The press will be rude, but being nominated for the Turner Prize is a rollercoaster ride – so enjoy it
It is that time of the year again. The cherry blossom has fallen, shop windows are full of sundresses and the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize has just been announced: Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger – the latter probably the best known of the bunch for his widely publicised piece State Britain, which replicated the one-man antiwar demonstration of Brian Haw outside the Houses of Parliament.
These four artists, who may be well known and respected within the art village, are now suddenly exposed to the scrutiny and ridicule of the mainstream media. The tabloids will trot out the usual “Do you call that art? My eight-year-old could do better” headlines.
The prize was set up as a PR exercise for contemporary art, but despite this, being one of the chosen four is a guilty fantasy for most artists, however cool or intellectually rigorous. For an artist in Britain, perhaps even the world, I doubt that there is an opportunity to exhibit that garners more attention than the Turner Prize. Nominees should be warned that all their exhibitions from now on – even solo shows in the glistening cathedrals of insider kudos such as MoMA New York and the Guggenheim – will seem a bit low-key after the hooha that surrounds the big T. Perhaps only showing in a national pavilion at the Venice biennale can approach it for razzmatazz.
The Turner is now in its third age. It started by hon-ouring the old avant garde, Gilbert and George, Richard Long and Howard Hodgkin. Then it moved into its golden adolescence when Charles Saatchi was synonymous with what was hot in contemporary art and the press went into outraged overdrive over lights going on and off or an unmade bed. The YBAs are now middle-aged, their studios are factories and they give to charity auctions for their children’s schools.
Now the prize highlights the work of emerging young talents. In previous years it was safe to say I’d never have heard of at least one name on the shortlist – and I’m meant to be familiar with the blizzard of names from cards that land on my doormat and ads I glance at as I flick dutifully through Frieze magazine.
Four years on, I can vividly recall my own experience of getting the call. I was changing into my cycling kit in preparation for my first mountain-bike race of the season at Eastway cycle circuit in Hackney (now ironically closed for Olympic development). The phone rang and my wife answered it. “It’s Nicolas Serota on the phone,” she said. My blood froze. The timing was right, I qualified, I worked in Britain, I was under 50, I had staged a large show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Barbican the previous year. I picked up the receiver. Sir Nick then asked me if I would like to be nominated for the Turner in a tone that seemed to expect that I might decline. I was never cool enough to do that. I said, “sure”. He asked me to perform the difficult if not impossible feat of keeping it confidential until after the announcement eight days later.
My wife and I had a teary hug. “You’re not going to race now, are you?” she said. But I was all hyped up, fuelled and ready to go. I was so happy yet I was filled with a dread that I still occasionally get, the feeling that when things are going really well some disaster will come along to balance out my good fortune.
I was terrified of crashing during the race. It started pouring with rain and I slipped and slid around the course and finished upright, coated in mud, which hid the fact that I had leaked the odd tear whenever I had remembered that little old me had been nominated for the Turner. I was so excited that I did not sleep that night and by the next afternoon I was so tired that I thought I had hallucinated the whole thing.
I rang up the Tate and checked with Serota’s office that he had rung me the previous evening.
The Tate press office asked me if I could supply a portrait photo for the press pack. I suspected that the trans-vestite thing would dominate and maybe overshadow my work, so we took a bland mug-shot over the weekend. This did not appear in any of the papers. Instead every arts correspondent had done a little research and dug up the portrait of me wearing my female folk costume The Mother of All Battles, holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Sample headline from the Standard: “Shortlisted for the Turner Prize: a gun-toting, cross-dressing picture of womanhood (no it’s not the art, it’s the artist).” I expect the Tate fed them the more newsworthy image.
I have never signed up to the idea that to retain status artists had to make work that was inaccessible and therefore unpopular. Good art can be easy to like and bad art often hides behind obscure theories. I knew my work had what I call taxi-driver appeal, so I was not afraid of embracing the media attention that comes with nomination.
“Strap me on and fire the engines,” I said to the press officer. I have always had a better relationship with the mainstream media than the art press. I won the Turner without ever being featured in an art magazine, perhaps the art equivalent of climbing Everest without oxygen.
Some artists, such as Rachel Whiteread or Chris Ofili, are more reticent when dealing with the media. Whiteread had been nominated for her greatest work, House, only to see it demolished by shortsighted local government. The stunt pulled that year by the K Foundation of giving her £40,000 for being the nominee whom the public thought was the worst artist only added to her woes. Ofili, for his use of elephant faeces, had inspired headlines such as “Dung ho artist tops Turner” ( Express) and “Artist Dung Great” ( Sun).
Such media storms can be traumatising for someone who has laboured away for years in a studio, making art not news. My advice to this year’s nominees is: decide how you want to approach the press. Leaving it to chance is still making a decision. Think what you will enjoy and what will be appropriate. Tomma Abts last year was very cagey and gave very few interviews, it suited her profile and her quiet paintings. Phil Collins, on the other hand, gave a press conference that was part of his exhibition.
Artists need to be more media-savvy now. The contemporary-art world has an uneasy relationship with the popular press, which perhaps reflects the widespread scepticism about art that is still prevalent among their readers. The Turner attracts the attention of news journalists, who can be a more rabid breed than nicely brought-up arts feature writers. Nominees would do well to take full advantage of the exper-tise and experience that the Tate press office has to offer.
Despite the media circus that dominates my memory of the Turner experience, it is good to remember that it centres on an art exhibition in one of the world’s most prestigious galleries where 100,000 people will come to see it. Hold that thought and the press can seem like just tomorrow’s collage material.
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