Urban Art Association

Totally disagree shogun. Turner prize is there to challenge what we think about contemporary art. It has served as a fantastic introduction for many of our biggest contemporary artists to get their name catapulted into the limelight.

I could understand a reaction like yours to the turner prize from a daily mail reader but just exercise some independent thought on this.

Just think of all the turner prize winners over the years - Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Richard Long, Anthony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili. That's just the ones I can name off the top of my head. All of these artists have taken huge strides to promote contemporary british art.

We are living in a time when british art is at the centre of the art world. The turner prize, the Freize Art fair, the big auctions, the plethora of contemporary art galleries around the country in places not normally known for the cultural achievements. The british art scene is so vibrant. It is just a such an exciting time to be an art fan. The turner prize is a huge part of this.

Go and check out the turner prize retrospective at the Tate. That will change your mind.

Well said Pez.

Wasn't me negging you shogun.

Creed's stuff isn't my cup of tea either but it certainly prompted debate.

Emin has never won the turner prize. She was shortlisted once. I personally think some of her installations are fantastic. They are a very personal take on her life and where she has got to today.

But hey even if you don't like those two particular artists that doesn't mean that you dismiss the whole prize....

Shogun - I didn't neg you either by the way. You're only expressing an opinion (and one shared by many I would imagine). Though am guessing you negged me?

State Britain; Mark Wallinger


Mark walinger has done some good work the pieces above i liked , the artist nominated cant choose the work for the Turner award.
In March 2007 Tony Blair delivered a speech in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, outlining his thoughts on his impact on the arts in Britain. Significantly, the Prime Minister concluded with the words: ‘The crucial thing is not the policy but the fact that, as Nick Serota said to me recently, museums now just “feel” different.’ While I doubt that Serota meant quite the same thing by this as Blair any irritation the Tate Director may have felt at the Prime Minister’s words were probably soothed by the knowledge that, a mile or two away at Tate Britain, he was staging an exhibition that even the wiliest spin doctor would be hard pressed to co-opt to the New Labour project. If Blair’s speech was about painting his legacy in a positive light, Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007) was, in its complex way, about exposing its darker traces.
Running the length of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, State Britain was a life-size, near-perfect simulacrum of the 40-metre wall of banners, placards and rickety information boards erected by the peace campaigner Brian Haw in London’s Parliament Square between June 2001, when he first began his protest against the economic sanctions imposed against Iraq, and May 2006, when police removed nearly all of his belongings from the site under Section 132 of the 2005 Serious Organized Crime and Police Act, which made it an offence to stage a public protest within one kilometre of Parliament Square without first obtaining permission. The rationale offered for this clause (which may not actually have the legal power to effect retrospective bans) was the possibility that terrorists might use protests such as Haw’s as a cover for their activities. However unlikely that may seem, Haw is today only permitted to occupy a space in the Square measuring three metres by two – hardly big enough to conceal a posse of Taliban.
A few days before the police moved in, Wallinger took hundreds of photographs of Haw’s ramshackle, hectoring, oddly splendid monument, and it is on these that State Britain is based. This in itself begs some knotty questions about authorship. Haw’s protest, after all, was an organic thing, responding to the events surrounding the ‘War on Terror’ and constantly being added to by sympathetic parties (one placard read ‘Australians say No to War on IRAQ’, while a Banksy painting of British troops daubing a CND logo on a wall also featured). The specific form it took in Tate Britain, then, was not dictated so much by the protester, or the news headlines, or even by the artist, as by those who framed, passed and acted on Section 132. By drawing those who sought to silence Haw into an inadvertent act of image-making,
Wallinger gives the often softcore stuff of participatory art a hard edge. The work here only existed because the protest does not, just as the protest only existed because of other absences or erasures: of due process, of liberty, of, ultimately, life. No work of art wholly regrets its own being, but State Britain comes close.
State Britain was at once a continuation of Haw’s protest and something like a wake for it, an expression of freedom of speech and a wry, sad meditation on the art institution as a place in which dissent is contained and sanitized. Did it make the museum ‘feel different’? Yes and no. I can’t help but think that, for Haw and Wallinger, if not for Blair, policy is ‘the crucial thing’.



i like this piece by Nathan Coley

maybe it doesnt work as well in a gallery but a good piece still.
in my humble opinion of course.

all that said, i dont like the man dressed as a bear wondering around a german gallery much myself, i think State Britain should be his piece for the Turner, i wonder if the judges / team who choose the art had second thoughts about which piece was to be shown and wimped out for the bear.
has the turner been Censored

look where the link goes now

www.theburnerprize.com/

welease woderwick

Oh dear. I'm worried my comments have come across as dissing the Turner prize completely.

Not so.
I agree Pez, it can ask great questions and does produce and bring people's attention to otherwise unknown causes/artists.

It's just every now and then it feels as though throw in a turkey just for the sake of publicity. Seeing some of Mark Wallingers other pieces, I can't help but question if he really thought spending 10 nights in a gallery walking round in a bear suit was going to really ignite any kind of 'artistic' interest. Did he just run out of ideas?

Maybe the bear stuff wasn't Wallinger's best work but the prize has to be for the best exhibition in the last 12 months. I think maybe the judges thought that it was about time Wallinger won the turner prize (he has been shortlisted before) so they plumped for him. Also the press pick up on the most "ludicrous" thing in the show in order to lampoon the prize. It's really frustrating how narrow minded a lot of the mainstream press are about contemporary art.

Wallinger DOES definitely deserve to win the prize I think. Remember this from a few year ago - f**king great image

Wallinger. Seconded.