This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

I’m coming into the Turner Prize debate a little late. Probably all’s been said now, prize given, done and dusted. I have a good-ish excuse though – while the prize was being awarded I was in Lodz, Poland enjoying the Camerimage Cinematography festival. As a film-maker, I wanted to review Runa Islam’s work because I am interested in the place that the moving image has in contemporary art, and I knew that moving image work was a significant part of this year’s show. I hoped that seeing the work in the context of “the Turner Prize” might give me some insights into the issue of film as art.

I won’t lie: I went into this fearing some kind of structuralist minimalist drear that often occurs when “artists work with film.” But it wasn’t like that at all. Islam draws the viewer in through the images, a gaze which is alternately subjective and objective. The narrative is there, everything is said, without words, but in the language of light, movement, gesture.

The protagonist in “Be The First To see What You see As You see It,” is a perfect English rose, first admiring, then delicately using, fine English china. Slowly and gently, her hesitant caressing of the crockery becomes more assertive, yet always remains gentle, until the cups, saucers and finally the teapot, come crashing down. Islam’s film perpetrates a sly subversion of so many sacred cows: “perfect” womanhood, Englishness, the sacral space of the museum (the china is at one point positioned on plinths), female rage…

“First Day of Spring” is similarly loaded with meaning, in particular the dichotomy that is simultaneously present in the frame: the lassitude of the rickshaw drivers and the busyness of the distant main road to which they’ll return. The premodern look of the rickshaw carts, bereft of logos. Very moving portraits of the men revealed as fragile creatures, subjected daily to the gruelling task of richshaw. The durational nature of film allows the viewer to languorously unpack and unskein the elements while remaining absorbed in the film’s world.

“Cinematography” wasted my time and Runa Islam’s, was its point to sneer at the “rules” of cinematography? This work slammed me right back into the middle of the dilemma I started out with: how do contemporary art and contemporary cinema intersect? Do they, even? Is the abyss between the two too wide? And yet I can’t help but feel that Runa Islam has the means to be a really good film-maker, with fascinating things to say. Next time I’d like to see her screen at the London Film Festival. Steve McQueen did it and we’re all the better off for it.

Coda: Oddly, although the actual prize winner Mark Leckey is apparently a film lecturer, and his work was mainly a film, he’s not any kind of a film maker whatsoever, and there is no point in my discussing what he presented.

Gillian McKiver is a film-maker, photographer and curator

by Francis Scholl

This is an attempt at not-shock art. Juxtaposing large images of The Royal Family with pictures of hard core pornography, seems at first glance to be designed to appall the “Daily Mail” brigade. Yet looking more closely at the show, including a press release quote of Andrea Dworkin, the late great radical anti-porn feminist, you realise that perhaps Joffe is hinting at his own discomfort with pornography, or at least trying to cast these now banal if still unpleasant images in a new light. Oddly you begin to sympathize with the Queen and her family, as though through being constantly photographed, like the porn models, they have lost their humanity. A stange reversal (of Joffe’s intentions?) which leaves you thinking more of the loneliness of Royalty rather than the exploitation of women who have become mere metaphors/vessels yet again.

Francis Scholl is an art lover and dog walker.

This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

Seeing the artworks in this year’s Turner Prize is less a visual experience than a verbal one, in that it reminds you how words and sentences are not only printed but can also imprint themselves on your poor visual field like after-images from a flash bulb. They can even temporarily blind.

Enter the exhibition and are met by Goshka Macuga’s glass and metal constructions, then pictures on the walls, and some feint marks behind them. You dutifully walk around the room – sheets of glass arranged radially, steel hand rails, constructivist collages with names like Void / Possibilities and Target Area / Lake of Creation, graphite dashes on the walls that look like falling rain, a sense of industrial design – trying to see without knowledge, or at least the right knowledge. Then you give in to the text on the wall.

From the text you learn that Macuga deals with the archives of the institution in which she is exhibiting, and that the collages take elements from the archives in the Tate collection of two artists who were lovers. You go back and see the pictures in a new light: the images could abstractly insinuate scenes from the artists’ relationship. Now the collages resonate. But then you read that the glass and metal sculptures relate to German history and were made specifically for the Berlin Biennale. Two of them are recreations of exhibition stands made for the Third Reich. Interested, you wonder how much of their history the objects give away… but the combination of the sculptures and the collages in one space seems arbitrary and conceptually confused. What you learnt from the text on the wall seems to have intercepted your experience, simultaneously allowing, opening up and singularizing the work’s meaning. This is the problem: objects are awkwardly silent, we speak nervously in their stead; the curator’s words on the walls, the artist’s words, these words.

