Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  At the top of my long list was a question about the Tate’s power to legitimize artists. With regard to the Turner Prize, the strong list of previous winners acts as an endorsement to the current nominees, but Serota was still circumspect. “There is nothing sacrosanct about the status of any prize,” he said. “It will only carry authority while it continues to be awarded to artists who are held in high regard or who are seen, in a relatively short time, to have merits that perhaps people didn’t recognize at that moment. It’s only as good as its last outing.”

  Competition between artists is almost taboo in the art world, and Serota admitted that contests like the Turner Prize are “iniquitous in drawing distinctions between artists of very different kinds.” Artists are meant to find their own path, make their own rules, and compete with themselves. If they develop a habit of looking over their shoulders, they risk being derivative. But if they are completely ignorant of the hierarchical world in which they operate, then they’re in danger of being outsider artists, caught in the bog of their own consciousness, too preciously idiosyncratic to be taken seriously.* “Few artists enjoy direct competition,” said Serota. “Artists struggle to express themselves, and for that they need an inordinate amount of self-belief. In some circumstances that self-belief will shift into competitiveness, but it is rarely comfortable.” Serota took off his rimless glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I shared that discomfort when I started at the Tate, but I came to recognize that the format of the prize—the early announcement of the shortlist and the public display of four artists’ work—spurs people to reflect about art.” The prize’s promotional materials incite each viewer to “judge for yourself.” “It creates a frame,” he added emphatically, “which allows people to participate in a rather more active way than they would as viewers of a thematic exhibition organized from the point of view of a single curator.”

  Serota resisted commenting on the many awards that have been set up in the wake of the Turner Prize, but he admitted to being “exceedingly pleased” that the British artist Tacita Dean had just won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize. “Tacita was nominated for the Turner at a moment [in 1998] when she was known to relatively few people. It would have been surprising had she won that year. At that stage, being on the shortlist was a help to her.”

  Only two women artists have won the Turner Prize in its twenty-two-year history—Rachel Whiteread, in 1993, and Gillian Wearing, in 1997. On this topic, Serota spoke like a politician. “No women won the prize for the first ten years, so it is two women in the last thirteen. There is a difference.” He frowned and sighed. “I don’t think you can persuade a jury to discriminate positively. A jury has a volition of its own. If there were any sense that someone was going to win because of his or her gender or ethnicity, then the prize would lose all credibility.” He lifted his finger and placed it precisely on the table as if he were making a fingerprint. “But if you asked me, do I think the right proportion of male and female artists have won the prize in terms of the contribution of the different genders to the discourse of contemporary art over the last ten years, the answer would be no.”

  Serota has chaired the Turner Prize jury every year since 1988. Although the judges are selected for their individuality and asked to be “utterly subjective,” few remember who the judges were in any given year, and the Turner Prize is often said to represent the times. “Generally speaking, people are ambivalent about becoming a judge,” explained Serota. “They are very conscious of the fragility of new art and the vulnerability of the artists. They know their decisions will be keenly felt.” At their first meeting, he advises the judges to shortlist only artists whom they regard as capable of winning. “There shouldn’t be someone brought in as a makeweight, because it can be an ordeal to be a nominee,” he said. “I take a lot of stick from the press, but I’ve got used to it. I know that today’s story will be tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. For artists and judges, it is more difficult. They find it hurtful to be trivialized and caricatured.” According to Serota, the media have found it hard to get hold of something that they regard as sensational this year. “Maybe the prize has grown up?” he wondered. “Maybe we have moved on to another generation of artists, whose work commands a different type of attention?”

  Tomma Abts’s studio is a modest room, lit by skylight, in an artist-run maze of thirty-two ground-floor studios called Cubitt, which is located in a North London mews. Even with recently installed radiators, the air was uncomfortably cool. A trestle table with a white laminate top and two junk-shop chairs sat on the clean concrete floor. Abts’s studio was remarkably devoid of visual references—no postcards, no clippings, no art books other than her own catalogues. She employs no assistants and paints her small canvases flat on a table or in the crook of her arm. She doesn’t like having people watch her work. “Nothing happens that you can’t imagine anyway. I am just sitting there painting,” she explained.

