Image 1 Description – Ten pumpkins on their way to the educational department of the Herbert Art Gallery are barred entry to the Turner Prize. They were swiftly redirected to the tradesmen’s entrance and service lift.“This fantasy of our minds that the first duty of free and rational beings is to refer to museums and libraries … this mental predisposition has been maintained and its fascination made to seem invincible: institutions have always presented themselves to men’s minds as the natural organ of success and the protector of the struggling.” (Proudhon) {00:44}
The Turner Prize (hereafter TP) is one of an ever expanding (proliferating commodity, ailing culture) number of middling institutions writ large, functioning in celebration of the most conspicuous polished turds that surface above the remaining effluence. It trades on and markets itself on its own self-affirmed, spurious and inflated significance. The TP constrains genuine artistic activity. [Why not elaborate on ‘genuine’ and ‘artistic’?] The TP reduces the individual artist and even the laudable, socially conscientious collectivisation of cultural conventions, to nothing more than an art transporter’s Luton van full of bland fetishised tat with a gilt-edged production budget. {01:34}
It does this whilst simultaneously proclaiming to possess the requisite (ever-undefined) authority to differentiate between better and worse examples of art production.2 The TP constitutes an affront in the form of a weathered and waning catechism to a long since dead version of art production that it smugly proclaims: some notion of avant-gardism, cutting-edgism, cultural radicalism, ground-breakingism and worthyism. The TP constitutes a means of production of value of vacuous rolled-out fetishised things, rendered meaningless by the likes of the TP itself. [What do you mean by meaningless?]3 This is a quote from Terry Atkinson as a distraction “...the Turner Prize is an event where silly hyperbole and amplifying mutual admiration are only some of the human weaknesses displayed alongside the art objects.”4 {02:29}
Image Description 2 – Five boxes with slits, bearing a certain similarity to the charity token schemes one might find towards the exit of a supermarket. Each box is labelled with the name of a competing collective above which the words ‘Have your say’ is written. Having your say by depositing a token that will not affect the final result could well be described as tokenistic. As Ms Davey wryly commented, “ No post it notes this year then”.The middling-higher institutions of art keep the individual, and for that matter the collective, in dependence by association with a lot of middle-level institutions: galleries, art schools etc. The TP promotes a system where the highly inspired (the most inert and feckless success stories) must be listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the uninspired (the reserve wealth of failure). Everywhere the individual must regard themselves first as a member of one or more of these middle-level coteries and yield unconditional obedience to them, and by implication to the spirit of the middling-higher institution that authorises them. Only by means of the individual’s collectivisation, institutionalisation by way of coteries and milieus does the individual gain a speculating relation to the wider, greater institution. As with catholicism the individual deals with god only through the priest and his obsequious attendees. Farquarson (Chatham 87) as the incarnate son with his administered functionaries as apostolistic exhibitions team: Hammad, Laura, Francis et al, to the deified, omnipotent thin-lipped Serota (Old Haberdasher 59). {03:49}
An individual or middle-level institution in the form of a collective associating in any form with the middling-higher institution marks the irreversible death of meaning for the collective. This is all such middle-level institutions will have achieved in their acceptance of the TP’s little marketing ploy: a form of toxic courtship that should have been swiped left long before the awkward, patronising first date. Nobody likes to see a victim prostrate and exhibited. This is a quote from Proudhon to add some much needed intellectual weight: “...every organisation that exceeds its true limits [...] loses in strength what it gains in size, and moves towards dissolution.” {04:32}
Every established power dictates and controls the limits of the organisations beneath it in order to reproduce itself; to reproduce the means of the capitalist class to dump its wealth in art stuff in its non-fungible tokenistic forms. The established power adheres to the same assumptions of capitalist relations of production, slave-wage labour, alienated labour, competitiveness, the ideology of possessive individualism; all - and by implication the TP as well - must be regarded as fundamentally anti-human. {05:08}
The TP constricts the individual artist, individual collective and with them the potential of any alternative means of production. What these institutions and attendant coteries produce, in association with the TP is entirely meaningless production5 that merely harbours an unrestrained potential of a synchronous excessive expansion of both superficial appearance and monetary value creation. {05:35}
Image Description 3 – A box of tokens for the Turner Prize token box.1
