Time for turds at ‘The Turner’ again !

Yes, once again it is one of the highlights of my year !  It’s ‘Turner Prize’ time and one of the leading contenders in this  year’s competition is a female performance artist named Spartacus Chetwynd who wears a bushy black beard and lives in a nudist commune in ‘exotic’ Nunhead. So nothing new there then !

Apparently her ‘happening’ takes place in a gallery where some young men cunningly disguised as root vegetables writhe and wriggle around in their tights. Her works are said to be ..“exuberant, spontaneous and filled with a kind of Dionysian and orgiastic energy that some audiences clearly find contagious”. Well they would say that wouldn’t they !  Oh! and I almost forgot. It also includes a puppet show which is something to do with Christ and Barabbas. Perhaps, during the performance, Ms. Chetwynd will have an “I’m Spartacus!” moment and end up hanging on a cross beside poor old Jesus.

Of course  ‘The Turner’ wouldn’t be ‘The Turner’ without excrement featuring somewhere, and this year we have an exhibit showing poo having sex with itself at an orgy, which has been hailed by the judges as “a compelling life project”, and curator Sofia Karamani said that the place where the crap is copulating ..  “is not a coherent geographical location with a linear history. It is an ongoing journey in a world that is the equivalent of reality, a state of mind.”

Critics have described the show as “demanding and thoughtful” where “high seriousness and scatological humour, ribald performance, death and despair all play their part.”  and one con ‘artist’s video exhibit, which splices a lecture on church architecture with footage of a deadly department store fire, is said to be .. “the most viscerally exciting work of art” .. and as having .. “the potential fundamentally to change the way knowledge is transferred”: and if that’s not a load of old bullshit then …

… I don’t know what is !