The Turner Prize for 2005, the UK's leading contemporary art prize, was awarded on Monday night to 38-year-old Simon Starling, who lives and works in Glasgow. He was one of four shortlisted artists whose work is on display at Tate Britain: the others are painter Gillian Carnegie, video artist Darren Almond and mixed-media artist Jim Lambie.
Starling takes away £25,000, thanks to sponsorship from Gordon's Gin, the accolades of the arts community, and - like every other Turner winner - plenty of argument.
The prize, with its focus on conceptual art, has proved a magnet for controversy. Starling's work is no exception, unlikely to appeal to those who are looking for art that rewards the simple act of looking. For this is work that cannot be understood without its commentary, its backstory. "Shedboatshed", the biggest work in his current Tate display, comes with a long tale attached: how Starling came across the rickety and picturesque wooden hut, like something out of an old-fashioned fairytale, in a wood beside the Rhine. He dismantled it and re-fashioned the pieces into one of the traditional boats of the area, rowed it down the river, took it out and put it back together to make the same shed all over again.
This is "process" art, whose focus is in the transmutation of one thing into another, of the material into the work. Process art was a hot concept in the 1970s, but Starling brings the idea up to date with a new sense of romanticism, and with the intricate narrative of the piece that is part of the process he undertakes as well as part of its result.
He does not just make things: he travels, he explores, he does everything the hard way. It is work that carries a passionate ecological message, all about the durability of things rather than their disposability. It's anti-mechanistic, anti-industrial. There's something about that half-rotted woodshed that is as timeless as an illustration from a child's story.
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Starling takes away £25,000, thanks to sponsorship from Gordon's Gin, the accolades of the arts community, and - like every other Turner winner - plenty of argument.
The prize, with its focus on conceptual art, has proved a magnet for controversy. Starling's work is no exception, unlikely to appeal to those who are looking for art that rewards the simple act of looking. For this is work that cannot be understood without its commentary, its backstory. "Shedboatshed", the biggest work in his current Tate display, comes with a long tale attached: how Starling came across the rickety and picturesque wooden hut, like something out of an old-fashioned fairytale, in a wood beside the Rhine. He dismantled it and re-fashioned the pieces into one of the traditional boats of the area, rowed it down the river, took it out and put it back together to make the same shed all over again.
This is "process" art, whose focus is in the transmutation of one thing into another, of the material into the work. Process art was a hot concept in the 1970s, but Starling brings the idea up to date with a new sense of romanticism, and with the intricate narrative of the piece that is part of the process he undertakes as well as part of its result.
He does not just make things: he travels, he explores, he does everything the hard way. It is work that carries a passionate ecological message, all about the durability of things rather than their disposability. It's anti-mechanistic, anti-industrial. There's something about that half-rotted woodshed that is as timeless as an illustration from a child's story.
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