'Big Brother' office is now art (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

'Big Brother' office is now art

4:56am Tuesday 3rd October 2006 in Search By Martina Smit

AN office with an ugly houseplant, a shelf full of lever-arch files and three coffee-sipping staff is now art, according to the jury of Britain's controversial Turner Prize.

The reason? Because the three employees are making a reality TV show about reality TV shows, they say.

Fifteen-minute starlets whose lives were ruined by their appearances on the likes of Big Brother, Trisha and Wife Swap will tell their tales of woe in the resulting documentary The Return of the Real.

Video artist Phil Collins came up with the idea when he was, to his utter shock, asked to enter the Turner Prize competition. "I thought about it for a week," he says. "It felt like that moment in the film Carrie when she has a bucket of blood thrown over her and is made a fool of on a grand scale."

Known for his video criticisms of reality TV, he could hardly believe he was invited to take part in the largest media spectacle in British art. And so, he decided to turn the competition on its head and expose its nature.

This he did by setting up Shady Lane Productions, a working office tucked away at the end of the Turner displays, now open to the public. Just like any other office, it is filled with desks and chairs and computers. Three staff members go about their business from 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday (weekends are off), making coffee and thumbing through newspapers.

The only difference is the glass walls through which exhibition goers watch them like animals in a zoo, and the outside notice appealing for former reality TV victims to contact them.

"It is the first time we have had live work as part of an exhibit," curator Katherine Stout defends the work. "It's a form of performance art. Contemporary art has a role in questioning and reflecting what happens in society."

Rubbish entry

Another controversial submission is that of Rebecca Warren, who displayed bits of rubbish in museum-like glass cabinets or "vitrines". The 41-year-old picked up the debris - including dust fluff, twigs and a discarded cherry stone - from the floor of her studio in Hackney Wick, east London, and the road outside.

"I'm actually interested in what a bit of fluff and a bit of twig put in a particular order can mean," she says. "For somebody it could mean one thing and for somebody else it could mean something else."

Lizzie Carey-Thomas, another curator, comes to her aid: "She spent a long time putting it together. Despite the abject nature of the material, and the fact it is rubbish, there is a mini-drama going on. The objects are active within the box itself. They have emotional and associative resonance, and can communicate meaning."

As arbitrary as Warren's vitrines seem, so wonderfully organic is her abstract bronze figures. They rise like lumpy towers, their uneven surfaces caressed by the play of light. With these, curators said, Warren paid homage to her heroes - master sculptors like Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas - while also questioning their authority.

Accidental painter

This year's shortlist also includes a painter - a rarity for the Turner Prize that, ironically, draws its name from the 19th century British painter JMW Turner. The absence of paintings among previous nominees has prompted the Stuckists, an art protest group, to say: "The only artist who wouldn't be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner."

However, although Tomma Abts' canvasses seem to be precise geometric patterns of the exact same size (38cm by 48cm), they are all but carefully thought-out. "I start with nothing, really," the German-born painter says. There are no pre-conceived designs, no drawings, and no pre-studies.

Usually she first stains the canvas and then builds it up layer by layer, each time leaving some space untouched. These gaps morph into definite forms, until the painting "suddenly comes alive and makes you feel something". Only then she stops, Abts explains.

The last of the four finalists is Mark Titchner, with a kinetic installation of spinning optical wheels that mimes the act of being hallucinated. His second piece consists of a giant billboard and two pseudo-machines in the shapes of a tower and a tree. With these, Titcher is said to explore the clashing ideas that shape society.

Preserved cow

This year's winner will receive £25,000 prize money, while the other finalists will each win £5,000.

Previous winners include Chris Ofili for his Virgin Mary splashed with elephant dung (1998); Damien Hirst's cow and calf in a glass tank with formaldehyde (1995); and Martin Creed's empty room with flickering lights (2001). Last year installation artist Simon Starling converted a shed into a boat, sailed down the River Rhine and turned it back into a shed.

Despite its controversy - or perhaps because of it - the annual Turner prize show attracts an average of around 100,000 visitors.

The exhibition cannot survey "all that is important in contemporary art in Britain", admits Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director and chair of the Turner jury. "Nor is the prize intended either as a long-service medal, or as a forcing ground for new talent.

"It answers the simple questions: what were the exhibitions, which were the works of art and who were the artists whose work had the strongest impact this year on the jury?"

The winner will be announced during a live Channel 4 broadcast on 4 December.

• Turner Prize 2006 Exhibition, Tate Britain, London, 3 October 2006 - 14 January 2007. Admission £5.