Good news from the north. Lifting the age bar has had dramatic effects on the Turner prize.
Now that it’s no longer restricted to the under-50s, with all the usual star-making and specious controversy of the last two decades, the shortlist is far more varied and mature. Painting, sculpture, installation, collage, film and print are all on display in an absorbing and graciously presented show at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. This is immediately more representative of the art scene in Britain today.
And more than that, the work feels out-turned, rather than wilfully inaccessible or self-involved; all four artists are alive to the ebb of flow of other people’s lives and to the tide of international history. Hurvin Anderson (born Birmingham, 1965) looks both backwards and forwards with a sequence of metaphysical post-pop paintings of his father’s barber’s shop in the Midlands and lush landscapes of their ancestral Jamaica as it exists in his imagination.
Here’s a customer in a not-quite shop, where the floor falls away and the ceiling opens skywards, in a cape that might be made of African fabric. Is he dreaming of Jamaica? Is he actually black? The image deflects all answers in its strange conflation of contradictory visual layers.
Another painting in the series shows black and white photographs pinned to the mirror above a miniature skyline of hairdresser’s bottles. Probably Muhammad Ali, possibly Martin Luther King: you deduce the identity from the form or pose, until both fade into uncertainty and you can’t even recognise these black heroes. Is it OK to Be Black? asks the title. Anderson alludes to art as well as politics – Morandi bottles and Mondrian abstractions in the rectilinear photos and mirrors; colour field painting and Peter Doig in his dripping Caribbean landscapes. His art swithers between figuration and abstraction.
And always there is the sense of something hidden, something behind what you see: another life, another place. This is less compelling in the landscapes, overlaid with gigantic palm fronds and the mesh fences through which an outsider might view them. But it’s languidly pervasive in the shop scenes, where figures (and the artist himself, one senses) truly seem to exist in a floating world. What is it to be a black painter?
Lubaina Himid (born Zanzibar, 1954) is showing works from her Oxford and Nottingham shows earlier this year. They are, I fear, the wrong ones. Her partial redactions of old Guardian covers, so that they show up what she regards as black stereotyping, are like an agitprop slide show. Her 18th-century bone china service, overpainted with scenes of slavery and the supposed perils of abolition, is an apt period piece, but it is overdone and its piquancy thus short-lived.
Indeed the strongest work here, other than the recent and marvellously dreamlike painting of an encounter between four black men and a mythological bird-woman in a curious seaborne chamber, which touches on the tragic journey of a slave ship, is the huge installation A Fashionable Marriage. Life-sized figures cut out of plywood preen, gawp and guffaw across a raised stage: a Georgian toff with a ruff of filthy rubber gloves, in memory of Hogarth (whose Marriage à la Mode is reprised and updated here); Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as the fated lovers; and looking on, as one of the two black servants in Hogarth’s original, Himid’s alter ego in modern dress. It is an uproarious send-up of 80s politics and art through the theatrical medium she has made her own. Indeed it was created in 1986.
At least this exhilarating parade is the artist’s own work, however dated. Andrea Büttner (born Stuttgart, 1972) has simply borrowed an enormous photo display from the Peace Library in Berlin and let it run through more than one gallery. Presented rather crudely, like a series of parish noticeboards, this is nonetheless a riveting examination of the French philosopher Simone Weil’s ideas on rootedness, belonging and the human heart, accompanied – one might say illustrated, except the relationship is far deeper – by the photographs of August Sander, André Kertész and others. What we might not be able to imagine – the soul, the Holocaust, the universe – is carried here in these magnificent images.
Weil’s concern for the poor is, I suppose, Büttner’s own theme. It is in the photographs of old master paintings of beggars displayed on tables so low you are required – ostentatious tactic – to bend down to see this priceless high art. It is in the large and heavy-handed woodcuts she has derived from Ernst Barlach’s 1919 statue Cloaked Beggarwoman, embodying German shame and defeatism after the first world war. Coarsest of all, it is in the greasy finger swipes made on a mobile phone that the artist has had painstakingly transformed into enormous etchings that resemble ab-ex brushstrokes; a counterproductive waste of human labour, never mind money.
Büttner’s 2007 film about Carmelite nuns was a much stronger candidate for the prize, which will be awarded in a live TV ceremony on 5 December. Indeed one concern about the new age rules is that the prize may start to look backwards, as in Himid’s case, to work from the long ago past. But the judges base their shortlist strictly on the exhibitions they have seen in the previous year; in this respect, nothing has changed. And rather like the Man Booker, often thought to reward the wrong novel in a writer’s output, so the Turner prize sometimes alights on the wrong phase or works in an artist’s career. And so it seems for Rosalind Nashashibi, whose spellbinding films I always seek out, and who has long been one of Britain’s best artists.
Nashashibi (born Croydon, 1973) is showing two films. Electrical Gaza employs many characteristic methods, fusing narrative techniques with documentary footage, staging occasional scenes, interrupting vérité with fragments of animation. Here, she captures the self-contained life of Gaza, removed from the world yet somehow enchanted: shops selling sweets and wedding dresses; cars stopping so that friends can leap out and hug one another; streets that end in sparkling blue sea, where – unforgettable image – horses are bathed in the waves.
It could be a seaside idyll were it not for the fearful crowds queuing at the Rafah border as the gates clang shut, or the Hamas youth march cutting straight across the scene. Alleys end in roadblocks, cars are forced to reverse down streets and as the camera rises high to look down on the blasted landscape, revealing traces of unexplained violence, Benjamin Britten’s Fanfare from Les Illuminations surges on the soundtrack, Rimbaud’s ironic phrase “Only I have the key to this savage parade” ringing out as if describing the ultimate mystery of Gaza.
The film is incomplete. Nashashibi was forced to leave by Israeli incursions and my sense is that the piece might have been as good as her best work given more time. But as it is, she is showing another film about a secluded enclave, this time a compound in Guatemala where two artists live together, an elderly mother and her daughter. Whose work is whose? Are we inside or out? The women speak of being imprisoned here, once, and it feels as if they still are, only now by choice.
Glowing red interiors give way to dense green gardens, threatened by snakes and the jungle beyond. Villagers arrive with food, make lunch, keep the artists afloat. How would the women survive without them – or without each other? What will the mother do when the daughter leaves on holiday? What will the daughter do when the mother dies? Nahashibi takes us into this slow, mesmerising existence in a film without narration, or even much dialogue, yet profound as any tragedy. It’s only half of her show, but this work alone deserves the Turner prize.
