The Turner Prize 2015 winners were announced on Monday night during an awarding ceremony at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre. Quite a few people thought the London-based Assemble were favourites, so it wasn't a surprise when the collective (boasting 18 members) received the £25,000 prize from Sonic Youth co-founder and artist Kim Gordon.
The most surprising thing about this edition of the Turner Prize, though, is not the fact that, as predicted, the project won the award, but that Assemble is not a group of artists, but a young (ages range between 26 to 29) design/architectural group that at times resembles one of those radical architectural practices that brought a wind of change on the Italian design scene in the '70s. The collective described indeed themselves to the New Statesman as, "sort of architects, sort of not, sort of maybe".
For the Turner Prize project Assemble recreated inside Glasgow's Tramway a full-size, wooden mock-up of one of the houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, that they refurbished with the locals.
The buildings in Granby Four Streets were mainly derelict until 2011. There were plans to demolish the terraces, but, as a reaction, the locals started a community land trust and tried to regenerate the streets planting trees and organising a monthly market. Assemble took part in the project, recreating the public spaces with construction companies, the residents and housing associations; then they refurbished the homes hoping to put them on sale below market rate, or to offer them for sale under shared ownership schemes. At the moment only 70 of the 200 homes available are occupied.
The house mock-up at the Tramway Theatre doesn't feature any expensive art pieces, epileptic fit-inducing video projections or avant-garde items with obscure meanings attached to them, but it includes ceramic pieces, benches and furnishings made by Assemble and the residents.
The space is indeed also a shop where products made by a social enterprise established by the collective can be bought (somehow it sounds a bit like one of those cool projects the Netherlands-based Droog love). Nine Granby Street residents were trained and employed in a workshop to make handmade products – sawdust door handles, Granby rock bookends and pressed terracotta lampshades – from waste materials and the rubble of demolished buildings.
Assemble's project is almost a manifesto, a call to employ art and architecture as social tools (and in this it reminds of Lina Bo Bardi who tried to integrate social values in her designs such as the SESC Pompeia, a social and cultural leisure centre); it looks at several issues, including the privatisation (of public spaces) and deprivation cycles, and the process of excluding residents from specific regeneration projects, while reminding us all that the housing market is becoming a trap for too many people who can't buy/rent their own spaces.
The project also points towards the impact that the cuts to local government have created in the suburbs of many areas where there are no funds available.
All these themes somehow also fit with next year's 15th Venice International Architecture Exhibition, "Reporting from the Front", set to be an inclusive event that will listen to stories, thoughts and experiences coming from different backgrounds.
The fact that a group of urban regenerators won one of the most prestigious art prizes in the world defeating the other artistic projects (Bonnie Camplin's study centre about conspiracy theories; Nicole Wermer’s Marcel Breuer's Bauhaus Cesca chairs with real luxury fur coats stitched to their backs and Janice Kerbel's music piece "Doug" with its black-clad singers), is extremely significant and points towards a change in the modern art market.
Rather than looking at eye-catching yet meaningless, frivolous or inaccessible art with extremely obscure meanings, the jury opted for something else, a work about a housing project by a socially-engaged architectural practice trying to have an impact on people living in a specific area and attempting to make a difference via an interdisciplinary process that combines art, architecture and design.
Launched by a group of friends in 2009 almost as a hobby, Assemble's first project consisted in turning a disused petrol station in London into a temporary cinema; in 2011 they got their first commission focused on the New Addington Central Parade in Croydon and consisting in transforming a car park into a public square. Other socially interesting projects followed since then.
Assemble are the first non artists to win the prestigious award, they do not depend from an art gallery, they don't do art fairs, and they aren't part of a pretentious art market populated by too many ignorant millionaires who buy a Jeff Koons because Prada has got one.
Art critics who prefer vapid avant-garde projects that alienate people's minds and artists who mainly develop visual works with no direct social impact, may not like Assemble's admirable project, but surely this choice marks a change in trends.
There are indeed other creative minds working along these lines to try and raise awareness on social divisions, deprivation and inequality, or focusing on regeneration schemes that involve residents and locals. As seen in a previous post, photographers Flavia Dent and Helena Crabtree started a visual project that transformed their fascination with brutalism and geometrical shapes into a deeper interest in the communities living in the blocks of flats they photographed.
Assemble's unusual art project - that could be considered as a radical statement with a sociological purpose - was picked by a jury panel that, chaired by Tate Britain's new director, Alex Farquharson (and including critic and curator Jan Verwoert; Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Kyla McDonald, artistic director of Glasgow Sculpture Studios) featured Alistair Hudson, director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, who conceives the museum where he works as a service to the community.
This year's Turner Prize choice proves therefore that art and architecture are changing and that words such as "collective" and "community" may become the future in these disciplines and in others as well. It must be highlighted, though, that this future reeks of a past à la William Morris: the jury verdict stated indeed that the members of Assemble "draw on long traditions of artistic and collective initiatives that experiment in art, design and architecture. In doing so they offer alternative models to how societies can work. The long-term collaboration between Granby Four Streets and Assemble shows the importance of artistic practice being able to drive and shape urgent issues."
At the moment Assemble may be still a bit untrendy and unfashionable (after all, they don't go out with Prada...yet?) and their works are not part of a private collection exhibited inside grand buildings owned by fashion conglomerates, yet their modus operandi may become the next big thing.
The most superficial part of the fashion industry should really be alert as its end may be extremely near: just as it happened with the art world, collectives and more meaningful fashion projects may be around the corner, and we may hopefully be able to leave behind the sad, commercial stuff that has been generated in the last 8 years and that has destroyed creativity and too many young fashion brands.
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