This year, one of the western art world’s most prestigious and controversial honours, The Turner Prize, went to Martin Boyce for his creation, ‘Do words have voices?’—a quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal sculptural installation recalling a melancholy urban park with metallic trees. The trees, fashioned from the pillars that support the gallery ceiling were lush with geometric aluminium leaves dappling the light cast over the entire space.
On the ground, more leaves were scattered, this time cut from paper, each of them the same angular shape. An angular park bin and a desk, based on a library table by French modernist designer Jean Prouvé, with letters scratched into it as if by a child, completed the scene. Much of the artistic vocabulary for Boyce’s installation derives from a modernist garden, complete with concrete trees, created by designers Joel and Jan Martel in Paris in 1925.
The judges praised Boyce’s ‘pioneering contribution to the current interest which contemporary artists have in historic modernism’. They said his work ‘uses his knowledge of historic design to create distinctive sculptural installations while opening up a new sense of poetry’. His attention to detail was so great that he even redesigned the room’s ventilation grills to complement his installation.
The ceremony was held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, where photographer Mario Testino presented the award. The gallery on the south bank of the Tyne is the first venue outside the original locations—the Tate family of galleries—and it is only the second time the exhibition has been hosted outside London as organisers strive to make the British art world’s foremost prize less London-centric. The exhibition at Baltic, which has already been seen by 120,000 visitors, continues until January 8, 2012.
Named after the painter J.M.W. Turner, the award was established in 1984 and is presented to a British or Britain-based artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding year. Primarily a prize to celebrate new developments in contemporary British art, it has come to dominate the British arts calendar ever since. As historian Virginia Button described it in The Turner Prize: twenty years (Tate Publishing, 2007): “The idea (of the Turner Prize) is to do for new art what the Booker Prize has done for new fiction: generate a great cloud of fuss, feuding, gossip, theatrical controversy…and so forth, that will focus public attention on what artists are up to.” Although it represents all media, and painters have also won the prize, the prize has become associated mainly with conceptual art.
Regarded as the art world’s most edgy prize it has stoked considerable controversy about contemporary art since it was established. Rachel Whiteread’s award in 1994 for ‘Ghost’—a sculpture/installation of an ‘inside out’ room—provoked howls of anguish from the tabloids. That was nothing compared to the jokes and virtual non-comprehension of the formaldehyde immersed ‘dead sheep’ and ‘sharks’ which greeted Damien Hirst’s win in 1995. In 1998, the talking point was Chris Ofili’s use of balls of elephant dung attached to his mixed media images on canvas, as well as being used as supports on the floor to prop them up. In 1999, when Tracey Emin was short listed for ‘My bed’, featuring a dishevelled unmade bed with stained sheets, surrounded by detritus such as soiled underwear, condoms, slippers and empty drink bottles, the tabloids again had a field day.
By contrast, there were works by other Turner nominees which were judged as allusively strong and metaphorically rich.Artist Anish Kapoor’s ‘Void field’ (1989) with its organic, archetypal shapes was one and Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ (1994) generally ridiculed by most was appreciated by some for its memorial quality; Vong Phaophanit’s ‘Neon rice field’ (1993) with its serenely simmering light; Cornelia Parker’s ‘Colder darker matter’ (1997) with its mysterious and poetic interplay of interior and exterior and, indeed, Gillian Wearing’s ‘60 minutes silence’ earned critical acclaim. Most of the artists nominated for the prize selection become known to the general public for the first time as a consequence, some have talked of the difficulty of the sudden media exposure. Sale prices of the winners have generally increased. Chris Ofili, Anish Kapoor and Jeremy Deller later became trustees of the Tate. Some artists, notably Sarah Lucas, have declined the invitation to be nominated.
As British art moved away from the sensational, the prize winners have been more cerebral, and their work more intangible. The current decision to honour Boyce’s atmospheric, large-scale, site-specific installations was an uncontroversial choice as well. According to Reuters, “The Turner Prize has long thrived on art that seeks to shock and provoke, and this year it provided a new twist—an understated show which critics called one of the best yet.”