turner
Rabbit - the original Jeff Koons version, not the Mark Leckey knock-off
Mark Leckey won this year’s Turner Prize, an award granted every winter to artists deemed most influential or progressive in the preceeding year. It is a well-known and much-discussed fact that the Turner Prize, named after Joseph Mallord William Turner – a delightful British artist who invented impressionism before impressionism had been invented – has been steadily turning in the past years towards the conceptual arts, and its reputation is each year anew subjected to a crossfire of criticism and disdain.
This perhaps is understandable to a degree. The Turner Prize has brought us such unforgettable works of art as Martin Creed’s ‘Light Going On and Off’ (this is both the formal title, and the exaustive description of the work), Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed Avec Dirty Linen and Various Detritus’ – which was shockingly beaten to the Prize by Steve McQueen’s ‘Cameras Tied to Drum and Rolled Through Streets of Manhattan’, and Damien Hirst’s ‘Cow and Calf in Formaldehyde’.
This year, the Prize was so dull that even the Stuckist movement, whose traditional protests against the Turner have somewhat ironically become an integral part of its annual process, have decided to give it a miss this year on account of it being not worth the time of day. The winning work was a video retrospective of segments of popular culture that influenced the artist – including, reportedly, the Simpsons and Felix the Cat.
Now I was never one to claim I understand modern art as such, but recently I have begun to seriously lose the plot. My first fallacy seems to have been belief in the concept that a work of art needs to be somehow original. My second fallacy was the thought that art required some skill. Turner had skill. His art was not merely conceptual – it was actual. Take these two works – The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window – and Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, created almost half a century later. Looking at the Snowstorm, you might dare say ‘heck, it’s just a fuzzy mush. I could do better’. But you probably won’t say the same for the Abbey. I wish I could draw like that.
left - Tintern Abbey, 1794; right - Snowstorm, 1842
My point is not that Turner’s work declined in his old age – au contraire, he got better. He started with realism, and then started deconstructing it until he singlehandedly invented impressionism, before the world was ready to call it a new art movement. My point is that Turner had earned his right to draw in fuzzy blotches. We all knew he’s not doing it because he can’t do any better.
My problem with conceptual art is not that it is pretentious and banal in the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ style (which a lot of the time it is) – my problem with it is that there doesn’t seem to be anything behind it. Art demands skill, and artists need to earn their right to put up an empty canvas and call it a masterpiece. You can’t just deliver your bag of dirty washing to the Tate Gallery and go around the other entrance to collect your £25,000 prize. It’s not just about the concept. It’s not just about the budget. There needs to be some skill involved.