What a dreadful fix we are in, socially, environmentally, politically. You name it. What now seems worth doing or making as an artist – to respond or not to our dystopian crisis, is the big question. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This year’s Turner prize show, at the Towner Eastbourne, does both.
The biggest piece in Ghislaine Leung’s show is the repurposed ventilation system that was removed from the Netwerk Aalst bar in Belgium in 2017, following the introduction of a public smoking ban. Leung acquired all the redundant metal piping and ducting and as much of it that fits has now been slotted and bolted together to climb around the doorway and run across the floor at the Towner. Originally slung from the ceiling in the bar, Leung dictates that it now be attached to the floor. She calls her plain descriptions of her works, and their instructions, “scores”, and the relation between her ideas and their physical manifestation is similar to the relationship between a musical score and its performance. Other works riff off a similar rulebook, or score sheet, and Leung’s art has a ridiculous sort of rigour. Hers is an “exciting rethinking of art production and practice”, the exhibition booklet tells us. One might take issue with the “exciting” part.
In another work, the score tells us that a fountain is installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound. Which it does, gushing away in a low steel drum, and leaking on to the floor. It almost cancels thought. There’s a carefully disguised absurdist streak to Leung’s straight-faced scores. Or at least, I hope there is.
Jesse Darling’s wonky steel pedestrian barriers and skewed railway tracks (the sort, apparently, used in the mining industry) tilt awkwardly and lean drunkenly and the tracks pitch and yaw and make their way through a hole gouged high up in the wall. Dismal and faded union jack bunting flaps from a maypole decorated with unravelling warning tape, and bandaged aluminium crutches lean against the walls for support. Everything here is bent and busted and unfit for purpose, a theatre of last things, the damaged and the precarious, the walking wounded and the patched-up. Frilly net curtains and tangles of razor wire decorate the entrance.
Sculptural ideas and a sort of Beckettian fortitude and humour keeps it all stumbling along. “The zombie apocalypse is now, this is it!” shouts Darling in the little Tate films that profile each of the artists. Darling’s film hijacks the standard format and takes the film crew on a road trip to Felixstowe container port. A journey to the end of the world, it is better, even, than his show.
The wretched official forms and pieces of documentation that members of the Windrush generation who had been denied their lawful immigration status had to provide in order to avoid deportation are made all the more squalid by being re-drawn and enlarged in Barbara Walker’s Burden of Proof. Every crease and smudge, all the weary typewritten questions and scrawled addendums of these official forms and bits of paperwork are carefully recorded, tracing the bureaucratic processes that these pieces of evidence have gone through. The papers look worn out.
Portraits of the victims of the scandal overlay the dreary forms and proofs of employment status. Walker records all the minutiae with scrupulous objectivity. She’s also drawn a number of portraits of those who have been affected by the scandal directly on the wall at the Towner, at huge scale. Burden of Proof is made all the more painful by Walker’s straightforward approach. It is hard not to come out screaming by the end of it.
Rory Pilgrim’s RAFTS offers a bit of relief. Working over several years with members of Green Shoes Arts, a project in Dagenham and Barking, London for the socially deprived and vulnerable people, Pilgrim has made a long film of his collaboration, which also gave rise to a six-part oratorio, in which the idea of the raft as a support structure and a means of escape became the subject. People compose poems, sit on park benches, commune with trees. An unemployed man can’t survive on minimum wage. He’d like to see universal credit and flying cars.
Interviews with the participants and scenes of young people dancing in a Dagenham stadium (to a song written by Pilgrim) intersperse poetry readings and song, with an orchestra (in which Pilgrim plays harp and piano) and choir. Pilgrim’s oratorio was later recorded live at a concert venue. Each of these films lasts over an hour. Artworks by the participants in RAFTS are also hung about the space among Pilgrim’s own delicate little paintings and drawings. He has described himself as having a queer, camp sensibility, and I think he plays up a certain preciousness in his art. His films and social practice are more interesting, and full of hope and heart. But give me the zombie apocalypse any day, and a win for Jesse Darling.
