Richard Wright's no title in the 2009 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain / photo Simon Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography
BM: With that in mind, let's talk about the Tate. In many respects it sets the art-world agenda…
AS: The way the MoMA used to.
BM: Yes, but I’m thinking particularly of two marquee exhibitions: the Turner Prize and the Unilever Series in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. This year’s Turner Prize exhibition just opened at Tate Britain and you wrote in your review for the Guardian that “the show is a meat-grinder.”
AS: Well I don’t think it’s the exhibition itself, it’s all of the attendant attention that the artists get.
BM: Which has become part and parcel of the Turner Prize phenomenon.
AS: It has certainly become so over the last 20 years. Before that it was a rather quiet affair and not very good either. So yes, it seems to have turned into a bit of a monster, I think in several ways. To begin with, it affects the artists who get chosen. Having been a judge myself, the question does arise early on in discussions about who’s been nominated, whether the artists proposed could deal with it, whether they are equipped and whether it will actually harm them if they’re pushed into it. So they’ve got to have a bit of resilience. And there are artists who have refused to be in the show. That affects the kind of exhibition you get. And then artists are nominated for what they’ve done in the previous 12 months, which is a bit of a loose description really because obviously you are looking at their back histories much more so. Who should win becomes driven by the exhibition they’ve put on rather than the things they’ve done that have led up to that. And so they have to really perform and they go too far sometimes. Instead of showing their best work, they show a Turner Prize work. That’s a bit strange, but maybe prizes are always a bit skewed in that way. And then, this is from my experience, in the discussion you have about who should be given the prize—having already discussed whether one artist or another is equipped to deal with being in the show in the first place—you have to consider how well they’ll do with not winning it. So that’s complicated.
I think most of the artists now take the Turner Prize for what it is without blowing it out of proportion. They’re not going to break down into tears and say, “It’s the proudest moment of my life.” It’s not like those hideous Oscar things. Most artists accept that it will change your life, possibly in bad ways. And then you get artists who were nominated and didn’t win it, whose careers then blossomed. Peter Doig never won it; Tacita Dean never won it. Tacita went on to win the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and has now just won the Kurt Schwitters Prize in Germany. But it isn’t about awards, is it. Artists who worry about getting awards are a bit like critics who wonder if one day they’ll get an OBE or something.
It has become a phenomenon, obviously. Nothing’s pure and there is a way in which it has certainly helped the reception of contemporary art in the UK and probably beyond. That’s why other countries have emulated it.
BM: As we have here with the Sobey Art Award, which was just given out last week to David Altmejd.
AS: A set designer really, isn’t he. I mean he’s all right, but where would he be without silicone glue?
BM: Perhaps, but his exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale did bring significant international attention to a young Canadian artist, which can be a rare thing.
AS: Janet Cardiff got it, didn’t she? And Rodney Graham’s Vexation Island was one of the big hits of that particular biennale.
« Page 2 First page Page 4 »Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
