THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25
Chloe went to her first open call, which happened to be at the Wilhemina agency, as I waited across a quaint, narrow, cobbled street in an Italian coffeeshop. How I love Italians and their coffee! A photographer came outside with a stick thin model and took photos in the alley-like street. When Chloe came out, she looked amazing, but no luck. And they were rude. Open calls are the worst!
We did some running around to stores after that from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Circle, back to Zara, and eventually found our way to the Tate Modern, excited to see the exhibition of the winners of the 2018 Turner awards.
TURNER AWARD WINNERS AT THE TATE
Special exhibitions charge a fee, but we were happy to pay…until we got inside. I kept hearing B’s comments from the night before about artists’ stretching to seem intelligent but creating work that lacked substance. I found creative imagination and subtlety absent. The messages were either totally evasive or hit like sledgehammers. No delights of fancy, tricksters, or thought provocation.
At the Vancouver International Film Festival a year ago, I had the good fortune of hearing filmmaker Leon Lee. He was there to introduce his most recent film about the prisons in China, but he is best known for his earlier film about the harvesting of organs from people in poor countries to sell on the black market to the rich. The message I took away from the evening was this: Lee said if people want to learn facts about something, they go to Google. His job (and I would say any artist’s job) is to deliver a story that will make people feel. This thinking was sorely lacking among Turner award winners.
The first winner was forensic architecture, a collective of artists, who documented an Israeli invasion of a Bedouin village in the Nagreb area in 2014. During the invasion a teacher was murdered. The collective filmed the invasion and then used their footage and photographs to try to redress lies in the press and prompt justice. Their efforts have been almost entirely ignored by authorities. Was their point that no amount of proof and documentation matter?
The video prize winner, Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen, looks at the insidious influence of colonialism and the impact of pressure exerted by Super Powers on small countries. We found his videos boring, pompous, slow paced for no apparent reason, linear and documentary-like, and still hard to interpret. The exhibition description seemed entirely different than the video. As a three screen project, beautifully shot in film, the video’s quality was excellent, and expensive, which created a subliminal, mixed message — the video cost lots of money. Was the money coming from a colonial country to finance it?
Mohaiemen had a second video, a fictionalized story, which may have been more interesting, but we were done. Chloe wondered if maybe he meant them to be comic because they were so ridiculously pretentious. If only it were so.
Luke Willis Thompson, projected one 35 mm film of someone’s skin sculpture, and another of a person of African descent staring at the camera. No sound. Too bothered to read the description. Come on! Next and thankfully last was Charlotte Prodger’s video. Another unimaginative viewer experience. She read from her journal about being gay, coming out, blah blah, with shots of her feet and the Scottish countryside.
THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
Thank heavens for the rest of the Tate. We saw two amazing Chris Ofili paintings, one of a crying woman, another a deep blue with a barely perceptible image of a struggle with police. We also watched a video about the black protests in Tottinghill in the 1950s. A straight up documentary that was informational and interesting.
The find for me, though, was a piece by Keith Piper called “Go West, Young Man,” from1987, an incredibly powerful piece about psychological consequences of using words to describe people, in this case, people of African descent. He visually illustrates how the labels used by white people — monsters, sexualized savages, brutes — are internalized by those who are called the names. Repercussions on self-esteem and image are as can be expected. I also really liked a video called “Raking Light” by James Richards, which was evocative and ethereal.
