30 MARCH 2012 | A-N MAGAZINE | REVIEWS 31REVIEWS | A-N MAGAZINE | MARCH 2012

Why George Shaw should have won the Turner PrizeBaltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 21 October 2011 – 8 January 2012 I always take an interest in art’s biggest bauble, the Turner Prize, and usually have my favourite entrants, but for once, in 2011, I was actually excited about a nominee. It was through the prize I learned about the work of George Shaw, comprising of paintings, in Humbrol enamel model paint, of seemingly insignificant places in the area of Coventry where he grew up.

Occasionally, something just speaks to you. I’m not from Coventry and my feeble attempts at Airfix as a child were limited, but his representation of abandoned pubs, bent fences, tatty lock-up garages and scrappy woodland appealed greatly to me. There was a personal recognition that the landscapes he was painting looked similar to where I grew up, but more importantly, and why I wanted him to win the Turner, was that his work felt so representative of where the UK is now as a country.

This is not to disparage Turner winner Martin Boyce’s work, which I also like. However, Shaw’s paintings seem much more significant, almost like a stark acknowledgment of a Britain brought back down to Earth after what Adrian Mole writer Sue Townsend brilliantly referred to as ‘The Cappuccino Years’. The time when we pretended everything was getting better in new modern sophisticated Britain, when really they were getting worse, covered only briefly by froth on the surface now swept away.

Coventry, like pretty much everywhere outside the South East of England, has suffered economic decline, in particular in its once thriving car industry. However Coventry declined not in a dramatic, easily aesthetic way, like Liverpool and Glasgow did in the 1980s; cities picked apart by so many ‘social realist’ photographers and documentary makers.

Coventry’s decline was slower, almost unknowable. A breaking apart, due to various factors, of economic, social and cultural ties, something that has now

enveloped much of Britain, from Dundee to Burnley, Ipswich to Plymouth. Shaw’s Coventry is neither the ‘gritty’ inner city like East London, places for the latest crop of art students to colonise, nor the ‘quaint’ leafy suburbs, but the area in between. Places where the hope of the post-war settlement, of new housing estates and modern factories and a better, more stable, more egalitarian world has decayed. Places confused, liminal, unsure of what anything means anymore or where things are heading. The Britain that I know, the Britain David Cameron hasn’t got a clue about.

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That’s not to say ‘The Cappuccino Years’ that led us to now didn’t have their plus points. For those of us in the arts it was a boom time. Galleries expanded and spread, audiences grew and diversified, there was cash for ambitious projects, and art entered more into the arena of mainstream culture. Now though, when I look back on so much of the work that was created at this time, at least that which dominated the public consciousness; the infamous Young British Artists, all those big public sculptures and the Tate Modern Turbine Hall projects. Grand visions assembled by armies of fabricators with money no object. Even if I like such work and still value it, I can’t help but think back into art history.

Back to the turning of the 19th century into the 20th, of the fin de sie cle, the Viennese Secession, the beautiful decadent work produced at the zenith of a culture that would soon collapse in on itself. A high point before everything that was solid melted into air, transformed by technological advances, war, depression, revolution, social change and scientific discovery. I look back and ponder that we might now be at a similar point again.

The sheer lack of monumentalism in Shaw’s work seems to me to represent the UK now. A country humbled from its arrogance that its laissez-faire, sado-monetarist system should be embraced by the world and that real industry could be replaced by finance and the ‘Cool Britannia’ cultural industries. Shaw shows instead the reality; a Britain cracked, dog-eared, confused, battered, half-shod, but in a way that is sublime and truthful rather than bleak.

His use of Humbrol model paints is also resonant. An everyday product that most people must have used at some point as children, Humbrol was once manufactured in Hull. Now it is produced in China and its old plant stands abandoned and boarded up. Hull being another place in the UK that has suffered slow, quiet, decline, ignored by those in the ever faster spinning wheel of the City of London, a wheel that has now fallen off its axis.

