Thanks, Jayne.
Actually, I felt a bit guilty about this one, since it goes a bit against my principles to write a slating review of an exhibition I'd not seen (even though that was the premise of the comp).
So, being in London for a few days, and wanting to see the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain, I was glad to discover that if I got a two-show ticket, seeing the Turner would hardly cost anything.
So were my insults justified? Paul Noble, the one who draws and sculpts turds, has draughtsman's skills, but seems to have nothing to say.
The two video works are pretty bad. Both take existing film footage, and chop it up for sensational, disorienting effect. Elizabeth Price's is like a pretentious pop video, with banal phrases occasionally superimposed on the pictures. Luke Fowler's takes a potentially interesting subject - the ideas of R.D.Laing - and desn't do it justice.
The really silly one, though, is the performance work of Spartacus Chetwynd. Two people, dressed like bits of forest, bob around with a puppet that is supposed to be a mandrake root. Selected members of the audience are pulled up to speak to the puppet, and it whispers secrets to them. I wasn't selected, maybe because I was giggling. It's really bad.
Ms Chetwynd seems to embrace an amateur aesthetic which excuses her from being any good at puppetry. Her bio contains one of those sentences that make a parodist despair of ever catching up with the absurdity of reality: 'She lives and works in a nudist colony in South London.'
So I don't feel guilty now. And if I'd seen the show before I wrote the piece, I'd have been considerably more scathing.
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