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.
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.
posted by Claire Nichols at 9:18 PM
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