On 21st October 2022 the University Of Wolverhampton School Of Art took a bus full of students to Liverpool to view the Shortlist for the Turner Prize in the Tate Liverpool. After the Turner Prize exhibition, I wandered through the rest of the galleries before heading out to the Open Eye Gallery and then the Bluecoat. Read on to see what my thoughts were.
Intro To Turner Prize
My knowledge of the Turner Prize is a little limited and I was only aware of the previous media flare ups of Tracey Emin’s bed and Damien Hurst’s half cut animals.. I steeled myself for maximum weirdness but I was overly sceptical.
Into the first room of the exhibition we see a group of monitors with looped videos and headphones, next to which is a panel of text about the four artists shortlisted for this year’s prize.
- Heather Phillipson
- Sin Wai Kin
- Veronica Ryan
- Ingrid Pollard
With people already using the headphones I took a few images of the wall text to refer back to it at a later date. Once we’d decided it was time to enter the first exhibit/gallery we approached the ticket desk and then were allowed into the jaws of Heather Phillipson’s “Rupture No. 6, biting the blowtorched peach, 2022”
It began with a walk through a narrow corridor with both sides featuring screens in portrait orientation showing eyes of animals and creatures.. Zebra, chameleon, owl and tigers are amongst the moving images that made me feel I’d just walked into a posh clothes shop and was being intently stared at by security. There are multiple monitor speakers all providing a soundscape to this room that sounds like alien beings but are animal noises, disturbing and disquieting..
Once through the initial part it was into the main room which featured a cold blue, almost external scene with illuminated salt rock lanterns hanging from the ceiling, wind turbines fashioned from pleasure boat anchors and piles of shiny foil around the room.
in the centre of the main room is the top of a grain silo made from corrugated metal that appears to be on the ground and being used as a sort of shelter. In this warm looking space is a. floor of sand, bottles of propane gas hanging from an old car wheel and banging around together with vehicle mud flaps as it’s all driven by a desk fan each side.
Again it looks warm in here due to some more illuminated salt rock lamps and also the contrast to the outside of it. There is a strange soundscape and moving images being projected onto the mostly blue walls, headphones hang from the ceiling so that visitors can hear a different set of sounds incorporating strangely read news articles, repeated words and all manner of other sounds.
The room to me felt like an apocalyptic film set, as if I expected Kurt Russell’s “MacReady” from “John Carpenter’s The Thing” to come bounding across the landscape with his flamethrower. It felt like an Ice Age was underway and a desperate soul had squirreled away enough fuel and shelter to stay alive longer than everyone and everything else on the planet. The lit up salt rocks reminded me of meteorites from sci-fi movies that might have landed on the earth as part of a universal shake up millions of years into the future, or even fifty years.
It was an interesting exhibit and Phillipson has indeed created what she terms as “a maladaptive ecosystem” Thought provoking and unnerving thi sis probably the exhibition that is lingering in my minds eye longer than the remainder.
Ryan’s Room
Veronica Ryan is an artist who uses found objects and waste products in her work, to create seemingly familiar objects, The very yellow room that we entered contained many individual pieces of work, some bundled into a collection or separate work but a catalog available showed some of the titles of the work. Some called Infection, others called Multiple Conversations, Exclusion Zones and Along A Spectrum. They didn’t really tell me anything about the work in particular but looked like some reclaimed waste fashioned to look like food items, groceries and other objects you might find in your house.
I didn’t notice any sounds or other engagement opportunities, simply the art speaking for itself hanging around the room, on metal workshop shelf units, on dinner tables and coffee tables.
This work didn’t connect with me at all and I felt no emotions from what I was seeing in front of me, maybe if we had a talk from the artist, it might have made more sense or provided some general information to help me translate the art. I guess sometimes you just like something or you don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very new to Art and have much more to learn so it may be that my ignorance prevented me from getting too involved with this set of work, and I am usually ok at interpreting my own narrative around other’s work but for me this just fell a little flat.
K-Poptastic
The next exhibit and shortlisted artist for the revered and sometimes sneered at Turner Prize was a few works from artist Sin Wai Kin. The artist here explores identities amongst other varied topics and in the first room has created a teenagers bedroom feel, with K-Pop (Korean Pop Music) style images on the wallpaper and posters prominently displayed. The display did take me back to some of my friends rooms whe we were growing up and playing on ZX Spectrums in a themed room.
There was a video playing on loop that featured a music video by a fictional K-Pop band made up of seemingly four boys, all portrayed by the artist and featuring defined characteristics as you might see from other bands. Think Spice Girls and their labels, Sexy,Ginger,Sporty etc, and you’re somewhere near. My daughter, in her twenties, is a fan of BTS one of the largest K-Pop acts and she knows tonnes of information that has been released about the band members, but like Sin Wai Kin illustrates in this work, it might all be fictionalised.
There was a group of Standees (cardboard cutout style displays) in the centre of this room, all showing the members of the band, that I think was called “It’s Always You”, standing wearing their style of clothes and pose so as to readily identify each member. For me though I looked behind the standees and to the sideways view of them and thought them to be purely Two-Dimensional with no substance behind them, propped up to stay upright.
Also in this exhibit was a video installation titled “A Dream of Wholeness in Parts” 2021 which was around 23 minutes long and used traditional stories and allegories to get across a state of confusion that exists in many people’s lives. Taking the parts of different characters the story is tol using video and captions but I must be honest, that this was a little out there for me and I wasn’t immediately engaged in it. I think that it deserves tracking down to watch it from start to finish to see if its meaning becomes clearer to me.
