The four artists shortlisted for the 40th edition of the Turner Prize 2024, Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine le Bas, are a motley crew. Looking back to the genesis of this prize, in 1984, the Tate Gallery showed a fraction of the contemporary art it exhibits today. In response, Tate launched the Patrons of New Art, a high-powered group of individuals to assist in purchasing contemporary art. Conceived out of necessity as a mechanism for acquisitions, with government funding being cut, it forged mutually beneficial links between the private and public sectors. As a showcase to this, they launched the Turner Prize; its architects – Rudi Fuchs, Director, Van Abbemuseum, John McEwen, art consultant, Sunday Times Magazine, Nicholas Serota, Director, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Felicity Waley-Cohen, Chairman, Patrons of New Art, Alan Bowness, Director, Tate Gallery, hoped to foster greater public interest in contemporary art.
Nearly two million people watched the first award ceremony on BBC’s Omnibus, sparking thrilling debate, but the press questioned Malcolm Morley’s relevance to British art. Waldemar Januszczak, wrote in the Guardian(November 1984), that Morley was “the dark horse of the group.” He surmised, “Clearly (he) has no chance. Largely because he’s lived in America for the past 20 years and hardly qualifies as a British artist.” He was nominated alongside Richard Deacon, Gilbert and George, Richard Long, and Howard Hodgkin – all of whom would win the prize over the subsequent years (yes, you can see the problem here).
“We are nothing, if not critical.” Robert Hughes
Since then, the Turner Prize – named after the innovative painter – has been variously credited and discredited with broadening the definition of contemporary art. Ideally, it reflects the evolving landscape of contemporary art in Britain, albeit through the lens of four specific voices. No doubt, some of the best-known names in contemporary art have been awarded – Howard Hodgkin, Sir Steve McQueen, Tomma Abts, Grayson Perry, Chris Offili, Helen Marten. Beyond the controversy, the Turner Prize’s potential lies in its capacity to platform creativity and inspire critical thinking. Typically, artists selected explore daring concepts and highlight societal issues, the latter becoming of central importance. In its best years, it reflects the diversity of contemporary art and the complexity of the world we live in. This year is not one of its best.
The problem, it seems, lies not so much in the selection but in the language of institutional representation. The Turner Prize is awarded to a British artist. ‘British’ can mean an artist working primarily in Britain or an artist born in Britain working globally. On winning the prize, Morley said, “I think of myself as an international artist, but essentially it’s English painting rather than a kind of European painting …Turner is certainly one of my heroes.” In principle, the prize focuses on their recent developments in British art rather than a lifetime’s achievement. Tate selects a new panel every year from within the art world – directors, curators, critics and writers and at least one member is from abroad, to widen the perspective. The members of the 2024 jury are Rosie Cooper, Director of Wysing Arts Centre, Ekow Eshun, writer, broadcaster and curator, Sam Thorne, Director General and CEO at Japan House London, Lydia Yee, curator and art historian and chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain. Alistair Sooke said, “British art’s top award once enraged the tabloids, birthed the YBAs and sent a jolt through the nation – now it is facing a midlife crisis.”
By its nature, the Turner Prize calls into play questions of national identity and what it means to be British today. However, in the case of the four nominees of this milestone edition, they seem to be mainly having conversations with the institutions that underpin the ecology of the art world rather than the wider public, and this is most evidenced in the language they use. Presently, there is a trend to foreground your personal identity, in particular sexual orientation and ethnicity, to the thesis of your work. Yes, there is a long overdue need for this platform to be inclusive (note the original exclusive architecture of this prize), but has it gone too far? Where is the mystery? The wondrous potential of art is that in the process of creation, something unexpected (often incomprehensible) is born that strangely captures the spirit or mood of our time.
One thing that unites the four nominees is that they speak about their work (or it is being explained) in English. In Britain, we have an extraordinary literary tradition, and as the late critic John Berger said, we are “nothing if not critical”. I say the nominees are a ‘motley’, referring to the words used in the Elizabethan era that described the multi-coloured fabric of a jester’s costume, symbolic of the fool’s place outside the class system. It signified that the jester was beyond the sumptuary laws and thus had the exceptional ability to speak freely, even to royalty. But these artists do not seem to be speaking freely at all, and what is being said about their work is building an impossible barrier to entry for the general public.
There is far too much alienating art speaking throughout the art world, specifically with the Turner Prize. The Turner Prize exhibition opens with, an artist who addresses our collective greed by seducing us with beauty and then punching us with facts. He asks important questions about the provenance of objects and whether museums (or anyone) can ignore the narratives of looting or skullduggery embedded in what they display. However, in the press release, we are told: “Abad’s practice is concerned with the multiple histories contained within objects and how these are implicated in familial and national memories. Heavily influenced by his upbringing in the Philippines…”
Aside from this stating the obvious (that objects trigger the memories we assign them), of course, he was “heavily influenced by his upbringing”. That is why we call childhood your ‘formative years’. It is much more interesting, for example, that he is married to the jeweller Frances Wadsworth Jones, who helped him realise the giant concrete replica of a bracelet belonging to the late dictator’s wife and kleptomaniac Imelda Marcos, ‘Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite’, (2019).
