'Making Sense of the Turner Prize': Margaret Sharrow's latest 'Exploring Art' talk

Image: Outside the Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain, London. Photo copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010.

It's all over now, bar the shouting, and maybe you didn't even get to see it. The Turner Prize exhibition, Britain's most prestigious art award, is always controversial, but then it was designed that way. The work shown is praised and pilloried, met with puzzlement, indifference or incomprehension. So what's it all about?

Artist Margaret Sharrow will attempt to unravel a little of the workings of this annual event in 'Making Sense of the Turner Prize', the latest in her series of Exploring Art talks. The presentation will be illustrated with examples of work by all the previous Turner Prize winners, as well as the 2010 contenders. 

The talk will take place on Wednesday 12 January 2011 at Lampeter's Women's Workshop, at St James Hall, Cwmann. The day begins at 10am with relaxation and discussion, a shared lunch, followed by Margaret's talk. The charge of £2.50 includes lunch. All women aged 16 and over are welcome. 

Can't attend? Read Margaret Sharrow's reviews:

Turner Prize review

Dexter Dalwood talk review

View 'Footfall', a video response to Turner Prize 2010 winner Susan Philipsz's 'Lowlands Away'

2 January 2011

'Footfall' by Margaret Sharrow - a video response to Susan Philipsz's 'Lowlands Away'

'Footfall' copyright Margaret Sharrow 2010

'Footfall' by Margaret Sharrow is a response to 'Lowlands Away' by Susan Philipsz, a work of sound art shown at the Turner Prize 2010 exhibition at Tate Britain in London, 5 October 2010 - 2 January 2011. The video is designed to be viewed on mobile phones in the gallery, or elsewhere with or without the memory of Philipsz's piece.

(Phones set to silent, please.)

'Footfall' on YouTube

Other videos by Margaret Sharrow

Self portrait diptych, 2010

Soul group, 2010, currently showing at St Dogmaels Gallery

Portfolio

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Review: Dexter Dalwood's Turner Prize talk (thoughts on 'the Darth Vader of painting' and visual sampling)

Image: Dexter Dalwood, 'Sharon Tate's House', 1998

setting: a room, but with people

Grateful to have a place in the fully booked venue, I settled into my seat to await the start of the second of Tate Britain's series of talks by each of the artists on the Turner Prize shortlist. Having missed the Otolith Group talk on 22 October, I was able to attend the talk by Dexter Dalwood, which took place on 5 November 2010 in the Tate Britain auditorium (accessed through the Clore Gallery entrance).

The talk format was a structured but fairly informal conversation between Dalwood and Michael Bracewell, writer and critic. The latter part of the talk was accompanied by a slide projection, mainly of examples of Dalwood's work. What follows is a filling out of the more coherent parts of my notes from the talk. Direct quotations are, therefore, approximate... and sections have been rearranged, and dropped out, like the Morse code Katie Paterson sent to the moon and bounced back, minus random bits of information.

advice to students

Dalwood spoke of the need for 'an odd passion for looking at stuff to get you involved in making ... Once the light goes on there's no reverse gear from the nerdy aspect.'

Advice to students included the idea that ideally, if yourself as you were on the first day at art school was to time travel and walk into your degree show, the earlier self would be 'totally shocked and surprised'.

He spoke of having to map out a course for yourself: in his case, he went through a series of narrative paintings with figures during his BA at St Martins; a time of 'bad semi abstracts' at the RCA; and then a time when he was 'lost' and unable to paint.

He recalled advice he had from Paula Rego in a tutorial at St Martins:

'"Always be as cruel as you can." It's a good thing to think about - not blood and guts but in making, risk, push it out. For you it might be a huge revolution, for viewer they might say, "oh, it's such and such". Always be pushing up the ante. Deliberately make it hard in a way, but not to numb it. That's the only advice I remember from college.'

contexts for Dalwood's practice

Dalwood said he came to art through music, not the other way round as is perhaps more typical. Growing up he had an awakening with the advent of the Velvet Underground, a glamourous fantasy come to life. 'I was excited about the idea of the Velvet Underground. The space in New York to do with Warhol was light years from the grim Bristol existence in the 70s.'

