Turner Prize. 04.

Jeremy Deller's Memory Bucket: A Film About Texas has taken this year's Turner Prize. In the New York Times, Carol Vogel writes that the work "focuses on two politically charged locations: the site of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco and President Bush's hometown of Crawford. Mr. Deller is best known for The Battle of Orgreave, a film he created with the director Mike Figgis that recreated clashes between the police and picketers during Britain's 1984 miner's strike."

From Deller's The History of the World

In the Guardian, Maev Kennedy notes that the announcement is hardly a surprise: "Even the losers don't have a word to say against the winner." Elizabeth Mahoney is happy, too: "The unpredictable way that he works, and the sometimes playful, sometimes darkly serious work that he produces, suit these bewildering days.... Accessible and yet intelligent, touching and frequently hilarious, Deller's art is always involving." Last week, Tania Branigan profiled the artist; and Jonathan Jones has been pulling for him for a while, too.

What's remarkable is how many of the finalists have made use of film and video. Memory Bucket even made Chrissie Iles's list of top ten films of 2004 in Artforum. The Tate describes Turkish artist Kutlug Altman's work: "His films reveal the complex texture of memory and imagination, truth and fantasy, which composes our understanding of everyday life. They are deliberately modest in technique, retaining the immediacy of home movies despite being presented as multi-screen, multi-layered installations."

Langlands & Bell's The House of Osama Bin Laden is an interactive animation and Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare presented his first film this year, Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball).

Little wonder, then, that past Turner winner Tracey Emin recently decided it was time to make a movie.

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2004 12:44 PM