Latest Turner Prize is one of the best in ages
This year’s shortlist comprised of four artists producing tangible objects, unlike in recent past
It’s sculpture, but not as you know it. For years the shortlists for the annual £25,000 Turner Prize given to an artist under 50, with the runners-up each receiving £5,000, have focused on sound art, archive art, theory art, video art and other more or less immaterial forms. Last year’s competition, when much of the exhibition space was left empty, was won by a bunch of architects, on the spurious grounds that they had produced something “useful”.
This year, however, we’re back in the realm of actual physical stuff, most of it three-dimensional, that is tangibly there in the gallery in front of you. Michelangelo, though, it certainly isn’t. Come to that, it’s not even Equivalent 4, Carl Andre’s notorious “Tate Bricks”, which caused such a controversy when exhibited in this very gallery 40 years ago this month. At least it had the virtue of patently being something — a pile of bricks.
Defying categorisation
The four artists in this show all take mundane objects and put them into juxtapositions so cryptic they defy categorisation. Throw in a lot of tricky background ideas relating the perception of objects to the gnomic structures of linguistic philosophy, and there’s plenty to exasperate the sceptic and give even the most receptive gallery-goer a headache.
None the less, this is one of the strongest Turner Prize shows in ages. Helen Marten, at 30, the youngest, but best known of the four, sets the tone with meticulous but inscrutable assemblages in which organic, industrial, architectural and domestic objects come together to baffling effect.
Marten’s work is a kind of postmodern collage, carefully designed, with found objects sitting beside specially created pseudo-objects; a drainpipe, for example, turns out to be a piece of hand-glazed pottery. Marten appears to be playing complex games with the distinction between real objects and the “images” of objects, all with the aim of making us take in the world around ProjectforaDoor us with greater intensity.
Anthea Hamilton, 37, has provided the exhibition’s most-publicised work, a 20ft-high pair of male buttocks in moulded polystyrene, grasped by a pair of male hands. Based on an unrealised proposal for an apartment block doorway by Italian designer Gaetano Pesce, this overbearing bottom doesn’t make quite the impact you’d expect, not least perhaps because the whole idea of artists researching and restaging each others’ work has been done to death over the past decade and now feels passé.
The surrounding installation BroodandBitterPass immediately brings to mind the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, with a brick-patterned suit hanging in front of brick-patterned wallpaper, and a collection of plastic and metal chastity-belts seen against walls painted with Magritte’s trademark blue sky and clouds.
Josephine Pryde, the oldest at 49, sent up the notion of gallery-going as a form of infantile tourism by sending visitors round her 2015 exhibition in Philadelphia on a miniature train. Presenting the train in a static form, however, as it is here, rather defeats the object. The best things in her exhibition are lengths of Ikea worktops whose paper surfaces have been allowed to fade at varying rates to create fugitive abstract images with the flavour of early 20th-century photograms — images crated by placing real objects on to light-sensitive paper. Anyone who has struggled to put an Ikea kitchen together or has to wipe one of these surfaces down will find a wry pathos in these ingenious works.
The room devoted to Michael Dean, 39, the only male contender, looks at first like some devastated builders’ yard, with concrete casts of bits of corrugated iron standing upended like enigmatic monuments among a wreckage of clay and plaster. In the centre lies a vast mound of pennies and twopenny pieces totalling £20,436, which is, an information panel tells us, the governmentdesignated annual minimum on which a couple with two children can survive in Britain today.
If this stark reminder of everyday realities (and Dean, it might be added, has two children and was until recently strapped for cash) feels welcome amid the ivory-tower atmosphere of the Turner Prize, it remains ambiguous: are we supposed to think this sum insultingly low or unachievably high?
But it is only one aspect of a work whose real underpinning is Dean’s preoccupation with writing, and which seems everywhere to be bursting to achieve literal meaning. What look like huge upended paper-clips appear to be trying to twist themselves into some sort of writing, while stickers designed like cab-firm business cards, but bearing Dean’s bewildering concrete poetry, adhere to surfaces in random clusters.
Raw inventiveness
If it all sounds maddeningly abstruse, even pretentious, there’s a fantastic vitality, humour and raw inventiveness to this work, a sense, all too rare in contemporary art, that there’s more than can be taken in one viewing.
Marten and Dean, the two strongest contenders, deal in a kind of postinternet surrealism in which the meaning and veracity of every object and image is ambiguous and up for grabs. Both leave you scratching your head, but with the sense that it would be worth delving beneath the baffling surfaces. Where Marten’s work feels cool and slightly academic, Dean’s has a sense of gutsy connectedness to a world beyond the gallery and the messy realities the rest of us live in — which makes him my favourite to win the Turner Prize 2016.