January 2009

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The Tate’s annual Turner Prize exhibition opened last week with a shortlist of artists that, for once, has stirred interest beyond its tributes in journalese. The list includes two key figures whose work is already recognised within contemporary art in Britain as a key influence to a younger generation.

Glasgow-based, Cathy Wilkes has evolved a language through building sculptural installations that combine objects and materials from spheres of public and private ritual. I Give You All My Money (2008; pictured above) is a checkout tableaux that gathers the inanimate clutter of the shop floor within a constellation of domestic ephemera and hardened porridge. Wilkes will typically employ a complex array of objects, littering the gallery space in a way that can both alienate and draw upon subjective experience. Her ability to make the viewer negotiate her work on terms of its own making and the blunt confidence of her delivery is evidenced by this most recent work.

The centrepiece to Mark Leckey’s exhibition is similarly successful in initiating the uninitiated caught within his web of cultural reference. Cinema in the Round (2007) is a lecture that Leckey performed several times before committing it to video. The precise selection of material from a heavy swell in which Philip Guston, Gilbert & George, Garfield and The Simpsons all appear presents an argument for the animate physicality of visual media that would have been better served by television. Leckey’s sensibility for sound and image is excessively held in play by various works on film and paper scattered about the gallery in this dense survey.

Leckey’s work is definitively made with an ear and eye trained on London, which is where the remaining two artists on the shortlist are also based. Goshka Macuga who is known for her strategies of display and collaboration worked with the Tate’s archives of Paul Nash and Eileen Agar to produce a series of collages shown alongside architectural sculpture. Runa Islam is represented by a catalogue of 16mm films from 2004 to 2007, the most recent being ‘CINEMATOGRAPHY’ which employs the camera to track the letters of the title across the interior of a workshop.

The Turner Prize has a habit of falling into the hands of artists whose careers are underwritten by a highly singular practice. If the tradition is upheld this year either Wilkes or Leckey will serve a handsome match. The exhibition at the Tate is not supposed to sway the judges from their task in discussing the portfolio of nominated work, much of which was this year based on exhibitions outside the UK. That said, if they do get on to the matter of the installations in the Limbury Gallery at Tate Britain, Wilkes’s exhibition would surely argue the strongest case.

Michelle Cotton is a curator.

The Turner Prize exhibition is at Tate Britian until 18 January 2009. The winner is announced in December.

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