For its 40th anniversary, the Turner prize returns to Tate Britain after national outings to museums from Liverpool and Coventry to Eastbourne and Hull. For the next five months, the upper galleries at Millbank will be entirely devoted to the 2024 shortlist. And if, as the old saying goes, we get the Turner prize we deserve, then our aesthetic times are apparently not worth the ticket (£14 for non-members), being the most insipid, issue-based, dutiful and conventional trudge of a show in years.
It doesn’t look like this on paper. The quartet of artists is properly international: Filipino, Roma, Black British, Scottish Sikh. They range in age from 38 to 65, and work in everything from drawing and painting to textile, installation, sculpture and soundscape. There is a three-metre long reprise of an Imelda Marcos bracelet, a film of footsteps projected on spectral organdie on the floor, a suite of larger-than-life oil portraits recently shown at the Courtauld. There are so many exhibits, in fact, that the titles run like dense stock inventories along the walls; so much stuff and yet so little to look at.
This is a read-around experience in other ways too. It opens with screeds of history from the Manila-born Pio Abad. To say that you learn from this sage and well-read artist (images of his latest books, from James Baldwin to Roberto Bolaño, are incorporated into meticulous ink drawings of African masks and swords from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) would be true, but an understatement.
From Abad’s wall texts, you learn about the sphinx sculptures at Blenheim Palace that bear the likeness of Gladys Deacon, a former Duchess of Marlborough, who owned a pearl and diamond tiara that once belonged to the Romanovs, but was auctioned by Stalin at Christie’s in 1927. After Deacon’s death, it was snapped up by Marcos. This is as startling as the two bronze diadems Abad is showing, alas, are not.
So too is the desperate tale of the Philippine islander “Prince Giolo”, captured with his mother by traders of enslaved people and bought by the pirate explorer William Dampier around 1686. Giolo was put on display in Fleet Street around 1692 and died soon after of smallpox. There is much more to learn of his tragic life from Abad’s excellent text and his presentation of an illustrated manuscript from St John’s College, Oxford. But his laser engravings of Giolo’s tattooed arm on marble panels contribute very little, beyond the commemorative act of their making.
And nothing in Abad’s show is quite as affecting as a small watercolour painted by George Le Clerc Egerton, chief of staff of the 1897 Benin punitive expedition. This is a horrifyingly lightsome little record, done to illustrate his journal, of a group of Benin masks propped on an altar stained with the blood of the dead. Abad has the keenest sense of the increasingly degraded pages of this journal as visual evidence, too, of the appalling violence in Africa. I look forward to reading a book, one day, by Abad himself.
Can he have been consulted about the soundtrack bleeding straight from the next gallery into his? This happens all the way through the 2024 Turner prize show; the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan against 90s rave, against reggae, against random wailing screams – such crass curatorial orchestration.
Jasleen Kaur’s recreation of her 2023 Glasgow Tramway show – itself an evocation of growing up Sikh in Pollokshields – throbs with music, from worship bells to techno to an automated Indian harmonium. An Axminster carpet stretches before you, apparently invoking a devotional space; a Perspex roof hangs above you, apparently the blue-grey of a Glasgow sky. Through it you see Irn-Bru, a funeral wreath spelling out Vera, tracksuits with Sikh emblems: more stuff upon stuff.
A replica of her father’s red Ford Escort is draped in an outsize Scottish doily (though this is also, apparently, a reference to the cotton trade). Photographs of Glaswegian protesters successfully blocking an immigration raid in 2021 are scattered on the floor. Why? Why is this up and that down, why this cliche, that position, why draped? Without the wall texts, nothing coheres.
Delaine Le Bas’s sprawling installation runs through one gallery into another, then another and another, as if it might amount to something. White paper flowers, white fabric enclosures dripping with painted words and images – a human heart, walking legs, weird birds, witchy figures. Round the corner is a slumped horse of black cloth, a glade of faux seaweed, fabric fluttering as you pass, reflected in hazy silver walls.
The final room quotes the delphic oracle – “know thyself” – and seems to try for ancient overtones. But the look is all pastel silliness and what the artist calls her “Gipsy-hippy-punk” aesthetic. Immersive installations have been everywhere for decades and I couldn’t stand this one’s wilful clumsiness.
And so to Claudette Johnson’s oil pastel portraits of Black sitters, which set out to challenge their invisibility in our art galleries long ago and have now become monumental in scale. Delicate, highly realistic, the medium sometimes grazing the surface to leave scant traces, sometimes emphasising the furrows and folds of a face, or clothing, with greater insistence, these are entirely traditional (part of their political point).
Extremely sensitive on a small scale – the page of a sketchbook, for instance – they lose power when enlarged to several feet, especially when the focus shifts from face to body. The best work here is the most adventurous – the densely worked face of a reclining woman, in-turned, stately in her exhaustion, her body no more than a few sparse contour lines.
The Turner prize has had trouble attracting sponsors of late – and no wonder. It feels too strenuous to call for its end, on the basis of such a weak show, but it seems to have run out of originality and fire. There are far stronger artists out there, beyond this narrow and doctrinaire shortlist, so this is not even a reliable index of the times. Johnson is so venerable, esteemed and hard-working, she must surely win. But those considerations have very little – like the prize itself, these days – to do with the power of art.
