Art galleries are usually quiet places where the only sound is that of chins being stroked or bored guards chatting to each other. Not so this year’s Turner Prize in Derry~Londonderry, the first room of which hosts a spoof life-drawing class by David Shrigley. Renoir would not have enjoyed drawing this figure. In a break with the tradition of life models being female and human Shrigley has placed an over-life-size animatronic male model on a plinth amongst artists’ easels and chairs.
Life Model, 2012, David Shrigley
The badly proportioned model blinks every now and again and – in an unnecessary twist I have never experienced in a life class – urinates into a bucket. Visitors are encouraged to sit at an easel and sketch the figure – with the resultant images being displayed on the walls around the room. With the model being so peculiar all the drawings look misshapen, skill has little bearing on the outcome and something you rarely hear in a gallery is engendered. Laughter.
The gallery space is inside the newly converted Ebrington barracks. Across the river from the main city of Derry~LondonDerry it was a British army base during the years of murder and violence in Northern Ireland. Now it has been converted into an arts complex, complete with cafe, although whether it will survive after the Turner Prize leaves town is uncertain.
2013 has seen an attempt to rebrand Derry. Not least of which is the so-good-they-named-it-twice attempt to call it Derry~LondonDerry. I don’t think that’s going to work, but it has been designated the UK’s City of Culture and has enjoyed a year of events that have tried to change its image. For many years the city has been associated with the IRA, Bloody Sunday and Martin McGuinness. Actually Martin McGuinness is still around and spoke at the opening of the Lumiere arts festival. But it is hoped that the year of culture will help rebrand Derry as an arts centre and the Turner Prize is one of the biggest events in Derry’s year in the limelight.
The second gallery space in Ebrington has been taken over by Laure Prouvost, who is showing Wantee, an installation based around a film about her grandfather, who was a friend of Kurt Schwitters. Gramps was a conceptual artist who amongst other things dug a tunnel, headed down it and was never seen again. Or was he? Actually the character is completely made up. Prouvost sends up the life of an intense artist, bringing props from the film – bottom shaped vases, a tea-tray made from a canvas, into the gallery space, finding uses for artworks that were never intended. Chairs are balanced on books and you get the sense she had a rare old time writing the script and making the film. The fun didn’t transfer to this viewer and after a while the amateur filming and voice-over started to grate.
One of the important things visitors can usually do at the Turner Prize is moan that there ought to be more painting. This year that entertainment has been stolen away as there is a painter on show. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is the artist carrying the weight of the world’s painters on her shoulders. Of course to get into the Turner Prize a painter needs a gimmick. Yiadom-Boakye’s is that each of her paintings is completed in only one day. These are big canvases and that sounds an impressive claim. However a little research reveals that the day deadline only applies to the act of painting – all the preparation can take place before. And the one day isn’t cut off at 12 midnight. She can go on painting if necessary. Although the paintings appear to be of individual people, they are all of invented subjects, all black, slightly androgynous, created in the style and scale of 19th century portraits.The works are shown in a darkened room, forcing you to stand close to the canvases – which will incur the attention of the guards, who will tell you to move back. Maybe these canvases are (yet) another performance piece after all.
If you have an area for public feedback you are going to get it…
The final artist is Tino Sehgal. He has provided no physical work to show in his allocated room. Instead interpreters have been employed to start conversations with visitors on the subject of the market economy. When this Turner Prize show opened people were being given £2 for participating, but that has been reduced to £1 – the market economy in operation – no doubt supply was not equal to demand. The piece dates from 2003 which is a long time ago in contemporary art terms and pub-style conversations about the market economy are, let’s be honest, something most people try and avoid. The interpreter when we visited was evasive and a bit adept at answering questions like a politician – interesting question, let me ask you a question. Sehgal allows no photographs or documentation of his work, a gimmicky secrecy that puts him in the same category as Masons and sect-leaders.
Ultimately the fact of the Turner Prize being shown in Derry~Londonderry is the most important thing about this show. Who wins is less important than the using of art to help bring together a divided city. As such the pieces that engage the public and create discussions are most relevant in this place where for years people didn’t even cross the river into the other side of town. Sehgal’s work gets people talking, but it is on a topic that a lot of visitors will find dull – and which has no answers. Economics provides employment for economists, but little else of lasting benefit. David Shrigley’s work involves people but also gets them laughing. It isn’t his strongest work, but I would hand him the cheque and see what he does with it. If you’ve ever wanted to see your work on the walls of the Turner Prize galleries then this is your year. Get to Londonderry before 4th January.
Building 80/81,
Ebrington,
Derry~Londonderry,
Northern Ireland BT47 1JY
Closed on Mondays
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