Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Can't paint but he's a winner

The Turner Prize worth $62,000 was awarded to experimental artist Jeremy Deller who says he can't draw, can't paint, and was told at school he shouldn't be an artist, and didn't go to art school.

His work that it is about "events" and "social interventions"

"Deller's eclectic back catalogue includes: making the world's most expensive cocktail ($620 worth of spirits, chasers and fruit) at Stringfellow's nightclub and then inviting guests to share it through straws; re-staging the 1984 miners' strike Battle of Orgreave at the original site with miners and actors (Mike Figgis then filmed it) and staging a concert of a northern brass band playing acid house music.

The work he submitted for the Turner Prize show at Tate Britain is no easier than previous work to categorise. It includes "a wall painting", or flow chart, in which lines join up words and phrases such as "acid house" and brass bands; a wall of photographs of strange memorials he has erected around the country to people he feels passionate about (dead miners, a cyclist killed near his home in north London, a bench he installed near the late Brian Epstein's home and a banner at Tilbury to commemorate the arrival of the Windrush with the first West Indian immigrants); a video of a Spanish street procession; and another of interviews Deller conducted in Texas with a survivor of the Waco slaughter and with a woman who once sold George Bush a hamburger."

W: http://www.smh.com.au/news/Arts/Cant-paint-still-a-winner/2004/12/07/1102182255786.html
Source: SMH.