Then Cathy Wilkes’s installation: after the first, general, newly-arrived view you circle the arrangement, naming the parts like Adam[1]: the supermarket checkouts, mannequins, bare walls, eaten baby food, burnt wood, crucifixes roughly painted onto the sides of stacks of tiles, slight clumps of hairy dust, pram, oven, step ladder. Identification, recognition. A clear mentality and sense of purpose starts to rise off the objects, impelling you to narrative: decayed, excreted, burdened, trapped. Then you make a trajectory from front, vaulting over the check-outs, to back: heart, consummation, nurse, birth, bat and ball, childhood, burnt wood, carbon-based life, white beard, ladder, stairway to heaven…

The next three rooms contain films by Runa Islam. The first film (Be The First To See What You See As You See It, 2004) shows a woman in a gallery looking at, then touching the exhibits, felinely pawing them, then knocking them off their plinths in slow motion. She looks like an Oliver Sacks case, a person with renewed sight learning to see by touch. In the second film the movement of the camera spells the film’s name: CINEMATOGRAPHY. The interior of a film apparatus workshop (the text tells you) moves by but because nothing is framed and everything is autofocused-on, nothing is recognized. The identity is in the name spelled out by the mechanism: something like a pre-Kantian perceptual passivity constructed by the viewer, at the level of vision.

A similar sensation happens as you watch the last of Islam’s films (First Day of Spring, 2005) with the sound of Mark Leckey booming out from next door. The voice pervades, cartoon-god-like, and as you enter Leckey’s room, standing outside the ‘cinema-in-the-round’ construction from which it emanates, it inflects everything. Videos and objects look like experiments before the discovery of the persistence of vision: a strobe-lit slide show that fails to intimate motion; a video showing a figurine of Felix the cat rotating, inanimate, while flickering effects clatter around it. As well as movement and stasis, there is a terrific play of presence and absence, actual and virtual: in a feat of CGI (transferred to film) a video of Jeff Koons’s aluminum balloon rabbit shows no reflection of the camera that films it. You see all this with the voice pontificating about and around them. An A4 printout of evocative verbal images suggests that Leckey is in on this: like Janet Cardiff’s audio walks or Willie Doherty’s photo-text works, the rhetorical voice verbalizes experience at the point of first contact.

Benjamin saw photographs as having been attacked by words. In his view, as the medium’s potential to bear witness was realized verbal cues were instituted to circumscribe it. Magazine editors started to put captions in their pictures, giving them control over the pictures’ presumed significance. The finality of the wording inhibits the reader from ‘free-floating contemplation’ before the news image.[2] Roland Barthes agrees and goes further: ‘The text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance … The text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested.’[3]

Implications for Mark Leckey abound. His speech governs form and content in a way that is descended directly from those works of the late ‘60s where language becomes a medium in place of paint and stone. It is also a natural extension of the project started at that time, to ‘demolish the distinctions between art practice, theory and criticism [through] … rigorous self-reflexivity [and] engagement with the issue of how language frames practice’[4]. In Leckey theoretical language (complete with cod-Derridean word play) soaks into practice, or rather, runs before it, laying guiding tracks for its (and other works in audible range) reception. Adam / Leckey takes ownership of the animals / experience by naming.

Macuga’s work is only explicable, or basically ascertainable, via a verbal narrative that is provided by and attached to the wall of the institution of which she is making a critique.[5] Thus it fulfils Nicolas Serrota’s twenty-year old ambition to ‘promote understanding and appreciation of the art of our time, as well as that of our past’ by ‘collaborating with artists in the presentation, acquisition and documentation of their work.’[6] He determined to rescue a Turner Prize floundering in esoteric obscurity and irrelevance; but when the explication melds with the artwork it explicates you have a repression of the critique; the institution’s meaning pre-empts the visitor’s, when all it wants to do is help. Such repression results in prize-winners giving “monosyllabic answers to the desperate journos”, as Grayson Perry has observed of Tomma Abts, who in his view wanted to “shut out the clamour of contemporary art.”[7] The clamour, that nervous noise made to fill the silence, itself causes another nomination: there is now ‘a high chance that someone on the street could name a living British artist’[8]. But after this owning they need to be allowed to see the art as well. You could look at Islam’s work as a model of how we can do this: how each individual can, on entering the gallery, have the chance to be the first to see what they see, as they see it.

