Thanks to everyone who entered the Tate calendar giveaway!

I now know all about some of your cultural highlights for the summer, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Magritte exhibition at Tate Liverpool, the Camberwell Arts Festival, and of course the mighty Manchester International Festival, which this time round features everything from an opera inspired by John Dee to The Day We Sang a 'love story with singing' created by Victoria Wood.

I've now randomly selected the two winners and they are:

Ben for the Miró calendar
Kate for the Watercolour calendar

I've emailed you both so get back to me as soon as you can to receive your calendars.

 

 [Susan Hiller, Witness 2000. Tate Britain Installation shot
Original commission Artangel © Susan Hiller. Photo: Tate Photography/Sam Drake]

I finally managed to get down to Tate Britain to see Susan Hiller’s exhibition last weekend, on the final day of the exhibition, and I'm so glad I did. I was intrigued by the sheer variety of work on display, spanning four decades of Hiller's career, but also amongst this selection were some incredible stand-out pieces that I found especially captivating.

Many of the works in this show engage with notions of meaning and memory, including what is lost and forgotten. I found myself especially drawn to those that had an anthropological quality, collecting materials often seen as disposable or ephemeral - from seaside postcards or clips from popular films - and carefully assembling and cataloguing them to give them new status. Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, for example, is a collection of postcards from British seaside towns, all of which share the same caption: ‘Rough Sea’. Accompanied by meticulous charts and documents mapping their location and information about their finding, they are both beautiful in their own right, immediately evoking windswept, faded seaside towns, and intriguing as a kind of museum collection. The title makes it clear that the work is in part intended as a tribute to the forgotten artists who painted, photographed and hand-tinted these scenes.

Monument is a tribute of a different kind, but once again exploring the idea of lost or forgotten identities. There’s a strangely uncanny feel to this series of photographs of memorial plaques from a neglected Victorian monument to civilian heroes from a London park. From the Freud Museum, on the other hand, takes this notion of re-investing meaning in a different direction, bringing together a range of apparently unrelated ‘found’ objects in a very personal take on the museum collection. Presented in identical brown cardboard boxes, the ephemera collected takes on a potent quality, becoming a series of mysterious personal mementos, relics and talismans - a system of fragments that point towards an ultimately inaccessible narrative.

There’s a similarly mysterious quality to The Tao of Water: Homage to Joseph Beuys – a cabinet containing bottles filled with water collected from holy wells and streams around the world. Regardless of the nod to Beuys, there’s something intriguing, beautiful and rather magical about this array of tiny, delicate antique bottles and test tubes, each carefully labelled with the location it was collected, and pointing to a multitude of different sacred sites.

There are a number of film and video works in the exhibition, which exhibit a similar quality of compelling strangeness, such as  Psi Girls (1999), which assembles a series of images taken from films of girls with telekinetic powers in a weirdly mesmeric installation. However, for me it was the final work that had the most overwhelmingly powerful impact. Witness is an extraordinary installation: a hanging garden of what initially appear to be ethereal silvery tendrils, dangling from the ceiling of a darkened room. On stepping inside this softly glowing space, it becomes clear that these are in fact a host of tiny circular microphones, hanging from silver wires attached to the ceiling. Listening to each microphone reveals a quiet yet matter-of-fact voice, which could be speaking any one of a number of different languages, telling his or her story of an encounter with UFOs or creatures from other spheres. Whether these stories are real or imagined is hardly the point: it’s the experience of listening to these hushed voices in this breathtakingly beautiful science-fiction style space that makes the work powerful.

Full of wonder, strangeness and ultimately, pathos, Witness was for me the undoubted highlight of an intriguing body of work, which always comes back to the idea of the unknown and inaccessible. Echoing with haunting lost voices and layered with fragments of forgotten things, this exhibition was a poweful experience and one I'm glad not to have missed out on:  a thought-provoking and inspiring retrospective.

[Susan Hiller Monument, 1980-1 Image:Tate Britain installation shot 

© Susan Hiller. Photo:Tate Photography/Sam Drake]

So this is an ambitious one even by Tate Britain's usual standards. Watercolour takes on a medium that has historically been associated with wishy-washy flower paintings by Victorian ladies, or runny landscapes by amateur painters, and invites us to challenge our preconceptions, in what aims to be 'a fresh assessment of the history of watercolour painting'.

