Adrian Searle
Aaargh! Tracey’s menstrual knickers. Not that I’ve got a problem with Tracey Emin’s undies as such, but it’s such a Tracey thing to put them on show at the Tate Gallery in London. Emin’s Bed is the first thing you see, right there in the centre of the gallery in her Turner prize show. And on one side of the bed, the night’s dreck: a nest of used tissues, unravelled condoms, slippers and a fluffy toy; KY jelly and a full ashtray. The sheets are rucked up and besmirched with sweat and unnameable stains, the duvet yellowed by bodies, the pillow bursting feathers.
Emin’s show is a monument to that frank and often brutal honesty of hers that she bangs on about so much. Here’s the confessional movie about her abortion; Tracey dancing to the Doors; interviewing herself to camera. Sensible Tracey in jeans at one end of the sofa. Smoking, drinking, tipsy Tracey in a little black dress at the other. A battle of titanic alter egos slagging each other off. Once I was touched by your stories. Now you’re only a bore. Your art has become so closed and predictable.
The Turner prize game show has become a drag. Steve McQueen should win: he’s got the intellectual clout, the gravitas, he’s the real pyjamas. He shows Deadpan, his film installation based on a Buster Keaton sight-gag, and two other works, Prey and Current.
McQueen’s works are undeniably beautiful, impeccably shot and edited, and lyrical to watch. Current slowly, almost imperceptibly, merges a sequence of projected slides of a bicycle drowned on the gravel of a shallow stream. Light and shadow play on the water’s surface, and the bicycle wheels appear to turn in the current. It is an odd and curious image, back-projected on a screen in a darkened room.
Prey focuses on a little white balloon, which lifts a small tape recorder off the grass into the wide blue yonder. One spool of the tape machine is red, the other green. The improvised drogue that stabilises the balloon and tape recorder is a cyan-coloured plastic bag. These are the base hues of colour film, and all McQueen’s work, till this point, has been shot in a richly textured black and white. So Prey is about colour.
But, for me, Deadpan is McQueen’s best work here, and the consummate work of the show. The wall of the barn whumffs around the artist, who stands still as the wall falls and passes over his body. Movement and stillness, danger and stoicism: Deadpan is sculpture for film.
Steven Pippin converted a row of 12 commercial washing machines in an American laundromat into a line of pin-hole cameras, which not only work on the principle of the camera obscura, but also process the film in the wash, rinse and conditioner cycles.
Pippin’s project is mad. It is also very funny, using the laundromat to rework some of Edweard Muybridge’s turn-of-the-century studies in human and animal locomotion. Pippin got a horse and rider to gallop through the laundromat so he could film this Magrittean incident, and stalked along the row of washing machines in his underwear, with an erection visible under his Y-fronts. Pippin’s best invention is himself – he’s his own best gag.
Jane and Louise Wilson’s new video installation, Las Vegas: Graveyard Time conflates two distinct locations, the gaming rooms of Caesar’s Palace and the Desert Inn casinos, and the underground corridors and turbine rooms of the Hoover Dam, which supplies the city’s water.
The baize acres of the empty baccarat tables, the free-spin glow of the roulette wheel, the banks of slot machines, the constantly vacuumed carpets, the concentric halos of lights and the shuffling, riffled splay of cards are all there in the Wilsons’ film. Yet their Vegas is oddly depopulated. But, whatever time it is in Vegas, it’s always money time – it’s all there in the atmosphere of the tables, the equipment, the set-up.
The intercut footage of the tunnels buried under the wall of the Hoover Dam, the endless worm-hole perspectives leading on to the humming roulette wheels of the turbines, are a kind of metaphor of the Dostoevskian underground, the soul’s hole.
The splicing is immaculate. I love this work, even though it is all atmosphere, only atmosphere. Thank God I’m not a betting man.