  Abts is a well-liked member of the Cubitt co-op. She’s a regular volunteer for unpopular jobs like rent collector and a level-headed participant in committee meetings. Her studio-mates mused affectionately about her eccentricities. Apparently when someone has occasion to knock on her door, Abts opens it only a crack or emits a hushed holler to say that she’ll be out in fifteen minutes. Awfully private, she is also admirably discreet. She is the last person to fuel the emotional battles that can erupt when a group of creative people work day in, day out in the same building. So effective is she in this environment that rumor has it she was raised on a commune. When I inquired whether this was true, Abts responded irritably, “Do I have to answer that? Does it matter?”

  Abts, who is thirty-nine, was born in Germany and has lived in England for twelve years. When I visited, she wore no discernible makeup except mascara. With bright blue eyes and shiny shoulder-length hair, she is, like her paintings, controlled and beautiful in an inconspicuous way. “When I start a painting, I have no idea what it will look like,” she said in a quiet voice as she gestured at the four canvases in diverse states of completion that she had hung at eye level for my visit. Abts’s pictures are all the same size—nineteen by fifteen inches—and she produces fewer than eight paintings a year. “I wouldn’t mind if I was quicker,” she said. “Sometimes they take five years, sometimes two. Recently I completed one that I started ten years ago. I work on them in phases, with lots of breaks in between.”

  Abts begins her work with a translucent acrylic wash, then applies oil paint in precise layers to create geometric abstractions that tease the viewer with hints of figuration. “My work hovers between illusion and object, and it reminds you of things,” she explained. “For example, I create a daylight effect or a feeling of movement. Some shapes even have shadows.” In Abts’s paintings, the bright lines that pop tend to be left over from the original wash, while the somber backgrounds that recede are among the last strokes applied to the canvas. “I always work inside out,” she continued. “I know it’s finished when the work feels independent of me.”

  Abts gives all her paintings titles that she selects from a dictionary of German first names. We lingered before one called Meko, a red, white, and green painting with an op-art feel. Critics describe her paintings as “living things” that incite “inter-subjective confrontation.” Abts frets about which paintings are exhibited together and exactly how they are hung, as if she were arranging the seating plan for a dinner party and it would be a disaster if Teete sat too close to Folme. When I mentioned casually that I’d be curious to see her dictionary of first names, Abts looked alarmed, moved toward the table, tossed a sweater over the mysterious volume, and said, “It is better if it is unknown.”

  Abts doesn’t relish speaking about her work, but she has developed a professional patter. “Why, as an artist, would you want to explain yourself?” she said as she tugged on the small gold horseshoe on a thin chain around her neck. “Painting is so visual that it is very difficult to say things that don’t compromise it.” Abts ref
used to name any influences or any artists with whom she feels an affinity. She likes to keep things abstract. On the topic of what makes a good artist, she was willing to point to perfectionism: “For me, you care one hundred percent about what you do. You can’t say, ‘It’s okay like this but it could have been a different way.’ You have a total vision of how things have to be—it has to be just right.”

  One subject that Abts was keen to avoid was Chris Ofili, the last painter to win the Turner Prize, in 1998. As his girlfriend at the time, she had an intimate view of the prize’s peculiar public process. “I have been part of the London art world for eleven years,” she said as she looked out the window. “There are four artists nominated every year. You always know at least one. It doesn’t matter who they are.” It took Abts three days to decide to accept her nomination. “I want to participate in things that are about art, not artists’ personalities. I wanted to stay an artist and not suddenly become something else…” She took a long, conflicted pause and then smiled. “Like a media person.”

