Rat Race

The Turner Prize 2006
Tate Britain
3 October 2006 –
14 January 2007


Four artists under 50 years of age are nominated for the Turner Prize based on their individual contributions to contemporary art. Year upon year (since 1984), it has always been interesting to see how the Tate’s Turner Prize balances the goal of surveying an array of contemporary art practice with the aim of catering for a variety of audiences.

From the socially engaged practice of Phil Collins to the formal concerns of Tomas Abts, this year’s show represents four very different approaches to making. The relationship the £25 000 winner’s prize has on the viewer’s relationship with the work on display gives a further edge to the Media driven exhibition (sponsored by Channel 4).

First up in this year’s ‘Rat Race’ is Mark Titchner. Democratic in his installations that position various social belief systems side by side, Titchner touches on the Turner Prize’s immersion in a world of advertising and self-promotion. His billboard pieces such as If You Can Dream It, You Must Do it, 2003, (below: Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London) unabashedly link the moral and aesthetic authority of bold design with religious and philosophical ideologies. This ambiguous, democratic attitude towards such broad concepts is further outstretched in the power that falls with the viewer in determining a sense of place within the non-space of his installations. In the dizzying optical illusions and hypnotic animations of Titchner’s installation, Ergo Ergot, 2006, for example, the sensual interaction and distraction the piece entices is intended as our stronghold within the work.

Rebecca Warren’s work shares more in common with the figurative sculptural tradition that stretches from Rodin to Picasso to the existentialist works of Alberto Giacometti. Warren’s unfired clay pieces, as the logical traces of this tradition should prove, project a humble ‘ugliness’ in their explosion out of and retreat back into the amorphous properties of the material. Warren’s wall-based vitrines share a similar patience with and embrace of material properties in the way the originally discarded objects she selects form part of a new visual context in their careful re-arrangement.

Whereas Warren’s work plays with the idea of material integrity, Tomma Abts’ work in the next room hinges on the idea of formal control. Abts’ pieces all start life as blank canvases, 48 x 38 cm, and using no source material and no preconceived notion of what she will paint, her pieces develop a formal logic through the improvisation with the paint that builds up each layer. In starting with a set frame and the idea that she will have no notion of what will appear, Abts ordains the painting with an autonomous power Warren finds more humbly in the consciousness she maintains and insists on within the act of making. Warren is unashamedly indulgent with the materials she uses, making the viewer’s experience of her work a far more human one, whereas Abts’ work leaves the viewer cold at the point where her insistent formal logic overrides any possibility of intuitive visual allusions becoming part of the work.

In the final rooms and passageways, Phil Collins presents an installation that explores the ethics of exploitation, inspired by the media spectacle of talk shows. Using the Turner Prize to play off the social tensions involved in our personal and public relationships with the media-propounded ideals of popularization and spectacularisation, Collins creates a comical and socially critical mouthpiece for the unheard ‘talk show hell’ stories he invites from the public. For the Turner Prize, Collins has built a fully functioning office, Shady Lane Productions, 2006. The aim of the office is to research and organize a set of projects exploring the influence that the camera exerts on the behaviour it seeks to record.

Have you been a participant on a talk show, makeover show or reality show?
Did the experience have a negative impact on your relationships or work?
Were the promises made by the show fulfilled?

shady lane productions would like to hear your story.

Visit the shady lane productions site at www.shadylaneproductions.co.uk .

The Turner Prize 2006 picks up on various strands of contemporary art practice and attitudes that are important discussions to have. To frame the discussions the artists have with their own work and in relation to their contemporaries in an institution with as big an advertising and power infrastructure as the Tate is a discussion that is only taken up by two of the nominated artists however: Mark Titchner and Phil Collins. And the latter is the only artist who consciously engages with various audiences on a level particular enough to broach issues about his work within the wider context of art, poignantly addressing the notion of artist as celebrity.

14 Magnolia Double Lamps

Chris Burden
14 Magnolia Double Lamps
South London Gallery
15 September – 5 November 2006


Chris Burden, 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, 2006. Restored 1920s Los Angeles street lamps. Photo: Andy Stagg.


