It looks so much better in the dark

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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The immediately notorious exhibit of this year's Turner Prize is Martin Creed's vast room in Tate Britain, emptied of everything but light and darkness alternating for five seconds. It is not much of an aesthetic offering, but I struggled with the potentially intellectual business of it as, possibly, an image of the first day of Creation according to Genesis, until an interpreter employed by the Tate claimed it to be a metaphor for mortality. "I think life is like that," he said, "one minute it's on, the next minute it's off" - now there's a man destined for a brief encounter with a London bus.

I returned another day, this time to witness a briefly dramatic variation - the lights switched off and stayed off. The five seconds of darkness doubled, trebled, quadrupled and extended beyond count - not utter darkness but dimness, you must understand, not the darkness of oblivion but the shroud of gloom on a sunless winter day, which made the room look as though ... as though the light had been switched off. Was there some intentionally catastrophic implication in this change of rhythm? Were we being subjected to the unnerving and the unpredictable? Were our sleep patterns and body rhythms under disruptive attack? Was this indeed an allegory of death as the Tate's tame interpreter had implied? Most visitors seemed not to notice the difference between light and dark, seemed wholly unaware of the room's apocalyptic possibilities, but simply milled about as crowds do when nothing focuses attention, aimless, yet aware that they were deprived of half the art show; newcomers to the room noticed nothing and walked on in search of more stimulating pleasures.

Only a single German tourist, diligently Baedekerisch, demanded in the accents of Dennis the Dachshund to be told where the art might be. The guard said, "This is it," dutifully parroted the Tate's official explanation of the piece as allegorical, life and death, coming and going, Heaven and Hell and a few embellishments of his own, and ended his exegesis with the consolation: "Don't worry mate, it's much better in the dark."

Better or not, it should strike the jury of the Turner Prize as alarming that most of the people in that gallery either failed to notice that such an apparently important work of art had ceased to function or were too intimidated to ask what and where it was. The incident illustrates the fact that despite contemporary art's massive propaganda, public funding, seeming popularity and apparently accepted cultural importance, most people are not sure what it is supposed to do or be; in their uncertainty they remain silent, and in their silence their numbers are counted by the Tate to legitimise the now ludicrous Turner Prize.

This year's exhibition is the weakest yet, its only remarkable achievement. The feeblest of this year's hopefuls is Isaac Julien, a film-maker who attempts to combine poetry, dance and art, but in doing so loses the best qualities of each; here he subverts the stereotype of the cowboy, but it was better done by Blazing Saddles long ago. Richard Billingham is probably the best known of the short-list for his brutally frank photographs of his alcoholic father, his mother and brother; these are images so ordinary that one wonders how they could ever have been classified as art rather than sociological journalism.

And the probable winner? Mike Nelson. He is the most robust of the four candidates and his installation the most physical; it is a system of passages and storage compartments that resemble every garage, shed, attic and cellar stocked by the home handyman, the raw materials of the installation artist laid bare. There is a certain frank honesty about it, but very little more.

This year's cheque for £20,000 will be handed out on 9 December by Madonna. Some have interpreted this endorsement by an irrelevant celebrity as cheapening the prize, but the calculated exploitation of so widely known and popular a figure is of no importance - what matters is sound content and serious judgment, but there is no evidence of either. If the jury has an ounce of sense it will award the prize not to any of the candidates but to charity.

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