We are pleased to announce that the following text has been cleared for both display and publication by unknown authorities within the Tate and the Herbert Art Gallery with no redactions or edits. On 7 October 2021 under the guise of contractual issues this text and the preceding crit was either to be removed completely from the Coventry Biennial exhibition or redacted, with the offending passages covered with gaffer tape. The high points of the discussions ranged between the horse-trading of whether the Terry Atkinson or Proudhon quote would remain unredacted to the deleterious tackiness of gaffer tape upon acrylic. Clearance was finally given, whether due to a beneficent wave of the hand from Farquarson (Chatham 87) or the onerous task of having to read through all of our texts, judging how they ‘may impact our partners’, or due to a liberal embarrassment of censorship, we will never know
2
“...The Turner Prize (TP) is an act of placement. It places artists, not only those that are on the TP list, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc but, by virtue of those who are on it, the TP also places those who are not on it. In this way the TP subscribes to perhaps the widest and most rampant and fundamental capitalist formation - competition. [...] Some of the corrosive first incursions of Conceptualism into the canons of Modernism in the last half of the 1960s, before these incursions buckled and were buried under a slurry of the aesthetic bombast of postmodernist hyperinflation of the claims about object and text as authoring agents. [...] When viewed in the context of such events, there is something ludicrous about the idea of agents, who eledgedy embrace the critical version of the A-G model [avant-Garde] both seeking for and gaining, or taking a chance on losing for that matter, a prize presented for the attainment of an alleged excellence in conforming to the paradigm of a particular version of A-G behaviour, the last thing of which is critical input.” T. Atkinson, The Turner Prize: Ordering the Avant-Garde (2002) Third Text
Image Description 4 – A black and white image from the 1970’s put through a AI colorisation process. Terry Atkinson, looking a little jaundiced by the process, sits third from the left.
3
We are not sure how an attempt to define ‘meaninglessness’ in the context of an art practice would go? We suspect it would need to form part of a wider critique of arthood. We’re not claiming we’ve begun even a cursory attempt at doing that but if we have it has been a trial and error, piecemeal affair. What constitutes a meaningful art practice that risks being ‘rendered meaningless by the likes of the TP’? We are equating the notion of a meaningful art practice with the notion of being distinct and not subsumed by a general idea of the institution of art )arthood(. Our own practice as we consider it is ‘unsolicited’ in that it wasn’t asked for, particularly encouraged, requested etc. Or if it is in some sense solicited (we were educated specifically in terms of art, conventionally at art school after all), then we at least view the request critically in the sense of making some concerted effort to reject those conventions on the basis that they are those of the wider institution of art, which in turn is inherently subsumed within, and committed to the reproduction of capitalist modes of production. The institution of art )arthood( has no critical reaction to capital but merely celebrates and reproduces it as a more insidious socio-cultural version. We attempt to maintain a critical reaction to the institution of art. Whatever set of relations are born can always die given the right conditions, which is why social systems such as art – the managers and manipulators of culture – present themselves as immortal and necessary. They do not promote the idea of groundbreaking productive artistic forces out of some naive altruism, any more than the ruling classes seize power for the express purpose of feeding the hungry and educating the poor. Instead they tend to pursue their own material interests, extracting a surplus from the labour, interests and pursuits of others. Even so, that wealth can always be brought within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive , individualist forms which bred it, invested in the community as a whole, and used to restrict disagreeable work to a minimum. It can thus release artists from the chains of economic necessity into a life where they are free to realize their creative potential. The less a work engages in relations of distribution, as they are orchestrated by the social system of art, the more ‘meaningful’ for want of a better word it becomes. The work can either remain sequestered within relations of production cosseted from distribution; or find some alternative means of distribution to enter into relations with, distinct from the dominant system. This theoretical work will need to keep on its toes regarding any alternative means of distribution and treat any opportunity like a sinking ship, ready to abandon it at the point of its inevitable subsumption into the prevailing dominant system.
4
T. Atkinson, ibid.
5
The sphere of arthood, conforming as it does to a paradigm of a purely celebrative version of Avant-Garde behaviour which is in no way critical, is populated by innumerable examples of vacuous sentiments and exchanges. The paradigm functions as a “culture of celebrity that consumes the [classical? Originating?] model of the Avant-Garde by ordering it through a model of mutual congratulation funded by a self regarding hyperinflation of the notion of the artistic subject” (T. Atkinson, ibid.), such as the following hollow, operatively meaningless atrocity from Matthew Higgs’ Instagram feed (Sept 2021): “Wow. [smiley face emoji] Jack Pierson at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Among the best gallery exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Unmissable. [smiley face emoji] & We need a full retrospective in NYC!” Not that surprisingly the 62 subsequent comments are largely affirmative.
