Turner Prize induces another art attack

A sub-heading in a serious newspaper greeted the Turner Prize shortlist, announced this week, as “a return to the norm”.

I wondered, had I misheard the roll call as it was revealed on the radio? The four nominees included the woman who put that whipped cream thing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, Heather Phillipson, who surprisingly sounds the least bonkers of the lot.

Also on the list is Ingrid Pollard, who uses photography to question our relationship with the natural world and interrogate social constructs; and Veronica Ryan, best known for sculpture evocative of seeds and pods and fruit that raises environmental and socio-political concerns. 

And then there is Sin Wai Kin, nominated for a film that takes, as its starting point, an ancient Chinese allegory, the Dream of the Butterfly, in which — according to jury chair Helen Legg, speaking on the Today programme — a philosopher wakes up from a vivid dream, where he fluttered about as a butterfly, pondering whether “he is a man dreaming about being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming about being a man”.

“Ah right,” said bemused Today presenter Justin Webb, “well, we’ve all been there.”

It’s easy to be facetious about contemporary art when the art appears to lend itself so readily to self-parody and is so out of touch with mainstream aesthetic tastes. Anything so obvious as a painting rarely makes the cut in the coveted award, named after one of England’s greatest painters.

In the art world, the fact that four individuals are up for the prize — rather than the collectives of 2021 — is considered “normal”. Probably the best known, Phillipson, has attracted public scorn for defacing Trafalgar Square with her work (one commentator said he felt sorry for the lion at the base of Nelson’s Column who has to stare at it 24 hours a day).

But as an iconoclast whose oeuvre confounds popular definitions of art, she is surely perfect for the Turner, whose previous winners have included Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, and Damien Hirst.

The latter, who said, “it’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw” when his animal carcasses in formaldehyde installations won in 1995, went on to be a highly collectable enfant terrible in art circles.

As, of course, did Tracey Emin, who didn’t actually win the Turner but was nominated for her unmade bed and is now a national treasure — not necessarily because of her art.

We should not forget why the Turner Prize was invented in 1984: to draw greater public attention to contemporary art. In publicity terms, it has been a triumph, since we can’t stop talking about it.

Sometimes shock value is the only measure of success in art. Look at Yoko Ono and her performance art of the early 1960s; her Painting to Be Stepped On asked audiences to stand on a canvas laid on the floor, a concept ahead of its time in nuttiness.

But such ideas did help to get her noticed in New York’s avant-garde art milieu, which was predominantly white and male-dominated. 

Art and outrage are natural bedfellows, as the Australian critic Robert Hughes pointed out in The Shock of the New. 

Turner himself was controversial, of course, with the square canvases of his later years rubbished by John Ruskin, otherwise a fan, as “indicative of mental disease”.

At the very least, the Turner Prize serves to rock the status quo, entertain and even offer meaning to life, some of the roles of art down the ages.

It also reflects its times, so it is no surprise that today’s stars focus disproportionately on identity politics, a current obsession. In 2001, Martin Creed inexplicably took the honours for his empty room with lights going on and off, possibly symbolising post-millennial angst, possibly not.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it though. But we do, as a nation, like art. People flock to galleries and queue for the big exhibitions, even those — or particularly those —featuring challenging art.

Emin’s “Loneliness of the Soul” show (with Edvard Munch) at the Royal Academy last year was practically a sell-out. And it was jostling room only at the Francis Bacon “Man and Beast” retrospective, also at the RA, with its bestial grotesques and bloody bullfights.

What we like less are curators and galleries telling us what to think. Last year’s Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain came with prissy warnings, lest we be offended, over the famous scenes of debauchery we were witnessing.

And the Courtauld has added new labels to its collection of Impressionists, with Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere now accompanied by a fretful note about the “unsettling” presence of a male customer who could, in fact, just be a chap waiting for his drink.

No display of Gaugin is complete without alerts to his penchant for underage Tahitian girls, as if the art lover might quail on discovering that the artist was deeply flawed. Yet in Paris, the Morozov collection, shown recently at the Foundation Louis Vuitton, managed to present Gaugin with plenty of comment but no censorship. 

Treating the public like adults, now there’s a novelty. Let’s hope it catches on here.