw and Black suggests they may gain a march on the more abstracted work of the other two. But who knows? second-guessing the turner Prize judges is a rite of spring, a comfortable calendar perennial. and one wondered when the turner was going to grow up and leave home.