This years Turner Prize

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Posted 10 Years Ago

I havejust looked at the short listed artists for the Turner Prize this year. As usual their write ups contain the same impenetrable twaddle we have become familiar with. Here are some excerpts: Assemble ‘their architectural spaces and environments promote direct action and embrace a DIY sensibility’.Bonnie Camplin ‘exploring what ‘consensus reality’ is and how it is formed, drawing from physics to philosophy, psychology, witchcraft, quantum theory and warfare’.Janice Kerbel ‘borrows from conventional modes of narrative in order to create elaborate imagined forms’.Nicloe Wermer ‘collages and installations which explore the appropriation of art and design within consumer culture’Have you ever heard such bovine excretia? Is it just me or are they consciously and intentionally taking the mickey ( I could use a much stronger word) out of the rest of us? Think I'll pen a poem about this and might inflict it on you all if it turns out okay - so there!

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10 Years Ago by Michael Edwards

With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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Posted 10 Years Ago

It's just words - empty, vacuous, meaningless. This is the stuff they're taught to write. These are the connections, with other likeminded fools, they are prompted to forge. This is the state to which English art education has been reduced by readily-accepted fraudulence. This is the reason why there is now a huge chasm between that which is regarded as art, and the public for whom it is presumably (but not actually) intended. It's a direct appeal for money - the acceptance of the cognoscenti, but these days that group has nothing to do with the appreciation of art, and everything to do with the appreciation of assets. There is a generation of artists, specifically the Young British Artists, (Hirst, Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Kapoor, Koonz, led by Granddaddy Warhol) who have exploited this vein until they've bled it white. All of it has been about money, never art, never honesty, never competence, always loathsome greed. We need to reject and shame it, for all the derision we shall invite by so doing and the uncertain notes which will be struck by otherwise serious artists who lack sufficient confidence in themselves to repudiate it. There is a danger of grasping philistinism to the bosom in that rejection, but it's a risk worth taking because this trend has to die. But in trying to kill it, you'll find the armies of critics, gallery owners, investors, academics, arts journalists, ranged against you. Small wonder that most artists find it so much easier to accommodate themselves to it and to speak the same degraded language in service to it.

Peter Davison

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Posted 10 Years Ago

An acquaintance of mine, who was a very good oil painter in a loose impressionistic style, enrolled at a local university to study 'Fine Art' as a mature student. She endured three years of being told that she needed to be more 'conceptual' in her approach, along with other rubbish, gained a BA Honours degree and then quit art as she was thoroughly disillusioned. A commentary on modern art education?

Sylvia Evans

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Posted 10 Years Ago

As you say Michael a load of old bunkum or something similar.

Michael Edwards

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Well I said I'd write a poem - sorry to inflict it on you all: THE TURNER PRIZE; A BRIEF SUMMATION Opaque, transparent, in the dawnthe complex torrents all reborn.Whilst dulcet seeds are germinatinglatent dreams are terminating.Resolutions by the dozenthaw the sausages, they’re still frozenDerivatives long since established,clues abandoned, never ravished.All distilled in focused meaningstrumpeting its lifelong leanings.Natures instincts won’t succumbto a sausage as blunt as a badgers bum.Emerging practice replicated,clouds skylining, soon corrupted.Life’s performing synergies,finessed in joyful eulogies.The Turner clan: contentious,steadfast;sausages short of an English breakfast.

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10 Years Ago by Michael Edwards

Michael Edwards

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Posted 10 Years Ago

My apologies it's a load of BS isn't it!

Sylvia Evans

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Clever old you..

Michael Edwards

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Bless you Marjorie, wrote this early today - my family think I'm nuts - I wonder why? - I write a lot of nonesense verse like this (as well as some serious stuff), I'll never win a literary prize but it's good fun. . Just written another one called Squaters Rights - don't ask!! Well it gives me a break from exercising and painting and gardening and decorating and my share of the housework etc. Might be another poem there...but it'll have to wait - got some cartoons to draw up - and doing a demo tomorrow !

Robert Jones, Napa

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Put it this way, Michael - it's at least as good as some of the stuff you'll find in galleries trying to give some sort of meaning to the work on show (generally, if you have to explain it, it's failed; there's a cartoonist on one of the papers, Guardian I think, who produces amazing pictures, if you like that sort of thing, but half the time you need an interpreter - a bit of a specialized field, and as I like his work I can't apply the same standards of logic to it; but ..... I think I'll stand by my rough and ready rule of thumb). I think I've mentioned my late Uncle Ernie before - we were at a reception where an exhibition was on, and he read the blurb pinned up alongside the paintings: "It doesn't mean anything!" he bellowed, discreetly, causing the windows to rattle, "it's just words!" He could be just a shade embarrassing at times; but he was right all the same. It must be difficult, though, to write the words for an exhibition of paintings: I did it once, long, long ago when I had a magazine column and an artist friend needed someone to give her a write-up, and I found myself using phrases like "silently expressive landscapes": I suppose it meant something - Gawd alone knows what.....

Michael Edwards

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Spot on Robert - it's not all that easy to write gobbldegook as I found out writing the poem above. Incidentally the term 'blunt as a badgers bum' is one I use regularly to describe my many worn down brushes - might even catch on.

Malcolm Buckley

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Posted 10 Years Ago

When you think of the title/descriptions you laid out in your original post and some of the what ever you want to call it that has actually won the Turner Prize, I think that should put you in the running for Poet Laureat easily, I think it was great Robert.

Derek Snowdon

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Posted 10 Years Ago

Smashing Robert as we all have been pondering about. Claptrap. That's why I wrote to the Artist mag about Geoff Hunt and was published when I complimented him of his down to earth words. He is down to demo to our art group next year, in the meantime he is part of the Wapping Group show at a gallery in Winchester in October.

This years Turner Prize

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