Editor's Note: Today we welcome a new writer to 3QD. Sue Hubbard is a freelance art writer based in London writing for a variety of publications from The Independent to the New Statesman. An award-winning poet, she has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt), as well as a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a recent collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt).
The Turner Prize at Tate Britain and Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy
Sue Hubbard
Many factors have lead to London’s pre-eminence in the contemporary art world: the importance of Goldsmith’s College to the Hirst generation of YBAs, Saatchi’s ubiquitous influence as a collector, Jay Joplin’s White Cube gallery, the founding of the annual Frieze art fair, and of course, the Turner Prize, that annual award set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art presented each year to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding twelve months. It has always been a controversial affair. There was, of course, that bed (it didn’t win) and Martin Creed’s minimal light bulbs that simply went on and off. Last year, the shortlist was universally derided as opaque and pretentious. But looking back over its history, love it or hate it, The Turner Prize has become a barometer of the British art scene. Those nominated, often previously unknown outside the art world, usually end up as household names.
This year the short list feels subtly different, not only is there an absence of videos (accident not design, it is claimed) but the work is thoughtful, complex, crafted and, in several cases, rather beautiful. There is little irony. Seriousness, it seems, is this season’s new black.
Glaswegian artist Lucy Skaer (the only woman) has named her installation Thames and Hudson, a reference to both those mighty rivers as well as to the celebrated art publisher. Yet, somehow, the whole feels made up of rather too many disparate parts. A dismantled chair has been used to make some rather obtuse prints, while her Black Alphabet is a version of Brancusi’s 1923 sculpture Bird in Space, caste 26 times in compressed coal dust – though her purpose and message remain rather a mystery. Her pièce de résistance, however, is the skull of an adult male sperm whale (a comparison with Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark is unavoidable) on loan from a Scottish museum. Suspended so that it is only partially visible through a series of screens, its sad bony hulk is reminiscent of those Victorian curiosities peered at through fairground peep holes.
[Image Credit: Lucy Skaer, Thames and Hudson 2009, including Leviathan Edge 2009, on loan courtesy of the Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland. Photo credit: Sam Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography.]