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Shocking pots win Turner Prize
08/12/2003 07:06 - (SA)
London - Britain's headline-grabbing Turner Prize, one of contemporary art's most notoriously controversial awards, was awarded on Sunday to Grayson Perry for scenes of domestic violence painted on ceramic vases.
Perry, sometimes billed as "the art world's favourite transvestite", uses decorative art techniques including ceramics and textiles to depict his own life and social habits in harshly frank style.
His ceramic vases appear attractive at first glance but on closer inspection the artist's violent themes become apparent.
In We've Found the Body of Your Child, a distraught mother is shown next to her lifeless baby and the man walking away seems the obvious perpetrator of the crime.
The £20 000 Turner Prize has been dismissed by critics as trivial, sensationalist and poor quality.
Last year British Culture Minister Kim Howells described the nominated works as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".
The 2002 prize was won by Keith Tyson, whose works included the entire contents of a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu made of lead.
This year's other contenders included brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose work Death is a realistically painted sculpture cast in bronze depicting what appear to be two blow-up dolls, one with a strap-on oversized penis, sexually positioned on an inflatable bed.
Another contender was 44-year-old video artist and photographer Willie Doherty, whose youth was spent in troubled Northern Ireland, where he witnessed the Bloody Sunday shootings of Catholic civilians by British soldiers in Londonderry as a 12-year-old.
He combines art, history and politics and his works have included news footage of Bloody Sunday.
Another competitor was Anya Gallaccio, 40, whose work includes a room made of chocolate and a bronze tree with real apples as well as sculptures made from ice, flowers, sugar and candles.
- AFP
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South Africa
