Turner Prize 2015 – Fur Coat Nae Knickers

In the run-up to the Turner prize exhibition (and in the excitable queue outside) there was some wondering about how Janice Kerbel would present her one-off performance of Doug from last year in the Mitchell Library. In this work, Kerbel uses the operatic form to present small stories of falling over, bear attacks and sinking at sea. It will be performed daily until January by six trained and professional opera singers, half hourly between 1-4pm – there’s a reminder of the worth of the Turner Prize. Not only in terms of the material resources to hand; but that it is able to make an otherwise small-audience single event completely free (as the original was) and widely accessible.

Assemble

Architecture and design collective Assemble

Monetising this attention and respect, the social activist art, architecture and design collective Assemble have made a showroom for their presentation. Broadly taking the form of the inside of a hollowed out terraced house, it is first of all a showcasing of their refurbishment of 10 dilapidated houses into community organised and owned affordable housing.

Using the prize as more than just a raising of profile, there is also a catalogue of some of the handmade elements that were made to make of the new community houses into a total work of art, with elements of design, art and architecture all put to the use of making welcoming and characterful homes.

---

Assemble's new form of artistic activism would make for a deserved Turner Prize winner

---

Assemble make a welcoming terracotta coloured space, enclosed from the otherwise whitewashed former industrial space of the Tramway. They’ve loaded the space with free newspaper catalogues, examples of the crafts made and videos of the social enterprise The Granby Workshop repairing the housing and making the objects on sale and in the space. Using techniques like paper marbling on home furnishings, and making textiles from block printing using timber offcuts, they're putting to good use craft techniques otherwise relegated to the minor self-therapies of the lone hobbyist.

Not only does this feel like a radical release of leisure crafts into community-building from their individualistic tendencies, but also a new framing of the public artwork. In the context of Glasgow’s recognition in the 90s by the Turner for its environmental artwork, the placement of Assemble within this context may be a signal that there’s an alternative to the kind of poetically associative works of artists like Douglas Gordon.

Thinking beyond this city, Assemble might even be a more practically useful turn on the work of Rachel Whiteread. Marking the opposite approach of her tearing down of old housing stock to make a monument to the loss of this kind of terraced housing, Assemble go on a very successful rescue mission. Taking their cue from the kind of gesamtkunstwerk of Art Nouveau and Bauhaus artist-designer-architects, their new form of artistic activism would make for a deserved winner.

Bonnie Camplin

Bonnie Camplin's Turner Prize exhibit

While Assemble take measures to build and sustain a kind of community housing, Bonnie Camplin makes a social learning resource in her corner of the Tramway. Her work is, physically speaking, some video monitors, books along most of the walls of the room and a photocopier. There’s a temptation to draw parallels with last year’s nominee Tris Vonna-Mitchell’s presentation of his research, though in 2014 it was under glass cabinets and through narrated videos by the artist.

In her presentation this year, in the screens and in the books and printouts, Camplin’s subject-matter makes oblique connections between cybernetics, dissociative personality disorder and book called Sex, Drugs and Magick. Through the provision of these resources (like Bits of Scary Terminator Tech That Already Exist), Camplin operates on the fringe of conspiracy theorising, with the Wikipedia printouts recognisable from the kind of earnest research of a serious-minded and concerned amateur.Yet Camplin’s work marks a certain professionalisation of these otherwise uneven and fragmented approaches and an academicism that gives dignity and weight to the tangent as means of structuring study.

Janice Kerbel

In between Assemble and Bonnie Camplin, there is the (at times almost empty) performance space of Janice Kerbel’s DOUG. Between these three artists, there is a perceptible motivation in this year’s prize to emphasise artworks and artists making use of new and unorthodox forms.

For DOUG, Kerbel composed a six-part vocal score based on the small, and perhaps fatal accidents familiar from cartoon violence and slapstick comedy. In Hit, an eagle drops its prey: 'Look up to hear the weight of lead/Crack of tortoise on my head.' There’s a sweet and sincere deadpan to slow and melancholy Choke, 'Stuck, stuck, stuck and there it will stay.'

Into the next song, Bear, there’s again a relaxed bucolic melody as the lyrics 'Gasp of surprise, feel heartbeat rise' are delivered. There’s a hyperbolic dolefulness in the calm reservation of hindsight. Presumably these unfortunate protagonists are already dead.

As well as the melodies themselves, the form of the six-part score is at points allowed to collapse into itself. While there are parts when the lyrics are intelligible, in others the performers lag behind and demand strained listening.

With the lyrics presented outside of the performance space, this calamitous tumbling of the structure against the content of the lyrics feels appropriate to the subject-matter. Though obviously elegant and rehearsed, there’s an inherent stumbling and tripping to the music itself. In this way, there’s an interesting strain that comes from Kerbel’s experimentation with the operatic form – marking the latest in her forays into different areas like sport, the radio-play and the circus poster.

DOUG by Janice Kerbal

Nicole Wermers

In perhaps the most conventional display of Turner Prize 2015, Nicole Wermers presents her sculptural work in which she has stitched fur coats into the recognisable Cesca chair. (Let’s raise a question here: why did they have to be real furs?) On the wall, there are ceramic recreations of the tear-off sheets used by those looking for flatmates and offering off-the-books French lessons.

Stitching the fur directly into the chair and upholstering them in fabric that imitates their linings, Wermers does not just quote in a detached way this famous design but dominates and incorporates it entirely into her work. In their sensuality and often seedy associations, combined with the (blank) ceramic tear-sheets, the room feels like an underbelly – the post-scarper cleared crimescene/function room of a raided mafia baptism breakfast.

Wermers’ work, though not marking the same departure from norms of function and practice as the others, manages to cohere well with the rest of the exhibition. While it may be the driest of the lot, it’s still got some of the sense of engagement and excitement of this year’s Turner Prize.

With Camplin’s left-field reading, slapstick opera and a showroom of socially-minded but attractive crafts, Tramway’s put on an interesting exhibition that’s really, sincerely – parenthetical pause for effect – fun.