Turner Prize 2008

Turner Prize 2008
Tate Britain
30 September 2008 - 18 January 2009


With Mark Leckey announced as this year’s Turner Prize winner, the viewer of this year’s exhibition may be surprised to hear that the award once used to excite quite controversial debate. That is, if one considers this year’s absence of egg throwing (as one woman did in protest to Martin Creed’s installation back in 2001) or pillow fighting (in response to Tracey Emin’s installation of her bedroom back in 1999) a lack of critical breath. All of this year’s short-listed nominees are for the most part somewhat of a quieter, and arguably more disquieting nature.

The first nominee on show is Goshka Macuga. Amidst her installations, you might feel as if you have arrived at an airport lounge. Macuga uses stainless steel and glass in conjunctions as bland and repetitive as all of today’s arcades of social regeneration. Macuga is a curator, collector and an artist. She throws us back into a glass world once so idealistically delineated by Mies van der Rohe, one of the pioneering Masters of Modernist architecture, and juxtaposes new imagery with wartime photographs from the archives of artist Paul Nash.

Cathy Wilkes’s installation is an agglomeration of found objects. First impressions might conjure a severely post-modern supermarket nightmare. This is not a lively zoo, however. Wilkes’s caged-headed mannequins and her carefully assembled prams and sale items are seemingly long-dead objects of curiosity (right: Cathy Wilkes Installation view: Selective Memory: Scotland and Venice, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005, Courtesy of the Artist, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Cathy Wilkes, Photo: Ruth Clark Photography). The death-knell from the Tate security guard rendered this experience all the more real for me, as I overstepped the invisible ‘line’ – “Please do not come too close to the art objects”, a low voice insisted behind me. This warning was not to protect against some dangerously animated tigers, but rather to keep vigil for a deity. Wilkes’s installation is indeed a fragile constellation, and treads a fine line in mediating the theoretical and material relics of our daily world.

Clean-cut simplicity is at the heart of Runa Islam’s films. In one of her films, Islam uses the camera to draw through and with the space. She has programmed a machine to spell out a journey through an industrial warehouse, tracing the form of the letters CINEMATOGRAPHY. In another film, the artist revisits the city in which she was born in India, seeing herself partly, she claims, as a tourist. She films a silent slow pan portrait of stationary rickshaw drivers – a delicate and richly coloured sunset scene. As with many of Runa Islam’s films, however, any sense of calm is always tinged with irony. Here we come to realise that the artist has paid the rickshaw drivers to rest whilst she films them. Inverting their job role, the focus shifts from the film to its maker.

On the other side of the coin we have Mark Leckey, this year’s winner, who is seduced by the convincing possibilities of film: its ability to transform worlds. His raw material consists of pop entertainment icons from the Eighties such as Felix the Cat, and also incorporates the work of other artists. In Leckey’s words, he is interested in ‘finding something that attaches itself to him’.

One artwork Leckey is clearly taken by is Jeff Koons’s shiny silver rabbit. Leckey films the expensive kitsch art object on a rotation table in his flat, panning in and out of mirrors in the room, and across the surface of the sculpture’s own glowing reflections. This film is shown on a single screen monitor and also makes an appearance as a fragment of Leckey’s larger installation, Cinema-in-the-Round, which records the artist giving a public lecture. In this address, the artist brings together slides of artworks and popular culture that excite him, from Philip Guston to The Simpsons. He collates them thematically under ridiculous headings such as ‘meat and potatoes’. Speaking over his film of Koons’s work, Leckey stands at the lectern proclaiming in a stark northern accent: “It’s gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh”.

Mark Leckey
Resident Poster, 2008
© Mark Leckey

For all of Leckey’s performative gameplay, he’s certainly a refreshing break from the deadpan self-seriousness of the other three. Many of the works in this exhibition touch on similar themes: theatricality and the gluttonous consumer gut. But Leckey gives us a little more. He uses his own experience growing up in the 1980s in the north of England as a way of connecting with the viewer. Leckey’s public lecture, especially, opens itself up to a meaty dialogue about both desire and transformation. It is a critical forum and exciting scene that neither of the other three succeed in creating. And this is perhaps why Leckey deserves the Prize money – the £25,000 cheque he says he will now hide away, because of the credit crunch.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 01 January 2009