Shed Loads

‘DON’T worry about trying to make sense of the artwork shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize. Just step back and enjoy it.

And if you get your kicks from sneering at Simon Starling’s bike he rode in Spain and Daren Almond’s video of his gran chatting, then go ahead and sneer.

Art is what you make of it. Or, rather, it’s what the experts make of it. Experts like Rachel Tant, the curator of the exhibition of this year’s Turner Prize finalists.

Looking at Starling’s Shedboatshed – he built a shed, turned it into a boat and then back into a shed – Tant rubs her chin and says she hopes it has some “resonance in a world at which everything happens at such high speed”.

She goes on: “The lengthiness and labour intensiveness of the pilgrimage provided a kind of buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism.”

It’s the shed that says so much; it’s a talking shed, without batteries.

And, as the Mirror hears explained, Gillian Carnegie’s Fleurs d’Huile is not a picture of flowers in a vase, rather a work that “interrogates the meaning of painting?”

Quite so. Especially if you hang it upside down…’

Posted: 18th, October 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink