The Turner Prize is often accused of deliberately courting controversy. But the 'shock horror' headlines provoked by some of its contestants say more about the resistance of the British media to anything new in culture than about the work itself. In fact, the shock of the new has been a common feature of British postwar art – as this brief history of outrage and controversy reveals:
In 1951, an abstract painting
called Autumn Landscape by Scottish artist William
Gear won a prize at the Festival of Britain, but was denounced by the
Daily Mail as a 'jam pot thrown at canvas'. In
parliament, Colonel Alan Gomme-Duncan, a Tory MP, called it 'appalling'.
In 1953, a prize-winning
model for a huge public sculpture to commemorate The
Unknown Political Prisoner, by Reg
Butler, was attacked by Laszlo Szilvassy when it was exhibited at the
Tate Gallery. Szilvassy claimed the abstract work reduced the memory of the
dead to 'scrap metal' – he was sentenced to a month in jail.
At the Destruction in Art
Symposium, held in London in 1966, Hermann Nitsch
– an Austrian 'action artist' – gutted a dead lamb while a film
showing the male genitals was shown. The Times
called the event a 'brothel of the intellect' and the symposium's organisers
were prosecuted and fined.
The art dealer Robert Fraser,
a friend of the Rolling Stones, was prosecuted in 1966-67 for displaying 'indecent'
drawings by artist Jim Dine and for
possessing drugs. Dine's drawings showed male and female genitals, and Fraser
was fined.
In 1971, the comedian Spike
Milligan smashed a glass door at London's Hayward Gallery in protest at American
artist Newton Harrison's plan to electrocute
catfish, oysters and shrimps as part of his Portable
Fish Farm installation. The 'catfish controversy' was widely discussed
in the media.
In 1973, Michael
Craig-Martin first exhibited An Oak Tree,
a sculpture composed of a glass of water on a glass shelf, which was seen
as a notorious example of the 'absurdity' of conceptual art. Craig-Martin
became a well-respected artist and teacher – at Goldsmiths College, University
of London, he taught many of the 1990s Brit art generation.
Artist
Carl Andre's Equivalent
VIII, a sculpture composed of 120 American fire bricks, was displayed
at the Tate Gallery in 1976, and savagely attacked by the media. The Daily
Mirror's front-page headline, for example, was 'What a load of rubbish'.
At London's Institute of
Contemporary Arts, feminist artist Mary
Kelly's 1976 exhibition was ridiculed by tabloid journalists because it
included stained nappy liners. Called Post Partum Document,
the exhibits were later published in book form.
In 1976, a show called Prostitution
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts included a rock music performance by
Throbbing Gristle and photographs of Cosey
Fanni Tutti working as a stripper and porn model. Other exhibits included
used tampons and syringes. In parliament, Tory MPs attacked the exhibition.
A community mural, called
Morgan's Wall, in London's Battersea Bridge Road
was demolished in 1979 because it used the image of Mickey Mouse without the
permission of the Disney corporation and because its leftwing political content
offended the Tory local authority. Brian Barnes,
one of the wall's artists, was arrested when he tried to prevent its destruction.
In 1983, the Scottish artist
David Mach created Polaris,
a public sculpture made of rubber tyres in the shape of a nuclear submarine,
and shown in London. On 21 August, James Gore-Graham, a furniture designer
with conservative tastes in art, poured petrol on the tyres, lit it, and accidentally
set himself alight in the process. He died in hospital.
In 1984, the first Turner
Prize award, to painter Malcolm Morley,
was criticised as tarnishing highbrow art by mixing it with lowbrow media
publicity. Critic Robert Hughes later described the media's love affair with
the prize as having 'rattled the teacups'.
Artist Allen
Jones's sculpture, Chair
(1969), was attacked and damaged by feminists while on display at the
Tate Gallery in 1986. His depiction of women as sex objects had been criticised
by women for years, although his work has also been defended as an exploration
of sexual stereotypes.
In 1989, the artist Rick
Gibson was tried at the Old Bailey in London and found guilty of 'outraging
public decency' by creating earrings from freeze-dried human foetuses. They
formed part of Human Earrings, a mannequin head
with wig, made in 1985. Gibson was fined £500, but the case cost £200,000
to prosecute.
Just after the Gulf War,
in 1992, a painting called Mickey Mouse at
the Front by war artist John Keane
was denounced by the tabloid press as lavatorial because it showed the Walt
Disney cartoon figure next to human excrement.
In 1993, the K
Foundation – Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty – tried to subvert
the Turner Prize celebrations by awarding £40,000 to the 'worst' artist
on the shortlist, in their view Rachel Whiteread, who in the event won the
prize that year for her sculpture House. A year
later, they burned £1 million as an art event.
At London's
Serpentine Gallery in 1994, artist Damien
Hirst's Away from the Flock
– a dead Suffolk lamb in a tank of formaldehyde – was vandalised
by Mark Bridger, another artist, who poured black ink into the tank, claiming
that he was amending the work.
In 1994, Peter
Howson's painting of a woman being raped during the war in Bosnia, Croatian
and Muslim, was rejected by the Imperial War Museum for being too brutal
despite the fact that it had been selected for exhibition by Angela Weight,
one of the museum's curators. It was subsequently bought by David Bowie.
In an exhibition at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery in 1994, artist Jamie Wagg displayed
two laminated prints of media images of the abduction of toddler Jamie Bulger
by two 10-year-old boys. Called History-Paintings,
Cartoons for Tapestry, they resulted in death
threats to him after the tabloid press whipped up a hysterical reaction by
accusing him of exploiting Bulger's murder.
In 1996, a sculpture by Jake
and Dinos Chapman showing 20 fused-together child figures, some with
penis-noses and anus-mouths, called Zygotic Acceleration,
Biogenic, De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x 1000), led to the
two brothers being accused of paedophilia.
Artist
Marcus Harvey's Myra,
a portrait of 1960s serial killer Myra Hindley created by using the handprints
of children, was vandalised while on display at London's
Royal Academy in 1997 by two men who threw ink and eggs at it. Neither
was prosecuted.
In 1997, sculptor Anthony-Noel
Kelly was arrested for stealing body parts in order to make sculptures.
Kelly aroused much media interest because of his aristocratic connections
(his mother, Lady Mirabel, is the Duke of Norfolk's sister) and his obsession
with death. He was sentenced to three months in prison for theft.
Police
raided the Saatchi Gallery in north London in 2001, following media complaints
that the exhibition of photographs by Tierney Gearon,
called I Am a Camera,
included pornographic and paedophile images. The 'offending' photographs were
a couple which showed her own children naked on a beach during a holiday.
No further action was taken.