The Turner Prize 1997: Gillian Wearing, Cornelia Parker, Angela Bulloch, Christine Borland

So in Parker's case we are confronted with a mix of recognisable works of art, one of which I am happy to praise highly, and collected curiosities which don't earn their gallery space by any stretch of the imagination. In between, there are partially-worked artefacts about which a bit more needs to be said.

Let me look briefly at two examples of such partially-worked artefacts. Inhaled Cliffs consists of two 'sheets starched with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover', and is shown 'Courtesy of the Artist and the Frith Street Gallery in London'. The sheets are neatly folded one on top of the other, as if by a launderess, but the lower one protrudes a little, creating a representation (specfically, an icon) of the white cliffs. Very cute. Two observations.

First, there is a fairly long tradition of using ready-mades in art works where they get to be seen as something different to what they are. There are numerous works by Picasso which do this (a pair of bicycle handlebars functions as a pair of bull's horns; a toy car figures as the face of a gorilla; and so on). Parker is working in that tradition, albeit minimalistically. It is a tradition unlikely to produce art of great consequence. Second,, the sheets could have been seen as cliffs without having been put through an alchemical laundry first. Reading about the alchemy may make us smile; it doesn't alter the work sitting under glass on the gallery plinth. The alchemy points us away from the work and towards the artist: How imaginative she is! What a sense of humour! I wonder what she'll think of next (actually, with the co-operation of NASA, returning a meteorite to space). In other words, the work is merely a lure put down to satisfy the artist's narcissistic desire to receive our look, our interest. The starched sheets are a decoy.

Another set of works is entitled Freudian Abstracts and is described as 'Photograms made with dust and fibre from Freud's couch', with thanks given to the Freud Museum (when Freud fled to London, he brought his couch with him). The three photograms (sometimes called Rayograms after Man Ray's pioneering role in developing them) can be seen as suggesting human faces and bodies, just as the white sheets can be seen as white cliffs. But these suggestions appear rather casual and undeveloped. Once again, our interest devolves from the photograms to the alchemy involved - to the provenance of the dust and fibre, and thence to Cornelia Parker who was shown at some length in the Channel 4 documentary on the Turner Prize actually extracting the stuff from Freud's actual couch into little plastic bags where it would be free from risk of contamination. Strange but true. But fairly ordinary photograms do not become considerable works of art because their maker is a bit peculiar, and all that the Channel 4 programme established was the peculiarity, not the value of the photograms. Fairly ordinary photograms probably belong in someone's degree show in Anytown, and it is odd that being able to obtain access to Freud's couch should become a ticket to the Tate. (Think of the consequences when this reality is realised! Why even I might try my hand: Dear Mr Blair, I see you have been nursing a heavy cold. Some good could yet come of it if you would kindly let me have your unlaundered handkerchieves with the aid of which I could create my projected work Snot...' and so on ad nauseam).

In terms of earning gallery space, Angela Bulloch fails badly. Even the Turner Prize Jury had difficulty with their citation, describing her as shortlisted 'for her inventive use of a wide range of media and approach to exhibition making'. Her installation pompously titled 'Superstructure with satellites' is basically a Bouncy Castle (and, as such, much appreciated by younger and young at heart visitors to the Turner Prize exhibition). Bouncy castles are now essential ingredients to any English village fete or school fund raising event. (For those on other planets, a bouncy castle is a large inflatable, often in the shape of a castle, on which children can bounce around and fall over without endangering themselves). They don't need elevation to the Tate Gallery; they are doing very nicely thank you. Nor is a bouncy castle installed in the Tate thereby converted into an interactive sculpture. David Bussel writes 'The viewer becomes the activator, making an intervention of some kind through the structure provided by the work itself within the context of the gallery. As such, the work becomes a kind of democratic collaboration of action and choice between Bulloch and her audience' (Bussel 1987 p 85). This is merely wind, better pumped into an inflatable. It is as pompous as the title of the work, and symptomatic of what happens when an attempt is made to justify work in the gallery which doesn't need or belong in the gallery. What Bussel says doesn't distinguish Bulloch's inflatable from the rows of machines in the Tate Gallery's basement which are activated by the intervention of a democratic show of hands underneath their patent hot air vents. And criticism which can't distinguish in this kind of way is vacuous. Bussel, nul points. Bulloch, nul points

