It comes as little surprise that Jesse Darling has won the 2024 Turner Prize, among a shortlist that was otherwise socially committed, worthy, obtuse and overdone – not to mention a teensy bit dull.
Ghislaine Leung’s reinstallation of the aluminium pipes and ducting that once provided the ventilation system of the Netwerk Aalst bar in Belgium, which she acquired and now occupies her space in the Towner in Eastbourne, was always going to be a hard sell. Rory Pilgrim’s collaborations with groups of socially deprived and vulnerable people led not only to filmed interviews, the creation of a six-part oratorio and a film lasting more than an hour, but also an installation featuring his own artworks as well as those of his collaborators. It all added up to a show of diminishing returns.
The only other contender who I thought might win was Birmingham-based Barbara Walker, whose large-scale portraits, drawn directly on the wall of the Towner Gallery in charcoal, are accompanied by meticulous copies of the soul-destroying official forms and other paperwork that some members of the Windrush generation have had to provide in order to prove that they are not “undocumented migrants”. Walker copied these much handled, squalid bits of paper, right down to the last detail. Her larger portraits capture something of the stoicism and forebearance of their subjects. Both the strength and weakness of Walker’s art is its literalness, though it brings with it a sense of quiet outrage about the kind of society in which we live.
In contrast, Darling almost revels in our social collapse. Net curtains and coils of barbed wire, closed blinds and shunted crowd-control barriers, washing lines and maypoles garlanded with filthy bunting and crime-scene tape, faded flags and skewed, careening railway tracks leading nowhere, all evidence of a country on the skids. With its slumped shelves of ring-binders stuffed with concrete, the bits of body-casts and hammers, the doilies and the bandaged crutches, Darling’s art has a wretched playfulness. Snagging on the details, I almost laughed out loud. Darling’s theatrical installation has a gleeful, thrown-together energy.
Tate always makes a little explanatory film, explaining each artist’s works, and Darling hijacked the usually reverent tone in freewheeling style. He took the film crew on a circuitous road trip, touring rubbish dumps and bleak brownfield sites, and tried to penetrate the security zones of the UK’s biggest container port, at Felixstowe in Suffolk. “Jesse, where are we?” wails one of the film crew. On the way the artist told jokes (how many performance artists does it take to change a lightbulb?), and revealed that he had a psychotic episode in a supermarket vegetable aisle in 2012.
This is all of a piece with Darling’s art, which is full of personality, vulnerability, weird detours and alarming collisions of ideas and materials. With Darling, you never know where you’ll end up till you get there.
