Politics in and dirty beds out for Turner (The Arts Continue on their Downward Spiral)

The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | October 20, 2004 | Nigel Reynolds

[Stoat]

Politics in and dirty beds out for Turner
By Nigel Reynolds
(Filed: 20/10/2004)

The contestants for this year's Turner Prize unveiled their wares at Tate Britain yesterday. You could have heard a pin drop. There are not a lot of laughs to be had in the 2004 version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" prize.

Politics are in. Dirty beds, light switches, pornographic pots and dollops of elephant dung are out.

One of Jeremy Deller's exhibits The History of the World 1997-2001. He is favorite to win the prize

"Yes, it is quite serious this year," confessed Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain. "There is a sense of commitment and interest in the wider political world. International politics are a more obvious part of daily life these days."

Painting - or dead, white, male art as it might be called nowadays - features little.

The main talking point is likely to be an interactive virtual animation of an isolated house briefly lived in by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996 during Taliban rule, which has been created by the artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell.

A comment on the "inconclusiveness" of the war against terror, The House of Osama bin Laden, is like a video game.

The artists, despatched to Afghanistan by the Imperial War Museum after the invasion, took photographs of the house, turned them into a digital video and visitors are now able to negotiate their way around bin Laden's country gaff with the aid of a joystick.

"But there are no targets, no bullets, no pursuer. Langlands and Bell have taken the adrenaline out of the arcade game," said Judith Nesbitt, a curator of the Turner Prize exhibition which runs until the £25,000 prize is awarded in December.

The House of Osama bin Laden, by Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, is described as like an arcade game

Less of a talking point will be a 12-minute film, Zardad's Dog, by the same artists.

The Tate has dropped it from the exhibition following legal advice that displaying it could prejudice a jury hearing a torture trial at the Old Bailey. The film is of a trial in Kabul. The Old Bailey jury is hearing a case against Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, an alleged former warlord in Afghanistan, charged with conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages.

Another protest artist, Jeremy Deller, was named yesterday as 6-4 favourite for the prize by William Hill.

Among his exhibits is a video of interviews conducted at George W Bush's favourite diner in Texas and a "wall painting" of phrases such as "acid house", "advanced capitalism" and "free parties".

Also on display are photographs of arty memorials he has installed around Britain.

They commemorate the arrival of the Windrush, carrying Britain's first West Indian immigrants, and the deaths of a picket killed in the 1984 miners' strike and a cyclist killed by a drunken driver.

The sole offering of Kutlug Ataman is less political, more bizarre. Six video screens carry simultaneous interviews with Turks who believe that they have been reincarnated.

The jolliest, and rather decadent, entries are by Yinka Shonibare, an Anglo-Nigerian artist. He is displaying an exotic 30-minute film version of Verdi's opera Un Ballo in Maschera, without music or words and a 3-D installation of a headless courtesan dressed in African textiles on a swing, inspired by Fragonard's painting, The Swing.

[Stoat]

It appears that the life's work, genius and efforts of DaVinci, Raphael, Van Gogh, and Michaelangelo have been wasted, at least on this current crop of "artists". We are truly living in a Dark Age as far as art is concerned, and I am terribly saddened by the realization that things will probably not change during my lifetime. Although the study of quality art from other eras can take untold lifetimes in and of itself, I feel cheated by the fact that the age in which I live will be among the lowest points in all of human history in terms of artistic merit.

[Our man in washington]

Good points, but there are a handful of conservative artists out there who are trying to make inroads into the artistic community.

I'm trying to make a hobby out of playwriting myself. It's sometimes a bit tricky being the lone conservative, but I look at the bright side: thousands of playwrights are currently writing plays about how they hate their parents or about how they hate this country. I have every other topic to myself. (Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.)

[Stoat]

Congratulations to you and others of similar perspective in your efforts to produce quality art. By my earlier comments, I didn't mean to imply that no gifted artists exist in our time, only that they are not given the sort of acclaim that they are due and have not been the voices who have been held up as representative of the best we have to offer. In past times, great, quality art was universally heralded as being worthy of public acclaim....now it is relegated to a struggling minority of honorable people while the worst and most vile trash imaginable is held up as being a grand expression of our culture.

[Spirited]

"Quality art" had/has a different source.

A great deal depends on one's muse. Just as much may depend on what the gatekeepers release and what "taste"/view the media creates and pumps/pimps.

[Plymouth Sentinel]

Stoat,

This is appalling. Unfortunately, most artists have been on the wrong side of every issue.

The good news is this: we have Eliot, and we have Milton. Over the coming years Eliot will supplant Keats as the best short poet in the language. Milton is unrivalled for his ambition and range, and the last six lines of his great epic are far and away the best lines in our language.

Milton's wrote in his prose "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" that tyrants are lovers of license, not liberty. This describes perfectly our liberal politicians since Carter, and the lesser arts and artists that populate our commercial art industries. Victor Hanson wrote the other day that little learning or scholarship (central to artists' ability to craft) advances what natural gifts these artists possess.

If you have the time, the best book ever written on art is "On Moral Fiction" by John Gardner. He wrote that the purpose of art is to beat back monsters and chaos. Art may joke or mock or while away the time, but great art must be life affirming. Anything less only exists in the shadows of great art.

More to come.

[Stoat]

Readers of this thread may also be interested in this Free Republic thread:

Gay novel wins Man Booker Prize

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1250725/posts

WARNING: Reading this thread may induce nausea in normal, healthy people.

[alwaysconservative]

Thanks for the ping! And you're right, OMIW: you have all the good topics to yourself, and I know you'll do great things with them!

Take heart! Artists who dare to produce "The Passion of the Christ" (on their own dime) prove that even this era has it's own redeeming qualities.