It’s not often you laugh in a contemporary art exhibition, but I did in Jesse Darling’s room at the Turner prize show. There’s an energy and wit to his sculptures, made from crash barriers and red-and-white plastic tape; to his jaunty, priapic candles attached to walls; to his hammers bound up with ribbons and bells and placed in glass cases (their inherent masculinity spoofed and transformed, as if they were fetish objects from some future religion). “This was the most public gig I’m ever going to do in Britain,” he says of the exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne gallery. “I mean, the British public reasonably don’t care about contemporary art, because they’ve got plenty of bad things to deal with, especially at the moment. But the Turner prize does feel a bit like public property, and rightly so. So the whole British thing in this show is quite on the nose. I won’t do it again.”
Darling, 41, lives in Berlin: his observation of the state of Britain is that of someone who has become something of an outsider. He has talked of his shock at coming back to a post-Covid UK that seemed dilapidated and run down. Berlin, with its decent childcare system and welfare support, feels more hospitable. But the exhibition is not only about Britain. It is, more generally, about the impermanence of things; the fragility of what we take for granted. The unusually engaging film produced to accompany the show (such films are an annual part of the Turner prize, usually a dutiful studio interview to contextualise the work) makes that clear.
