Rachel Campbell-Johnstone in the Times wonders what might win the Turner Prize next year, under the heading “Batty enough to win in 2005?”. Alas, this isn’t a cue for a spot of piss-taking. She’s the Times’ art critic, and takes it all very seriously. Batty is a reference to this year’s winner Jeremy Deller’s video of bats in Texas. His entry/display also includes video footage of Waco, and of Dubya’s favourite burger bar. Bats in Texas…Waco…Dubya. Geddit? As Campbell-Johnstone puts it:
Jeremy Deller, Monday night’s fitting champ, emphasises the way in which art could be political and reach out from the gallery to infiltrate the real world and alter the way we approach it. Art, his work stresses, cannot be left stranded in its own self-referencing aesthetic sphere.
Indeed not.
What I’d love is for someone to do a Sokal on the Turner: that is, knowingly produce some worthless garbage, then get in with the right crowd, schmooze the critics and the makers-and-shakers in London’s art world, come up with the artspeak needed to present your work – challenging pre-conceptions….subversive….moving out of the artworld’s self-referencing aesthetic sphere – and then, at the ceremony, announce that your work is in truth a load of complete crap, and walk out of the room leaving an open-mouthed audience. But then I think, well, this is pretty much what Duchamp did nearly a century ago. And his urinal has been voted the most influential modern art work of all time.
They’re way ahead of me.
Leave a Reply