The result is a whistle-stop tour through the history of watercolour as a medium, showing it to be far more than a vehicle for representing nostalgic English rural scenes. The 250 paintings in this exhibition in fact include not merely sunsets and meadows, but also maps, abstracts, botanical illustrations, and even paintings of battlefields and concentration camps. Though there are some notable omissions (David Hockney springs immediately to mind) there is a very wide range of artists repesented, encompassing both celebrated watercolorists like  J.M.W. Turner, William Blake and Paul Nash together with contemporary artists who are not primarily thought of as working with watercolour, including Anish Kapoor, Andy Goldsworthy and Tracy Emin. A central portion of the exhibition also explores the mechanics of how watercolour painting works, and the techniques that have been used by artists over the ages: small vitrines display all the paraphenalia of painting, inviting us to peer at dirty paintboxes, half-empty tubes of paint, smeared palettes and even Turner's paintbox.

The curators of this well thought out exhibition have evidently done their utmost to avoid clichés, and offer a genuinely different take on a medium that is often written off as being simply 'accessible', safe and dull. But whilst there's no doubt that this exhibition convincingly demonstrates the range and versatility of watercolour as a medium, proving that it can pack a powerful punch, at times the pace feels a little too hectic, the scope a little too wide, and there seems to be something oddly lacking.

Ultimately, for me however, the strength of this ambitious show is all in the power of the individual works that catch your eye (for me it was Patrick Heron and Howard Hodgkin, but for someone else it would doubtless be different) and stop you in your tracks, which really make you think again.

[Image: Patrick Heron, January 9: 1983: II  1983  © Estate of Patrick Heron. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002]

The Turner Prize is the one contemporary art prize that everyone has heard of, even if they, like Brian Sewell, believe it's simply for ‘extremely contemporary rubbish – assemblies of rubbish masquerading under important names’ – or, as ex-Culture Minister Kim Howells once put it, 'cold, mechanical bullshit'. That's probably because over the years this prize has become synonymous with shock and controversy, causing all kinds of brouhaha and outrage in the pages of the tabloid press.

Yet given its racy history, this year's Turner Prize exhibition feels surprisingly tame. You won't find anything like a Tracy Emin bed, or the Chapman brothers' pornographic dolls, or Martin Creed's light-switches, or even an Ofili dung-encrusted canvas on this shortlist. But then, on the other hand, you could say that these works are everything that contemporary art clichés are made of: this year's selection offers us powerful, witty but ultimately rather ugly paintings by Dexter Dalwood; distorted sculptural objects by Angela de la Cruz – canvases lying ruptured and battered on the gallery floor, or smashed up against a wall; and a predictably obscure installation from The Otolith Group – a dark chamber filled with books, old TVs playing grainy subtitled films, and walls painted with obscure quotations.

Yet the final work in the exhibition, Lowlands by Susan Philipz, really does offer us something a little bit different. This three-channel sound installation of a sixteenth century Scottish lament sung by the artist was originally shown as part of her exhibition at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and has been reconfigured for the Turner Prize, where it fills the otherwise empty gallery with a haunting and mournful melody.  Compared to what we might usually expect from a Turner shortlisted artwork, this is scarcely ground-breaking stuff - but is the shock-factor really what matters?

On the day I was there, the gallery housing Philipz’s installation was jam-packed with people, from Japanese tourists, to old ladies with their eyes shut, to students lying on the floor with sketchbooks – whilst the other galleries remained empty but for the occasional hushed footfall. For that reason alone, Philipsz would certainly get my vote for the overall prize. Controversial it’s absolutely not – but how refreshing to encounter a work so straightforwardly immersive, emotive and strangely beautiful in the context of a Turner exhibition.  And who would have thought that the most unusual thing about this year's Turner Prize artwork would be that the public would actually like it?

[Image: Turner Prize 2010, via Tate]

June's Late at Tate Britain was hosted by Grizedale Arts. This event told the tale of Grizedale's ten-year transititon from sculpture park to radical arts organisation pioneering new approaches to artistic production and reception through a programme of out of the ordinary artists' residencies, events and social projects from their base in the Lake District National Park.

This is a story that particularly resonates with me, perhaps largely because I had the opportunity to witness it at close quarters: from walking the sculpture park as a child (and occasionally creating our own Goldsworthy-inspired mini works of land art); to more recently, the chance to take a look at the redevelopment of the Lawson Park site.