Dalwood spoke of the A New Spirit in Painting show at the Royal Academy in 1981 where figurative painting was allowed in after being sidelined in the 1970s, of a peculiar subjective expression allowed back. Philip Guston was very important after the shift, as were Julian Schnabel and David Salle. In the mid 80s, he contended, there was a backlash against market control of success, when 'painting appeared to behave badly'. Photography, he said, then became the main postmodern form, while painting had to recarve out territory. Gerhard Richter was the main exponent - 'he became the sort of Darth Vader of painting'. In the wake of Richter everyone thought that if they were serious they would have to think conceptually, a phenomenon that was more endemic in the UK than Germany. Blurring the photo became the look, with few doing something different, though examples of divergence included Peter Doig's romantic dreamscapes, which Dalwood perceived as fresh. Generally there didn't seem to be a territory one could occupy in painting, when there seemed few acceptable avenues to pursue.

Things have changed a great deal, Dalwood said, since the time when a great cultural weight was given to abstraction, which 'feels like a hundred years ago'. He cited the example of the 'incredible hubris' of Clyfford Still, who famously remarked that when his paintings landed in France you could feel tremours all the way to the Kremlin. So when Dalwood decided to use one of Still's paintings as an element in his painting to represent the peeling wall of a swimming pool ('Brian Jones' Swimming Pool', 2000), he felt it would evoke pathos.

Image: Dexter Dalwood, 'Brian Jones' Swimming Pool', 2000

on the art historical references in the paintings

When asked how important it was to him that the viewer knows the references, especially the younger viewer, or one from a different culture, Dalwood emphasised that the paintings are not a checklist. The Tate St Ives show for which he was nominated for the Turner Prize was the first show with titles of the paintings on the wall. In Dalwood's commercial shows the viewer sees the painting first, then the title on the printed list supplied by the gallery. It is an important point: Dalwood has chosen not to provide the viewer with signage, because he wants the viewer first to see the work as paintings, as images, and second to read the title, and thirdly to make further meanings. He sees the paintings as being like 'pebbles that make ripples that keep going' or as 'an irritant to the viewer' because they might have their own image of what a particular famous room might look like, and discover that Dalwood's painting is 'nothing like my version, like the novel compared to its adaptation into film'.

on Dalwood's working methods

Dalwood starts work on a painting with sketchy pencil drawings which may have a bit of a collage element added, then moves on to make a collage, quite a small one (smaller than A4 or 8" x 11"). The transition from collage to painting is 'where it all happens'. He is not interested in translating the collage in a photographic way into a painting, but in how the collage acts as a springboard that lets him invent. The excitement for him is 'how I do the lamp for an 8x6 foot canvas, not replicating the photo'.

He has become interested in how to use flat colour, how colour in itself is a powerful element in painting. Dalwood had a one year scholarship to India during which he studied miniature paintings, which fascinated him as examples of how to set up a theme or mood with one colour, a technique he has adopted into his own work (look at the expanses of colour, for example the carpet, brick wall and massive ceiling light in 'Sharon Tate's House', 1998).

on sampling

Dalwood says he is at ease with the concept of sampling in painting, a visual equivalent of music sampling. David Salle chopped up elements in his paintings with no hierarchy, but we are well past that now, Dalwood contends. 'It's how we construct our lives. It's easy for me to use quotes from different things as a language with some energy if the things are more than the sum of its parts. If I'm editing I ask, why would that work? Is it too corny, too obvious? Painting will have an odd quietness where you find a moment when it settles and functions as a painting.'

He began to think about collage elements on the surface of the painting. 'Robert Rauschenberg's Bed was the most alarming painting I could imagine making and putting in a gallery.' Made in 1955, this 'bed with paint' made Dalwood see him as 'a giant... a leading postmodernist exponent, along with de Kooning'. He struggled with how to include collage without it being arbitrary but part of the fabric of the painting.

'If you were in a prison cell and given two magazines a week you could construct a whole other world from just that plus what you think of.'

'We sample stuff in our heads - books, films we haven't seen - yet I could tell you about them. I feel totally easy about it; it's a valid thing to do. But it took a long time to get to that point. You have to do what's right for you. At art school I was asked "Why do you put things together so awkwardly?" Perhaps awkwardly is the point of the work. What you do naturally odd - there may be a reason for it.'

Notice of the talk on Tate Britain website

Documentary of Dalwood shown at 2010 Turner Prize exhibition

TateShots 'Meet the Artist: Dexter Dalwood' documentary about the Tate St Ives exhibition 23 January - 3 May 2010

Found footage: Otolith Group at the Turner Prize 2010

Photos of Otolith Group at Turner Prize 2010 exhibition, copyright Oli Scarff/Getty Images

I came to this year's Turner Prize exhibition with an uneven knowledge base, having seen Dexter Dalwood's exhibition at Tate St Ives this spring (the exhibition for which he was nominated - some of the works shown at the Turner Prize exhibition are from this show, others are not), but knowing nothing of the work of the other nominees. I was immediately captivated by the Otolith Group's presentation, a dark room after the light of Dalwood's, filled with a series of thirteen televisions and a single large projection screen, with accompanying round table with tiny anglepoise lamps and plenty of black plastic chairs. On the walls are stencilled quotations by Chris Marker. (The Otolith Group is 'an artist led collective' founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The book on the table presents Chris Marker as if he might be a member of the Otolith Group, which is not the case, as far as I can tell. Just as well, because, born 1921, he is surely too old to be a collaborator for the Turner Prize, the current rules for which state the nominees must be under the age of 50.)

