|
 Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain which oversees the
annual awards for contemporary art, said the works of the four
finalists had "jumped out" in comparison to works by other
artists seen by the jury.
The finalists, whose names were announced in May, are Duncan
Campbell, who was born in Ireland and now lives and works in
Glasgow, James Richards of Wales, Tris Vonna-Michell of England
and Ciara Phillips, a Canadian living in Scotland.
Curtis said there was a much greater emphasis this year on
videos and projections the jury had seen in a number of places,
including the Venice Biennale art show, than on gallery works,
like painting or sculpture.
Three of the four installations feature slide projections or
videos that range in length from 10 minutes to almost an hour.
"Most of the works this year are audio-visual, it just
happened," said Sofia Karamani, the museum's co-curator of
contemporary art. "It is very similar to how every one of us
these days deals with images, how there is so much around, so
much visual information, and we take some of it to be our own
and we appropriate it and recontextualize it.
"I would say it's a lot to do with the Internet, a lot to do
with how we understand, collect and disseminate information."
The winner of the 100,000 pound ($163,000) prize, which every
year touches off a debate in the British media about whether the
entries are art or not, will be announced in December.
Past winners of the 30-year-old prize include Damien Hirst,
Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley.
Two of the installations deal very directly with how images are
used in society. Richards filmed censored sexual images in Tokyo
library books, showing how they had literally been sandpapered
to make them unrecognizable.
Campbell has used a famous 1971 image of Irish Republican Army
fighter Joe McCann, sometimes called "the Che Guevara of the
IRA", to show how images can be turned into commodities of mass
culture.
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Lizzie Carey-Thomas, curator of contemporary art at the museum, said
Richards's video showed defaced images in books of works by the
photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Wolfgang Tillmans, both of
whom produced explicitly homosexual photos, as well as the work of
Man Ray, who photographed many female nudes.
"These books adhere to a still current law in Japan which forbids
any institution from holding material that could be seen to elicit
arousal in the viewer, so these pages of the art books have been
physically and quite violently sandpapered out."
Campbell meanwhile has used the image of McCann, who was shot dead
by British soldiers less than a year after the photo was taken, to
show how images become part of pop culture, to the point where the
picture of McCann and his M1 rifle was emblazoned on T-shirts and
Christmas stockings.
"Campbell explores how a single image that reflects a powerful
moment of opposition or resistance can come to embody a violent or
ideological struggle and how the meaning of the struggle changes
when the image becomes a commodity," the exhibition catalog says.
Vonna-Michell's installation includes slides based on a story about
his mother's childhood in post-war Germany "with an accompanying
intimate and calm monologue that reflects the personal nature of the
story", a press release said.
Phillips, the only one not to use videos or slides, has filled two
rooms with more than 400 colorful, abstract-design handmade
screenprints, pasted onto the gallery walls. But her work, too,
includes images of people and huge, colorful renderings of capital
letters.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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