[1] It’s interesting to think of the myth in terms of gender and Wilkes’s work and Leckey’s persona; it also points to the problems of the second person, hitherto used to emphasise the kind of coercive semiosis being discussed.

[2] Benjamin, Illuminations, 1970

[3] Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 1977 – he remakes the point in The Fashion System, 1983

[4] Jon Bird and Michael Newman, from the introduction to Re-writing Conceptual Art, 1999

[5]Alex Alberro has pointed out how Latin American conceptual artists refused to rely entirely on linguistic structures to theorize the construction of the subject, because of the fact that “the dominant language (Spanish or Portugese) was itself culturally and socially problematical, being symptomatic of the ruling class.” (ibid, p233)

[6] Quoted from The Aims of the Gallery: The Tate Biennial Report, 1988-90, p12, by Louisa Buck in The Tate, The Turner Prize and the Art World, in The Turner Prize and British Art, 2007)

[7] ibid, p35

[8] Anya Gallaccio (shortlisted 2003) in the same volume.

This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

What a wonderful day. …I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years. Each year as the Turner arrives I wonder what reaction the world will have and each year I feel the Turner comes under pressure….About time we gave up the cynicism, the British public love it. Their Turner has become part of our cultural history, like the Booker Prize and I’m fed up with the pretentious intellectual argument every year. Fed up with the negative, even though it is always in our face.

Art historians may debate the quality, which I shall too, I am critical as a purist visual artist, I am not commercial, and I like work that is steeped in theory. It doesn’t have to be complex, but it does have to be grounded in philosophical development. In other words it has to stack up, be substantiated.

I am not a writer, I paint, I find words difficult and limited. This is why I paint, to communicate much more than words. Painting expresses my other dimensions ie: my subconscious thoughts and feelings. I am looking for work that reflects this other communication, the more, the real the truth from the heart, and I found it. You may not like what It says or why I like it, but I demand tough truths, as life here for me is tough, no luxury or doddle, no support, no favours and no kindness. I could go on, no protective men, no one providing except me, and everyone passing judgement. With that reality check, I like my escapism as much as the rest, and other forms of culture entertain me.

May I succinctly say that I thoroughly enjoyed the works of Mark Lecky, Runa Islam and Goshka Macuga, I found pleasure within their work, the intellectual enquiry. It is an investigation and a journey but I felt shallow, they had only humoured me.

I loved the stainless steel frames and glass of Goshka, and adored the positive sensation that surged thourgh me, clean pure lines with smoked glass that has reflective qualities. I could see a ghost of myself as well as others through the glass, I thought of multidimensionality, I thought of field paintings, I ran through the concept and it felt good. It felt sophisticated civilized, developed. The public enjoyed it, appealed to their sophistication, it justified the Turner, this is what they expect. I struggled with the exterior of the room, trying to tye the two themes together, or perhaps I got that wrong..? The public seemed to see these as two separate parts and enjoyed the Nash and Agar in isolation. For me, the concept didn’t come together, although I liked the rain on the walls, it seemed random and disconnected.

I am leaping a room to Runa Islams three films. I can see cinematography as an important messenger. Tate benches and a film scene, cine camera sound running and a film with a young lady who is behaving provocatively, teasing china, until it drops and smashes. I am repulsed and angered by her decadence, I see a spoil t princess and I want to shout ’silly bitch’! Thats my honest reaction, it is too tiresome, aggravating and petty, but I get it. 30yrs ago, I would have got it better,I thought. I asked two young lads about 22yrs old. Loved it, enjoyed it, made me laugh ( I thought, oh yea, just like a cheap thrill) and the other,felt angered and disliked the girl, nay detested the action. Wow, aren’t they informed, this is the publics debate, and they really are involved, and engaged with the Turner.

