Gillian Carnegie refused to appear in the film at all, leaving her shadow, Daniel Kelly, gamely attempting to sketch a copy of one of her paintings from his laptop. Jim Lambie sent his student to the Isle of Bute to study a Victorian Gothic chapel floor, before co-opting her into gluing mirrors onto handbags and laying out his stripes of vinyl tape. Darren Almond's protégé was made to wander around Blackpool and Wigan in search of the artist's roots, before Almond met him in London and told him about his own moment of student revelation, when he started going to exhibitions and discovered that 'these artists are really thinking about shit'. Not shit as in excrement, but shit as in important issues, presumably. The film shifted from the intelligence-insulting to the baffling, with Starling countering a suggestion that his work might be too academic by saying that there was a dialogue within the work between the elements.

Collings makes some perceptive comments about the problems inherent in this kind of broadcasting on the Channel 4 website: 'The guy turning the lights on and off [Martin Creed, 2001 Turner Prize winner] was a very good artist, but you'd have to be an incredibly informed, elitist player in the art world to know that. And that's the problem with the Turner Prize - it's putting on, for a very large audience, a spectacle that a very large audience can't possibly hope to understand. So it's not surprising that that very large audience is more interested in scandal.'¹

Although you don't have to be an elitist or an art world player to be informed about contemporary art, it's true that there's a division between those who are comfortable with the theoretical and historical perspectives that usually help people 'get' such art, and those who are excluded from that debate. Channel 4's broadcast managed to patronise the informed, while offering little of substance to the general viewer but not a formal background in the subject. A programme that simply set the artists in an art-historical context (as Jim Lambie began to do by sending his student to see a Victorian mosaic) would have been far more rewarding and relevant.

Starling's work has been criticised in parts of the British press for being 'boring', which betrays a philistine tendency to denigrate any art that encourages or requires thought. In fact, there's something deeply exciting about the fictions the artist creates from the historical and physical coincidences he finds in the world. Starling himself talks about collapsing stories onto each other and plundering narratives: a good example of this is his 'Bird in Space', exhibited in New York in 2004. The work collapses the infamous Brancusi taxation trial onto the modern story of George Bush imposing a 40% tax on imported steel in 2002. Starling's interest was sparked by the fact that in 1925 the US government had also levelled an identical 40% tax on Brancusi's 'Bird in Space', claiming it was an industrial artefact rather than a work of art. Just as Brancusi won his landmark case, so the World Trade Organization forced Bush to repeal his tax. Starling subsequently imported a 4,900 lb Romanian steel plate to New York, and floated it above the gallery floor using three helium jacks.

In collaging events and narratives, Starling is making new stories, and these can be read as satires, political fables, or simply enjoyed for their own sake. It is true that to enjoy them it helps to have some knowledge of the source materials, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The histories of art and ideas exist in the world just like anything else, and are fair game as artistic material. To adapt Joseph Brodsky, an artist's work is always in dialogue with the work of others; the alternative is talking to oneself.

James Wilkes

Reference
1. Matt Collings, The Turner Prize and Contemporary Art. www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/T/turner2005/matt_collings.html (last accessed 7 December 2005)