Their work over the past year has included erotic artbook images with the smutty bits sandpapered out, exploring the commodification of art through dance, telling circuitous personal stories live to an appreciative but perhaps baffled audience and, for the more old school-minded, screen printing.
It is that time of year again — the shortlist for the Turner prize, which for 30 years has been astonishing and entertaining some people, angering and exasperating others. Yesterday, four artists were shortlisted for the 2014 prize, none of them “especially well known” to the wider public, the chair of judges and the director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis, unapologetically acknowledged.
“It is a chance for us to bring out some of those names that the smaller art world has been talking about,” she said.
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None of the four can be easily categorized or pigeonholed. The best known is 41-year-old Dublin-born Duncan Campbell, whose previous work has included fact-meets-fiction biopics. The others are Ciara Phillips, who creates workshop installations with screen prints, textiles and photographs; James Richards, who makes and borrows film and images to create video installations, and Tris Vonna-Michell, who delivers fast-paced spoken-word performances.
The prize is no stranger to presenting challenging, tricky-to-grasp work. Curtis said the four artists had produced “serious work” with a genuine social and political content. “There is perhaps less fun, but I hope we can do the job of communicating why these works are important and why they caught the imagination of many people over the last 12 months.”
Vonna-Michell is known for creating what Tate curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas called “circuitous, densely-layered and elaborately constructed tales” delivered live or as recordings.
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“Always there comes a moment of bewilderment and confusion as we’re bombarded with all this information and anecdotes and stories, and this is the point,” she said.
Phillips showed “an incredibly strong graphic sensibility, a really vibrant use of color and a sense of humor” in her screen prints, according to Helen Legg, the director of Spike Island in Bristol and one of this year’s judges.
Campbell is shortlisted for his presentation in the Scottish pavilion of last year’s Venice Biennale in which he screened the 1953 arthouse film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Statues Also Die, which explores African art and its post-colonial commercialization. Campbell screened a response that explores commodification more widely, using footage that included a new dance work by the choreographer Michael Clark.
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Richards, the youngest artist on the shortlist at 30, is nominated for Rosebud, which mixes images of nature that he took using a pocket camera with artbook photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Wolfgang Tillmans. All had any parts that might arouse coarsely sandpapered out.
All four artists will now prepare work to go on display at Tate Britain, London, from September. The GBP25,000 (US$42,330) winner will be named on Dec. 1.
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