  Whatever the outcome of the prize, the New Museum in New York has decided to honor Abts with the first solo show to be held in its new building, in April 2008. New Museum senior curator Laura Hoptman, a loquacious intellectual and a longtime Abts fan, believes that “if Tomma had not arrived at this moment, we would have found a way to create her. It seems odd to talk about abstract painting in these terms, but I think of her work as a kind of activist art. We’re living in a hell of a time right now, and I see profundity in these small objects. These dour geometries are not just formal exercises. There is a lot of work in them, but they’re not simply about the labor. Tomma falls into the tradition of mystic painters like Barnett Newman, Piet Mondrian, or Wassily Kandinsky. She has cracked a nut that artists have been working on for eons—how to paint the inchoate. Her paintings have this ‘thing,’ this feeling, this notion of the vastness of the universe and the internal…soul.”

  It is hard to imagine two artists more dissimilar than Phil Collins and Tomma Abts. She creates slow-cooked fictions—lonely, restrained pieces that turn their back on the specificities of the everyday. He gathers raw documentary experiences, which are contingent on the participation of others and delve into their messy lives. While few artists capture the global moment as well as Collins, few artists resist our times as defiantly as Abts. Yet similarities in their histories reveal just how small this art world is. Both have shown at the infamous Wrong Gallery in New York, been feted at the Istanbul Biennial, and received the Paul Hamlyn Award, a bursary-style accolade given to artists who need “thinking space.” Finally, in this race, Collins and Abts are favored by two of Britain’s most influential art critics, the Guardian’s Adrian Searle and the Daily Telegraph’s Richard Dorment.

  Rebecca Warren, however, is the bookies’ favorite. The betting shop William Hill is the market leader in special betting on cultural events such as the Oscars, the Man Booker Prize, and the potential plot lines in forthcoming bestsellers. According to the firm’s spokesman, Rupert Adams, the results of the Turner Prize are “so random” that odds compilers do not require art world expertise. “We Google the artists, and whoever is the best known often comes up high. It suggests pedigree,” he said. “As with a horse, it is one of six or seven variants. This year we felt it was time for a painter—that’s art to the layman—so our odds at the time of the nomination, back in May, had Abts as the six-to-four favorite. But Warren has since pulled into the lead because of where people are putting their money.” With a total stake of about £40,000, the Turner is a small market that is often swayed by “friends and family betting.”

  The artist Keith Tyson admits that he had a gambling problem when he was a nominee in 2002. “I had an intellectual interest in chance as well as a fantasy of beating the laws of mathematics,” he said. “The Turner Prize was my first opportunity to bet when I could have an effect. My odds were seven to two. In a four-horse race, that is an insult. I had absolutely no choice. I’m sure it’s solely because of the bets I put on myself that I went from being the underdog to the favorite. I won’t say how much I took home, but I won more from betting than I did from winning what was then a twenty-thousand-pound prize.”

  One day in early November, Mark Titchner, who was then ranked third in the bookie’s standings (odds: three to one), was speaking to fifty or so visitors in his room at Tate Britain. A bashful hippie type with rock-star sheen, Titchner had already acquired a handful of groupies—hip young women with nose rings and cleavages on proud display. At thirty-three, Titchner is the youngest of this year’s nominees and positioned as the taste of a younger generation; his work has the avid backing of art college students, and the Acoustiguide that accompanied his exhibition features commentary from the lead singer of a grind-core band called Napalm Death. Titchner’s room was purposely overloaded: a kinetic black-and-white sculpture spun to psychedelic effect; television monitors flashed Rorschach ink blots; a giant red-and-black billboard poster read, “Tiny Masters of the World Come Out” and three large wooden sculptures (respectively evoking a pulpit, a tree, and a table covered in car batteries) were attached to each other by wires and said to amplify the psychic mood. The room hummed with activity.

  Slouching with his hands in the pockets of his black jeans, Titchner explained the spinning sculpture, which is called Ergo Ergot: “Ergo refers to René Descartes’s famous statement, ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ Ergot is a fungus with hallucinogenic properties that was synthesized to make LSD.” Titchner has no problem with words, but, self-conscious about being perceived as pretentious, he hedged his way to a conclusion: “I guess it is kind of like the case that reality is not what it seems to be. We build our belief systems with fragments of faith.” He swept his hair out of his eyes, then asked, as if thinking aloud, “What does it mean for a work of art to succeed in this context? People like it? It’s bought for a lot of money? Critics like it?” He stopped short of mentioning the judges.

