Opening at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, the 2017 Turner prize is an uneven and at times frustrating exhibition. Relaxing the upper age limit for nominated artists is a good thing. Some artists don’t hit their stride until relatively late or are, for various reasons, overlooked. For a long time Lubaina Himid, born in Zanzibar in 1954, was just such a case. In the last couple of years, major solo shows in Oxford and Bristol, and her inclusion in a survey of 1980s black art, have brought her a new audience and increased visibility. Her 1987 tableau, A Fashionable Marriage, is a take on William Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode, restaged as a series of cut-out figures. It remains the best thing in Himid’s Turner prize exhibition, which is a pity.
Her 2007 paintings on butter dishes, jugs, plates and tureens overlay the glazed crockery with fat-cat country squires lumbering about on horses, black servants and slaves, querulous ladies pondering the abolition of slavery, in a motley procession of 18th and 19th-century types. Riffing on the satirical prints of Gilray and Rowlandson, Himid shows what an accomplished graphic artist she is.
In another series, she works over pages and spreads from the Guardian, between 2007-2015. There are knives, guns, teeth and abstract, optical patterning, all relating more or less directly to stories about black sportsmen and women, police killings in the US, street gangs in London, and a host of other stories. Himid’s adumbrations are well done but minor. Her one, recent painting is a still and stilted thing. Were it not for her earlier work, would she be in the Turner prize now?
Too many paintings by Hurvin Anderson fill another gallery, in a survey of works from the last decade. I have always liked his barbershop paintings, and the way he uses the paraphernalia of bottles and products, the mirrors and posters and illustrations of haircuts on the walls as a kind of abstraction – they make you think of abstract expressionist Hans Hofman’s push-and-pull rectangles of dancing colour, and also at times of Dutch painter René Daniëls’ plays between figuration and abstraction.
In some of Anderson’s work, this game becomes a more awkward play between quotation and derivation. It is almost impossible to paint without quotation. I’m less interested in Anderson’s paintings of trees and foliage. Sam Francis is in there, along with Peter Doig and George Shaw. One recent painting, commissioned for the Arts Council Collection, presents a series of barbershop portraits hovering over a small shelf-bound Manhattan of hair products. Many of the portraits are like photographic negatives, white on black. Only Malcolm X and Martin Luther King appear in full focus and full colour. Is it OK to be Black?, the title asks. But again, I kept thinking of other painters, and in particular of Luc Tuymans.
Andrea Büttner and Rosalind Nashashibi’s shows are the best in this year’s prize. Büttner’s show is complicated, not least by a large display, called Simone Weil: The Most Dangerous Disease, borrowed from the Peace Library and Anti War Museum of the Evangelical Church of Berlin, which frequently lends it out. Mixing texts by the French thinker and activist Simone Weil, and large numbers of photographs, including harrowing Vietnam war images, American landscapes by Ansel Adams, August Sander’s portraits of national socialists, and much besides, the display is intended as an introduction to Weil’s times and thoughts.
There’s a lot to read and look at before we even get to Büttner’s large woodcuts – a bare black silhouette of a hill, jaunty potatoes floating in a field of colour, a number of simplified images of a beggar, a body humped over, arms extended in supplication. An entire wall is covered in hi-vis yellow fabric, on which hangs a number of large-scale etchings derived from the fingerprints and smears on her smartphone screen. As well as erudition and gravity, there is a kind of musicality to Büttner’s exhibition. I don’t know what all this adds up to, or where Büttner’s identification with the ascetic, socialist, religious Weil is meant to take us.
In her new film, Vivian’s Garden, Rosalind Nashashibi gives us a portrait of the relationship between a mother and daughter, Vivian Suter and Elisabeth Wild, in their rambling, ramshackle home and overgrown, snake-infested garden in Guatemala. We glimpse the daily comings and goings, their staff and numerous dogs, life behind a hefty gated entrance. Suter drags large canvases through the foliage. Her mother, in her wheelchair, glues together a collage by lamplight. The film is full of fractured glimpses, incomplete conversations, talk of departure and some violence in the past. Things hover that we can’t grasp. Nashashibi’s films are often extremely beautiful to look at, their slowness never a burden. For Vivian’s Garden alone, Nashashibi deserves to win.
A second film, shot in Gaza in 2014, slides down alleys, cruises the streets in a car, watches a Hamas march and witnesses the queues and anxieties at the border crossing into Egypt. Sometimes the scene – young men talking and singing in a room, a view over the city, the awful architecture at the border – flips into animation. Towards the end of these weary scenes from ordinary, but extraordinarily difficult everyday life, a black dot grows to almost fill the screen, a strange and startling irruption.
• The Turner Prize is at the Ferens Gallery, Hull, until 7 January.
