Walking around the Tate Britain exhibition of the pieces shortlisted for the Turner Prize, it was very tempting to dismiss them out of hand. Listening to the artists discussing their work on the Channel Four 3 min slots some days later however gave me cause for reflection. Their works present themselves as strange objects each on the shore of distant islands beyond the seas of ordinariness, neither speaking with each other nor with ordinary mortals. Of course in our post modern culture such remoteness in itself is considered enough to make them each a cause célèbre, but is that enough?  Should ‘not-understandingness’ be a criterion for excellence?

We are told that these artists are understood by a select audience but I wonder how true that is. Does that select audience really understand or genuinely share some truth that the rest of us are missing? Is this select audience being regularly transformed by these works as earlier generations have been transformed by the masters of the past? Of course new work often has a period of ‘challenge’ but Carl Andre’s bricks have been sitting in the Tate now for over 40 years and the screwed up pieces of A4 paper were mailed to members of the art world over 15 years ago. For me it is time to take stock, if such conceptual work is to be considered art, at best it is partial and at worst too thin to be seen at a cultural level. Partial because it is generated largely by the mind and therefore remains a commodity only for the mind; which is of course a partial reading of humanity and too thin, because a work cannot be seen if it remains essentially private and unable to communicate with a wider audience.

Culture is by definition a collective phenomenon, so a central quality of any art work has got to be its ability to communicate. We have got to ask the question therefore, if these Turner shortlisted schemes are put forward as art, by what means are they expecting to communicate? Is it enough to assume that if a form means something to an artist, that it will mean the same to everyone else? Clearly that cannot be the case. We each have a unique view on the world which our postmodern culture validates. So by what means are these pieces meant to communicate? If the post modern edict that ‘anything goes’ has run its course, by what criteria are we to judge the works of the new culture? Well those criteria have surely got to be some form of clear communication that sets up a positive connection with and within culture, in my view this has three separate but sometimes related qualities which if justified will not only explain the grounds of communication but will also suggest a way of reintroducing beauty into art. Indeed beauty may once again become a criterion in the judgement of art. These three qualities are:

1. Ordinariness: generating links to the exiting culture
2. Good form
3. Reconciliation of dissimilars

Each of these three criteria can arguably stand alone and can be sufficient in themselves but they will often be interrelated. Let’s examine them briefly in turn. Firstly what do I mean by ordinariness? The ordinary is the ground state of culture, which is of course constantly being extended. A table for example is part of this ground state, in the distant past we would have eaten off the earth or perhaps a flat stone, at some point someone created a table. Its usefulness communicated and established its continued use in culture. Other artefacts similarly established themselves, bowls, jugs, wheels, and eventually more subtle pieces that spoke beyond the utilitarian, about the sensual and emotional world of humanity, in painted and sculpted artifice that remained connected to the ground state of culture through the figurative. Within this first mode of communication the artist is simply working within the established boundaries of culture, a well crafted artefact can reinforce, extend or refresh ideas already in circulation.

The second of these qualities; ‘good form’, remains central to culture, despite the fads and fashions of recent times because it is essentially derived from the ground state of our perceptual systems. The nervous system sees, feels and hears the world in coherent form. It is our nervous systems that find the order we experience in the natural world but also in the human extension of that world in what we call our culture. We cannot separate ourselves from this perceptual reality; it is part of what we are which is why it promises to be a return to beauty. In this mode of communication the artist is using her form making skills to create an artefact that is so well composed that it resonates profoundly and speaks directly with our nervous systems.

The third way that communication takes place is through the reconciliation of dissimilars. If an artist has adopted this method of communication it is because she has experienced something which she cannot communicate within the ‘ordinary’ established aspect of culture and needs to speak beyond the edge of the ordinary. To do this she must find the similarities within dissimilars. She must find a way to show us how previously contradictory phenomena are able to be reconciled, how an aspect of the world beyond the edge of the ordinary can be related back to the ordinary. This aspect of culture may initially need a period of time to be assimilated by the culture, not because the work is seeking difference for differences sake but because of a compelling need on the part of the artist to share her experience of the world. This is a relatively rare aspect of culture; it is the most vital aspect of culture, a relentless process of unification, a process that reveals what we might call beauty in its pulling together of our post modern worlds.

Well this piece clearly needs filling out but it is an offering. It may raise some question about how the Turner Prize nominees seek to communicate with their public or whether they have no such ambition and seek rather to remain in their private worlds.

Silent Lion

This has been an interesting week, in quite separate ways the power of architecture to affect lives was raised as an issue by two people but from very differing perspectives.

A few days ago I had a discussion with a politician who talked about being shown around the Houses of Parliament by a lady who outlined the way the building influenced the behaviour of the users. The building was presented as having a very authoritarian, masculine form. Most people would not have been aware of this but with just a moment’s reflection; it is easy to see how the form of the debating chamber for example sets in stone the politics of conflict, or should I say opposition. I quoted Winston Churchill’s lines to her, “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” but added that she was lucky to have had such a tour with someone perceptive enough to make such observations. The conversation then moved to the buildings of Plymouth and our shared confusion that a building as modest as the Plymouth Civic Centre could merit being listed by English Heritage.

To me this clearly seems to be a decision made by visitors to the city rather than those of us living here. From an experiential perspective the building has offered little to the inhabitants of the city. It is a prima facia community building but does nothing to speak about community. Rather its form is strident in the urban landscape standing as a dominant masculine form more suggestive of civic control than civic community. One can only imagine that its English Heritage champions were more concerned with its modest pedigree, seen from an academic historicist perspective rather than from the experiential perspective of the Plymothians who use it. It is interesting however, though perhaps not surprising, that both these political buildings have such controlling forms.

The second time that this issue was raised this week was at a lecture delivered by Professor Woudhuysen. He was talking about future trends in architecture and the construction industries. His presentation was filled with critical figures and statistics including the £4,000.00 price tag he normally charged for is lectures. His position was largely an overview, often remaining at a national or even global level in its breadth and perspective. His offerings to the future of architecture derived from this global perspective, his criticism of other architectural gurus, such as Lord Richard Rogers and Prince Charles were scathing, and any models that he hinted at for his audience were distant and lacking context. At one point the brutal high-rise dwellings of Hong Kong were offered as a model for the housing shortages in the UK. Even if the 1947 planning acts were repealed as he suggested, a position with which I have a certain sympathy, his proposals remained almost totally without a qualitative dimension. This lack of an experiential take on architecture was typified by his derision of Winston Churchill’s remark that by coincidence I quoted earlier …. “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” His futuristic posture seemed to release him of the need to engage with the real time experience of the ‘now’ rendering him unable to read the qualitative affects of architecture. Although his macho lecturing style won him some raucous laughs from his largely male student audience, I suspect that the future lies closer to the female readers of the political architecture mentioned earlier rather than with a Futures Guru that lives more in his head than his body. Fortunately and somewhat ironically I believe that his kind of take on the future belongs to the past.