No, this is not my winner, I experienced little, with the second film, I started to bounce on the foams square seating, was this part of the performance, it must be, it didn’t make my experience clearer. Third film, I had an excellent debate with a woman that was born in India. Would the taxi cyclists have resented being paid to remain still all day by a western Indian woman. No she said, why should they, this is one day only where they didn’t have to work hard, just sit and they would go home and celebrate and have energy for once for there family, an unique opportunity, oh, as life model, as I studied, my mind is stuck in viewer viewed mode: observer being observed by object observing. Releasing an argument of object or human, which should not become an object in my opinion.

I don’t find deep intellectual satisfaction within this work, I begin to feel it is superficial and naive.

Oh, but its such fun, talking with the ,public, looking at the work ,checking my response, watching the public response, they are so engaged, they behave accordingly. Mostly still, watching the films, I try to soak up the atmosphere in the darkened rooms, it is electric, they appear tree like and rooted to the stump that they sit on. Quiet heads, absorbing, amused. They like this work.

Mark Lecky, now here is an intellectual. Yes, very good, so clever. This is a wonderful, interesting and witty project. Perfect in execution, ahh that must be it!

I am bored, it is not emotive. There is no chaos here, no multi tasking. It is a male focused, brilliantly executed study. It is a purist piece, but I am afraid to say I’m bored.

Ohmygod my winner is Cathy Wilkes, it couldn’t be any other, such sensitivity. She has set herself a project to say what is not sayable, to show, what is not discusable. Single handedly she is attempting to address the area of the unspeakable truths. She is speaking of our state and state of mind and of the other dimensionalities. From the banal to the untouchable subconscious, the big iceberg inside you. She is speaking of the monotony, the banal head in a cage entrapment, the maids bell that is tied to your invisible apron string, of subserviency, of having your brains punched in, albeit British Gas or partner. This installation is exaggerated, over stated, but it may have to have been. How many times have I seen someone try too say so much and be ridiculed. I watch the public, expecting rejection, but see none, heighten discussions awareness and conscious thought.

This is good, they see, I see, she must win. Cathy Wilkes is trying to talk in 5 dimensions. She talks of love, through her repetitions. The heart on the floor with holes, are they moth eaten? Are they short sharp blasts of disappointment and sorrow. It is steeped in symbols, she has worked too hard, overtasking, like me. It is so obvious, can you hear this time, she seems to goad me, yes Cathy, I hear and see loud and clear, keep saying it, please don’t stop, we are fooling ourselves and the truth will out and Cathy, you could be the girl to say it.

This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

It is that time of year again , the hype, the glory and oh yes the art. Is it worth it? and does the Turner Prize really mean something? these are the sort of questions that arise yearly. The first thing that I encountered as I approached the Tate Britain were The Stuckists handing out anti flyers against it (and The Tate). Are they there to piggyback onto the media attention of the Prize…? I don’t even want to start going into that debate. Amusingly they handed a flyer to Nicholas Serota (or an uncanny lookalike) who was passing through.

The first piece of artwork I was confronted with was Goshka Macuga’s big spiral glass Deutsche Volk – Deutsche Albeit, a piece that primarily looks at conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum displays. I instantly couldn’t help but think about artwork chosen on the basis that they’re ‘photogenic; it just looks great on camera’. But one of her sculptures Haus der Frau 1 did amuse me and gave me a strong sense of the topics she was exploring, it reminded me of a large letter holder that at once looked like a bizarre queuing barrier. There was strange modernist feel about the work; of course it was referential to works of this era. I also didn’t really see the connection of the Paul Nash and Eileen Agar collages, although I read the blurb and understood that they helped inform her explorations, but I still felt they were disparate to her sculptures and unnecessary somehow, more like a sketchbook reference.