The Tate event did a good job of reflecting Grizedale's idiosyncratic and uncompromising programme, relating its story through re-enacting a range of artists' performances alongside music, drama, film, dancing and food. Bringing together a pleasing mish-mash of projects, ranging from Souped Up Urn (a tea urn created by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane) offering tea on the lawn, to Harold Offeh performing Crow, a mesmeric wedding dance, dressed as a gigantic bird; and from Juneau Projects serving up live music and chat beneath strings of coloured bunting, to sculptor Pablo Bronstein selling crisps; the event was also a clever and frequently entertaining presentation of the hazards, as well as the highlights, of socially engaged practice - the "pitfalls and pratfalls" of this approach to art. Part village fete, part live art performance, this event was just as weird and wonderful as I might have expected.

[After discussions with both Tate and with performers from Egremont, a community that Grizedale Arts have worked with over many years , it was decided that the evening's performances should go ahead in spite of the tragic events which took place in West Cumbria last Wednesday.]

Find out more about Grizedale here or read about their new book Adding Complexity to Confusion.

[Chris Ofili: Afrodizzia (2nd version) 1996 via Tate]

Chris Ofili is perhaps best known as an artist associated with controversy. In 1998, he was awarded the Turner Prize for a series of works that challenged the conventions of paintings through encrusting canvases with elephant dung; whilst his painting of a black Madonna prompted outrange when it was first shown at the Brooklyn Museum a year later. But today, with a midcareer retrospective recently opening at Tate Britain, Ofili no longer seems quite so radical. The challenges he mounted to the stereotypes of black culture; his provocative references to pornography, gangsta rap and blaxploitation; and even his characteristic use of blobs of dung to embellish his canvases no longer look like highly controversial, or even particularly distinctive moves. Nevertheless, there is still a huge amount of enjoyment to be derived from this glorious journey through Ofili’s career from the early 1990s to the present day.

Bursting with sparkly exuberance, Ofili’s early works are a real treat, incorporating glitter, beads, sequins, map-pins and magazine cutouts in swirling rainbow patterns. These bejeweled canvases range from the mystical and mysterious to the noisy and frenetic: some demonstrate a buoyant sense of humour in their lively interrogation of racial stereotypes; whilst others, like the affecting No Woman No Cry – Ofili’s response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence – are poignantly beautiful and emotive.

Yet in the tension between form and content that exists in these works, it is the form that tends to grab the attention. Perhaps most immediately arresting is Ofili’s use of colour, the canvases awash with emerald green, heady crimson, vibrant yellow, tropical turquoise, hot pink and deepest midnight blue. Gaudy but gorgeous, these works seem first and foremost an optimistic celebration of the sensual and erotic pleasures of art: in Afro Love and Unity a couple embrace beneath an exploding star; whilst in the companion piece, Afro Sunset they appear entwined together amongst an exotic jungle canopy, in attitudes reminiscent of a Klimt painting. Not all of the works in this exhibition are so flamboyant: yet the quieter, small-scale watercolour and pencil representations of sultry female figures, faces, elegant birds and exotic flowers, which for me were an unexpected highlight of this exhibition, are also invested with a similar sense of vitality. Indeed, even the installation The Upper Room, which forms the centerpiece of this show - a hushed, half-lit chapel-like space, reached through an echoing corridor, in which 13 magnificent panels depicting a golden monkey-god in the jewel tones of stained-glass windows are ranged like the solemn figures of the Last Supper – seems less a comment on religion and its iconography, and more of a purely sensual experience.

Indeed, only in the final pair of rooms, does this exhibition become more ambiguous. Here, the mood shifts away from joyful opulence: this selection of the artist's more recent works moves away from rich texture and embellishment, instead offering us a series of flat canvases. In the first of these rooms, the paintings are entirely blue –a sombre, pared-down palette of twilight, indigo and ultramarine, broken only by the shapes of half-glimpsed shadowy figures. Meanwhile, in the second room, Ofili dispenses with the naïve style of his earlier works altogether in favour of a more highly stylized approach, as unearthly figures appear and disappear amongst hard-edged blocks of starkly crude colour: a venomously purple female nude accepts an orange glass from the hand of an unseen man; a dark gothic figure appears to be either vomiting or inhaling a stream of acid-yellow banana shapes. Yet although they may raise more questions, these are distinctly uncomfortable paintings, devoid of the joyful exuberance of Ofili’s earlier works – and unfortunately, without this sense of vibrant aesthetic pleasure, they simply just aren’t as much fun.

Chris Ofili will be showing at Tate Britain until 16 May 2010.

[Both images: Chris Ofili, The Upper Room 1999-2002 via Tate]