It is always a shock more than a delight to actually see the nominees for the annual Turner Prize, currently on display in the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. The actual winner, Veronica Ryan, who carried off the money for an installation entitled
Along a Spectrum, was announced some weeks ago, although the popular judgement, expressed by the number of tokens tossed into glass cases at the exit for each artist, would appear to dissent.
The problem for anyone not well grounded in the aesthetics of contemporary art, and also, I suspect, for many who would consider themselves to be so, is to establish the criteria by which such works are to be, or have in fact been, judged and appreciated. Unlike with traditional figurative art, it is hard to decipher the artistic code or conventions employed. The initiated and the uninitiated constitute two contrasting forces who issue facile sneers across deep trenches. 'Call that art?', comes the call from a general public, a request dismissed by the cognoscenti as philistine or ignorant. Any disorientation is taken as being a display of an inability to follow what is grandly termed experimentation in new media and with new materials by bold artists breaking free from the shackles of tradition.
The gulf has greater depth in Liverpool than in any other British city, especially for the visitor whose artistic pilgrimage will take in the Walker Gallery with its unsurpassed collection of Victorian canvases, including some very fine Pre-Raphaelites. Do these widely varying styles of art really belong to the intellectual cosmos?
Anxious not to be labelled a mere insensitive ignoramus, but conscious of having no claim to expertise, I struggled on a visit to the Tate to see the 2022 Turner exhibits to keep an open mind and attain some understanding of the consciousness which produces such trail-blazing work. There is no risk of falling prey to any Stendhal Syndrome, and indeed my enduring reaction is bemusement. Veronica Ryan has bags hanging from the ceiling in a room painted a uniform bright yellow, with a table in the centre covered by assorted objects such as cushions and vases. Accompanying material informs the viewer that 'Ryan creates sculptural objects and installations using containers, compartments and combinations of natural and fabricated forms to reference displacement, fragmentation and alienation'.
On the other hand, a poster on the gallery wall declares that 'rather than having fixed meanings, Ryan's work is typically open to a wide variety of meanings', as implied by titles such as
Multiple Conversions, or
Along a Spectrum 2021? So who establishes meaning, the creator or the viewer? What does the artist intend? If no understanding is required or intended, what is the basis of appreciation?
Are observers to be cowed into non-critical acceptance of a higher dimension, or are they free to attach any sense at all to what is to the uniformed eye merely a series of dangling bags? Or is it folly to expect anything as banal as meaning? I once heard a critic loftily dismiss such a quest by demanding to know if we expected meaning of designs on curtains.
Ingrid Pollard names her installation
Seventeen of Sixty Eight, and had along one wall photographs of cottages while the facing wall featured eight frames containing completely blank, unadorned white surfaces, the whole aiming apparently to question 'our relationship with the natural world and (to) interrogate ideas such as Britishness, race and sexuality'.
Heather Phillipson called her installation
Rupture No 1: Blowtorching the Bitten Peach, and she does have a series of arresting, coloured windows of what look like slashed eyes but are split peaches. The official information is that her wide-ranging practice involves 'collisions of wildly different materials, media and gestures', which constitute what she calls 'quantum thought experiment'. I wonder how we could know that by looking at the artefacts alone.
Sin Wai Kin's
It's Always You is another questioner, this time of 'the commodification of identity and of queer coding within pop music'. However, what the visitor sees are some nifty cardboard cut-outs of young men at the centre of a pink, spotty room with screens on the wall. There is plenty of throbbing music in the background, and one item named
Inside/Outside features a bowl of unappetising noodle soup being slurped down. We are told that Sin 'brings fantasy to life through storytelling in performance, moving image, writing and print. Drawing on their own experience existing between binary categories, their work realises fictional narratives to describe lived realities of desire, identification and consciousness'.
I wonder if it would be possible to exhibit such work without the accompanying paper work offering an, or even
the, interpretation? The documents on gallery walls proclaim that interpretation is free while offering one specific outlook. And is such work purely and intentionally for the higher elite? The emperor obviously does have, must have, clothes on, but do today's artists have any interest in letting the crowds lining the street actually see them? However, full of goodwill, I remain baffled.
Joseph Farrell is Professor Emeritus of Italian at Strathclyde University
