Films and funny puppets vie for Turner prize

LONDON - Reuters

Turner Prize nominee Spartacus Chetwynd restages key moments from her nominated exhibition the ‘Odd Man Out 2011’ at Tate Britain in London, Britain. EPA photo

Turner Prize finalist Spartacus Chetwynd’s “Odd Man Out” show comprises two theatrical performances using poorly constructed homemade costumes and puppets with paper backdrops in a deliberate effort to shy away from “professional” art.

Chetwynd, who lives in a nudist colony and wore a false beard during her interview with the press, is one of four finalists given an exhibition at the Tate Britain museum in London and the chance to win the $40,600 Turner Prize live on Britain’s Channel 4 television network on December 3.

Her installations will vie with film from Elizabeth Price, Paul Noble’s painstaking graphite on paper drawings of the imaginary metropolis of “Nobson Newtown” and Luke Fowler’s combination of mundane photographs and a 93-minute film on the life of a maverick Scottish psychiatrist.

Fowler’s photographs and everyday people

Fowler’s exhibit consists of photographs of people in everyday poses and a long film which follows the life and work of maverick Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing (1927-89), who believed that psychosis did not have anything to do with chemical imbalances in the brain and is caused by and fuelled by the social environment where one lives.
Drawings of graphite on paper in small and incredibly intimate details are built around one word at the centre of a piece, which fan out from infinitesimally small drawings, into bigger, more intricate figures, creating vast, dramatic almost lunar landscapes or precise architectural pictures.
Members of the Turner Prize 2012 jury are Andrew Hunt, the director of the Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, Heike Munder, the director of Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Mark Sladen, the director of Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain and the chair of the jury.
The fifth member of the jury, Michael Stanley, the director of Modern Art Oxford in Oxford, has died.
The Turner Prize awards British artists aged under 50 for an “outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding”.