turner prize won by duncan campbell

The Turner Prize is Britain's biggest modern art prize:
Jay Doubleyou: turner prize 2014

The shortlist has been out there for some time:
Jay Doubleyou: turner prize nominee: duncan campbell
Turner Prize 2014 artists: Duncan Campbell | Tate

And earlier this month, it was announced that Duncan Campbell had won:
BBC News - Turner Prize 2014: Duncan Campbell wins £25,000 prize

Duncan Campbell is the Turner Prize winner. Even I'm baffled, says Tate boss

Duncan Campbell wins the 2014 Turner Prize for It for Others, a video installation that the chairman of the judges admits she doesn't entirely understand

Duncan Campbell is the winner of this year’s Turner Prize with a 54-minute film that even the chairman of the jury described as “a bit baffling”.

Campbell’s film, It for Others (2013), is a montage of Marxist economics, contemporary dance, comedy ketchup bottles, African tribal masks and images of the IRA member Joe McCann.

According to Campbell, a Dublin-born artist now based in Glasgow, it is an “open-ended” essay on the commodification of objects and the omissions, lapses and prejudices used to portray histories in certain ways.

Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, admitted she was not entirely sure she knew what it meant - but said that the artist had deliberately made his work ambiguous.

Speaking before Campbell received the £25,000 prize at a ceremony in London, Curtis said: “It’s a mysterious work, I think, and he uses lots of devices to keep you watching and to make you wonder, ‘What does it mean?’ It has clarity and also quite a lot ambiguity, and that’s quite odd."

Duncan Campbell is the Turner Prize winner. Even I'm baffled, says Tate boss - Telegraph
Turner Prize 2014: 'There's only one real artist here' - Telegraph

But what is it about?

"It for Others" is, as its voiceover announces, a film about the production, meaning and circulation of objects. It takes its cue and inspiration from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ essay film Statues Also Die (1953), which examines the colonial commodification of African artefacts (that “death” being the removal of meaning that comes with their plucking from their original religious and social contexts). Organised in three distinct and tightly argued “chapters”, Campbell’s work takes as starting point the African artefacts that Marker and Resnais filmed. It considers the traumas of colonialism and the arguments for repatriation of precious objects from western museums; one passage directly takes issue with British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s statements on the Benin bronzes. Indeed, Campbell had wanted to film those objects held by the museum that Marker had shot in the 1950s, but negotiations became protracted and time ran out, forcing Campbell to use reproductions instead.

Duncan Campbell: ‘Politics seeps into everything’ | Art and design | The Guardian
Turner prize 2014: Duncan Campbell wins Britain’s prestigious art award | Art and design | The Guardian

Another Guardian artist disagrees:

Duncan Campbell – currently favourite to win the prize – takes a very different approach. His politics is analytical. The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu as well as Marx’s theory of value are among his references in a 54-minute film that also includes an attack on the British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor for being a wishy-washy liberal who defends the museum’s ownership of Benin sculptures stolen from this west African state in 1897.

I know one thing – MacGregor’s liberal history of cultural encounters and global diversity, which he communicates through books and radio as well as British Museum’s displays, has taught people a lot more about global art than anyone will learn from Campbell’s film. I found the use of African sculpture in his film offensively and wifully ignorant, so obsessed with ideological point-scoring that it treats African art as a mere prop.

It is Campbell, not MacGregor, who refuses to look at African art as a meaningful human creation. His commentary insists that western modern eyes cannot “see” the true nature, the real and lost context of these objects. Instead we imagine them as “art” to be bought and sold. This sounds deep but is both cliched and glib. In reality, history can excavate the cultures of 19th-century Africa as intimately as it can recreate any past – and MacGregor tries to do just that. The British Museum displays African artefacts well. It invites visitors to explore them in depth. By contrast, Campbell uses them to score debating points in a film that reduces politics to an elitist pseudo-philosophical rant.

Why is political art such elitist twaddle? | Art and design | The Guardian

The Daily Mail might agree:
Why does the Daily Mail love to hate art? | Art and design | The Guardian
Duncan Campbell wins Turner Prize 2014 for film about African art | Daily Mail Online
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