Turner prize: A Retrospective

this weekend i felt that i needed to embrace the many cultural opportunites that london has to offer.

and so i went to the turner prize exhibition at tate.

i am not renowned for my artistic interests, and usually my preferred approach to galleries is to get round them in about 15 minutes, and then sit in the coffee shop.

however, i was pleasantly surprised with this one. i loved it.

there were the obvious winners that are always intersting to see. the cow in formaldehyde being one (and gosh, cows really do have tiny brains don't they?)

but the thing that i most enjoyed was the massive range of art forms that were there. the thought process behind many of the pieces is often so insightful and imaginative.

Gillian Wearing's winning piece was a film of a group of police men and women, standing as though they were being photographed. they were filmed for 60minutes, stuck in this format.

there are a few who look as though they have drifted off. some others have really bad cases of the fidgets. but towards the end, all of them just look very uncomfortable. at the end there is a huge sense of relief.

in the description of the piece, it says that the artist wanted to explore ideas of surviellance and the feeling of being constantly watched. this is now something very central to all our lives, and to use the police in this exploration, i feel adds a further dimension to her work. the police are people of authoirty, the people that often act upon the findings of today's constant surveillance and cctv footage. without getting carried away, i thought that piece especially was very interesting.

other interesting ones for me were Anish Kapoor's scultures, using an intense purple pigment. the effect was that you can't really focus at all on the pieces. and the colour is so intense that you feel as though you are losing your balance. all from a piece of art. amazing.

chris ofili offers a moving tribute to stephen lawrence, a young victim of a racist attack, but without entering the realms of cheese. in fact, i didn't even notice the tribute until i realised that in the tears of the woman in "no woman no cry" is the face of the murdered teen. then, on reading the description, i looked for the words written behind the painting, where it says "rip stephen lawrence". the tribute was so unintrusive, and yet so definitely there, that i found the effect profoundly moving.

i don't know if i am now becoming a bit geeky, having entered this whole new world of art and all. but next weekend i'd quite like to venture to the national portrait gallery. and not just to use the coffee shop.