A Turner Prize win more worthy of the Eighties than the present day
At 63, Lubaina Himid is a beneficiary of a change in rules, but was it the right choice, asks Mark Hudson
Lubaina Himid has won this year’s £25,000 Turner Prize, with a range of works reflecting the black experience in Britain, dominated by A Fashionable Marriage, an uproarious tableau of collaged, life-size figures parodying Hogarth’s iconic series Marriage A-la-mode.
Himid, 63, who was born in Zanzibar, trained at Wimbledon School of Art and is now Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, is the first beneficiary of a relaxation in the rules, which has allowed artists over 50 to take part for the first time since 1991. The result, by common agreement, has been the strongest Turner Prize exhibition in years: mercifully short on tabloid-baiting antics (lights flashing on-and-off and the like), and with a strong sense of the personal experience of the artists, alongside human themes we might actually care about.
Fifty-two-year-old Hurvin Anderson’s multi-layered paintings looked at quintessential Afrocaribbean settings such as the barbershop with a rigour and reticence that felt peculiarly English, while 44-year-old Rosalind Nashashibi’s films focused on tense human situations in far-flung places to quite haunting effect. German-born Andrea Buttner, 45, came closest to the prize stereotype of befuddling conceptualism, with a lot of rather inscrutable prints.
What this year didn’t provide was a widely-predicted winner in the manner of last year’s Helen Marten. Really, Anderson, Himid and Nashashibi could each have made credible victors for very different reasons.
The decision to give the award to Himid feels at once natural and perplexing. On one level it is fantastic that this previously unsung veteran of a little-known but important moment in British art, the Black Art movement of the Eighties, should finally be recognised for a 40-year contribution.
Certainly, A Fashionable Marriage, with its ruffs made of decaying rubber gloves and Cubistic portraits of Thatcher and Reagan, is the strongest single work in the show. But those Thatcher and Reagan references give the game away: the piece was created in 1986. And none of Himid’s more recent works shown here come close. Le Rodeur, for instance, a rather faux-naif painting from 2016, is very far from prize-winning material indeed.
The Turner is supposed to be an award for work produced now. The entrance criteria were narrowed in 1991 precisely to stop the prize becoming a lifetime achievement award, as it had. With Himid’s win, that is what it has become again. And there’s irony in the fact that the first winner over 50 in more than 25 years is being honoured for a work she made when she was 32.
While I’ve already heard it said that Himid’s A Fashionable Marriage is only now making its resonances fully felt, this seems a specious cop-out.
Personally, I favoured Anderson. His densely-worked, enigmatic paintings focus just as strongly on the contradictions of multi-cultural Britain, but in more subtle and ultimately more profound ways. Most significantly, they are very much of the present time.