Starling wins Turner Prize
2005-12-06 12:58
London - An artist who dismantled a wooden shack, converted it into a paddle boat and sailed it before turning it back into a shack was on Monday awarded Britain's most prestigious - and often controversial - art award, the Turner Prize.
The £25 000 award was given to English-born Simon Starling for "Shedboatshed", or "Mobile Architecture No 2", which started life as a shack in the Swiss town of Schweizerhalle.
Starling took it apart, turned it into a boat and paddled it 11.2km down the Rhine to Basel, where he rebuilt it.
Starling, 38, said he was "a bit flabbergasted" to win.
"I don't like to be thought of as eccentric because that's not what my work is about. It's a serious business on many levels," said the thin, bearded and bespectacled Starling.
Architecture on the move
"It's a bit of mobile architecture. It's an attempt to make an artwork, which is very ergonomic and easy on the environment. It's a very simple idea," he said.
"I went on a little expedition up the Rhine to find a structure I could use for a project and I found this shed. It had a paddle on the side so it was just an incredible piece of luck.
"It's about slowing things down, about trying to retard this incredible speed at which we live."
Starling, who lives and works in the Scottish city of Glasgow and the German capital Berlin, had been the bookmakers' favourite to win the prize, announced at a ceremony at London's Tate Britain modern art gallery by culture minister David Lammy.
Curators at the Tate, where his work is displayed, say it "counters the illusory nature of globalisation and capitalist exchange".
Also on display is a hydrogen and oxygen-powered bicycle, named "Tabernas Desert Run", which he used to cross the Spanish desert. The water produced as a waste product of the bike was used to paint a watercolour illustration of a cactus.
Artists on the shortlist
The shortlisted artists were Gillian Carnegie, for her series of "bum paintings"; Darren Almond, whose work included a video installation of his widowed grandmother reminiscing about her honeymoon in Blackpool; and Jim Lambie, a DJ who decorated a floor with psychedelic designs.
The three shortlisted artists received £5 000.
The work of this year's contenders was considered to be far tamer than in previous years of the prize, which traditionally sparks a debate in Britain's media about the nature of art and the merits - or otherwise - of conceptual artists.
Previous recipients include Damien Hirst, known for pickling dead animals, transvestite potter Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili, recognised for using elephant dung in his paintings.
Jeremy Deller's Memory Bucket won the 2004 competition with a film concerning the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, and US President George W Bush's home town in the same US state.
The Turner Prize is renowned for favouring controversial conceptual works, and Carnegie was first person to make the shortlist in five years who exclusively uses paint.
The annual honour, named after painter JMW Turner in 1984, is given to a British artist under 50 years old for outstanding efforts in the past 12 months.