Collaborations
As well as Gilbert and George, there are a few other outstanding collaborations in the world of contemporary British art.
Art & Language
In the same year that Gilbert and George won the Turner Prize, Art & Language (1986) was also shortlisted. Art & Language was a Conceptual art group which aimed to promote critical debate about art and the artist. It was founded by artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell in 1968. 'In the 1960s and 1970s there was no one more rigorous and frightening and impenetrable than them,' according to Matthew Collings.
They produced a magazine called Art-Language and later some paintings, called Incidents in a Museum, for which, along with their 'continuing contribution to the critical debate about modern art and its context', they were shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
Some of the early members have left now, and there was a rift between the English and the New York sections, and another between the older and younger members. In 1986, for the Turner shortlist, it was just Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden.
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Two brothers who used to be assistants to Gilbert and George are shortlisted for the 2003 Turner Prize. Jake and Dinos Chapman have worked together since 1992, when they launched themselves on an unsuspecting art world with their anti-aesthetic manifesto, declaring, 'We Are Artists' in excremental brown smears. Since then they have shocked the public with their grotesque and violent work.
In The Disasters of War, a table-top display of miniature Airfix figures invites closer scrutiny. It reveals itself to be three-dimensional replicas of the acts of brutality and viciousness portrayed in the etchings of the same name by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya.
Peering at it, the viewer is trapped into an uncomfortable complicity with the disturbing, mocking attitude the piece appears to take. Some people react with moral recoil, others just laugh.
Perhaps the Chapmans' Disasters of War reinvests Goya's work with fresh horror for a hardened audience. Or ought to. It's difficult to know. The brothers' work is deliberately inscrutable. As they say, 'When our sculptures work they achieve the position of reducing the viewer to a state of absolute moral panic, they're completely troublesome objects.'
Recently, Jake and Dinos Chapman took art O levels and exhibited their work. They were both awarded B grades.
Jane and Louise Wilson
Identical twins Jane and Louise Wilson (1999) both received firsts in their degree shows. Although they studied at different colleges they produced identical final work and went on to successfully apply to Goldsmiths College on one form. They have continued to work as one artist ever since, making sculpture, photography and film.
The twins used to be the subjects of their own films: taking acid, or being hypnotised, or parodying movie action sequences in cat suits. More recently they have concentrated on making film installations in which they create disturbing atmospheric environments in gallery space. They film actual architectural places (like the abandoned Stasi headquarters in Berlin, or the former nuclear weapons base at Greenham) and invest the experience of watching it with anxiety and alienation.
Sometimes they do appear in their films, but now only as distant figures, sometimes just filming their feet. 'We want to show peripheral vision rather than a vision that is absolutely centred,' the twins have commented. 'We're interested in the kinds of slippages that come to you obliquely and unexpectedly from outside the line of vision.'
|