The film, Otolith III, is largely composed of clips from black and white Indian films of the 1960's and 70's, with new colour footage and voiceovers added to weave together a series of narratives, of which more later. The smaller screens simultaneously play the thirteen episodes of a television series on the legacy of ancient Greece originally broadcast in France in 1989, The Owl's Legacy by Chris Marker, retitled by the Otolith Group as 'Inner Time of Television'. The programmes can be viewed individually using headphones, or collectively as an installation, as all are subtitled. As far as I can tell no alteration has been made to the content of the original programmes; they are simply re-presented, as it says in the catalogue on the table, as an opportunity for a new audience to see this hard-to-find television series.

Now it might seem that anyone could choose their favourite television series, arrange one player for each and have a sort of simultaneous 'box set fest' (though what people actually do is to watch their episodes sequentially on a single screen). So why is this presentation art? Aside from falling back on the notion, famously propounded by readings of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain and other 'readymades', that anything can be considered a work of art, especially if placed in the setting of a gallery, I initially struggled a little myself once I realised that the Otolith Group had not themselves made the programmes on the 13 screens. However, the images were individually captivating. Headshots of interviewees, usually dully located in academic offices as was the norm in this period of television, were juxtaposed by chromakey against backgrounds of art objects, particularly owls. The episodes could be watched individually with headphones, but because of the subtitles, it was possible to view the whole simultaneously, and to notice juxtapositions and repetitions between the episodes. The whole thus becomes more than the sum of its parts, though the parts, as the catalogue asserts, are a kind of television rare in its time, and not produced any more, in terms of its scope and associative linking. I haven't explored the full depths of this, as most of my time was focused on the film, detailed below (but if I manage another visit and watch one or more episodes straight through, I will certainly report my impressions here).

The description of 'Otolith III' that follows contains spoilers - although not in relation to a conventional plot

Otolith III is a film very similar to Fellini's 8½ in that it is about the process of making a film. The characters confront the director in turn, asking 'Why haven't you made the film yet? Why did you leave us trapped in the village?' The director asserts that it is 'a project I don't believe in anymore, a mistake'. The same story is told over and over in each section, each from the point of view of a different character (the boy, the reporter, the engineer, and others), but also from the point of view of the director, who contemplates casting possible actors from footage of members of the public, seen in slow motion colour film through a long lens. The story is told mainly in voiceover, over clips from a range of black and white Indian films from the 1960s and 1970s. Though disparate clips are ever changing, meanings are anchored to them from the voiceover. After a while the same clips appear again and again, with different shades of meaning given by the different characters. The story of the unmade film revolves around the encounter of the boy with a Martian; the frequent effect is that the footage, whether black and white or colour, appears as if from a detached viewpoint, as if we are seeing the behaviour of our own species as if we are another engaged in some sort of scientific study. This effect may not be so strong if one is familiar with the Indian film clips, which are from the arthouse tradition rather than the Bollywood: undoubtedly knowledge of the contexts of these clips opens up whole other levels of meanings, which interact in turn with the titles of the books on bookshelves the camera pans over during the credits, suggesting a survey of art, literature, science and philosophy, that is, thinking of this 'alien' human species.

A title interjected with footage of children playing seemed to sum up the crux of film:

THROUGH THE MYTH OF THE MARTIAN A WHOLE HISTORY IN EXTERIORITY CONSTITUTES US AS COSMIC INDIVIDUALS THIS HISTORY IS MADE UP OF TRAPS AND AMBUSHES REVEALING THE CHARACTER OF MAN TO BE AN IDIOSYNCRASY PRODUCED BY THE COSMOS ITSELF

The whole idea of the Martian, or the 'alien', can be taken as a metaphor for a person of one culture being plunged into another, with all the bewilderment that entails. Indeed the Otolith Group position themselves as 'tricontinental', and the viewer unfamiliar with Indian arthouse films of the 1960s and 1970s has some sort of experience of cultural dislocation in viewing this film.

