Art
Turner's grave
Giles Auty
The Turner Prize: works by short-listed artists (Tate till 2 December)
Joseph William Mallord Turner, Eng- land's greatest artist, was born in 1775 on St George's Day as was Shakespeare, her greatest writer, some 211 years before him. After a lifetime of superhuman achievement, Turner was laid to mortal rest just before Christmas 1851 and has so remained until 6 October 1984 when events at the Tate Gallery may have caused him to turn uneasily in his resting place.
The occasion was the presentation of the inaptly named Turner Prize, donated by a body called the Patrons of New Art, to the person who in the opinion of the New Art Jury, has made the greatest contribution to art in Britain in the previous 12 months'. This culmination of months of art-world speculation had roughly equal elements of the Booker Prize, Miss World and more or less total farce, as Lord Gowrie, looking even wilder than usual, was forced to shout the result to the assembled throng — the microphones being non-operational.
`The winner of the 1984 Turner Prize', yelled the Minister for the Arts, tearing open the envelope, 'is Malcolm Morley.'
In my quarter of the hall, groans of disbelief were followed by the audible speculation that Morley's 'greatest con- tribution to art in Britain in the previous 12 months' may have been his full-time resi- dence in America.
A miasma of venom hung in the air before conversation slowly resumed. Perhaps it might have helped dispel this if the jury had made clear the reasons for their choice. Of course, even this would not necessarily have comforted the other, losing finalists who had come so close to E10,000 plus a pretty large helping of art-world kudos.
My own more immediate concern was how I could adequately explain the occa- sion and its deeper meanings, not least to friends from my locality who had shown their sympathetic concern for New Art by watching both of the films Omnibus had made on the subject and about the Turner
Prize. I had already run into trouble after the first half of this programme had been shown, twice being asked whether losing finalist Richard Long 'tips water down the Avon Gorge on ordinary working days or only when the cameras are watching?' without being able to provide a satisfactorY answer.
Unlike one of the critics appearing in the Omnibus film, who expressed the arrogant view that public opinion is immaterial, I do not believe art should or can exist in a vacuum. It is at least one duty of art writers to present a comprehensible context to the general public. At the beginning of Part Two of the Omnibus film, the announcers tried to make some plausible parallel between the innovatory nature of certain of Turner's paintings and the fashionable novelty of much of today's New Art, so justifying the use of Turner's name for what is intended to become the visual arts equivalent of 3 major literary prize. Such a comparison is shallow and this" leading and does no credit to a supposedly serious arts programme. Turner was a great artist not simply because he was an innovator — the inventor of a new tap washer is that — but also because he was almost immeasurably gifted and accom- plished. His artistic skills were no less dazzling than his formal audacity. In the hands of a lesser mortal some of his themes might have appeared theatrical and over- blown; this is why his lifelong study of the natural world and superb draughtsmanshiP were essential. Turner did not ape the fashions of his time but invented a new, personal language. For him, innovation always had a genuinely expressive purpose and was a natural consequence of the fertility of his mind. As such it was poles apart from innovation conceived as a stylis- tic means of 'making it' — fame and, fortune that is — in the modish world 0' contemporary art. In passing, it might be noted that prizewinner Malcolm Morley made Photo,; realist art while that style was the rage arl,c1 has subsequently made a fortunate svviten to neo-Expressionism — to coincide with .a boom in that mode also. This does not in itself make him a bad painter — his work is often colourful and lively — but does suggest a rather different set of priorities from those of Turner to whom, along vvitbd Picasso, Mr Morley has already compare himself. It is on record that Turner once lashed himself to the mast of a sailing boat, the better to observe the ferocious splendourr of a storm at sea. Today such a humble ye dangerous action must seem all but inconl- prehensible to a generation of artists wh°' in the absence of all humility, lash thern; selves only to frenzies of ambition ar'' megalomania. Just why this should be the case is the subject of a most readable new book by tile r American art historian Suzi Gablik. In he somewhat despairing analysis, Has M°„, ernism Failed? (Thames & Hudson Ow'
Ms Gablik convincingly answers many of the questions which must vex the minds of people patient enough to retain any in- terest at all in the world of contemporary arts.
This is a world about which the artist Robert Mangold has recently written: 'By the end of the Sixties the whole scene was different. . . . For one thing, I felt there was a kind of commercialism taking place that I found offensive. I felt the need to put distance between me and the art world. Things were happening that somehow seemed so divisive, and everyone was jealous of everyone else. . . . I just wanted to get the art world out of my head.. . . To me it seemed a deadly context to live in.'
Yes, something does seem to have gone seriously wrong since Turner's time.
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