In the adjacent room Cathy Wilke’s installation which involves pieces We Are Pro Choice, Non Verbal and Prices, looked like someone’s house the morning after a mad party, the familiar scene of leftover food but with the addition of supermarket checkouts. I did not connect with/ respond to any of her symbolic imagery and juxtapositions so I am not able to comment much on this piece. The next rooms were a succession of beautiful quality 16mm films by Runa Islam, the first – CINEMATOGRAPHY was a roving camera that appeared to be filming a studio/ workshop space. The movement of the camera was seemingly illogical yet precise and I wondered about the pattern or logic that it followed. It gave it a sci-fi quality and I felt it opened up the possibility of new meaning being able to be read into the scene (I later learned that Runa was writing her name with the camera). Her other films Be The First To See What You See As You See It and First Day of Spring are equally concise, both are thoughtful and visually stunning in their own way. The former has colour and visuals that remind me of an early Peter Greenway short, and the camera of the latter is slower and smoother – a footage of colourful rickshaws and drivers pensively sitting in a group, in which she highlights the cinematic potentials, and though the scene is inscrutable, it feels just on the verge of breaking into a strong narrative.

Last but not least was Mark Leckey, his Cinema in the Round was a montage of popular animations including The Simpsons and Felix the Cat from 2D to CGI, interspersed with Jeff Koon’s highly reflective steel rabbit and the Titanic, in a lecture setting where one was aware and constantly reminded of the theatre room and its audiences. It was an interesting reflection of different dimensions and space that exists and that one occupies, but for some reason the Turner prize context in which it was exhibited confused me. As I read the blurb about the work ’something about the layers and layers of the self’, and seeing Leckey’s extremely decadent and plush posters for these ‘lecture events’ (one of them being a special Tate one), suddenly made me wonder if there was not any serious ego massage happening here (both artist and proprietor). I read the catalogue later and the insight given into Leckey’s work sounds more reasonable and down to earth. But I still can’t help feel that one can also make anything sound justified if one is clever enough.

For me going to this Turner Prize shortlist exhibition, was not about the critique of the artists, who’s great, better etc. All of the artists have their own validity and place in the world, but it’s the housing of these artists under this super inflated roof, and that it is rumoured to signify you as ‘making it’ as an artist is what I find disconcerting and of which I am wary of. When I was wondering who would win I wasn’t thinking about who’s work I liked the best, I was thinking about who the Turner Prize would ’strategically’ let win, for example it’s mainly female nominees this year they might probably let a female artist win (especially as there has only been about two or three since the prize began in 1984). I am not denouncing the credibility of the Turner Prize completely, but there are certain potential aspects of it that niggles at me – the zoo-like entertainment side of it and it being a complete marketing ploy for the Tate. My unease was not made any better either when on my out I was charged a whopping £2.10 for the smallest cup of hot chocolate that I have ever had.

This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

Presented at first with Goshka Macuga’s room: reflections and handrails alongside a mishmash of collaged artwork, I found myself more interested in watching others’ responses than responding myself. Looking at how their legs distorted in the reflective panels as they circulated the “artwork”.

I had heard about the second room: mannequins, conveyer belts, hair on the floor and empty bowls with traces of food left within. No matter what angle I stood at, which ever view I took, I just could not see why. Such randomness placed next to the ‘blurb’ on the wall did not have any connection. The only interest I found was that the conveyer belt was stationary yet, I could hear sounds of it moving. I traced that sound and found it was coming from Runa Islam’s piece. How ironic that I found the most interesting factor of Cathy Wilkes’ work was a competing artist’s own work in the next room.

Reaching the first of Runa Islam’s 3 video pieces I sat and watched “Be The First To see What You see As You see It 2004”. A gallery space, a tall china tea pot and tea set separated and placed on plinths. The conveyer belt sound whirring behind and above soothed me: as it repeated each creak with the emitted light. A lady prowls around the plinths, moving closer and closer until she is face to ‘face’ with the tea pot, her nose an inch away from it’s smooth body, yet she still holds a distance. It flicks to her with 2 bells; picking them up she respectfully tinkles them. The next scene she is toying with the lid of the pot, moving it agitatedly as if to test how far she can push it without causing harm. The sound is compelling of china against china; the clinking sound of impending destruction’s beginning. Second by second she becomes more restless relishing in the joy of bringing the fragile objects to the edge of the plinth until finally the first item drops. Then the next. Then the bell; without even looking at it she tinkles it and lets it slip. The camera pans down to the smashing objects yet she dismisses it and doesn’t look, almost as if it is the sound that she is craving.

Flashbacks to her pouring and drinking the tea from this tea set, dipping a pink wafer into it and then inserting it into her lipsticked mouth. The kitsch aspect reminded me of my grandmother’s teacup, accidentally knocked to the floor, rendering the set incomplete.