His show, first seen at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is a subtle critique of institutional denial and parodies the idea of provenance. Cleverly seducing us with beauty, his titles express a more profound tragedy: “I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country” (2023). But the language around the installation sucks. He makes work from “the perspective of his Filipino heritage”. So what? Abad grew up somewhere, like the rest of us. Talk to me about his imagination, give me some juicy details about his strange fascination with specific materials or display cabinets (his works are magnificently framed) and tell me why this person blew your mind.
In the next room, we have a proper head jumble. Read this: “Kaur’s work explores how cultural memory is layered in the objects and rituals that surround us,” she describes this as “making sense of what is out of view or withheld.” I mean, come on. In her exhibition, this takes the shape of a glass ceiling littered with trash, showing us her unprocessed detritus. Sorry, Kaur, you are super bright, but I could neither see nor think of all the noise. The art spoken around the work is insufficient. What about the desire that rises when seeing forms ripe with secret, intimate feelings that will never be disclosed? Kaur was trained as a jeweller. I would love to see a miniature sculpture/ piece of jewellery she might make after this edition of the Turner Prize. I bet it would be precious, exhilarating and completely surprising.
Around the corner, we did – thankfully – find some mystery in Delaine Le Bas. I have no idea what all the painted veils and floating cutouts symbolise, but it does not matter, the whole installation was cohesive and fully immersive. I cried at the creepy altar and shivered when a black horse streaked past me in the reflective walls – bonkers marvellous. Le Bas was nominated for her show, Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/ A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna – inspired by Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze. The title is a little long, but it works against the work like a chant, and you feel the totality of her vision.
Again, the press release language lets her down “her work focuses on political, social concerns as well as private and emotional aspects of her life, including her Roma heritage and the cultural history of her people…” ffs!!! Her people – where are my people, I wonder. I am suddenly reminded of a very awkward introduction at a cocktail party. Introduced to our host as Irish Hungarian, the man started dancing a jig and mumbling, “A hurdy hurdy gurdy diddle de doo”. He repeated this three times, and I laughed at him. Irish people do that you see, they laugh hard at themselves, then go away and write fucking Ulysses. Language matters, it’s high time the art world stopped bullshitting us.
If you studied literature, you will know all about postcolonial literature and Derrida. But nobody, except academics, bloody reads Derrida: “The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed… not at the centre but in an eccentric centre, in a corner whose eccentricity ensures the solid concentration of the system.” Derrida in conversation with Amy Ziering Kofman from Documentary Derrida.
In the last room, we have, described by Modern Art Oxford as “one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today”. Her monumental drawings of Black women are as powerful as her political activism: she was a founder member of the BLK Art Group, and her seminar at the First National Black Arts Conference in 1982 is recognised as a formative moment in the Black feminist art movement. Fellow artist and winner of the x Turner Prize, Steve McQueen, wrote in a review of her 1992 show, In This Skin: Drawings by Claudette Johnson, “What she does is to bring out the soul, sensuality, dignity, and spirituality of the black woman… Claudette Johnson’s work is rooted in her African heritage. Her talent is as powerful as it is obvious.” Unbelievably, she has only just been nominated to the Royal Academy. By far the most relatable in this show and likely the public’s choice – Johnson also suffers from this garbage jargon when writing about her work. “Johnson has a unique way of using colour, pose and scale to create visually arresting portraits which invite viewers to sit and spend time with them.” What!?! That sentence says nothing – and we are reminded that her true talent is evidenced in the capacity to speak with great clarity in her chosen medium.
The problem no one is talking about in the art world is that the language used is divisive: it excludes all those not formally trained in the arts (this is also the case in European institutions). Words, not images, prevent people from wanting to engage with contemporary art. Instead of offering us the freedom to encounter new forms in space, possibly incomprehensible but simultaneously compelling, we must negotiate this insane barrier of nonsense. Instead of the art triggering wild, unsolicited thoughts and feelings, there is the embarrassment of not understanding.
Thankfully, at the entrance to the exhibition, there are four artists’ videos. In these, you hear each nominee speaking about their work in their own words. Searching, touching and aware that what they make is pre-verbal primarily, they explore ideas without being prescriptive. Whilst watching these, I kept thinking about the first nominees for the Turner Prize. Where do young men in this country see themselves represented in institutions today? I know it’s a complex, thorny question, but we must discuss it. However, in totally excluding them and reinforcing this linguistically, the judges demonstrate the same closed-shop mentality as the architects of this British art prize. We need to do better.
Imagine then, my relief when later that day I met with the writer Tommy Sissons, at a reading of his poem at the House of KoKo, where I had gone in support of a friend (Bo Wilson reading ‘The Glorious Bouquet’). Sissons knows how to write, unafraid of all the gritty, complicated aspects of this slightly broken island, whetting lived experience with searing observation. This is art, and he is my stealth nominee for an alternative script to this year’s Turner Prize 2024
“…England is shaved into the back of heads. England is the echo of a Christmas song in an empty Wetherspoons’ loo. England is miners chipping in for the IRA bomber who almost killed Maggie to have another go. England is discussed most where England is most hated. England is discussed most in England. England is walking down the pier at Skegness when you are old and crumbling, and your partner has packed lunch but forgot to bring it, and the coach home is not for another hour, so you sit before the coastal shelf and think about the North Sea and what Vikings and Germanic tribes are buried within it, and what paper boats were sunk there, and what love letters were discarded of in secret there. You think people mistake its muteness for secrecy. A horn is sounding as a boat comes in and another departs. England is as England always was. England, it’s your round.”