Turner Prize 2024: the most conventional and uptight edition in years
Aren’t you supposed to let your hair down when you turn 40, and have some fun? For the first time in six years, the Turner Prize is back in London. I was hoping for a blowout, as it enters its fifth decade. But this exhibition, the prize’s most conventional, uptight edition in a while, is as raucous as a drinks party at a seminary.
Recent provocations are a distant memory; instead, the jury opts for a trusty formula – selecting four individual, studio-based artists. First up is Pio Abad, a Filipino-born artist, who reprises much of an exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum that secured his nomination.
Like so much contemporary art these days, Abad’s elegant, considered work engages with the legacy of colonialism. A series of ink-and-screenprint works on paper, each as meticulous as a blueprint, juxtaposes household items (a potted plant, a jar of Nutella) with contested objects from Benin in the British Museum. A painstaking, map-like study, in pale-pink pencil, of a deer-hide robe at the Ashmolean, supposedly given by King James I to the father of Pocahontas, becomes, according to the artist, an “atlas” of “stolen lands”.
Abad takes the day’s hottest, most contentious issues, and lowers their temperature to zero degrees. The result? Poetic but ice-cold and cerebral, even curiously repressed, art. A 17th-century manuscript, lent by an Oxford college, does little to dispel the antiquarian, ivory-tower atmosphere. Where’s the fire?
Claudette Johnson’s monumental images of nameless black men and women against randomly colourful backgrounds would likewise fit right in at an academy; several surfaced at the Courtauld Gallery last year. Her approach is conventional beyond belief: everything is respectful, don’t-scare-the-horses, polite. Yet, Johnson’s touch can be unappealing. The way she depicts skin can make it appear blotchy. Folds in fabric resemble varicose veins.
Three lively environments constituting a “psychic landscape” by Delaine Le Bas, a British artist with a Romani background, should, on paper, provide some spark; the third, Ascension, filled with painted organdie banners, centres upon the high priestess of the Delphic oracle in antiquity, and seems intended to channel chthonic forces.
If only. Le Bas’s whimsical, faux-naif paintings of silhouetted, monochrome figures with bestial heads are pretty, not primal. Her rooms could be attractive sets for the next immersive theatrical experience. The ambience is, again, too civilised, too tame.
Which leaves Scottish-born, London-based Jasleen Kaur – who, in my view, should scoop the prize on December 3. Inside her space, objects and sounds evoke the artist’s Sikh upbringing in Glasgow. A red Ford Escort, covered with a gigantic doily, like a net catching a memory, occasionally pumps out tunes. A semi-opaque suspended ceiling cleverly supports various cryptic items while partially withholding them from view: glow-in-the-dark prayer beads; half-drunk bottles of Irn-Bru (Kaur is from north of the border, after all); even – happy birthday, Turner Prize! – a few blue and orange balloons.
Here, at last, is a little energy and effervescence. It’s refreshing. That said, the mood inside Kaur’s mysterious, temple-like room is still meditative, even downbeat, thanks, in part, to an automated harmonium’s mournful hum. It isn’t that the Turner Prize’s 40th birthday party fails to catch fire. It never gets going.
From Sept 25; information: tate.org.uk
