By Lydia Firth
The Turner Prize is considered the most prestigious art award in Britain. In 2023, the winner was Jesse Darling, with an exhibition involving a series of erratically distorted modern objects including crowd control barriers and barbed wire. The apocalyptic scene is both disturbing and humorous; it’s almost unclear whether the humour lies in the cartoonish contortions of the objects which make them look strangely animated, or in the simplistic, haphazard, (dare I say shoddy) nature of the art – which was awarded the biggest honour in the British art world. The Turner Prize is notoriously divisive, with traditionalists scorning entries like Darling’s, reflecting on what they perceive to be the decline of art, disdaining the fact that Romantic painter JMW Turner’s name is associated with contemporary ‘nonsense’.
For many, this exhibition would prompt the reductive phrase uttered in many a modern art gallery, “I could do that”. There are several responses to this: the camp that would reply, “yeah but you didn’t” (and then slightly risk validating any art or any artist by default), and the camp that would claim “you just don’t get it”. Perhaps the latter is the case for the uninformed viewer of Darling’s work, as by reading more about his winning exhibition, I began to appreciate it a bit more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it required much skill to assemble tattered bunting and old office files, but reading about Darling’s intentions and beliefs helped to somewhat enlighten his detritus. The arranged objects evoke themes of nationality, identity, austerity and immigration. On further examination, the objects are manipulated precisely and cleverly: the barriers are drunkenly tilted, union jack flags sag mournfully, crutches lean against the wall on standby. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle deemed it ‘a theatre of last things’. I think Darling somewhat captures the zeitgeist, which I suppose is easy, and worrying, when it can be represented by a series of broken things.
For me, it’s a fine line between defending this type of art from those who would immediately dismiss Darling’s work as clumsy and deny any validity to its political and social sentiment, but also having the integrity to question whether it is good. Of course, whether art is good or not is mainly down to the viewer, or in the Turner Prize’s case, a jury who commended Darling’s evocation of “a familiar yet delirious world invoking societal breakdown”. Conceptualising ‘good’ art raises the point that our definition of what art should do, or be, has shifted: we can surely assume the impressionists would look upon this room of fragmented debris and be utterly repulsed. Our conception of what can be defined as art has widened – now, art does not exist solely as an object of absolute aesthetic beauty, but it can also be inherently unaesthetic, political commentary, akin to Darling’s. Through championing the latter, we must not let the former slip away, or be dismissed for frivolity. What is visual art if not somewhat superficial?
Where I find most difficulty with Darling’s exhibition, and then with much of conceptual art, is that it fails to stand alone without any supplementary literature. I fear this has become a chronic issue in contemporary art. The point of visual art is that it is visual; we shouldn’t need to read to understand what the artist is trying to do, because then it is only excelling with the help of literature. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling for me, walking into an exhibition open-minded and yet still desperately looking for something to read that will enlighten the artwork. Art should stand alone without a literary crutch, and it should provoke the viewer (whether emotionally, intellectually, viscerally), not just mystify them.
I am undecided on Darling’s landscape of broken and discarded things. I would defend it from reactionary traditionalists, highlighting the warped barriers that allude to painfully current themes such as the right to protest and political boundaries. I would also refrain from calling it excellent art. Whether this speaks to its failure, or perhaps its success, I’ll leave up to you.
Image credit: The Art Newspaper