  After the crowd dispersed, Titchner lingered in his exhibition. He told me that coming back to the exhibition was a little bit like returning to the scene of the crime. It was difficult because “you start questioning some of the decisions you’ve made.” Like the other nominees, he found that the prize process made him uneasy. “It’s cool to have qualified,” he said. “But I think you could get obsessed and spend all day Googling yourself.” Titchner couldn’t bear to read the press. “Right now, I’m not interested,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if he’d just caught wind of a revolting smell. “I’ve read stuff in the past and got angry when I felt that the work had been done a disservice. It’s nothing to do with me, really.” He looked at his feet and then slowly swept the oak floor with his gaze. “For an artist, the most important thing is to entertain yourself on a daily basis. And you want to be able to sustain a level for a long period and actually get better.”

  I told Titchner that I was under the impression that most artists, whatever their odds, think they’re going to win. First, friends, dealers, and other believers surround the artists with support; any nay-saying tends to be done behind their back. Second, the minute the artists agree to participate in the prize, they enter a strange zone where they need huge amounts of self-belief in order to weather the public scrutiny. “Thinking you’re going to win is a good way of torturing yourself,” Titchner admitted with a pained expression. “My contemporaries have been very supportive, but a few have said, ‘Oh yeah, well done. The show looks great, but you won’t win.’”

  After reading a feature on Rebecca Warren in the British fashion magazine Harpers & Queen, in which the sculptor likened herself to a “pervy middle-aged provincial art teacher,” I pestered the Tate press office yet again for an interview. With five days left until the final judgment, I was offered a last minute, non-negotiable, one-hour slot. When we sat down in a meeting room at Tate Britain, Warren wore jeans, a black blazer, and green leather boots that had the air of being just one pair in a considerable collection of trophy footwear
. Her dark hair was pulled back in a disheveled ponytail. “I’ve tried not to think about the prize in a competitive way, because it would involve second-guessing the best way to work, and it might affect the art,” she told me. “I wanted to be as true as I could to the lineage of what I’ve been doing. Eventually things crystallize. Your work takes on a form that’s recognizable, or otherwise you’ll never be known. It has to become apparent that ‘Oh, Rebecca Warren makes that kind of thing.’”

  Although Warren is clearly determined about her career, she was curiously ambivalent about her work. “I don’t necessarily love the things that I’m making,” she said. “It’s about allowing yourself to accept what you do.” When I asked the tough question What makes a great work of art? she ventured a tentative answer. “A great work,” she said, “allows you to look at it without it nagging you. It’s not that it’s open to any interpretation, but it’s not got a limited fixed meaning.” Warren was nevertheless amused by the tabloids’ reductive antics. Back when the shortlist was announced, the Daily Star ran a story headlined “Booby Prize for Art.” It depicted one of her figures with gargantuan buttocks next to a speech bubble that said, “Does my bum look big in this?” Warren’s reaction was unequivocal: “Once you’ve got in the Daily Star, you just think, this is brilliant.”

  Warren’s work bears witness to the legacy of Young British Artists, or YBAs, an acronym coined by Charles Saatchi. The YBAs were part aesthetic tendency, part brand identity, part social group. Their diverse, generally figurative artistic output shared an ability to trigger media “scandals.” Damien Hirst was for many years considered the ringleader of this at once amorphous and cliquey part of the London art world. It was initially affiliated with the art school at Goldsmiths but has since tended to move in the hinterland of the White Cube gallery. When I asked Warren about her attitude to the term, she admitted, “I’m PYBA—post–Young British Artist. I’m the same age, but I’ve come along later. I’m attached, but not quite attached. I know most of those people, but I also know the younger generation.”