Review of Turner Prize 2009 at Tate Britain

by Michael Landon

Any art lovers wandering along the Thames this Autumn will have plenty for their delectation with the 2009 Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern's Pop Life.

But whilst Pop Life is all outrageous imagery and colour, this year's Turner Prize has a genial coolness to it. The show is literally devoid of any colour; genteel greys being the pervasive tone, forging an almost academic feel.

A more 'serious' Turner Prize

It seems the Turner Prize wants to be taken more seriously this year, which is most welcome as I have not been a fan of previous years' efforts.

The first exhibit you encounter upon entering is Lucy Skaer's. Her most startling piece (although not immediately) is an installation called Thames and Hudson 2009, comprising new and recent work including Leviathan Edge 2009. 

This appears as vertical slits in two sides of wall, enclosed in which is the awesome skull of a sperm whale, presumably this being the “leviathan” in the title.

Her aim – if you read her introduction – is to: “Slow-down our understanding of what we are looking at, directing our attention to the act of looking itself.”

She seems to pull this off well, as you can't take in the image of the whale all at once, slowing your eye and thus your mind.

A similar mechanic is at work with her Black Alphabet piece, where Brancusi’s iconic Bird in Space is recast 26 times in compacted coal. Looking closely, the coal spindles have an interesting form, peer back though and they create a strange alphabet shape on the floor.

Wander next to Richard Wright's exhibit and you will encounter the non-titled No Title 2009. A large empty room with an intricate gold print on the far wall.

Instead of of decoration, Wright's work here is intended to commandeer the space and to make it part of the work. Three red marks sitting above the doorway on the adjacent wall (easily missed) are also intended to this effect.

Much of the meaning of the work was lost on me however, for aside from creating two interesting, if slightly disconcerting imagesProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 rom distance, I felt only engaged by thProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 prettiness of the gold designs on the far wall and little outside that immediate visual gratification.

Former UAL student

The paintings, collages and sculptures of former University of the Arts student Enrico David's installation, offer a more vivid spectacle, although that is not to say they are any more successful.

These include two papier eggmen from his nominated exhibition How Do You Love Dzzzzt By Mammy? at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel.

This carnival of absurd figures on a black stage has a jokingly perverse tone - David is supposed to be the surrealist out of the artists here after all – but it is a shame that there seems to be no substantial ideas connecting the tone to the look.

Perhaps my favourite of the short-listed nominee exhibitions is that by Roger Hiorns. A sculptor known for his "chemical interventions", Hiorns shot to international fame with his installation Seizure, which saw him transform a London council flat into a fantasy cave of brilliant blue crystals covering every surface, by filling the room with copper sulphate.

He is partly nominated for that work, but his exhibit in the Tate includes an eye-catching grey landmass of ash laying dormant on the floor as you walk into the room.

Called Untitled 2008, the ash is made up of different tones of grey, hinting that what you are looking at is the cremated and destroyed remnant of some large mechanical object.

It is interesting to learn from the wall text that the ash is in fact the atomised body of a passenger plane. This is quite poignant for obvious reasons, and can be viewed as a memento to human failures or mortality, with Hiorns trying to trigger questions about our interpretation of what it is we are actually viewing

 and how that changes.

Haunting symbolism

Another piece from him is a lattice shape structure containing circular discs which turns out to be freeze-dried cow brain.

The purpose here is to present matter that was once capable of ideas and shape it into another idea – the idea of brain matter as sculpture. His haunting symbolism did make me stop and ponder - unlike most of the the other exhibits - so for that reason, he gets my vote.

Exiting Hiorns' room, you encounter the last room. A small theatre to watch video of the four artists talking about their work. Much like the show, the artists themselves seem unusually understated in their explanations.

Exit this last room and there is a small hall with two notice boards each side with hundreds of notes pinned on each one.

This is where viewers of the exhibition get to leave their feedback or some interesting conclusion about the artists' work inside. My note would read: “After years of shock, real value and skill has returned to the Turner Prize at last.”