Date
1 October 2015
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Turner prize 2015: design as art, fur coats, singing and conspiracy theories

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Date
1 October 2015

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It’s been a year of firsts for the Turner prize, the illustrious and often sensational contemporary art prize that counts Damien Hirst and Wolfgang Tillmans among its past recipients. It is the first time Scotland plays host to the prize and perhaps most significantly the first time that sees an architecture and design collective nominated. Staged in one of Glasgow’s prime art spaces, Tramway – a sprawling 19th Century tram depot whose tram lines still cut across the floors – the venue for this year’s edition played to the Scottish city’s industrial character.

London-based collective Assemble is the wildcard nominee. Shortlisted for its revival of a cluster of derelict terraced houses in Liverpool, the group of 18 designers and architects has ostensibly set up a shop inside a 1:1 replica of one of the houses they have been renovating with local residents in Granby, selling ceramics, door handles, stools, glazed tiles and tables from their in-gallery showroom. By way of social enterprise, Assemble is bringing DIY craft (the space really carries the unskilled air of a schoolyard craft fair) into the haughty realm of fine art, but for all the good the Granby initiative seems to be doing, it is treading a fine line in the context of a £25,000 art prize. And yet, perhaps their unlikeliness could make them the obvious choice for 2015.

"For some people it’s art, for some people it’s something else. In one way obviously we’re not a part of that world, what we do is much messier and much less precious."

Fran Edgerley of Assemble

I asked Fran Edgerley, one of three representing Assemble in Glasgow, whether the Turner prize had changed the way they think about their work. “I think it means a lot of different things to different people, for some people it’s art, for some people it’s something else. In one way obviously we’re not a part of that world, what we do is much messier and much less precious, but we care deeply about our work,” she explained.

Although interesting to see live performance in the show, Canadian-born Janice Kerbel’s warbling six-person musical piece Doug unfortunately had me waiting for its end. Full of classically trained trills and crescendoes and abrupt stops, the nine-song narrative tells of the catastrophes that befall its protagonist, but you’ll be hard-pressed to pick out many words from the disorientating vocals.

Tucked away out of sight is Bonnie Camplin’s reading room of conspiracy theories, fantasies and delusions Patterns. It feels more or less like an uninspiring and less successful version of something Susan Hiller might have done, and repeats ideas well outlined by French philosopher Michel Foucault many years ago. In a room neatly lined with books, photocopies and pamphlets, a cluster of televisions play interviews with people who speak about aliens, occultist Aleister Crowley and theories about Nazi clones. It could pique the interest of someone socially curious about power and beliefs, but as a work of contemporary art it feels derivative, and leaves little to be desired.

Above

Assemble: Showroom for a Granby Workshop, photo by Keith Hunter

Nicole Wermers’ Untitled Chairs has all the makings of a thoroughly stylish work of art, pairing exotic fur coats with a suite of Marcel Breur’s Cesca chairs – a classic piece of 20th Century furniture design – remade by the German-born artist. A streamlined pairing of steel and suede, the chairs make use of materials favoured in modernist interior design, and each is made all the more luxurious by the fur jackets sewn onto their backs, which, at first glance seem as if they have been casually draped and left by a room of beautiful wearers. This is precisely their intention: to crystallise fleeting social gestures – a kind of genteel marking of territory – into rigid sculptural form. They also add a feminine presence to the male-dominated world of modernist design.

Untitled Chairs has been dismissed by some as a vacuous work, but I think this highlights a problem in the way we tend to look at contemporary art. Since conceptual art cast aesthetics aside, art has distanced itself from appearances in the name of gravitas. By this point this is a frankly arcane way of seeing. That being said, Wermers’ chairs do seem destined to exist only in a changing backdrop of near empty white-walled gallery spaces.

This is the fate shared by all works here with the exception of Assemble’s Granby Workshop, which reaches so far outside the gallery you have to wonder how it got inside. The historically provocative Turner prize has tended to uphold the kind of work which seems to exist merely to be exhibited, but even where it doesn’t, a move to include something like socially enterprising design simply feels like another of its rousings. For its diversity and the questions it asks about the lines drawn around contemporary art alone, this is one of the more interesting shows in recent years.

The winner of the Turner prize 2015 will be announced on December 7.

Above

Janice Kerbel: Doug, photo by Keith Hunter

Above

Bonnie Camplin: Patterns, photo by Keith Hunter

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Alexander Hawkins

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