Rant about the Turner Prize
As an art student, the Turner Prize is something I am meant to take an interest in, and understand to be somewhat important. However, I can’t help but look at the artists work that is nominated for this prize and feel that it is nothing more than a huge joke.
First of all, I would like to introduce you to the winner of the 2010 Turner Prize, if you do not know who this is already:
Susan Philipsz.
The above image is a view of the room that hold’s Susan Philipsz “work” at Tate Britain. When I say work, I use this term loosely, because….where is it? It’s not the bench, and it’s not the two black boxes against the wall, or the random man unfortunate enough to be sitting there. This is actually a sound installation. A part of me actually wants to believe that this “artist” got lost on her way to X-factor and, through some form of human error, ended up being nominated for an art award. The piece Susan chose to submit for the Turner Prize is, as I understand it to be, an old Scottish lament about a love that gets lost at sea sung by Susan herself. This is played through the two speakers so one echoes the other and it has quite an eerie feel. In all due respect to Susan, her voice isn’t bad, I just can’t justify it winning an art award, and I almost certainly wouldn’t pass my art course if I sang a nursery rhyme and played it to my tutor. Unless I’d written 10,000 words of evaluative in-depth annotation to explain it and produced a series of experimentation with a range of different media and linked it to the work of others. But that’s another story.
The other artists nominated for the Turner Prize are not exactly the next Picasso or Van Gogh either. I can just about accept Dexter Dalwood as an artist; his work is mostly acrylic paintings on canvas portraying his wild and crazy abstract ideas about non-abstract things. His work is very stylised, to put it nicely. His paintings are nice, but I’ve seen GCSE work of a higher standard.
Angela de Cruz is a sculpture artist. By this, I mean she paints canvases in solid colours and then destroys the frame and throws it on the floor. Or she breaks chairs. This makes me wonder if she has some sort of anger issue and art is her way of dealing with things; she seems to like destroying stuff. Remember those plastic orange chairs you get a school? One of her pieces is just one of those chairs. With the legs broken off. Maybe she just ate too many pies and sat on it.
The Otolith Group isn’t something I can’t really comment on. I’m sure their films are very good, but I just really did not have the time to sit and watch them. And similar to the sound installation, whilst films can have some degree of artistry, I can’t help but feel that an art gallery isn’t the place for them. We have cinemas for a reason. Why not have cinemas dedicated to showing these “pieces of art”, as well as those that show feature films?
All in all, the Turner Prize is a joke. And I’m off to become a Stuckist.
