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Monday, 9 December, 2002, 17:59 GMT
Turner Prize: You asked an arts critic
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The painter Keith Tyson has won the controversial Turner Prize for art. The artist - originally from Ulverston in Cumbria - picked up a cheque for £20,000 at last night's awards ceremony in central London. His entry featured 39 paintings surrounding a twelve foot high, black column filled with whirring computers. Tyson, the bookmakers' favourite at 5/4 on to win, beat Catherine Yass, Liam Gillick and Fiona Banner to the award. The shortlist was called "conceptual bullshit" by Labour minister Kim Howells and Tracey Emin, a former Turner nominee, described the prize as undemocratic. Arts critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston answered your questions about the Turner Prize in a LIVE interactive forum.
His winning entry features 39 paintings surrounding a 12 ft. high black column filled with whirring computers and entitled "The Thinker" after Rodin. He says his work mixes art and science. The critics called it playful, inventive and quirky if the liked it; pompous, infantile and cartoon doodles if they didn't. The Culture Minister, Kim Howells called the exhibition all of all four Turner finalists, "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit". Nothing new there then. The Turner Prize has always been a machine for generating controversy and getting modern art talked about and this year is no exception. With me to answer you questions is The Times arts critic, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, who was at the award ceremony last night. Rachel, thank you for joining us. I've quoted a few other people's views, what was yours?
This year there's a great sense, I think, that they were searching for something else. They were looking to other medium, they were looking to science to the text, they were looking to architecture and I think there was more a sense that they were struggling to look for something and that what we saw is in no way enshrining a new political or artistic ethos, it's just - looking.
There's always been that accusation but I don't think there's anything more corrupt, if you like, about it this year than any other year. How do you make a decision? Artists can't be judged like a pot of jam at a garden fete. It's inevitably going to be impossible to say which is the better artist.
Of course it's great there's one artist who gets the £20,000 and that's going to be a great help in their struggling careers - though I think all the ones this year are pretty established anyway so they probably didn't need the money that much.
Is the whole thing discredited?
But while we haven't got time on our side, while we're working on the present, while we're looking at what's happening now in the British art world or in a sector of the British art world, all we have are things like the Turner to go by and why not - it's just part of the sifting process.
Although I now think that we've become so familiar with it after almost 100 years of it that it scarcely elitist - everyone can talk about - every cabbie has a view on it, everyone's seen it and vaguely aware of what's going. Whether they like or not - that's up to them, personal taste.
And another one entitled "25th June 2002 - Miracle of the Conservationists" it's called. A sort of gold background with purple splodges and at the bottom it says - "a picture restorer accidentally removes a layer of paint, revealing the face of God". Sue from Oxford has e-mailed us to say: I think Keith Tyson's work reflects the fact that designers nowadays tend to use and rely on a lot of technology in order to produce something creative. To what extent, would you agree?
Post-Modernism got very caught in talking about what had gone before - making comments on comments, on comments, on comments. This scientific, technological way is a way of opening the art world out and making it more interesting. You could say that's very shallow - he's certainly not a great scientist. I think pseudo-science is the word usually applied to him - mad professor is what he's dubbed.
But it is very much about time. There's a mirror which opens out and one side is black and the other side is a mirror and there's a countdown clock registered every hundredth of a second which is apparently the maximum time which we can register the difference between one image and another and that will countdown everything that is reflected within that mirror until it is closed. His work is very much about the impossibility of actually experiencing the present and how the present inter-shot with memories and hopes and that we can never actually quite be in the present. Which actually goes to the core of his work, which is this dynamism. That he wants everything moving and changing and our ideas zoom off along impossible lines of thinking. We can draw to a halt, panting - we haven't a clue what's going on. Some people feel frustrated and angry and in the hands of a charlatan and other people feel delighted because in a way his work is just about the power of creation. I think that was one of the things he wants to portray.
He's obviously delighted. But let me ask you a couple of more general questions though about the Turner Prize. Ian has e-mailed us to say: The Turner Prize is as much about art as it is about getting people talk about modern art. It works as this discussion is had every year when the winner is announced. I haven't seen the entries yet, but they sound interesting. Andrew Jones, UK: Do you think the thing which devalues modern art the most is the lack of art used to create it? Maybe some of today's artists should expend more time crafting their pieces and less time thinking about what they mean. That's a familiar complaint isn't it? Not enough craft goes into these modern works.
A certain type of cutting edge art is looking to endlessly test out new technology and it is going to be sometimes clumsy doing it and a lot of it is seen as a sort of prototype or plan because we're looking for the new. So the finished state isn't quite as important as the ideas. I think this is a phase. I think we mustn't think we're stuck forever in this and it's enshrined. When you look back on art history, as we look back to the Renaissance, this is just going to be a mere blink of an eye in history - this last two decades. What are we going to distil out of it? Probably very, very little - just a tiny few paragraphs.
How much of this do you think will last?
What will last? Well an awful lot of it will probably decay because it's not well enough made - which may be one very nice way of time-sifting it out.
Do you think that's fair to lump these Turner Prize winning artists in with graphic designers and the kind of people who produce commercial advertising?
Is it time that we moved on a bit and did something different?
That's all we have time for on this interactive forum. My thanks to our guest, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, and to you for your questions. Goodbye.
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09 Dec 02 | Entertainment
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