The pair of buttocks that could win the Turner Prize
After 2015’s nadir, the most controversial art prize in Britain might just have redeemed itself this year, says a startled Mark Hudson
Among the nominees in this year’s Turner Prize shortlist is a giant pair of male buttocks, set in a somewhat explicit pose. With the awarding of the prize itself, which takes place in December, now being broadcast on the BBC rather than Channel 4, the inclusion of this outsized piece of personal anatomy is bound to cause controversy.
But the shock in art terms regarding this year’s list is less the rude bottom than the fact the jury has gone trad in its choices. Sit down before you read this, but the shortlist looks very like the return of sculpture. This isn’t, I hasten to add, sculpture in the Michelangelo or Henry Moore sense, but wilfully complex, elliptical work that is out to subvert the way we see the physical world around us.
The artists have been shortlisted for works that also include a sofa with a chunk of concrete dumped on it and combinations of discarded machinery. But after years of Turner Prize art dominated by conceptual art, sound art, archive art and film art, in which the exhibitions of shortlisted work offered us precious little we could actually look at, this is at least art that is composed of physical stuff – form, space, colour and manipulated materials.
In recent years, Britain’s most lucrative art award – £40,000, to artists under 50 (£25,000 to the winner and £5,000 to the runners up) – seems to have lost its capacity to shock.
Classic public-baiting works such as Damien Hirst’s bisected sheep in formaldehyde (1995) and Martin Creed’s Lights Going On and Off (2001), now feel like ancient history. Last year’s prize – in a nadir for the award and arguably for British art – was given to a group of architects, Assemble, largely it seemed, because they were well intentioned.
This year’s shortlist, however, startles, not so much through outrageous imagery or an appearance of taking the viewer for a ride – but because it signals a return to the fundamentals of art. It may be as trickily post-conceptual as anything else thrown up by the award, but one way or another it is visual art that is actually visual.
Josephine Pryde, 49,
Based in London and Berlin, but hailing originally from Alnwick Northumberland, and one of two north-easterners among the four, Pryde is shortlisted for her solo exhibition at CCA Wattis, San Francisco. While her work is essentially photographic, it is presented alongside sculptural elements.
There’s an evident physicality and sensuality to works such as her series It’s Not My Body, which superimposes MRI scans of foetuses in the womb onto desert landscapes using tinted filters. They seem like they’d make fantastic Pink Floyd album covers.
Anthea Hamilton, 37
Nominated for her exhibition Lichen! Libido! Chastity! at SculptureCenter New York, Londoner Hamilton is a kind of updated surrealist who brings diverse and often bizarrely unlikely existing imagery, from Japanese Kabuki theatre to John Travolta, into vibrant and challenging installations. Her monumental buttock-doorway Project
for door (After Gaetano Pesce) is derived from an unrealised work by the great Italian architect-designer Pesce.
The piece is an 18-feet-high brick wall with an arch broken through it framing a pair of male buttocks, clasped by a pair of male hands.
It was originally designed for an apartment block on New York’s Upper East Side in 1972, and was – not entirely surprisingly – never realised.
While Gaetano Pesce used a “wellknown architect”, whose identity was never revealed, as the model for the original work, Anthea Hamilton scanned the derriere of “a well-known cultural figure” for her version.
Like many of Pesce’s works, including a sofa composed of an enormous rubber foot, the piece functions through its surreal use of scale, with the over-sized human placed in humorous relation to the monumentally architectural.
Hamilton has wholesale absorbed the piece into her own oeuvre, in what she describes as a “call and response” to the original work.
“Appropriation” is now a proudly proclaimed and near-universal element in contemporary art. Works that stand on their own without referencing other art, or indeed lifting whole aspects of other people’s art, are fast becoming a rarity.
Pesce himself, apparently, entirely approves of Hamilton’s use of his work.
Michael Dean, 38
Originally from Newcastle, the only male among the four shortlisted artists makes inscrutable, large-scale installations with what might be taken for bits of building waste – concrete, reinforcing steel and DIY hardware – placed in unfathomable juxtapositions.
Dean, we are told, is preoccupied with the interconnectedness of public and private space.
In a piece from his nominated exhibition at the South London Gallery, a large piece of concrete sits on top of a sofa from the artist’s own sitting room, with a book of photos of the artist’s wife sitting on the sofa placed on top.
By tearing a page from the book the viewer is, we understand, taking a piece of the artist’s domestic world into their own private space.
Helen Marten, 30
London-based but originally from Macclesfield, Marten has been a name to watch for a good five years for her whimsically sophisticated 3D collages.
Like Michael Dean and Anthea Hamilton, she brings things together rather than making them from scratch, and her cool, wry works are even more elusive and difficult to quantify than theirs.
A work from her shortlisted exhibition Green Nibs at the Venice Biennale consists of what looks like a load of washing up bundled into a long fish-like shape and suspended from a shelf. Bits of what might be doll’s houses are juxtaposed with bits of plumbing hardware and discarded machinery in what is effectively conceptual art that just happens to take a very tangible physical form.
So, there’s still much in the Turner Prize for people who think art should “look like something”.
But if you also like the sound of art that makes you think, with a rich and diverse use of materials and imagery, there’s plenty to look forward to in this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.
The Turner Prize exhibtion opens at Tate Britain in September. tate.org.uk