This leaves Christine Borland's chamber (or, at any rate, little shop) of horrors. Her work belongs to that local tradition which treats artistic activity as a form of research, and sees its output (its works) as a prompt or stimulus to the audience's thinking. This is clear from the Gallery poster giving the Jury's citation of her work which says that ' she has been shortlisted for her exploration of the language of forensic science...her work asks the viewer to consider the ways in which institutions exploit and devalue life. Like an archaeologist or historian she conducts research'.

But to this one might reply she isn't in the running for a prize in archaeology or history; nor is she submitting a Ph. D. exploring the language of forensic science. One question about her work is whether it is anything more than illustrative of theses and themes in the work of (say) Michel Foucault, so that one could (for example) imagine her 'works' as illustrations to his texts. But I'm sure the Turner Prize jury regard illustration as a low genre, and not the stuff of their prize.

In the Tate exhibition, Borland displays three works, all with a more or less complicated story behind them.

First, we have The Dead Teach the Living which, according to the exhibition catalogue, 'points to how science has legitimised the dehumanisation of racial groups' (Button 1997, unpaginated). A collection of death masks held at the Anatomical Institute in Munster, and probably at one time used as teaching aids, was subjected to laser scanning into a computer. According to Borland, 'the data was converted and painstakingly rebuilt in three-dimensionally molten ABS plastic by machine. The resulting piece is necessarily removed from the emotive originals, the new material inviting curiosity and interaction' (Borland 1997, p 76).

I don't understand how the buzz word 'interaction' can apply here - Borland's exhibition piece consists of Greek-sculpture like white heads safely under glass on gallery plinths. You can look at them and walk round them. If this is interaction, so be it. But as for 'curiosity', I think this is absolutely right: Borland has found one cabinet of curiosities in the Anatomical Institute at Munster, and created her own cabinet of curiosities as a replica of it. But a cabinet of curiosities is, in terms both of the museum and the art gallery, itself a throwback to a period in which an understanding of science had yet to stabilise and likewise a conception of art. The early records of (for example) the Royal Society are replete with examples of pseudo-experiments which aroused curiosity: a spider is placed in a chalk circle, and observation made as to whether it stays in the circle or runs out of it. But modern science requires that we go beyond mere curiosity; to do that, we need among other things the idea of a research paradigm and the distinction of appearances (which may be very curious) and reality (which hopefully falls into patterns we can understand and extrapolate from). Likewise, modern art, in freeing itself from connections with other institutions and practices to which it had been ancillary - religion, ritual, the fabrication of social distinction - establishes itself as something which allows us particular kinds of experience, of the beautiful and the sublime, which are categorically distinct from the everyday curiosity which we might feel about the objects displayed in an ethnographic museum. The Tate Gallery is not an ethnographic museum, and is ill-advised in turning itself into an amateurish one.

Borland's second work is called Phantom Twins and consists of two dolls made of leather, sawdust and replica foetal skulls and modelled on similar dolls used in the eighteenth century to demonstrate childbirth to medical students. According to the exhibition catalogue, ' The original "dolls" contained real foetal skeletons - beneath the stretched leather the skulls are clearly visible. Although Borland used plastic replica skulls, obtained from an osteological supplier, her "dolls" nonetheless convey, at one step removed, the poignancy and uniqueness of the tiny lives buried under the leathery carapace" (Button 1997, unpaginated).

This is a credible attempt to justify the work, though the titling of the work, with its allusion to phantom pregnancies rather than real ones doesn't help us get to this perception. Nor is it clear why two dolls are better than one for this purpose - wouldn't a solitary doll have been more poignant?