There's plenty to engage with here, and even if you don't 'see everything' it is easy to spend an hour just in the Otolith Group room, plus however long one might spend with the other artists on the shortlist (who it might be said tend to get short shrift in terms of visitor time). However, if you are uncomfortable with films that don't present an immediately obvious narrative, I'd recommend you challenge yourself here for as long as you feel able, knowing that upon leaving the Turner Prize there is the reward of something much more straightforward in the form of Doug Fishbone's Elmina, just to the right of the Turner Prize gift shop. Oh, and the four short documentaries about the nominated artist, that play at the end of the Turner Prize exhibition. In which Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group says that the world doesn't need any more films, so that anyone who makes a film had better have something important to say. Otolith III is worth teasing out, as it certainly deals with some fundamental issues.

The Turner Prize exhibition continues at Tate Britain 5 October 2010 - 3 January 2011. Admission charge £8 / £6 concessions, free for Tate members.

23 November 2010

Turner Prize visiting info

Otolith Group Turner Prize documentary

Otolith Group web page

A Long Time Between Suns, the exhibition for which the Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize

The Owl's Legacy (more about it, with a clip here)

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Turner Prize 2010 review: Tate Britain's apples & oranges annual

Installation view of Otolith Group at the Turner Prize exhibition, 2010. Image copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010

As always, the Turner Prize seems to offer comparisons between apples and oranges - a difficult task to compare diverse work in different media. This year the visitor sees, starting at the exhibition entrance and walking straight through, paintings by Dexter Dalwood, film and video installations by the Otolith Group, sculptural paintings and sculpture by Angela de la Cruz, and sound art by Susan Philipsz.

It helps to know that what is actually being compared is not the work on show, but the exhibitions (elsewhere) for which the artists were nominated. As I've only seen Dexter Dalwood's show at Tate St Ives, I can't offer any perspective on whose exhibition most brings out the qualities of the work of the particular artist/s, or how the exhibitions compare with other exhibitions by the same artists, all salient points for the Turner Prize committee. The public, aside from those priveleged and dedicated enough to travel round the UK and Europe seeing exhibitions with persistence and prescience, are left to compare what is actually on show, and to browse the catalogues of the artists' work displayed outside the exhibition. As the natures of the prize and the exhibition are constantly evolving, in future it might be an idea to show, either through photographs or video, the exhibitions for which the nominations were made. This would be a great contribution to the Turner Prize exhibition, and would allow the public to make a more informed comparison - as most people naturally assume that what they see in the exhibition is the basis for awarding the prize, when it is not.

In Susan Philipsz's case, the location of the sound art is particularly relevant to appreciating the full impact of the piece; the acoustics of the Clyde bridges in Glasgow are surely completely different to that offered by an exhibition room in the Tate. However I can say, without any use of the imagination, that the impression made by Dexter Dalwood's paintings in St Ives is somewhat different from that in London. It is not just the surroundings, stepping off Porthmeor Beach as opposed to a rainy day by the Thames, or even the difference in architecture, the classical square forms of Tate Britain differing from the partly rounded forms of Tate St Ives, with the main atrium fronted by a wall of curved glass overlooking the beach. The St Ives exhibition consisted of far more paintings, four rooms full, spanning work from the 1990's to pieces completed in 2009, months or possibly weeks before the exhibition was mounted, so there was a sense of continuity and development, from early pieces representing interior spaces, to the first ones that utilised overt references to other painters, to recent pieces such as The Death of David Kelly (2008) that are more simplified. In addition, Dalwood was persuaded by the St Ives curators to hang a series of small paper collages that are an intermediate preparatory stage crucial to his work. These were a striking display in the sea-facing rotunda, and provided a fascinating insight into his working process. It was possible to compare collages with their subsequent paintings, and to see which elements were altered, resized, recoloured, substituted, or, like the figure on the staircase in the Mandelay painting (2009), removed entirely. Finally, Dalwood had curated an exhibition of work from the Tate collection, with a common theme of work produced in 1971, which was shown in the lower gallery, visible from the area containing the collages. I'm uncertain as to whether this exhibition 'counts' as part of Dalwood's Turner Prize nomination, but it would certainly have been held in the minds of many visitors as they absorbed Dalwood's paintings upstairs. Dalwood's choice of the year 1971 as a common theme is a personal one, as it was a significant year in his childhood (we are not told why) when he was living in nearby Penzance. A record album design sits alongside work by Picasso (both are typical of sources he has 'collaged' into his paintings). Significantly, there is a maquette of a sculpture by his uncle, the sculptor Hubert Dalwood. The elder Dalwood's striking work, as seen in a catalogue in the public reading room, may have been both an inspiration and a burden to live up to. The 1971 exhibition was certainly very informative as to the cultural climate from which the younger Dalwood emerged (even if he didn't see these particular pieces at the time), and thus provides a different level of reading for the exhibition of his paintings.