I watched it three times just to hear the sounds, yearning to hear and feel the tension as each item neared the edge, lining up to shatter upon the floor. This action that as a ‘civilised society’ we refrain from, became addictively compelling.

I could not help but attach what I was experiencing to what had just come before. This representation of my feelings towards art, to Cathy Wilkes’ piece: I looked closer and closer, and more than wanting to respect it and leave it be, I wanted to turn on those conveyer belts as they it pushed it all over the edge. Oh what a sound those horse shoes would make as they clinked to the floor!

Mark Leckey’s work was interesting; a 40 minute presentation on what objects he felt held weight. His ideas were humorous and intriguing yet how could he believe that his artwork deserved us being subjected to his opinions? It neared to an evening at the pub listening to someone enlightening his friends to obscure ideas he thinks we should appreciate more in the world: lemons, shoes, and meat and potatoes, except he had a microphone and video clips to support his point.

Once again, I wonder about the Turner Prize as so many do. Is it not supposed to be about innovative work that has been the most inspiring over the past year? There is something wrong here when the most exciting parts are the voyeuristic compulsion of Macuga’s reflections; the idea of Wilkes’ work animated and crashing to the floor; the sound of a film reel turning; and a random presentation on the weightiness of objects that should be left to drunken chats on a Friday night.

Is this really all Britain has to offer?

The winner was announced by Nick Cave – here’s a clip of the ceremony.

Was Mark Leckey your favourite? Or would you have gone for Runa Islam, Goshka Macuga, or Cathy Wilkes?

This review was generated in partnership with Interface at a-n.co.uk. Delve into the Interface archive at www.a-n.co.uk

The Turner Prize is an exhibition and also a competition, intrinsically encouraging the audience to compare and contrast the 4 artists. But is this a help or a hindrance, I ask myself, ruminating over a cup of tea in the Tate café?

The show opens with the subtle, removed, work of Goshka Macuga. The highlights here were the collages- the humorous ‘Collective Unconscious’ 2008, where the profile of a head was placed on a broken turret- literally cracking up. The lines of the brickwork mirror the contour lines on the head – collage’s subtlety and witticism exploiting here the matched with the mismatched.

Where Macuga is well-conceived but occasionally dry, Cathy Wilkes, with her detritus of her disconcerting reality, was sticky and cloying. No space for symbolism here, everything was chained to the literal. I was drawn to the baby food on the supermarket checkout, crusty with old food, and each with a baby fork, reminding me of stories of the drab repetitiveness of parenting, the endless drudgery.

Runa Islam’s films are a relief then – their humour, poetry, in a richly rewarding visual language. The very brilliant ‘Be The First To See As You See It’ kept me captivated and returning for addictive thrills, surreptitiously asking what would happen if I stopped caring about things I am suppose to care about, quite the opposite of Wilkes where that care is just so insistent it is claustrophobic. The blue background reminded me of Dutch still lives, with their fine porcelain and the occasional inscrutably beautiful woman. Islam’s protagonist touches what shouldn’t be touched, all the time with a dance of sexy nonchalance. Encouraged to find beauty in these plates, those bells and teacups, the camera trains on them as an antiques expert, a silent sales pitch chiming in your mind’s eye. Yet this is where the beautiful assistant is a good-girl-gone-bad twiddling, fiddling, and eventually enjoying the smash of the crockery, And once this starts the plates are on death row it seems, waiting to fall off the edge, but with the air of a mafia ‘accident’- at the end of one foray the woman gently taps her fingers on the plinth, a glimpse of a satisfactory smile.

Mark Leckey ended the Turner prize with a flourish and answers my opening question. His ‘Cinema in the Round’, was a series of intelligent, fascinating explorations of the relationship between object and image, and in the process invites the audience to collaborate, as we fill the seats of his auditorium, reforming the audience featured in the film. His lectures are a real collage of research interspersed with works by Jeff Koons, tripping between popular culture, and fine art, he even includes meat and potatoes. So the benefits of artists being presented in a competition encourages the sense of their interconnection: unveiling a continuously developing and universally enriching community of thought. And it isn’t just artists being influenced by the work here. As I leave I realise I have been drinking from a paper cup not crockery. I smile – after Islam’s film the Tate is not taking any chances!