Post by Taxigirl on Oct 29, 2003 9:57:24 GMT
An exhibition of art by this year's Turner Prize nominees has opened amid controversy over its shock value.
A statue of a naked couple in a sex act and a sculpture of bodies being eaten by maggots, both by Jake and Dinos Chapman, are among the works on show.
Fellow nominee Grayson Perry has created vases featuring images of child abuse, sex acts and death.
The exhibition, at the Tate Britain, opened to the press on Tuesday and will open to the public on Wednesday.
The Chapman brothers deliberately set out to make work that provokes a strong reaction
Katharine Stout
Curator
There is a "health warning" at the London gallery saying visitors should not bring those under the age of 16.
One of the Chapman brothers' works, titled Sex, depicts bodies being picked at by maggots, snails, spiders and rats.
Another, called Death, is a bronze sculpture of a pair of blow-up dolls engaged in a sex act on a lilo.
Katharine Stout, the exhibition's curator, said: "The Chapman brothers deliberately set out to make work that provokes a strong reaction.
"Here they're dealing with things that have been a common thread in their art, sex and death.
"When you see the sculptures they do invite a strong reaction, but with Death it's also quite funny, it's quite absurd."
The brothers, who are among Britain's foremost modern artists, are favourites to win the prize.
But The Times art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnson said the Chapmans "aren't working for me".
"It now seems like a parody of itself, and in a sense that's what they're trying to do - they're poking fun at the child-like desire to provoke," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"But it's no longer provocative. You look at it and you think 'so what?'"
Perry's vases put disturbing messages onto pottery, such as the silhouetted figure of a man who has hanged himself and another with an erection who is being beaten by a woman.
Also nominated are Irish video artist and photographer Willie Doherty and sculptor Anya Gallaccio.
Some of Gallaccio's exhibits - using things like apples and flowers - will rot during the course of the exhibition.
"They will start to smell as they rot and ferment," Ms Stout said.
Doherty is showing his video work Re-Run in which a man is seen running across a bridge from two angles.
The Turner Prize, the UK's most prestigious modern arts award, regularly generates controversy from critics who believe it is elitist and unrepresentative of "real" art.
Last year the prize was dismissed as "conceptual bullshit" by the then culture minister, Kim Howells.
Last year's victor, Keith Tyson, had cast the entire contents of a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu in lead as part of his entry.