Arts & Culture
The shock of the old
Published 10 November 2003
Art 2 - Rrichard Cork welcomes a return to provocative form for the Turner Prize
Last year, the Turner Prize exhibition was a curiously low-key, listless affair. None of the shortlisted artists ignited any great excitement. Only the cack-handed intervention of Kim Howells, a short-lived junior culture minister, gave the event some spurious notoriety. Even though his ministerial brief was focused on encouraging tourism, he warned visitors away from Tate Britain by dismissing the entire Turner Prize show as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".
His philistine attack said more about a minor politician with frustrated artistic leanings. Howells then made the mistake of revealing his own bland and mediocre attempts at Sunday painting.
This time around, though, the Turner line-up is generating widespread debate. Most of the rooms crackle with provocative show-stoppers. They are, admittedly, the work of well-established artists, so the Turner Prize 2003 contains no revelations about the young, emergent talents of the 21st century. Their prevailing fascination with death chimes with the darkest aspects of our own turbulent times.
Not that there is anything overtly troubled about the first, spectacular work. No fewer than 2,000 red gerberas, fixed be- hind four tall sheets of perspex, fill Anya Gallaccio's room with sumptuous colour. Our first reaction is delight: we are overwhelmed by the allure of the flowers and their rich green stalks. However, euphoria gives way to more unsettling considerations. Because the gerberas are real, they will fade and rot by the time the exhibition ends in January. Nobody, not even the artist, can know exactly what stage of decomposition they will have reached by then. But their decay is inevitable and, seen in this light, the perspex panels take on an oppressive air as they trap the flowers against the gallery wall.
Gallaccio has never looked more powerful or ominous than she does here. Playing with our expectations, she places three delicate ilex twigs on the floor. Leaning tipsily against the corner, they could not appear more vulnerable. But they turn out to be life-cast bronzes, and the brilliant berries they support are made of glass. The apples trussed to a tree with rope are real enough, and will duly deteriorate as the show proceeds. But the tree itself is a bronze cast, so the wasting of the fruit will be even more macabre when it contrasts with the sturdy permanence of the trunk and branches.
By coincidence, another tree acts as a prop in the most substantial exhibit by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Almost a decade ago, they made their first large sculptural response to Goya's wartime etching Great Deeds Against the Dead. Instead of the butchered Spanish corpses that Goya had shown, tied to a tree trunk or hanging head first from its branch, the Chapmans used shop mannequins. Castrated and dismembered, they could not have been more drastically removed from the bland physical perfection of the bodies displayed in department store windows. Even so, the Chapmans have now gone much further. Returning to the same subject, in a monumental and gruesomely painted bronze called Sex, the victims have become skeletons assailed by a mass of swarming maggots, snails and flies.
Relying on casts of junk-shop props and medical skeletons, the Chapmans have invested their sculpture with a potent sense of disgust. The threat of decay hanging over Gallaccio's doomed gerberas is here transformed into a festering reality. The hungry worms and beetles burrowing into the crevices of Sex are meticulously painted and succeed in conveying a palpable feeling of revulsion. The vehemence of Grand Guignol is spliced, uncannily, with an attention to painstaking detail reminiscent of the most obsessive images painted in a 19th-century asylum by "mad" Richard Dadd. Apart from an indolent bat suspended in a tree hole, and the black crow perched on the highest stump in order to survey the whole repellent orgy, Sex is consumed by a collective urge to devour everything within reach.
A similar impulse seems to dictate the action in the Chapmans' other new sculpture, Death. From a distance, its two anonymous participants look like blown-up plastic figures. They are, in reality, bronze casts, but their origins lie in two inflatable sex dolls. The female leans over the male and immerses herself in fellatio. It seems nothing more than a mechanical ritual involving two robotic morons. The male appears unaware that oral sex is being performed. It means nothing, and despite the controversial subject matter, Death is worth little more than a glance. The presence of such a brazen sculpture in a public gallery has compelled Tate Britain to display a warning that "some of the works in this exhibition are sexually explicit and not recommended for children under 16". But I cannot imagine that the offending work will hold anyone's attention for long.
Insult to Injury, the Chapmans' other exhibit, is a very different matter. Goya's 80 harrowing etchings are hung, with claustrophobic effect, all round the room. The atrocities they depict with such incisive yet compassionate flair arise from Goya's experience of his war-shattered country. The Chapmans' fascination with these prints must stem from an awareness that they bear directly on our own traumatic follies. Hence, presumably, the decision to purchase a set of the etchings and add grossly distorted faces of their own in gouache and watercolour.
The changes they made to Goya's original heads have already caused widespread offence. Accusations of unforgivable vandalism are levelled against them by those who find the alterations as alarming as the knife-slashing of the Rokeby Venus by an enraged suffragette. But plenty of identical etchings exist elsewhere, and these particular prints are a late edition issued long after Goya's death. So I feel no sense of outrage looking at the caricatures invented by the Chapmans. Both brothers are skilled draughtsmen, even if they do indulge in a childish fondness for big-eared, grinning grotesques.
They invade Goya's images at every turn, making them seem even more like products of a demented nightmare. A man hanging from a tree now has a teddy bear's head, emphasising his helplessness. Another scene is inhabited by soldiers with Nazi helmets, summing up the Chapmans' desire to pull Goya's torture and desolation right into modern history. Far from ruining Goya's work, they have carried out a sustained act of homage.
Compared with the Chapmans and Gallaccio, the other two shortlisted artists lack visceral impact. Grayson Perry has flourished in the pre-exhibition publicity round, with gleeful tabloid stories focusing on his transvestite alter ego, Claire. Perry has only recently been able to let Claire play an important role in his work. Here, he displays the extravagantly embroidered Coming Out Dress worn in a performance three years ago. Perry often dons similar garments in public nowadays, and they relate to the girls on his earthenware "pots", who seem to have strayed from Alice in Wonderland. His distressing themes such as parental abuse of children are depicted on the deceptively gleaming, luxurious surfaces of his multi-coloured vessels. The bleakness of his work has parallels with his own childhood. But Perry has a weakness for pictorial fussiness and sweet, plaintive figures uncomfortably close to Victorian sentimentality at its most doe-eyed.
Willie Doherty is a tougher and far less decorative artist, armed with a long-standing determination to reflect on the troubles of his native Derry and Northern Ireland. His two-screen video installation confronts us with the front and back views of a man running at night across an empty, harshly metallic bridge. Garish red lighting intensifies his alarm, and he seems desperate. But is he the hunter or the hunted? Doherty does not tell us, and he confines Rerun to a loop of this one, infinitely repeated sequence. Compared with the complex subtlety of his finest work, it does not seem enough to sustain attention for long. But the man's sweating, grunting plight is vividly conveyed. His life-or-death urgency links up with the rest of a show fuelled, at best, by a haunting sense of panic, bewilderment and loss.
"Turner Prize 2003" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8000) until 11 January
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