Art

Hear this: great art will never be seen anywhere near the Turner Prize

Lauren Down | Friday 10 December, 2010 09:20

Susan Philipsz photo by Taavetti Alin

As art students descended upon Tate Britain on Monday in protest of creative cuts and increasing tuition fees, the normally glitzy proceedings of the Turner Prize were given a healthy dose of reality. Collecting the prize, and the prestige that goes with it, not to mention the incredulous £25,000 prize money was Susan Philipsz for her ‘Lowlands’ musical installation.

Hailing from Glasgow but now based in Berlin, the piece consisted of recordings of the artist singing a 16th Century lament for a drowned lover, which she originally played beneath three bridges on the River Clyde in Glasgow itself before its transposition to the Tate Britain. Up against Angela de la Cruz’s achingly simple designs, Dexter Dalwood’s contrived and utterly over-rated paintings as well as the works of Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar from the Otolith Group, Philipsz work was the first sound installation to win the prize.

Whether you feel the sense of sculptural space and memory created by Philipsz in her work deserved the award or not I find myself siding with Duncan MacMillan when he suggested that: “contemporary art as it is epitomised in the Turner Prize is merely art mimicking the stratagems of latter-day market capitalism…dependent on the illusion of constant newness.”

Claiming to present the latest and greatest contemporary artists, The Turner Prize has long been the site of controversy and mediocrity, focusing on new media works whilst ignoring the brilliance of innovative and creative use traditional materials: often perpetuating nonentities in this pseudo celebrity obsessed culture. Quite simply some of the most breath taking artistic outputs in existence right now will never see the light of the Turner Prize, ultimately calling into question its relevance in today’s younger artistic society.

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