Art Comment

23 October 2006

Revisiting my recent post Art is Bollocks I visited the Turner Prize Exhibition this weekend. As for the art, their were few surprises – Rebbeca Warren and Mark Titchner’s work were both inconsequential; nothing special; nothing interesting. Tomma Abts’ paintings were probably the highlight – their abstract nature combined with the layered and built-up texture inherent with the medium was really something special.

Phil Collins’ work was sadly incomplete; as I was visiting on a Sunday the office he’s constructed as part of the exhibit was empty, leaving the focus being on one of his video works focusing on the effects of reality television on it’s participants. I think his work is probably the most innovative of all the nominees – the most deserving of the prize – but personally I have a real problem with video work presented in a gallery setting; to me, it’s just not the right atmosphere to experience tele-visual arts. You inevitably don’t see the piece from the start, joining it halfway through, and often (as with the exhibit at the Turner Prize Exhibition) you have to stand – or worse, loiter as people mingle past.

The most interesting thing to me was not, however, the exhibitions. At the end of the gallery was a room with walls covered in pieces of paper, attached by pencils. An illustration accompanies this post. It acted as direct physical interpretation of blog comments, so directly after you’ve finished walking round the exhibition you could add your take. The range of comments – as with any blog which is unmoderated – was varied, from juvenile “Phil Collins was better in Genesis” jokes, though to well reasoned critique. One of the most prevalent comments was that the comment wall was in-fact the best piece of art in the exhibition, and I tend to agree.

While this comments concept has been done before with smaller exhibitions, I think it really resonates magnificently with the concept and ideals of the Turner Prize. It would be interesting to see how far you could push some of the modern concepts from the online world into the physical realm in this fashion; social networking, user generated content and the like could all have interesting possibilities in the art world.

That would certainly be more interesting then lumpy statues and spinning plates.

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Note:

If you tried to visit this site or send me any email yesterday or this morning you will have noticed the site was down; this was due to a rookie error on my part – my domain name has expired! This was due to the rather obvious set of circumstances that when I registered the domain 4 years ago I used a different email address to what I use now (which is, of course, @de-online.co.uk). So, when the domain company came to email me that the domain was expiring, they were mailing an old address…

If you sent me mail during that time it’s liable to have bounced back – please try again!

From: Articles

23 October 2006