by JimRob on Sat Nov 09, 2002 9:20 am
Yeah... I think the Turner's doomed to be conceptual from now on (although, really, it's practically impossible to create artwork without some sense of concept). There are usually one or two people each year who manage to employ some skill and aesthetic sensibility while they're expounding their idea. Yass and Gillick seem to be producing things which are enjoyable to experience rather than just coldly 'clever'. Tyson I can't say much about from the photos, but Banner...
My biggest objection to Fiona Banner's is that it's not actually visual art but literature; being written in large pink letters or in sculpted clay isn't essentially any different to putting a poem in a different typeface. And 'the extreme limits of written communication'? Well, that's a) not exactly a new idea (see cummings, Eliot, Coleridge, etc. etc.) b) followed in exactly the wrong direction: the sexual extreme's been so explored, and we're so surrounded by textual sexuality all the time now, that it's almost impossible she's going to push the envelope any further, and c) why would she want to? And the punctuation marks are just asinine.
However, she won't win because there would be widespread rioting if she did; they're more likely to choose someone relatively traditional like Tyson or Gillick. Tyson, I think.