More to the point of this essay, the poignancy is created only through the telling of a story - the dolls require narrative support. And this is always problematic. Is it the dolls which convey the poignancy of those brief lives or the narrative which told us about 18th century demonstration dolls?

Borland's third work was shown in course of construction on the Channel 4 documentary which accompanied the Turner Prize (and the continuous screening of which was manifestly the most popular attraction on the day I visited the show. It helped that seating was provided). Entitled After a True Story - Giant and Fairy Tales the work is listed as made of 'Glass, dust, lights and books' (though the dust looked like talcum powder to me - and I am told that such was indeed one of its ingredients). The piece is made by laying a replica skeleton onto glass, dusting around it, removing the skeleton and lighting the resulting negative image. The books on display have texts which link us into such themes as bodysnatching - the fate of the corpse of the 'Irish Giant', Charles Byrne (1761-1783). There are two separate works on display: one made with the help of a big replica skeleton, one with a small replica skeleton.

Watching the works being created in the TV documentary, I was reminded of watching women arranging flowers for our local village hall horticultural displays. This may or may not be relevant. That I should have made this connection does suggest that I couldn't find an appropriate point of reference in sculptural traditions and conventions for what Borland is doing, but this may be simply because she isn't doing very much: she has to make or have made a replica skeleton (not so easy), design and get made a display installation (this simply costs money and someone's engineering skills), arrange the skeleton (easy) and dust round it (easy), then remove the skeleton without disturbing the dust (a tricky business). She thereby creates an interesting enough visual effect. So does my bedroom wallpaper.

Skeletons and images of them are evocative objects - they get used at Hallowe'en, on pirate flags, and in some paintings and sculptures (including medieval Church decorations and in morality paintings). They clatter around horror movies. In the Tate Gallery, a large room is given over to the negative images (Cornelia Parker would have called them 'The Negative of Death' or somesuch) they have left on dusted glass, cleverly lit to produce reflected images above and below. A couple of books lie open for us to read; Borland made the pages at which the books are open. The pages, which tell the tale of Byrne and Crachami (whose real skeletons are on display at the Hunterian Museum in London) are made so as to look authentically part of the books, though these themselves were obtained from a second-hand bookshop). It is curious, but it is not moving; it is not terribly thought-provoking; it is rather elegant and, in the end, rather fatuous.

CONCLUSIONS

Do these discriminations and evaluations lead to any general conclusions?

If there is one general issue worth singling out it is probably that of the relationship between object and work. In some cases very obviously (Parker, Borland), the art work is, or is replaced by, an object, uniquely defined by its provenance. In this aspect, there is a reversion to pre-modern art forms, of which the religious cult object (relic etc) is archetypal. Such objects were objects of veneration before they were objects of aesthetic contemplation. The characteristic modern (post Renaissance) move is to free the work from this kind of dependence on the object which contains it, the material used for its construction. In Walter Benjamin's phrase, such modern works are post-auratic: no aura attaches to their mere objecthood. The test for a cult object is whether its physical destruction is an act of sacrilege.

But pre-Renaissance cult objects were created within an overarching theological and metaphysical framework , world-view and set of institutions. The Turner Prize objects lack such a framework of institutional and ideological support. They are megaphysical rather than metaphysical objects. Because the objects originate and are essentially tied to private obsessions, rather then public frameworks of meaning and understanding, they remain at the level of curiosities and horrors. They do not, except occasionally and per accidens, transcend their origins to which they are, indeed, insistently tied. As works of art they therefore limp. It is rather as if a group of bag ladies had been invited to come to the Tate and put the contents of their trolleys under glass, on plinths. I am sure it would make a curious sight, and it would certainly improve access and pull in the crowds. It gives me another idea. Dear Nicholas Serota....

Bibliography

Bussel, David 1997 'Angela Bulloch' Frieze, June-August issue.

Button, Virginia 1997 The Turner Prize 1997 (Gallery catalogue) Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd.

1997; previously unpublished

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