George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann
Talk of the Turner Prize, Where, for One Thing, Talk Is Art
Tino Sehgal, foreground, is one of four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize. His work “This is exchange” involves a simple chat.
By ROSLYN SULCAS
Published: November 29, 2013
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — On a recent morning, a group of teenagers stood in a room, now an art gallery in a former military barracks here, and stared at the bare white walls. They were searching for the work of Tino Sehgal, one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
What they didn’t yet know was that they were the work: Mr. Sehgal’s art exists only as personal encounters between members of the public and a guide paid to engage them in conversation. It was a moment worthy of the oft-contentious reputation of the Turner, an annual award of £25,000 (around $41,000) under the aegis of the Tate Museum that is given to a British artist under 50. The winner will be announced on Monday.
Mr. Sehgal’s performance art piece — here in a three-month exhibition, along with works by his fellow nominees, David Shrigley, Laure Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — is one sign that the 29-year-old Turner Prize can still be counted on to provide at least a few challenges to traditional expectations.
The finalists are nominated by a four-person international jury of curators and gallery and museum directors, led by Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, who plays no part in the final decision. The prize is well known in Britain, and it makes for a moment when people entirely uninterested in contemporary art discuss contemporary art. The award ceremony on Monday will be shown live on national television, as it is each year, and bookmakers are eagerly taking bets on the winner. (A few days before the announcement, Mr. Sehgal was the favorite at Ladbrokes, with 7 to 4 odds.)
But winning isn’t required. Even a nomination for the Turner can be a turning point in an artist’s career, said Chris Hammond, whose gallery, MOT International, represents Ms. Prouvost. “What the Turner Prize does is to instantaneously bring the artist to a new, broad audience,” he said.
Tracey Emin, nominated for the prize in 1999, was blunter. Writing in 2006, she said: “If I were speaking to the artists who are in it this year, I’d say something like: ‘Don’t worry too much. The price of your work is going to double.’ ”
Critics have often been scathing about the quality and shock value of some art that has been nominated for the Turner. The prize “is perhaps most famous for trying — sometimes desperately — to elicit a reaction from its visitors,” Zoe Pilger wrote in The Independent last month.
The prize is also popular partly because of that shock value, much enjoyed by the British tabloids, which have followed some of the exhibits with delirious glee: Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, or Ms. Emin’s unmade bed with detritus from her stay there during a siege of depression, including condoms and cigarettes.
This year, the prize apparatus is also breaking a barrier with its setting: For the first time, the Turner Prize exhibition and award ceremony are being held outside of England, here in Londonderry (called Derry-Londonderry in all Turner publicity), designated as Britain’s first City of Culture.
The city is deeply associated with the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict that raged on the Irish island for decades. Londonderry bears testament to sensitivities that prevail, despite the 1998 Good Friday agreement. (Some see the London prefix, added to Derry in 1613, as a British imposition, thus the double name that is popular with many.) The placing of the exhibition in the Ebrington Barracks, where the British Army was garrisoned and which remained barred and inaccessible until relatively recently, is meant to symbolize a transformation from devastation to regeneration.
“We recognized there would be challenges, but there was always a desire on our part to make it work,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate Museums, in a telephone interview. “I hope that by putting it in Ebrington, we lay down another layer of history.”
The exhibition is part of the extensive calendar of events planned by Culture City, an organization working in concert with the city’s designation. The art is in building 80/81, transformed by a $3.9 million renovation from dilapidation to a gleaming series of galleries facing the curving Peace Bridge, built in 2011.
What will happen to Ebrington when the Turner exhibition closes is uncertain. “The real value of having the Turner here has been showing the potential of those buildings as a cultural center,” said Willie Doherty, a Londonderry-born photographer who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize. “I think we will have missed a huge opportunity if we don’t develop and build upon the success of this year.”
The galleries provide an unobtrusive, custom-made space for the artists. Mr. Shrigley’s “Life Model 2012” is an ill-proportioned animatronic naked man, three meters (about 10 feet) tall, surrounded by chairs and, usually, groups of people earnestly drawing it.
Mr. Shrigley, 45, has been producing books of illustrations — and photography, cartoons, sculpture, animation and painting — since the early 1990s, and he has been commercially and artistically successful; last year the Hayward Gallery in London presented a 20-year retrospective of his work, the source of his nomination. His pieces are funny and accessible; therefore, he said cheerfully in a telephone interview, “I don’t have any expectation of winning the prize.” A giant man urinating in a bucket, he said, is not a winner.
A video and sculpture installation from the French-born Ms. Prouvost, 35, who moved to London at 18 to study experimental film and video, is in the next gallery. Her whimsical film installation “Wantee,” for which she was nominated, is animated by her voice telling the story of her (fictional) conceptual artist grandfather, whose creations, displayed around a space resembling a tearoom, are used as domestic objects by her grandmother.
“The idea of a dialogue with the audience is important to me,” Ms. Prouvost said in a Skype interview. “I am coming from the experimental scene and questioning the idea of telling the story and making moving images.”
Ms. Yiadom-Boakye, 36, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent, is perhaps the wild card in the pack because she is a straightforward portrait painter. But her portraits are of imaginary people that she describes as “composites” of memory, images and imagination. At Ebrington, the dark-hued figures emerge from the dark, textured oil-painted canvases and low lighting with almost palpable intensity.
And then there is Mr. Sehgal’s 2003 “This is exchange,” which centers on a discussion of the market economy. (There is an incentive for visitors to participate: a small sum of cash.) Mr. Sehgal, 37, who studied dance and economics before turning to the world of visual art, is enjoying a moment in the sun; he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale this year.
No matter how many bets are taken, the Turner Prize outcome is never predictable. “It’s not a vote but a discussion, which makes it unpredictable because passions come into play,” said Judith Nesbitt, the head of National and International Initiatives at Tate. “It’s opinionated. It’s not objective. It can’t be.”
From a local point of view, said Graeme Farrow, the programming director of Culture City, it hardly matters. “The real winner,” he said, “is Derry.”