The last part of Sin Wai Kin’s show here is the makeup removal wipes used to remove the identifying makeup from the faces of the Constructs in the film. They are a very arresting sight as you walk past them and could be mistaken for “Death Masks” of old. It may be that the artist was trying to achieve some of this too, but I felt it was an interesting capture of the rest of the exhibit, as though the artist was no longer in character after they’d taken this cathartic step and wiped the alternative persona away.
A strange series of art installations to be sure but another that I find myself mentally revisiting and thinking more about the meaning of it all. Especially when I see manufactured pop acts, or so called celebrities on the tv or news sources. It was also good to see this work in this environment as some of it had been involved in the British Art Show 9, which was presented at Wolverhampton University School Of Art earlier this year. It’s nice to feel a little involved or engaged by the fact that this has travelled to somewhere I’ve been.
A Load Of Old Pollards.
The last of the shortlisted exhibits in the Turner Prize show was by an artist called Ingrid Pollard and contained a lot of seemingly individual and disparate pieces of work that did actually tie together convincingly to help her tell the story of racism in the UK that still exists today and some examples from history that seem wholly unbelievable that it happened back in the not too distant past.
Her work is said to be based “on race, gender, and the concept of other.” and I saw this work mostly commenting on the racial aspect. In the image above you can see a widely spaced out gallery with items on the wall and a few plinths with cases on top of them. The one closest to the camera had a box on the top that could be opened with two small doors to reveal a short video of a stereotypical image of a black character from days gone by in the form of a marionette dancing. One of my coursemates told me that it’s in a box with closed doors to invite people to investigate what is behind the doors, and many people don’t feel able to open the doors for fear of what might be hiding behind them.
The signs on the wall feature pub signs for establishments called “The Black Boy” and also depictions of the stereotyped perception of a black youngster. Whilst this seems an abhorrent thing to call a pub in today’s society according to the Guardian newspaper there still around 70 pubs still named such in the UK. Some of them used the cruel and racist depictions in their signs but according to the gallery attendant we were talking with he suggested that “The Black Boy” might actually be a reference to King Charles II, who had a dark complexion due to his mediterranean heritage and was his mother’s nickname for him.
There was an interesting wall of apparently blank white canvases in frames but upon closer inspection they revealed lightly embossed designs for the pub signs and other racist toned images. I took this section of art to be that the racism is still hiding in the background of society, keeping a low profile but still promoting itself to those who know how to decode the images. THe gallery attendant who was a fine art lecturer at Staffs university suggested that he interpreted the work as racism is fading away as we move forwards and become a more inclusive and integrated society, which was an interesting observation too.
Another section contained some photography and some mechanical devices that seemed like threatening torture devices. “Bow Down and Very Low 123″2021 features a set of Lenticular prints on the wall , out of reach, protected by these vicious killing machines.
Here is also a short video to show how menacing these devices are. The cobbled together machines look like they could have been made by plantation owners in American Cotton Plantations to keep their slave workforce in control and to prevent an uprising. They remind me also of the racks and other torture equipment on display in the Tower Of London that were also used to control people and enemies of the state.
This exhibition of Pollard’s work features many items to show that racism was widespread back in the old days and is still to be found today in amongst the relics of historical writings, practices, and building names. This was also thought provoking and I’d surely be shocked to go to a pub called the Black Boy, but then there are so many other practices that have seemingly innocent or alternative explanations as to their foundations, such as Morris Dancers wearing black face paint. This practice is an often contested argument between people who believe it should be stopped and those who argue that it’s an historic tradition with no relevance to racism. One thing for sure is that you’ll never please everybody. I’m not sure if Pollard is contesting that there should be no pubs named the Black Boy or whether she is acknowledging the shock in contemporary society at the use of this name still. The fact that there are no real words or accompanying text leaves it up to the viewer to come to their own conclusions, but for me there are no real indications that she’s happy with the use of racist terms even if they come from an entirely different etymological source.
Overall Impressions & My Winner
Never having been to a Turner Prize exhibition I wasn’t sure what to expect, but my expectations were exceeded and more. New to analysing art and semiotics, my knowledge of symbolism is burgeoning and it might be that I missed such a lot of information presented but jsut not spotted.
I’ll be looking up other people’s reviews of the exhibition to see what their interpretations are of the art on display and to see whether any of my first impressions were way off the mark or not.
Some of it was weird and wacky, with a feeling of confusion on a couple of occasions but some of it made sense when considering it with some of my knowledge picked up from my first year at Uni and the first four weeks of contextual work this year.
My winner is between Heather Phillipson and Ingrid Pollard, and as crazy and out there as it seems I’d have to plump for Phillipson’s odd parallel universe of an ice age scene for the sheer inventiveness and interactivity between the sound, visual and sculpture works all blended into one piece of work. The other artists’ works didn’t seem to knit together into one peice of work, and whilst it might not need to, I did get a feeling that I preferred Heather Phillipson’s “Rupture No 6, biting the blowtorched peach” as a whole work.
It was certainly an experience and I would be more open to going to another such exhibition in the future where I would never seek out something like this usually, I think going on a coach trip to this has awakened a willingness to experience new art and hopefully it will help me improve my own practice as a photographer and artist. (Still weird to call myself an artist)
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