Controversy
There's nothing new about controversy. Joseph Mallord William Turner, now a much-venerated establishment painter, was considered a complete fraud by his contemporaries when he was a new young artist and during his lifetime (1775-1851). But now he's old (and dead) everyone loves him.
This is one reason why some people think Turner does actually have a connection to the new art of today's prize. As Waldemar Januszczak, former Commissioning Editor for Arts at Channel 4 and the man responsible for the channel's sponsorship, points out, 'We now know that these angry contemporaries of Turner were wrong, and guilty of massive misunderstanding. Which is why it is so appropriate that Turner should have given his name to an award whose ambition is to look at, encourage and champion new art in Britain.'
New British Sculpture
New British Sculpture isn't as new as it used to be either. But it was very new in the early 1980s. Then a lot of British sculptors were producing work characterised by what art critic Lynne Cooke defined as 'self-sufficient, relatively self-contained, fixed objects: objects made by hand, and fabricated rather than crafted from mundane familiar materials.'
This work was a big favourite of Turner Prize juries. For a while it was what was most exciting and new in contemporary British art. Bill Woodrow (1986), Richard Deacon (1987), Tony Cragg (1985, 1988), Anish Kapoor (1991), Alison Wilding (1998, 1992), Antony Gormley (1994) and Shirazeh Houshiary (1994) were all loosely associated with New British Sculpture.
Mundane familiar materials
Mundane familiar materials crop up everywhere in the 20 years of Turner Prize art. Unexpectedly ordinary materials such as beeswax, cotton and rubber feature in the work of Alison Wilding (1998, 1992). Helen Chadwick (1987) uses an odder assortment: from lambs' tongues and meat, to household cleaning fluids, chocolate and hair gel. She was shortlisted for her 'striking use of mixed media'. Just as banal is the tomato ketchup, lemonade bottles and variety of pickled vegetables that Tony Cragg (1985, 1988) includes in some of his sculpture.
Cragg argues that 'if we work on the premise that the quality and nature of our environment and what we are surrounded with is actually having a very direct effect on us, our sensibilities, perhaps even our emotions and intellects, then we have to be more careful with these objects and spend more time learning something about them.'
Washing machines
Bill Woodrow (1986) spent a significant period of his career learning a lot about washing machines. He used to work with junk and then he got specifically interested in manufactured appliances.
In 1981 he began a series of twin-tub sculptures: he would dismantle a washing machine and then reassemble it as something new. When he'd finished you could still tell it was a washing machine, but it was also a guitar, or a gun, or a bicycle frame.
Art critic Alistair Hicks explains that 'in looking for a different way to present information [Woodrow] is forced to discover an added and emphatic grace in objects that often previously possessed little … he has given new life to appliances and machines.'
Curiously, Woodrow is not the only Turner artist to get into washing machines. Steven Pippin (1999) started using washing machines as cameras in 1985. The glass in the door becomes the shutter, and the wash, rinse and spin cycles develop, fix and dry the negative.
In Laundromat-Locomotion, a launderette-style row of washing machines photograph things passing before them. Like a horse and rider, or a man with an erection. The pictures and title are deliberately reminiscent of a series of photographic studies of motion called Animal Locomotion taken by innovative photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and are equally pioneering – even if it is harder to see the point.
Steven Pippin (1999) also makes sculptures, but he has spent a lot of his time making everyday objects – like toilets – into cameras.
Scatology
Things scatological are another favourite in the art of the Turner Prize. Mona Hatoum (1995) fed a camera through her body. Watching the resulting film, the viewer sees the entire journey a piece of food might make from an endoscopic perspective: all the way from her mouth to the toilet. Helen Chadwick (1987) made her bronze sculptures, Piss Flowers, based on the patterns she had made pissing in the snow. Emin (1999) likes bodily fluids too, but the real champions of poo are Gilbert and George (1984, 1986).
Gilbert and George
Gilbert and George (1984, 1986) have taken photographs of their own excrement and wrapped them around a room. In Rudimentary Picturesthey magnified images of their blood, urine, sweat and semen until they looked quite different. Their art is called things like Sperm Eaters, Holy Cock and Naked Shit Pictures.
According to Gilbert, 'The audience is shocked by the idea of the subject, the idea of spunk. Or – we don't want to look at piss! Or shit – Oh I hate that! But when they see – because we make them very powerful - they think: ooh! It's quite interesting! I didn't know that spunk would look like that! That's quite beautiful!'
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Gilbert and George
Coming 1983
Photo-piece
242 x 202 cm
© Courtesy the artists and Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
Photo: Courtesy Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Gilbert and George
Coming 1983
Click to enlarge
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Gilbert and George met at St Martin's art college in 1967 and have worked together as one artist ever since. In 1969 they declared themselves 'living sculptures', and have been so ever since. They wear worsted suits, white shirts and flamboyant ties, all of which they call 'the responsibility-suits of our art'. They don't look as odd as they did when everyone else was wearing flares, although they're still wearing the same things. Now that they're older they look a lot like Morecambe and Wise, which is probably quite deliberate.
They have slogans such as 'Art we only wish to serve you!', and live their lives as an act. As one art critic wrote, 'When they decided to use their own bodies as art material and their personal convictions as content, they literally invented their own medium and carved out a unique and memorable place for themselves in the evolution of contemporary art.'
Women
Female artists were neglected in the early years of the Turner Prize. The first women, Helen Chadwick and Thérèse Oulton, weren't shortlisted until 1987. But a decade later, in 1997, it was an all-woman shortlist. The year before it had been all men; but even then the gallerist Laure Genillard commented, 'The strength of women's art in the past 10 years has been overwhelming to the point of taking the art world by surprise. Therefore I don't think it is possible today to deliberately boycott women artists from the Turner Prize shortlist.'
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