It was great seeing musician and former graffiti artist Goldie on Channel 4’s Turner Prize coverage from the Baltic in Gateshead. The very fact that the Turner prize was held in Gateshead, shown on Channel 4 and partially presented by Goldie is a positive product of the last ten to fifteen years, of art’s increasing popularity and expansion out of the capital and, to an extent, out of elite circles. Goldie’s open enthusiasm for fellow West Midlander Shaw’s work was also great in contrast to fellow presenter Matthew Collings, looking like Karl Marx and talking the usual jargon.

Shaw at least has been given a solo show in the Herbert Museum in Coventry, and like all Turner nominees, should see his work grow in popularity and price even though he didn’t win. Hats off to Martin Boyce, but we’ll see in decades who was making the more important work, the work that captured the spirit of our age.

Kenn Taylor is an arts project manager and writer based in Liverpool with a particular interest in culture, cities and regeneration. kenntaylor.wordpress.com

1 George Shaw, The End of Time, 147.5x198cm, Humbrol enamel on board, 2008-09. Courtesy: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London and Wilkinson Gallery, London

2 George Shaw, The Age of Bullshit, 56x74.5x5cm, Humbrol enamel on board, 2010. Courtesy: Mr and Mrs R Burston, London and Wilkinson Gallery, London

The Future 2, 3, 4Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Allenheads, Northumberland 28 January – 25 February 2012

“From the industrial revolution to dereliction and the subsequent rebuilding of the community, the remote village of Allenheads (high in the Northumbrian Pennines) has frequently been at the vanguard of social, technological and industrial developments and declines. Peppered with disused mine shafts, abandoned railways and the now idyllic, overgrown slag heaps, it is a potent location for examining the future through the lens of history. It is here that the three artists in residence David Lisser, Alan Smith and Liam Murray pose the question ‘What will our future look like?’ And then ‘What role will humanity play – individually and collectively – in creatively reimagining and building that future?’

“Sheltering from the icy, snow lined landscape outside, I squeeze into a dark corner behind a rickety coffee table, shrouded in a tartan table cloth. All of a sudden the deep, heavy sound of breathing erupts from the rafters, filling the innocuous, pleasant little village café with suspense. High on the café’s wall, beyond the wooden rafters, a projection of stars pierces the dark. As the coffee machine hums and teaspoons clink on teacups a distant orchestra gradually rumbles into the awareness of the café’s occupants, intensifying until it becomes a triumphant, dramatic fanfare. Just as two unsuspecting cyclists, replete with neon Lycra suits and streamlined cycle helmets, enter the tiny café, the date 2045 roars into sight. This is the beginning of Alan Smith’s film 2045 a dystopian vision of the future based on close observation of the familiar and everyday and narrated by a soundtrack culled from an array of science fiction films. The film oscillates between long, contemplative shots of inane objects, suspended or empty domestic scenes, and shaky B-movie-esque commotion. Objects such as a zip, a showerhead, or two misshapen tomatoes acquire a mythological dimension as totems (or relics) of mankind’s innovation and as motifs for the proliferation of nature and natural farming amidst the collapse of humanity. The film climaxes with a deliberate nod to Silent Running (1972) as its frequented motif, the domestic poly-tunnel, floats off into space, carrying within it the edible plants Smith has nurtured there.”

Iris Priest is an artist and writer based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. www.irispriest.co.uk

>> Read the full review of The Future 2, 3, 4 at www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1942520

Read an excerpt from Iris Priest’s review of ‘The Allenheads Findings’, also part of the ‘This is the Future’ project in a-n Magazine December 2011 / January 2012; and in full online at www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1656267

1 Alan Smith, Whistlers Great, Great, Great, Great Granddaughter, 8.33x7.24cm, appropriated image, 2011. Photo: Alan Smith. Courtesy: Allenheads Contemporary Arts

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