Striving for shock value through vulgarity, some contenders for this year'sTurner Prize have missed the point, writes Aidan Dunne.
The Turner Prize celebrates its 20th birthday with a characteristically controversial exhibition of work by shortlisted artists. Well, at least by two of the five artists. It would be hard to upstage Tracy Emin's unmade bed from a few years back - she didn't win the prize - but Jake and Dinos Chapman have tried to live up to their reputation as agents provocateurs, with their painted bronze cast of two inflatable sex dolls in flagrante.
In the event, despite considerable media hype, the piece has the air of being a bit of tacky, pro forma provocation. The strange thing is that you can be sure that people will, obligingly, be provoked. It's a fair bet, as well, that Charles Saatchi will add it to his collection, even though the Chapmans have slagged him off in interviews. Perhaps it is an oedipal thing. They may resent just how much they owe him as their patron. It is possible that they will win the prize. Certainly they're odds-on favourites. But they shouldn't.
It may sound predictable and provincial to say so, but Irish artist Willie Doherty is the best artist, by far, in contention. Admittedly, his sole exhibit, a two-screen video projection, Re-Run, provides only a restricted idea of his achievement and capabilities.
It offers us two views of the same scene. In one a man runs frantically towards us across the deserted Craigavon Bridge in Derry by night. In the other he's running away from us. It's a cinematic moment abstracted and extended, looped so that there is no beginning and no end. We might be either hunter or hunted. Doherty characteristically uses cinematic language in this way, relying on our familiarity with its codes while declining to provide conventional narrative structures and, more importantly, narrative closure.
While the vast majority of his work is rooted very definitely and precisely in Derry and its surroundings, and within the context of the history of Northern Ireland, he has made work based elsewhere, including in Berlin. But one of the strengths of his work is its richly informed context, the way he is intimately at home in his physical, cultural and political terrain. It may sounds like special pleading to say that the local conditions have universal resonance, but in this case they do.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland loves its own bitter history so much that it's easy to forget how it reflects wider issues and conflicts. In attending to the specifics of place and time, and drawing in such subjects as the way meaning and identity are contested constructions imposed on the social and the physical landscape, the terminal unreliability of memory and the illusory nature of progress, Doherty has created fine photographic, film and video works that are widely relevant and make a great deal of contemporary British art look trivial by comparison.
It's as though circumstances have compelled him to deal with real life while many of his contemporaries across the Irish Sea have forgotten that there is such a thing as real life or real history.
Given that shock has been an integral part of most of Jake and Dinos Chapman's work to date, it was on the cards that they would come up with something outre for the Turner.
They've duly obliged with their sex dolls, but it is as if the work signals a kind of desperation on their part. There's opportunistic transgression of another kind in their defacement of a set of Goya's Disasters of War etching. This edition, printed in the 1930s, is regarded as inferior, but it was taken from the original plates, and the Disasters is in all a great work of art. Why embellish it with cartoon masks and other facetious additions? Does their appropriation mean, as one commentator suggested, that they "have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century that has rediscovered evil"? In fact, this is spurious nonsense. Goya is in no need of a make-over, and the moral force of his work has been, if anything, enhanced by its continued relevance in our time. The accumulating weight of evidence suggests that the Chapmans are more likely to be aiming for cheap thrills than moral or any other purpose.
The sheer imaginative banality of what they do is strikingly disproportionate to the inflated critical response it engenders. With their re-workings of Goya, their cod-ethnographic sculptures, their model concentration camp, it's as if, in an era of moral and aesthetic uncertainty, they've somehow been mistaken for real artists. Minus Saatchi's imprimatur and the smoke-screen of artspeak waffle, the work is alarmingly thin. Whatever is good about their Turner exhibit is by Goya, and they're just clinging to his coat-tails.
Grayson Perry attracted a significant level of media interest leading up to the exhibition, not so much for his work per se, one feels, more because of the opportunity to reproduce photographs of him in the guise of his alter-ego, Claire, complete with blonde wig and party frock. He has been described, accurately enough, as the transvestite potter. He makes elaborately-embellished vases. The vase is a tame, decorative, domestic object, but the images and words he applies subvert these safe, reassuring qualities.
His intricately-layered images, drawn and collaged, usually refer to dark areas of experience, to cruelty, abuse, crime, often relating to his Essex upbringing. There is a consistent concern with the notion of a seamy reality lurking behind the respectable façade. Perry is a graphic artist at heart, yet although these composite narratives are wrapped around vases, they are not particularly integrated into the form. On the other hand, take away the vase shape and the graphics would be diminished. So, they are not altogether convincing works.
Anya Gallacio works with natural materials to make site-specific sculptural installations, often on a large scale and often involving a process of decay. In this, she is working within a familiar, evolving artistic language, from Arte Povera to more recent environmentally-focused British sculpture.
For the Turner she has recreated an earlier piece, preserve 'beauty' in which masses of industrially-produced, scentless, red gerbera daisies are arrayed behind glass, for all the world like a version of a modernist grid. Over the course of the show they will decay, as will the real apples arranged in thick clusters around the stem of a truncated, leafless, bronze tree in because nothing has changed. So far, you might think, so good. In importing a whiff of living and dying nature into the rarefied cultural space of the gallery, she is doing something interesting and potentially profound.
Alas no. The tree installation is maladroit. It looks completely wrong and, worse, it echoes the Chapmans' equally bad Sex, in which joke-shop worms feast on the skeletal remains of mutilated corpses. The gerbera grid is like an artwork made by a bureaucrat, it's all idea. Apart from the one-note emphasis on entropic decay, what is most disappointing about Gallacio's work is its lack of visual flair.
Perhaps the very urgency of Doherty's work will tell against it, because we're living in a era when the arid, distanced play of the Chapmans is more to our taste. Oddly enough, some conservative commentators have praised the Chapmans and Perry on the basis of their display of conventional craft skills. But that's like saying: "well, the baby's gone but at least we have the bath water."
Craft skills are not enough and not an end in themselves if the end result is essentially bogus. Such is the case with the Chapmans.
Perry's work is flawed, as is Gallacio's. If the prize were to go to Doherty, it would be a recognition that art belongs in the real world, and is needed in the real world.
The Turner Prize 2003 Exhibition is at Tate Britain until January 18th. The winner will be announced live on Channel 4 on December 7th.