99 YEARS OLD AND STILL ARTISTICALLY CHALLENGED…

THE destination of the Turner Prize has now been announced but before the judges did so, I thought I should form my own opinion of the shortlisted artworks. To that end, I invited my old friend, the Estonian artist Tushort Planx to come with me to see the exhibits.

The first one we looked at was a huge sculpture called Project For A Door by Anthea Hamilton. “It looks to me like a naked backside with two hands clasping the buttocks,” I said.

“It is an exploration of the dark repercussions of sexuality,” Tushort corrected me. “The work is inspired by a suggested architectural design for a doorway,” he went on, with the space between the thighs envisaged as the passage between the outside and inside of the building.”

“Why are the hands upside down and severed at the wrists?” I asked.

“Upside down?” my Estonian friend queried.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “They’re upside down. The thumbs are at the bottom in both senses of the word.”

“Brilliant!” he said. “The sculpture of an architectural design contains a verbal pun: the thumbs are at the bottom of the bottom.”

“But to get the buttock owner’s own hands there in such a way is well nigh impossible, so the hands must belong to someone else. In which case that other person must either be a contortionist or be hanging upside down on the other side of the buttock owner which strikes me as both obscene and dangerous,” I said.

“Which encourages the viewer to explore the possibility that the buttock owner severed the hand owner’s hands at the wrist when he or she realised what obscenity she or he was up to,” Tushort explained, “or not, as the case may be. Brilliant!”

We moved on to the second artwork, Michael Dean’s pile of coins. “What’s this about?” I asked Tushort.

“It’s £20,436 in pennies with one penny missing,” he said. “That makes it one penny less than the poverty line for a family of four. Astounding. That removal of one penny is the unmistakable touch of genius.”

“It’s a pile of pennies on the floor,” I protested. “Why is that art?”

“You miss the entire point of the thought that went into it,” Tushort said dismissively. “Michael Dean starts with writing, which he gives physical form through the use of moulds and casts of his words, abstracted and distorted using materials from everyday life.” “Like pennies,” I said. “Exactly,” he commended me. “But if he’d used five-penny pieces, it would have taken up less room on the floor,” I pointed out.

“But you can’t remove a penny from a five-pence,” Tushort announced triumphantly.

“You could take away a five-pence and leave two tuppences change,” I suggested.

“You just don’t understand,” he said sadly. “In a work such as this, Michael shows that he has his finger on the pulse of the human condition.”

“Rather than on a buttock of the human rump,” I said.

More of the Turner shortlist later.