14 Magnolia Double Lamps stand proudly in two rows of seven, parading the main exhibition space of the South London Gallery. Each weighing down 1½ tonnes, they reach up in unison to clear the Victorian glass lantern ceiling by less than a metre. Chris Burden’s immaculately restored 1920s cast iron lamp posts were shipped into the South London Gallery from Los Angeles. In his installation Burden merges two phases of Victorian design, the gallery and the posts themselves, to create a wonderful sense of architectural disquiet.

Walking around the lamp posts that appear almost as decorative pillars, visitors to Burden’s installation are faced with a space seemingly in wait. The physical weight of the lamp posts, their perfect alignment and their colour uniform of battleship grey allow them to fit, aesthetically, within the Victorian building that has itself undergone a process of neutralisation through modernisation. The viewer is left to wander around what seem like ornate totems to industrialism. And just as elaborate, often secret, rituals form an important part of totemistic behaviour, there is a definite sense of movement and circulation begged of the viewer on this stage.

The design simplicity in Burden’s installation belies the significant technical feat of the piece, whose component parts, after meticulous restoration, made their heavy-duty journey from Burden’s studio in L.A to a secured grounding inside the main space of the South London Gallery.

Chris Burden’s re-fit in bringing Victorian lamps into a Victorian property, via a transatlantic journey, brings to light an historical irony. Burden’s lamp posts are rescued relics from a massive series once havened over Los Angeles’ megalopolis, as pawns in a civic ego. The majority were removed and destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s, the relics having become background noise on a broadly cultured stage. The original designs for these lamp posts was European, contributing to the pomp and pride harboured by L.A’s early century acquisitions. To return these posts to their design roots neatly though unsettlingly rejoins the Victorian municipal aim with it’s anti-matter.



This article was published in The Oxford Times on 13 October 2006

Celebration Park

Pierre Huygue
Celebration Park
Tate Modern
5 July - 17 September 2006


Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't, 2005
Super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound; TK min
Filming in Central Park : Public Art Fund
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Photo: Pierre Huyghe
Copyright Pierre Huyghe

The Tate Modern gives us a pronounced opportunity to explore the celebratory aspects of a selection of Huyghe’s work, from the nineties to the present. We go, for example, from viewing a small screen interview with the original voice of Snow White, Blanche Neige Lucie (1997), in a room with large white dancing doors, to hearing the slow-wind scene shift music of his more recent large screen puppet musical, This is not a time for dreaming (2004), an exploration of his struggle to satisfy a commission from Harvard University. Renowned and reaffirmed as a politically motivated artist, the Tate gives us ample space here to explore the various faces the notion of celebration adopts in the many social collaborations that make up his oeuvre.

Huygue’s films in this exhibition are no less than epic, both in subject matter and logistic scale. His film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), brings together footage of his own journey through Antarctica in 2005 that ran with a declared mission to find an albino penguin, and footage of the orchestral re-enactment of this voyage on Central Park ice rink. A Journey that Wasn’t reaffirms the co-existence of chance and control in his childishly willed adventure, with the double narrative of the diary and the orchestral piece building up loosely science-fictional connotations. The aural and visual pomp and circumstance of the band to a night-time backdrop are stunning. Their sense of effort, occasion and unison strongly reflects the collaborative force behind what was a 24-hour a day survival operation through deserts of ice. The gap between the gravity of this situation and its inherent pointlessness is the gap where Huygue endorses celebration. This is the point at which we start to lose ourselves in a cinematic experience of the layered narrative.

Leaving the exhibition, stills of Huyghe’s films stick in my head, but only from the most outlandish, the most surreal and the most celebratory parts. These images are taken from the points at which each film broke away from a single potential narrative, the points at which there were more questions than there were answers. Model design plan infrastructures fall to the ground at a whim, plants grow at an abnormal rate, children wear animal masks, celebrating their immersion into a new socialised land redevelopment programme, wind is caught in a large plastic bag from a cliff face and orange jacketed men trawl tragi-comically through white landscapes.