Turner Prize Exhibition 2008

Posted by guest author

18 December 2008

Gillian McKiver on the gap between film and art

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

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