Exhibition of the week Turner Prize
Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org). Until 2 January 2017
For some years now, the annual Turner Prize show has been something to “jeer” at, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Its “leaps into silliness” have been many. Last year, the prize was awarded to an architectural collective called Assemble for refurbishing a terrace of derelict houses in Liverpool; worthy though their efforts were, only in the “befuddled minds of the curatorial class” would they qualify as art. This year’s show, thankfully, goes some way to correcting the trend. The four artists nominated – Helen Marten, Josephine Pryde, Michael Dean and Anthea Hamilton – have put forward works that “speak to the eyes first”, rather than relying on extraneous waffle to make their point. The result is a “lively”, “inventive” and “fun” exhibition that genuinely tells us “something valid” about British art today.
“This is one of the strongest Turner Prize shows in ages,” said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. The work is generally cryptic. Helen Marten, for example, brings together a bewildering range of household and industrial objects – chains, drainpipes, shoes, snakeskins – to create “inscrutable” sculptures: a fireplace with lungs, for instance. The overall effect is “baffling”, but impressive. But anyone who thinks of contemporary art as a “flatulent puff of hot air” would find grounds here for their suspicions, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. Anthea Hamilton’s installation, for instance, features an 18ft-tall sculpture of a pair of male buttocks set into a trompe-l’oeil brick wall. Hamilton “pinched” the idea from an unrealised 1970s design for the door of a New York apartment block, intended for staff and social housing tenants. Then again, if her remake is lacking in originality or taste, it makes up for it in “humour, bombast and ambition”.
The show undoubtedly has its weak moments, said Jackie Wullschlager in the FT. For instance, Josephine Pryde’s gimmicky piece featuring a toy train and a series of photos of manicured hands is a “low-key” installation that “never takes off”. But the show as a whole is very good. “For the first time in years, the Turner Prize display feels like a real exhibition, with themes, conversations and an overarching vision.” The works are “raucously physical and frequently funny”. Most impressive is Michael Dean, whose “sensually evocative” sculpture consists of a mountain of pennies totalling £20,436 – the official UK poverty line for a family of four – surrounded by fences, chains and casts of his children’s fists. Dean is a powerful and “explicitly political” artist. “I hope he wins the prize.”