Susan Phillipsz Wins the Turner Prize

The Turner Prize is awarded annually to a British artist under the age of fifty. It is usually won by someone who pushes the definition of art in thoughtful or provocative ways.  Britain’s tabloids and crotchety art critics love to hate the prize (worth £25,000), and usually take great delight in comparing every year’s honorees with their own childhood doodles.  This year’s winner is no different.  Susan Phillipsz, who was awarded the 2010 prize last week, is the first artist whose work consists entirely of sounds. 

Phillipsz was honored for her installation Lowlands. It was created last spring for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, where the recordings of Phillipsz singing an old Scottish tune, “Lowlands Away” -- a lament about a drowned sweetheart who haunts a lover’s dreams -- were played beneath three bridges in Glasgow.  Lowlands has been generally well-received by Britain’s art critics.  Adrian Searle, critic for The Guardian, wrote that, “[Phillipsz’s] sense of place, and space memory and presence reminds me, weirdly of the sculptor Richard Serra at his best.  Her art makes you think of your place in the world and opens you up to your feelings.”

Searle is right: Phillipsz’s work engages with the long history of landscape painting in Britain (the Turner Prize is named after landscape painter J.M.W Turner). It does this by teasing out the poetics of emotion which, for viewers, are often bound to landscape itself.  But, like Serra, Phillipsz also amplifies (visually and aurally) the definition of sculpture a concept which, as Rosalind Krauss observed in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” is entwined with the visual project of post-modernism.  

 Take a listen for yourself.