10.12.01

"In awarding Creed the Prize the jury praised the deftness and breadth of his recent work.... we admired his audacity in presenting a single work in the exhibition, and noted its strength, rigour, wit and sensitivity to the site"

AKA: switching a light on and off - the winning exhibit.

I enjoyed this year's Turner Prize presentations, for three reasons. The first, the most dramatic and energising moment, was Madonna's calculated bad language and the fumbling apologies of Channel 4. It was a glorious 'up yours' dismissal of stuffy convention. Even her opening joke, pretending that the audience were in her house and viewing her collection, undermined the pompous power base of the occasion. She probably could buy most of it, if she wanted to.

Her following speech was more measured and articulate, suggesting that competitions and prizes are meaningless, that they rest on opinion rather than intrinsic merit. It was my second delight.

My third delight was the presence of Zadie Smith, and her discerning words. She derided the "fatuous art-speak", the "contempt for the viewer", and the "boring" experience of looking at the exhibits.

We all know the Turner Prize is a theatrical and probably deliberately controversial event. On the following news bulletins that evening, two news readers could not stop themselves from raised eyebrows and ironic smiles when they described the winning exhibit. On television news, an expression of opinion about a story is rare. It was acceptable, because we all understand what they meant.

If you object to all the silliness, you find yourself disadvantaged in a game of psychological judo. Of course, you do not understand it; or your remarks about its vacuous silliness point to its intrinsic value. It's meant to be vacuous and silly. However there is another way of viewing all this, and it concerns language. This is why I liked Zadie Smiths's presence, and her critical remarks.

To evaluate the Turner Prize event you need a strong literary understanding, perhaps more than the ability to 'understand art'. This is because the art is inextricably bound up with what you say about it. The more clever and learned the rhetoric, the more impressive the art appears. Without the rhetoric there is almost nothing to say about many of the exhibits, because there is nothing to reward our perception. In other words art becomes art because critics say so, and language produces art and not the other way round.

Unmade beds, dead animals, crumpled paper balls etc. are almost devoid of content, and do not pretend to be otherwise. This is the point - supposedly. They are conceptual pieces and critics can say almost nothing about them, so they have to refer to abstract conceptual ideas. Thus when placed in a gallery, an everyday object like a pair of spectacles might have the following significance:

This invites construction on the part of the viewer as much as the artist

This piece deconstructs popular notions of vision

The artist parodies conventional notions of representation

If anyone says it is boring - like the child noticing that the king is naked - then the critic can say 'the artist has attempted to express vacuous contemporary life, which finds significance in material artefacts'. Whatever you say critics have learned to counter it, using the unlimited flexibility of abstract language. They very rarely write facts or opinions because they are too easy to challenge, so they talk about concepts instead. "Fatuous art-speak" is an effective way of describing this, because it plays the critics at their own game: literary argument. There is no point in arguing about the exhibit itself, because everyone agrees there is very little to say about a crumpled ball of paper or a room light turning on and off. Nor is there much point in debating the meaning of post-modernism, structuralism etc. Instead, you have to expose the silliness of what the critics are doing: and it comes down to language.

For example: various people at the event declared that different pieces

1 Made narrative out of space

2 Provided you with a 'moment'

3 Had an after effect

4 Demonstrated the seductive texture of poverty

If you analyse what these remarks are supposed to mean you have to conclude - I suggest - that they are like 'A' level ramblings that would not fool a good English teacher. Your essay would be returned to you covered in red ink.

The presenter himself declared that you need to be 'finely tuned to know what to look for'. It's not difficult to understand what they are saying; the point is, does it make sense or is it just silly and boring? But they might agree and say their work is supposed to be silly and boring....So it is probably best not to argue in the first place and undermine them at their own game, with literary analysis.

When I was studying English, someone told me the story about the student who was presented with the examination question "What is risk?". The student allegedly wrote "this is", and walked out. He got an 'A' grade. These silly artists are effectively doing the same thing. The problem is, the people who evaluate them do not respond as the examiner really would have done, by failing the English student. Instead they pat them on the head and give them £20,000. A £20,000 fine would be more appropiate.But as a marketing and PR stunt the Turner Prize is probably worth a very large amount of money to people behind the scenes. Perhaps they are the real artists: con artists.