I can only speculate as to the layers of context and meaning provided by the unseen previous exhibitions by the other artists nominated for the 2010 Turner Prize: it is well at least to be aware that there is a great deal more to the Turner Prize than meets the eye.

The Turner Prize is awarded on the evening of 6 December 2010, live on Channel 4

Turner Prize 2010 exhibition continues at Tate Britain until 3 January 2011

Tate Britain Turner Prize link

Tate St Ives Dexter Dalwood exhibition guide link

Adrian Serle's review in the Guardian

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Rachel Whiteread Drawings: studies in negative spaces, places for play - Tate Britain 8 September 2010 - 16 January 2011

Photo: Rachel Whiteread video on display in main foyer, Tate Britain, to accompany her exhibition. Photo copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010; video copyright Tate

It's always interesting to see artists' preparatory work (see Francis Alÿs, 'A Story of Deception'), and this selection of drawings, photographs, maquettes and items from the studio of former Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread makes a nice complement to the current year's contenders' exhibition. There are many drawings made on graph paper, and I began to wonder what benefits this might offer her (scaling up? guidance against a tendency to stray from the straight line?), and why I hadn't tried drawing on graph paper myself. She is also fond of using whiteout as a drawing tool, something Michael Landy has used to great effect in some of his drawings of Tinguely's Homage to New York.

As a photographer it is always interesting for me to see what use non-photographer artists make of this medium. There was one photograph of an urban landscape, a study for her water tower piece I think, that she had painted over, giving a very atmospheric result. Other photographs were daubed with whiteout to indicate the negative spaces that are the hallmark of her sculptural work. (The idea of highlighting the negative space, the invisible thing in preference to the apparently existing things, is one that appeals to me greatly.) There is the famous house, blotted out while its neighbours remain. There is another photograph of the field, after the standing guts of the house that was Whiteread's seminal work had been demolished by an anxious council. An absence of an absence. Perhaps we should be visiting this ghost of a work that was a ghost of a house.

I also liked her plans for the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square - to have the mirror image of the plinth stood on top of itself, made of some translucent material. 'Do it! DO IT!!!' I shouted to her, though she wasn't there. Fortunately I did all this shouting in my head, or they would have thrown me out before I could have seen some of the most interesting work: studies on modified postcards (one filled with negative spaces through the aegis of a range of differently sized hole punches), and a vast array of handholdable (but sadly safe behind glass) treasures she keeps in her studio: glass globes and crystal balls, a mould of Peter Sellers' nose that was a sample from a sculptural materials company, single shoes, toys, stones, resin moulds of bowls, mirrors and other delightfully reflective surfaces. Such is the stuff we need to have about us, for reference, for inspiration, for play. For it is play that allows us to connect with the unfettered, uncluttered self that can create with clarity.

A bonus exhibition that can be seen on a combination ticket with Eadweard Muybridge and the Turner Prize.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings continues at Tate Britain, London, until 16 January 2011

Posted 9 November 2010

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Why it's not safe to let me into the Tate

1. I go bananas for Bacon.

2. The restaurant at Tate Britain is excellent. (The devilled kidneys on sourbread are out of this world, and the wine list could be a novella.)

3. I might actually read the comments on the Turner Prize exhibition. Who knows, I might even report some of them here.

4. I never, ever pay for the coat check.

5. The Tate membership will let me into exhibitions an unlimited amount of times. I have already made it pay for itself.

6. I may be found peering at the memorabilia of curation: is that wall photo printed out in 60cm strips? What kind of mirror plates are they using? Are photo corner tabs fashionable underneath, or above, matte mountings?

7. Who knows what they might think of me if I went to St. Ives?

8. In the shop I might be reading rather a lot of that book about marketing for artists.

9. I could be guilty of buying a pencil sharpener, finding that it was too small for the pencil, returning it, and persuading the person at the counter to sharpen the pencil for me with a Stanley knife. (Now why didn't I think to bring one to the gallery?)

10. Which leads to the scenario of me making unfeasible sketches of the George Dyer triptychs.

11. I always seem to be the last to leave at the end of the day. People have to walk around ringing bells and locking doors behind me to get me to go.

12. There is a pair of machines in Tate Modern, by the coat check that I do not pay for, that allows me to have fun making absurd not-quite-art videos. You have been warned.

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