the 2000 Turner Prize Shortlist

HOW LONG MUST NONNATIVE artists live and work in Britain before they shed the label ” foreign”? A decade plus, imply some dispiriting press reactions to the 2000 Turner Prize shortlist, which includes three artists born abroad. And yet the demographics of this year’s lineup chime nicely with Tate Britain’s general desire to test the parameters of “British” art. Candidates for the $30,250 prize are painters Glenn Brown (born Hexham, UK, 1966) and Michael Raedecker (born Amsterdam, 1963); installation artist Tomoko Takahashi (born Tokyo, 1966); and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born Remscheid, Germany, 1968). Raedecker has worked in the UK for five years, Takahashi and Tillmans for ten. All four have greatly enriched the British art scene; none, however, conforms to the accepted YBA model. The June 14 announcement has prompted much hand-wringing in the press over “Britart,” its own cherished and now officially dead invention, as speculations about the chances of Sarah Lucas and Martin Creed have been scotched—at least for the moment.

Shortlist authors (and the jurors) for this year’s award are gallery directors Jan Debbaut (of the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) and Julia Peyton-Jones (of London’s Serpentine Gallery); the Tate’s Keir McGuinness (chairman, Patrons of New Art); and Frieze publisher Matthew Slotover. Jury chairman and Tate director Nicholas Serota will stifle any fisticuffs. The result of their deliberations will be broadcast live on November 28, courtesy of event sponsors Channel 4. Tillmans, whose artfully casual, Gen X–privy snaps first showed up in the pages of youth style magazines like i-D, currently looks the likely winner. But, as dedicated Turnerazzi know, there’s many a slip ‘twixt odds-on status and ample check. Brown, best known for his virtuoso, pyrotechnic copies of Auerbach, Fragonard, and Dali, excavates the seam first opened by ’80s Simulationism. He has a good chance of winning, as does Takahashi, installer of vast acreages of recycled junk and scene stealer par excellence. Her epic 1999 appropriation of Charles Saatchi’s gallery, Line Out, an eye-poppingly detailed meditation on obsolescence and passing time, blended spectacle with intelligence. Raedecker, painter of spare, muted, faintly anxiety-inducing embroidered landscapes and interiors (and last year’s winner of the John Moores painting prize), is arguably a less mature artist than the other three, but his work expands an engaging lineup. So, a Turner Prize list that helps true up the lopsided, Sensationalized picture of UK practice in the ’90s: top-notch. And to all those foreign chappies: jolly good show all round.